My wife and I just visited a local knitting store to buy yarn for a sweater\/cap set for a little niece and scout yarn for an upcoming sweater-for-me project. It didn’t go the way we hoped.<\/p>\n
Now, local stores of any<\/em> kind have been challenged for a long time. Most recently by internet trade, but before that\u00a0they were threatened by malls and super markets, before that plain competitors and stores selling newer and better products. Still, in recent times internet trade\u00a0has probably given the coup de grace\u00a0to many small shops that were already struggling.<\/p>\n It doesn’t have to be like that of course. Good\u00a0service and the opportunity to see and feel a product\u00a0can still make the local store relevant. For example, I\u00a0have never seriously though about buying aquarium fish and plants online – not when I can go somewhere\u00a0and see that the animals are healthy and\u00a0look good; and\u00a0where I can get a qualified discussion about the answers. We want to support that\u00a0and don’t mind paying (a bit) extra to support them.<\/p>\n However, this time we didn’t get the chance. When we asked the first question about the pattern, we were advised to go check it on the\u00a0publisher’s web site. When we asked for some specific\u00a0yarn for the niece project we were told that it was not in store at the moment. (Period. No alternate yarn was suggested and there was no saying when new would be ordered.)<\/p>\n Surprised, we left the store\u00a0with money in the hand and\u00a0went to\u00a0publisher’s web site which\u00a0helpfully provided “buy yarn here ->” links.<\/p>\n The ordered yarn\u00a0arrived the next day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My wife and I just visited a local knitting store to buy yarn for a sweater\/cap set for a little niece and scout yarn for an upcoming sweater-for-me project. It didn’t go the way we hoped. Now, local stores of any kind have been challenged for a long time. Most recently by internet trade, but … Continue reading Bricks, Mortar and the Net<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/20150401_Garn.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5WBL8-50","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/325"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harsmann.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}