One of our big beliefs in the retail world is that “faster is better”, and this is an emerging truth especially with younger shoppers today. Faster store experience, faster delivery, faster checkout. What are you doing to increase the speed of how you are bringing your product or service or experience to market? In today’s New York Times, it was painfully pointed out how slow America is compared to the rest of the world with regard to internet speed and the cost of internet access (@NYTimes) http://nyti.ms/1zjXSpY. Here were some great insights:
– In Seoul it takes seven seconds to download a high-def movie, versus New York where it takes 1.4 minutes.
– The top three cities for internet speed are Seoul, Hong Kong and Paris, where broadband speeds are 10 times faster than U.S. cities.
– In the U.S. we pay as much as $300/month for slower internet, whereas the top global cities (with faster internet) pay $30/month).
Now the reason for all of this is that about 75% of us in the U.S. have no competitive choice for our broadband service, and with no choice, we get substandard speed and pricing, all of which we need to change. We need to change it because consumers continue to want more You-Tube and digitally rich marketing experiences, and retailers need to transition their spending increasingly to this type of media. But we need the speed!
Photo Credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/28429892@N02/2654920278/”>ryanfuller14</a> via <a href=”http://compfight.com”>Compfight</a> <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/help/general/#147″>cc</a>