So wouldn’t it rock if while you were reading online about carrot gloves you could see they’re on sale a few blocks away at Wabbitmart for $4.50 — 3 pairs left on the shelf? Not the sort of thing that sounds ridiculous these days (product aside), but it’s not close yet. Certainly not among anyone other than large retailers, and even they haven’t deeply integrated their online and offline stores. Why not? Why are the two worlds so far apart?

Well in part because brick and mortar retailers aren’t wild about signing up for direct comparison with e-commerce. And in fact, they’re already finding their role in comparison shopping unsavory.

A couple of months ago my folks came out west on an Amtrak train (like the one I’m blogging from now) and traveled with me to Victoria, British Columbia. Strolling about, we stumbled upon a little eco-shop called The Good Planet Company, where I struck up a conversation with the owner about the possibility of publishing his inventory on the web. The big idea was to provide open-source inventory management software that stipulates in the licensing that users must openly publish their inventory through some standard means (supported by the software). Then comparison shopping sites, services, and agents could help the user find products nearby. Customer’s could get their hands on the products faster than if they had to be shipped, and they’d retain all the other benefits of online comparisons.

I expected a lot of resistance to the idea of publishing product inventories openly — I doubt an all-or-nothing approach like that would win many takers anywhere. Much more likely to get shops to sign on if there’s a more nuanced model, like letting them use the software freely for any openly published inventory while charging extensively for any inventory kept hidden.

What I didn’t expect was that inviting comparisons between cyberspace and meatspace retailers would sound so horrible to the meaties. My Good Planet companion explained that he’d had several people coming in to see things like organic mattresses or bamboo t-shirts they’d seen online, give them a once over, and then announce blithely that they were going to go back to the web to buy them — much cheaper there.

My shopowner friend felt used. A little antipathy towards e-commerce is understandable, but much more pervasive than a little competitive annoyance is the business rationale available in stores everywhere: why invite the comparison with e-commerce when we can’t match the prices?

An academic point is that it’s not always the case that online is cheaper (dogfood, anyone?). Academic because I tend to trust storeowners to know their price domain better than I do.

I do think they’re miscalculating, though, when it comes to customers’ value of time. Online it may generally take less time to get past the paying, but offline is still faster at getting the thing in the customer’s hands. We’ve got a lot of impatience in this country, and that’s a flaw that still favors real-lifers. And that’s not likely to change in a hurry; too much physics on their side.