Let me preface this by saying I hold no position in Staples that I know of nor am I any kind of financial/investment advisor. This is simply an observation from Joe citizen.

This past week I received an order for this book from Alibris. Nothing unusual there, I receive orders from them periodically. I’m also under contract far away from home. Once again, nothing unusual there. Naturally I didn’t get the email about the order from Alibris until around supper time, which seems to be when such emails always arrive. No problem. After supper I’ll just hop over to Staples since they have a shipping counter. Bang my nose went on the door. Store hours are now from 9am-7pm. I got there at 7:04 and the automatic bank vault locks had kicked in.

Given that the Post Office is open for about 15 minutes per day now and nobody with a JOB can actually get to it, I decided to give up my lunch hour to ship the book the next day. After all the person had paid for priority mail. They charged me $39 and change to ship a book which normally costs around $13 at the Post Office. No, the Alibris shipping allowance doesn’t begin to cover the cost of actually shipping a book this heavy, but I’ve always eaten the other $7.

 It seems to me that upper management at Staples no longer wants any walk in business. Given the new store hours I feel it is only a matter of time before they pull a BlockBuster and start dumping all of the store locations to become a mail order only business. For an office supply store it won’t be a smart move. There are plenty of local vendors looking to scoop that business up and plenty of competitors when it comes to ordering on-line.