I bought my second pair of shoes on the web. You may wonder how can I buy the shoes without trying out in the store. Yes I did. I found out the price is much cheaper in the online store, $85 vs. $130. I felt pretty bad for the store clerk who showed me the product. But again I am not a rich guy now. As you may know, the world second richest man Warren Buffett also uses coupon at the “Diary Queen” store. By the way, he owns the Diary Queen Inc. So essentially he is putting money from the left pocket to the right  :-)  

This is my first shoes purchase from web. Online shopping (and banking) is nothing new to me. Amazon started it with books and CDs about 10 years ago. The interesting part is, with the development of e-commerce, we can now combine both the web and brick mortar stores to buy almost anything online: from appearel, cosmetics, electronics, shoes and even cars. This does not mean the real store will phase out. I think they need to provide more value (better service, better price, more choices) if they want to compete with the online stores. In other words, they have to earn it. Otherwise, people will just go online and buy everything from Amazon. Also, the stores both have online and offline presence such as WalMart, Best Buy and Target will have some advantages providing customer services (compare to pure online stores).  

For those curious minds, I got this Johnston Murphy Shuler Bicycle Toe from Zappos.