“To tell you the truth,” the clerk told me, “we don’t really want anyone in the store.”
I was at one of the new “Roll by Goodyear” tire stores that have popped up all over the Washington area, many in fashionably hip neighborhoods with pricey real estate. The stores don’t have much of anything inside, not unlike some Soho boutiques. But instead of using 1,000 square feet to display two blouses, one shoe, and a necklace, Goodyear is taking a minimalist approach to selling tires. There is no counter, and there are only a half-dozen tires on display, mounted on rods in the wall so you can spin them. In its bid for an ascetic aesthetic, the company has gotten rid of everything that makes a car repair garage unpleasant, including the customers.
I’ve been to my share of tire shops before, and other than providing tires, they have never had much to recommend themselves on. The waiting rooms have invariably been filled with plastic chairs in some color known only to 1974. On a counter would be a well-stained coffee pot and a stack of white, plastic foam cups; dreg-polluted cups were likely to be abandoned carelessly on the chipped linoleum of a low table. These cups competed for space with prehistoric copies of Car and Driver, Motor Trend, and Cat Fancy.
You could count on the magazines being coated with a thin, grimy film; the tables being coated with a thin, grimy film; the chairs being coated with a thin, grimy film. The bathroom — well, the less said about the bathroom, the better.
I always assumed the ubiquitous oily film was the price of all that tire-spinning necessary for “balancing.” There would be grime on the floor, mysterious brown stains on the warped ceiling panels, and up in a corner would be hanging a television half on the fritz. You could expect it to be tuned to a soap opera or CNN. Happily, there was no hearing it over the shrieking of pneumatic wrenches.
All of which to say that there was room for improvement in the business of getting cars new shoes. And that’s what Goodyear is doing, with an e-commerce approach. No more will you go to a garage. Order your tires online, and either Goodyear will send a “valet” to whisk your car away to a workshop or a van will show up to replace your tires right there in front of your house.
Either way, you stay in charge of your own coffee-making and television, which means no foam cups and no CNN. What’s not to like?
It’s clearly an improvement on what had been an ordeal of grime and tedium. But it leaves a question unanswered: Why does an e-commerce concept need a physical storefront, especially a storefront that isn’t expected to do much actual business? Haven’t we all been told that the internet was sounding the death beep for physical retail?
It’s not just legacy brands that are clinging to an outmoded brick-and-mortar model. Chic new shoe companies have been following the same path: Launch an internet, direct-to-customer platform, open a boutique in San Francisco, and then open boutiques in New York and Washington.
But why open the boutiques, which rarely stock a company’s full range of offerings?
I think it is because putting together a slick website has become all too easy, even as it remains all too ephemeral. Anybody can make a website and create an instant company. Bricks and mortar are now a sign of success, of solidity — an emblem of having made it that, in its own way, is more compelling than having gone public.
Thus the “Roll” stores, which act as an advertisement more than as a place of business — a brick-and-mortar blimp, if you will.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
