The Future of Retail

1. The thesis of Negroponte's article is not very explicitly stated, which makes it confusing initially. If I were to give it a thesis, I would say "Stores have become mere showrooms for products; in order to obtain maximum benefits from a shopping experience, people can now shop online instead."

2. This article definitely discusses ideas similar to Norman's theories on user-focused design. As Negroponte examines different types of stores, he focuses heavily on the effect shopping in a physical store has on a person. For example, he explicitly believes bookstores are not for buying books, but rather for the social experience of seeing other people shop for books, to meet in a cafe, and to visualize oneself "bumping into the unexpected." Visiting a store makes you feel a certain way that you don't feel sitting at home on a website. Shopping in and of itself is an experience, one that would be lost if shopping were totally converted to a digital phenomenon.

3. His ideas are certainly still relevant today, as many websites for shopping are crucial to certain  shopping activities we can't do in stores (if there are certain stores products don't sell or don't have in stock, or for certain sites that don't have a physical counterpart, like Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and so on). However, his prediction was that stores would die out in favor of digital shopping, and I don't find this to be true at all. I believe the two coexist, because each serves a necessary purpose that the other may not be able to serve -- the stock and convenience of the internet versus the physical and emotional experience of shopping in a store. Plus, buying groceries online just sounds dumb. How do you know if anything is fresh before it gets to your house?? How do you know if a shoe fits if you can't try it on on a website? Some products just make more sense to buy in a store.

4. I would imagine a lot of things would remain the same with the dynamics of shopping between the internet and physical stores. As previously stated, and as stated in the article, each serves a variety of important purposes and neither can be done without. So I feel, unless there is a revolution in the methods of shopping one way or another, the two shall continue to coexist and be similarly necessary for quite some time.