Slate Article-- Bogus Trend Story of the Day

The Sunday New York Times discovers online sales losing "steam."
By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, June 18, 2007, at 6:05 PM ET

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.Nothing lives up to our expectations. My parents. Your children. Television season finales. Yesterday (June 17), the New York Times located its disappointment in Web-based retailing in a 1,200-word, Page One piece titled "Some Buyers Grow Web-Weary, and Online Sales Lose Steam."

The lede of the article asks, "Has online retailing entered the Dot Calm era?" The story answers resoundingly, "Yes."

The Times finds consternation in the fact that since the Web commerce got started, annual online retail sales have grown at about 25 percent. But those overall rates are slowing, the paper reports, and market-research firms project further slowing. The Times quotes a Jupiter Research finding that online retailing's growth rate has peaked and will slow to 9 percent a year by the end of the decade.

The Times presents a few bogus anecdotes to explain the slippage, including "Internet fatigue" on the part of consumers who are "changing their buying habits." A shopper tells the Times that he now prefers real stores to online ones because of better lighting and better service. His example: Book Passage in downtown San Francisco. The shopper's wife—who just happens to be an executive at the brick-and-mortar department store Macy's—says shopping online is "much more of a task." What else would she say?

The piece provides additional evidence to account for online's decline. Dell now sells computers at Wal-Mart, it reports. Gone unmentioned is the fact that Dell sold PCs at Best Buy, Costco, and Sam's Club as recently as 1994, according to this Times article from one year ago. Another anecdote: Expedia.com has "almost tripled" its number of ticketing kiosks in hotels and other touristy spots. It could be a terrific supporting statistic if the story included the base number of kiosks that have been almost tripled, which it doesn't. The most bogus anecdote claims that "Borders … recently revamped its Web site to allow users to reserve books online and pick them up in the store." There's nothing "recent" about that service. Borders spokeswoman Anne Roman says via e-mail that the book chain has given customers the option to reserve books online and retrieve them in stores since November 2002.

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