Video Transcript:

Honest Ed’s, Toronto’s famous bargain store, closed in December and held a wake last weekend. Ed himself died 10 years ago. His son David says they survived dollar stores and big box stores. What they couldn’t survive was online shopping like Amazon.

Since the first trade ever made, there’s always been a human sense of a buyer and seller. Bargaining was one of the great human rituals. Customers who ever met Ed knew him through his gaudy signs: Don’t just stand there, buy something, etc. Even Walmart has greeters. People who used to buy from Eaton’s catalogue would write Mr. Eaton, like the kid from the hockey sweater.

The point wasn’t just the purchase, it was the contact. But with online shopping, the human links are severed. Artificial Intelligence and algorithms replace give and take in marketplace and bazaar. Or do they?

What about voice assistants like Siri and Alexa on Amazon? You can order from them, though you can’t haggle with them — yet. And then there’s eBay.

The question is: how much can you really drain the human element from the economic, as online shopping seems to do? Or has the death of the salesman, like reports of Mark Twain’s death, been greatly exaggerated? How much will Honest Ed, and his crazy store, in other words, be missed?