Just two or three years ago, I thought I’d never buy anything online. In fact, the whole idea seemed faintly ridiculous, as if the pounds of mail-order catalogs arriving each week and the veritable monuments to retail built throughout every city in the country weren’t already making it sufficiently easy to buy.

Now I already buy things online pretty regularly, and more and more often. What’s going on?

It started with books. Amazon.com was the first online store that most people heard of, and I was no exception. At first I had little interest, but then I tried it. Now it seems unbelievably tedious if a real bookstore doesn’t have what I want in stock. What do they mean they don’t carry all the works of Karel Capek? I’m outta’ there.

Then it started to happen with clothes. At the mall one weekend, I couldn’t find what I wanted plain white Hanes T-shirts. On a lark, I checked the Web, and the company had an online store. I ordered them, and they arrived within a week for just a few dollars that is, just a few dollars including the shirts. The cost of the shipping was insignificant, and I may never go to a physical store again for no-brainer purchases like clothes that are basically the same every time. Yes, sometimes you do want to try things on, but other times it’s not important.

Now the same thing has started to happen with other things too, even nonperishable groceries (why lug around all that laundry detergent and olive oil?) that can be delivered to your door on a regular schedule. It’s a radically expanded version of the milkman for the 21st century. I never absolutely hated going shopping before, but I wasn’t crazy about it either. The idea that it might become unnecessary for most things sounds pretty appealing.

It’s too early to draw conclusions about what this all means, and my experience may not be universal. Certainly there are still plenty of people who aren’t going online when they need to buy something, and a lot of online stores are still operating in the red. But what we could be talking about, folks, is the beginning of the end for retail as we know it.

The MIT economist Lester Thurow said as much at a September conference organized by International Data Corp. Thurow suggested that e-commerce could mean the end of 5,000 years of conventional retailing if online stores can combine price advantages with a pleasant virtual shopping experience.

After only a few years of trying, it appears that they can.

Let’s face it: the growth of malls and mega-stores has shown that people want selection, convenience, and low prices, and that’s about it. Sure, people say they’d rather shop from mom and pop on Main Street. But if the jumbo chain store out on the highway has those curling irons for a dollar less, guess where people go?

For better or worse, the same thing that happened to a lot of downtowns wide-scale desertion may happen to malls and other big retail outlets. In the next few decades, the “mall rat” might go the way of the soda jerk (which might not be such a bad thing!).

So a few years into the e-commerce revolution, here are a few observations and predictions:

Online stores need to become easier to use, as well as completely trustworthy. But considering that they’ve only been at it for a few years, the signs are encouraging. Online stores may also have to commit to paying to pick up and replace an item if the customer doesn’t like it.

If people can go online and get what they get from retail stores for less money, that is what they will do. If overhead costs for retail stores turn out to be higher than the cost of running an online store and shipping products to customers, then retail stores are in big trouble.

Some stores will have a kind of invulnerability to online competition. Retail stores that sell last-minute items like aspirin or milk will have a natural advantage. Stores that sell specialty items that you have to see clothes that have to be tried on, chairs to be sat in, or antiques to be closely examined also have a natural immunity. But stores that sell anything that people can get a sense of from a picture and description online plus reviews from other customers had better watch out.

Retail stores may improve their chances by becoming more multidimensional. In other words, they can’t just stock products, they have to be fun to visit. We’ve already seen the beginnings of this through combination bookstore-cafes, hardware stores that offer how-to classes, and stores like Ikea, where you can have a plate of Swedish meatballs as a break from pricing bed frames.

Other stores may have to offer who knows? upscale restaurants, dance clubs, or Imax movies to give themselves an edge. If they aren’t fun to visit and don’t offer something that people can’t get online, will anybody go?

That remains to be seen, but more and more, my money’s already on the Net.

Windows 3100?

The Gartner Group, a consulting firm based in Stamford, Conn. (www.gartner.com), released a research report in September estimating that the cost of migrating to Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 2000 operating system may be as high as $3,100 per PC.

Microsoft says W2K will offer greater reliability and management features that actually reduce operating costs, but by Gartner’s best guess, it could take companies more than three years to get a return on their investment in the new operating system. And by that time, of course, a successor to Windows 2000 may be on the way. Estimates were based on the needs of a 2,500-user company.

Anybody think they can do it for less?

Chris Ott is a freelance technology writer and can be reached at [email protected].