Bulk buying, at home
Move over there, master merchants! Dollarama is opening a new online service, which should cause a ripple in the universe. I’m thinking about Amazon, Walmart and Costco, which all imagine me to be their exclusive property. There are some technicalities: you won’t be able to order one article at a time, and there’s a significant shipping tariff ($18) applied to each order. However, when you need a lot of low quality merchandise, at a price point that makes your pile of pennies into a valuable method of payment, this could prove interesting.
I live in a zone where Costco (the mecca of folks who need to buy huge quantities and fill the car) is hit with the “bridge tax”, so I thought that finding a store in the city which served as an outlet sales site had fixed my retail needs. Now this!
Locally, I have a general store. A place to buy two jugs of milk, a bag of “Classic Frito Lays” and all the news I can remember, available just a few minutes away. And the flyers are dropped at the end of the lane, snowing or not. But, I want options. I wonder how many cartons of fake KD and fake luncheon meat (at a time0 will justify the delivery fee. Time to get the calculator out.
A confession: we are served, well, by online merchants. I can bring in just about anything, as long as “instant gratification” is excluded; the trucks don’t come this far out of the city, every day. Wherea everything used to be several hours away on public transit, I now wait several days for unscheduled delivery.
