طبعا انا سجلت في المجله مجانا حتى استطيع الحصول على المقال :
وبنسخ المقال كاملا وعليكم يالمهتمين ترجمته :
بسم الله
thought I got a sweet deal on my first car. It was a compact pickup, American-made, and the salesman who approached me on the lot told me that if I bought it that afternoon, he was prepared to double the advertised rebate and throw in a premium sound system free. I played hard to get by mumbling the word "Toyota," and the salesman took off an extra $500. I could see by his shirt's dark armpits that he was nervous, and when we went into his office to sign the papers, he vanished into an adjoining room, where I heard his superior loudly chew him out, just as he'd predicted to me would happen if he let me "steal" the vehicle. I drove off euphoric - I'd beaten the system - but the very next morning I realized I'd been toyed with. Reading the local paper, I spotted an ad for a truck identical to mine priced at a cool $1,000 less. Nearly identical, that is. The other, cheaper truck had leather seats and eight mighty cylinders, not a feeble six. It also had tinted windows and dual chrome pipes.
Buying Habits This bruising learning experience came back to me when I learned recently that cellphone companies are working on اداة اعجوبه a miraculous device that will take all the risk out of comparison shopping. This thingamajig will scan a product's bar code, access and search databases on the Internet and tell the user if a similar item can be purchased at any nearby stores for a lower price. Talk about making salesfolk sweat. Armed with such definitive information, consumers will not only have the upper hand over even the craftiest retailers, they'll also have the one and only hand, and profit margins should shrink accordingly. The best price for something, in theory, will be the only price, everywhere and absolutely, and bargain hunting will be a hunt no more but something akin to a point-blank execution.
"I want that TV for $340. Now. And I want you to smile when you ring it up."
Should the "shopping phone" fulfill its promise, deep discounts will become standard and universal, and stores will have to seek an edge in less familiar ways - perhaps by dressing their workers in clingy costumes the way Las Vegas casinos do. That would be one route: pile on the thrills. The other, more likely, more cost-effective route would be to stamp out the thrills entirely and cultivate a dreary bare-bones efficiency that will make today's Wal-Marts seem like Roman palaces and today's Wal-Mart employees look like emperors.
The few employees who remain, that is. In the race to economize spurred by foolproof pricing, stores may come to resemble unmanned warehouses except for a guard or two posted at the door. Select your item, scan it and walk away with it - with the help of a robot if the thing's too big to lift. The infamous cheapskate labor practices that Wal-Mart has been taking such flak for lately may fill people with nostalgia when that time comes. Remember those darling senior citizen "greeters" with their neat little name tags and perky words of welcome? So what if they had lousy health plans? So what if the women earned less than the men? They made the long aisles feel less lonely. They were cute.
Will the high-tech perfection of shopping mean the end of shopping? And what will Americans do with themselves then, with no Sunday-paper circulars to study or holiday sales to stand in endless lines for, plotting their course through the electronics aisle to the stockpile of $99 digital cameras that went for $220 the day before and will go back up tomorrow? Without all that hustle, drama and suspense, why should customers even bother to leave their houses?
Of all the error-prone human activities that digital technology is working to streamline - diagnosing illness, finding love, obtaining driving directions - racing around in search of a good deal may be one of those we miss the most. Despite the cost-controlled monolithic gloom of the Wal-Marts and Costcos of the land, human beings, deep down, are still creatures of the bazaar, with a restless desire to haggle and finagle that cuts across cultures and the centuries. Outflanking the salesmen and beating out other customers is a primal survivalistic drive that links modern Topekans with the ancient Turks. It's a contest we lose as often as we win, but when we do win, it makes us feel alive and gives us something to boast about to friends.
Of course when we lose, as I did at the truck dealer, we tend to feel had - but only temporarily. Being ripped off, in fact, can prove invigorating, and it may be a crucial engine of evolution, or at least of personal development. My grandfather, see, was a new-car sucker, too, who grew more bitter with every grand sedan he shelled out the sticker price for plus "dealer prep" and then traded in two years later at a huge loss. Someday, I vowed, I'd make up for his softheadedness, and though I'm still trying, I enjoy the fight. A penny saved is a nickel earned, to my mind, and though everyone paying the same amount for everything no matter where or when he goes to buy it may seem to some like a consumerist paradise, to me it sounds almost as stifling as Soviet socialism but without the vibrant black market that made it bearable.
Should the cellphone and the Internet finally level the retail playing field and make searchable every price tag on the continent, there will be no bad deals anymore and no more good deals, just equal, efficient transactions among machines whose screens will be able to tell their users everything except why shopping was fun once and now it's not. Now that it has turned into buying and nothing else.
Walter Kirn, a frequent contributor to the magazine, is the author most recently of "Mission to America," a novel.
وبالله التووووووفيق