Last week a couple of friends and I went to the mall, and what I saw shocked me: Great American cookies was gone, Teavana was gone and numerous others too. I had no one to blame but myself. Nowadays, when I decide to leave my house to look and buy a product, people look at me with disgust in their faces, “Who needs to go outside when you could simply stay home and get your product without moving a single muscle?” Online shopping has been around for a while, but it really kicked off in the late 1990s when Amazon and eBay became available to the public. Nowadays, sites like those are ruling the shopping industry due to their accessibility and ease, making it so that consumers don’t have to leave their homes to buy anything they want.

Shopping has never been easier, anything you could possibly think of is only a click away, how could anyone not be ecstatic? This is what many Americans are falling for. The illusion that convenience is better than quality. Have you ever seen those classic “expectations vs. reality” memes? That’s what shopping for clothes online is like. You expect to receive an exceptional piece of clothing, but you end up with something out of Kanye West’s new music video. The problem is that consumers simply don’t care, the convenience is too addicting. Back in the good old days if we wanted clothes, we would go out to the mall and be able to physically take a look at the quality of the product. We could be happy purchasing things because we knew we were spending our money on a top tier product.

Unfortunately,  people aren’t doing that anymore, and retailers are now the ones paying the price. While internet retailers such as Amazon have been leading the pack and have successfully added $27.8 billion to their apparel revenue since 2005, department stores have lost $29.6 billion according to Business Insider. Stores like Sears and Kmart have closed over 400 stores in these past two years alone according to a study done by the website Clark. Furthermore, I think we all know the epic tragedy of Toys R Us. The legendary store of treasures and wonders filed for bankruptcy this last March, and most of their stores around the U.S. now cease to exist. This is an epidemic, and if consumers don’t stop this now we’ll eventually lose Go! Calendars too.

The benefit that was being able to check a product for its quality is dwindling away. But the unfortunate truth is that the malice known as online shopping is showing no signs of stopping anytime soon, and all we can do now is just brace ourselves.