Amazon, E-Commerce, and the Rewiring of Retail

When I was running 5GuysTech, we had a real office, real staff, and a real pitch: the internet is where commerce is going, and your business needs to be there before your competitors arrive. We would sit across from small business owners, walk them through what a website could do for them, and wait for the moment they understood why it mattered.

Most of them heard us out. Almost none of them signed.

The objection that stuck with me was not hostile. It was calm and accurate. "My customers know where I am. They come in through the door. This is expensive." That was not denial. That was an honest description of how those businesses had operated for the entire length of their existence. The idea that someone would find a business through a search engine, hand credit card information to a server they had never met, then wait several days for something they could pick up that afternoon. That assumed a customer psychology most brick-and-mortar operators were not yet working with. Their current customers were not those customers.

They were right about the present. They were wrong about the direction.