I took this photo a few weeks ago on the streets in Washington, D.C.
This was a huge box from eBay coming to someone.
In my building, they recently built an extra storeroom for all the deliveries that are coming everyday--there is no where to put all of them.
Jeff Bezos was recently names the 4th richest person in America, as the stock price of Amazon is up 45% in the last year alone.
While today in the Wall Street Journal, even the revered retailer of Herald Square, Macy's, had their stock price shed half it's value in the last year, and other big box retailers are hurting just as bad.
eCommerce is threatening the very survival of brick and mortal retailers, as they are seriously eating their lunch--and breakfast and dinner too!
But this is part of a much larger transition occurring from our physical to virtual worlds...
As we abandon department stores and the Mall for online shopping,
movie theaters and playhouses for home theaters and video streaming,
physical activities for gaming and virtual reality,
and even factories and office work for telework and robots,
soon we will have no real place to go and nothing to physically do.
From the bed and couch to the computer and gym, like hamsters on the wheel of triviality, we might as well package ourselves up in the big eBay box and send ourselves to outer space--but only as long as we can get Internet access there. ;-)
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)