NEW YORK WHOLESALE

Deirdre Macken

Data can be confusing. Just recently we’ve been bamboozled by department store sales that suggest consumers are walking around in hair shirts, and figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that tell us the country is booming partly because of consumer spending.

What are we to make of all this? Do we trust the kings of retail when they do a body count or statisticians when they crunch numbers? Well, another way to find out what’s going on is to take a walk around suburban shopping strips and see what’s going on. So let’s take a walk.

Around our place, there are lots of empty shops with fading For Lease signs. Obviously, some shop owners have had a tough time and some landlords are yet to get the message. But look what happens when the shops are reoccupied.

Slowly, suburban shopping strips are changing from places where people buy stuff into places where people buy an experience. They are becoming service centres for modern lifestyles rather than stocking depots for households.

The sorts of retailers that have bowed out of suburban strips in the past few years include fashion boutiques, shoe shops, gift shops, linen stores, book shops, record shops, hardware centres and furniture retailers.

All these shops sold stuff. Mostly it was stuff that could be bought more cheaply online, downloaded online, picked up on overseas travels or delivered more efficiently at big centres. The sorts of retailers that have taken their place in the suburban strip are virtually all services. They service your body, your dog, your office, your hobby, your tummy and your mind.

But by far the biggest incursions into our shopping strips have been made by cafes, restaurants, small bars and fast-eating places. We groan whenever we see an espresso machine being installed in an empty shop – how many lattes can one suburb handle! But the food scene along our strip doesn’t just tell us about the switch from people buying stuff to people buying experiences, it also tells the story of the switch from fine dining to daily dining.

Many of these new eating places are casual, quick and reasonably priced. Whether they sell noodles in boxes, fabulous pies, sushi still warm from hand-rolling, bar food that’s shareable or soups that are home made and ready to go, they invite locals to dine or pick up dinner on the way home. Other new tenants along our shopping strips are all about servicing our bodies. There are the massage parlours and nail salons that provide regular grooming sessions for passing shoppers.

There are more hairdressers, including a few that also offer pop-in services and, it might just be our area but we’ve been inundated with dental clinics that are more about the beauty of your smile than the health of your teeth.

Slightly behind the main strip, there are more beauty centres, offering quasi medical services such as botox, laser resurfacing, peels and, if they have doctors on board, surgical procedures.

Along the same lines, there are more physical health centres.

These include physiotherapy places, yoga centres, gyms, sports medicine centres and community halls where you can do anything from bingo to pilates.

Speaking of maintenance, our pets haven’t been forgotten. Every suburban strip now seems to have a pet grooming shop, where pooches are groomed, washed, clipped and outfitted.

Another growth category is the business services outlet. Sure, these places sell supplies but most of them operate like a business centre, offering copying, faxing, printing, design services and advice to the home office workforce.

Some of these office shops are big chains like Officeworks, others are musty spaces where an IT geek will fix all your computer problems, but the Apple store is the most sophisticated version of the shop as a service centre. As Steve Jobs said a decade ago, the Apple shop is less about selling and more about being “the best buying experience” in town.

Next time you pop up to the shops, check out how many people are toting shopping bags. Check out how many people look fresher, fitter, prettier, well fed and more knowledgeable. Even if you can’t detect the money being spent on servicing people, you’re bound to notice how great their dogs look.

So the shopping strips are a mirror of what department stores are telling us about sales, and a measure of what statisticians are telling us about spending. We’re flashing the cash around but we’re coming home empty handed.

dmacken@afr.com.au

Google is aggressively defending itself against accusations it manipulates its search results based on ad payments, and it is encouraging users to go elsewhere if they don't like what the company does.

A recent blog it posted came in response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece in which Nextag CEO Jeffrey Katz slammed the company and its practices.

Katz wrote that his comparison shopping site analyzes the search traffic it receives from Google and can tell "when Google makes changes to its algorithms that effectively punish its competitors," including his company.

"Our data, which we shared with the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 21, 2011, shows without a doubt that Google has stacked the deck. And as a result, it has shifted from a true search site into a commerce site -- a commerce site whose search algorithm favors products and services from Google and those from companies able to spend the most on advertising," Katz wrote.

Google was quick to counter with a detailed blog to defend itself.

Senior VP of Engineering Amit Singhal wrote that Google's natural search results are never influenced by payment and that its "ads and commercial experiences are clearly labeled and distinct from the unpaid results, and we recently announced new improvements to labeling of shopping results."

Google announced those "improvements" to shopping results on May 31 and said by the end of the year its product search results will be limited to paid advertising and be called Google Shopping. It said this would lead to better shopping results for users because "having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date."

Katz isn't the only one who takes issue with how Google is doing things these days.

"[P]aid inclusion was one of the original sins Google listed as part of its 'Don't Be Evil' creed. But these days, Google seems comfortable with paid inclusion, raising potential concerns for publishers and searchers alike," wrote Marketing Land's Danny Sullivan.

Singhal says Google clearly labels its ads and commercial experiences as such and that they're not mixed in with unpaid results.

"This is in contrast to most comparison shopping sites, which receive payment from merchants but often don't clearly label search results as being influenced by payment," he wrote.

As for Katz's declaration that changes Google makes to its algorithms have punished his company, Singhal wrote that Google makes more than 500 changes to its algorithms a year so as to help users, not websites.

"Our algorithms are always designed to give users the most relevant results -- and sometimes the best result isn't a website, but a map, a weather forecast, a fact, a quick answer, or specialized image, shopping, flight, or movie results. And that's not just Google; Bing, Yahoo and other search engines do the same thing," he wrote.

Most interesting, though, is Singhal's advice that if anyone doesn't like Google's search results, they can go ahead and use a different engine -- he even shared links directly to Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Google Minus Google.

Whether or not you like what Google is doing, you can't deny it has pluck.

To check out the rest of Singhal's assertions, visit the Google Public Policy Blog where he also says some of the company's largest advertisers are competitors and that "the great thing about the openness of the Internet is that if users don't find our results relevant and useful, they can easily navigate to Nextag, Amazon, Yelp, Bing or any other website." Follow Christina on Twitter and Google+ for even more tech news and commentary and follow Today@PCWorld on Twitter, too.