By Steve Baldwin | March 27, 2014
Last Saturday, with freezing temperatures in New York City finally abating, I decided to take a long, brisk walk. Because I prefer to always have a destination (however arbitrary) for any walk I take, I decided to visit a retailer about two miles away to add a little shopping to my exercise regimen.
To map my route, I checked out the retailer’s web site to jot down the store address and enter it in my phone. But because the retailer has more than one store, I had to navigate through a corporate “umbrella” site with information on each of the retailer’s stores.
OK – no problem. Except there was a problem: a big one. After I clicked on the link from the umbrella site to the site of the store I wanted to visit, an ugly red 404 (“Page Not Found”) Error appeared on the target site. This 404 Error took over the entire browser area.
“Whoa!,” I said to myself — “this store might be losing hundreds — maybe thousands of dollars worth of walk-in sales per week — all because of this one easy-to-fix error. They probably don’t even know about it.”
“OK,” I said to myself as I put on my boots, “now I can stretch my legs, do a little shopping, and also do a good deed — at the same time.”
And off I went.
About forty minutes later, I arrived at the store, and headed straight for the person who looked the most Internet-savvy: a young guy in his early 30s who seemed to be running things.
I quietly explained to him that I was there to shop, but I also wanted to tip his IT people off about the sales-killing 404 Error. The guy didn’t have a computer that could connect to the Web, so I showed him exactly what was happening on my Galaxy S3.
After listening to me for a minute, the guy looked at me, smirked slightly, and said “I’m not really interested and I don’t really care.”
“You don’t care?” I responded, somewhat taken aback. “Why not?”
“Because we’re migrating to a new server. The old architecture is going away.”
“When?”
“Whenever. I don’t know. It’s not important,” he said. “Look, the truth is that we don’t get many people coming to the store from the Web.”
“But,” I protested — “that’s what I’m telling you. Nobody’s coming to this store because nobody can figure out where you are — the info isn’t even listed on your own corporate site!”
The guy didn’t say anything for a moment, and I almost thought he was connecting the dots.
He wasn’t.
“Listen buddy, ” he said, in a loud, patronizing voice, “are you here to actually buy anything or are you just here to complain?”
I was speechless. And now I became aware that an ominous silence was filling the store. Everyone — the counter clerks, the customers, even the Federal Express delivery guy — was staring at me like I was a shoplifter. One heavy dude, arms folded, moved slowly toward me from the dimly-lit back of the store, with a “do we have a problem here?” expression on his face.
Obviously, my little Good Samaritan mission had been a complete, miserable failure. There was nothing to do but bite my lip, keep my mouth shut, and get out of the store as soon as possible. So I quickly selected a few items, paid, and left.
As the door closed slammed me, I reflected that someday — and I fear this day is not far away, because I honestly like (or liked) this retailer — this particular store will be gone. So will the other stores in this chain. There will be hand-wringing, finger-pointing, and gnashing of teeth. There will be headlines blaming “The Internet” for how it’s crushing local stores, and how “the little guy” has no chance against the big Web brands.
Some of this will be true. But I guarantee you that the one thing nobody will talk about — the one thing that could have stopped this slow-motion retail train wreck from happening — that little 404 Error — will never even be mentioned.
Nor will the guy who could have fixed the problem when it was still a small one.
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