What is Retail?

Retail is selling to people, you, me, other people. Starbucks is in retail, Dunkin Doughnuts is in retail, LL Bean is in retail, and yes Amazon is in retail. Retail means having the customer come back again and spend more money, and having the customer tell their friends how great the stuff was. Retail is a happy customer.

What else characterizes retail? First, if all else fails, listen to the customer. And who is the customer? The person buying your stuff, simple. Now take Amazon, if I buy something and I don't like it, for any reason, I get to send it back, free, no questions asked, almost. It works, it is simple, and I feel comfortable buying from Amazon. Bezos gets it, he knows retail. That is why Amazon gets so many customers. Now Apple is retail, they make a product, the design it well, they stand behind it, and they demonstrate their love of their customer. It is a religion, it works.

Now for Google. Google is NOT in retail. It seems to see its only customer those who pay them, namely advertisers. And for a long while that is exactly what they were. Then someone thought of selling the Nexus. Well, now the customer was you and me, dear readers, and Google was clueless. The Nexus has it appears a fantastic failure rate, by that I mean it appears to be quite high, and I can personally attest to it.

Now try and go back and remedy it with Google, I did, no luck. I even sent it with a nice note to Eric Schmidt, the Chairman, who I worked with on a Presidential Commission a decade ago, so I was not some schlub from the street, and any luck, no way. Had I written say Ivan Seidenberg at Verizon, in hours there would have been a response, and for years there was. Verizon is in retail, Google seems clueless.

So what is Retail, at its core it is keeping your customer happy, secure in knowing if its broke you will fix it, one way or the other. For Google in my opinion and in my experience, we the customer are a dumb annoyance. So what did I do at Christmas, got the team Kindles, yes, Kindles, not Nexus, would never go there. And oh by the way, I try and tell this tale to everyone. If I buy a Nexus from Google, I am terrified if it is defective, no warranty helps, the characters on their customer service just want to tell me they feel my pain, they really do. But fixing anything, are you nuts, they are Google.

Now one final note, I also have seen that somehow the Googleniks have in my opinion seemed to get to slam bad reviews on Amazon, perhaps Amazon would want to investigate, just a thought. Will Google ever understand Retail, after all Apple did, but then Jobs had his walk in the Desert, Google has not had that, yet.