共享題干題Passage 2
Shoppers on Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season in America, are notoriously aggressive. Some even start queuing outside stores before dawn to be the first to lay their hands on heavily discounted merchandise. Despite the frenzy at many stores, however, the recession appears to have accelerated the pace at which shoppers are abandoning bricks and mortar（傳統(tǒng)實體商場）in favor of online retailers e-tailers. So this year Black Friday（so named because it is supposed to put shops into profit for the year）also marks the start of many conventional retailers5 attempts to regain the initiative.
E-commerce holds particular appeal in straitened times as it enables people to compare prices across retailers quickly and easily. Buyers can sometimes avoid local sales taxes online, and shipping is often free. No wonder, then, that online shopping continues to grow even as the offline sort shrinks.
The shift in spending to the Internet is good news for companies like P&G that lack retail outlets of their own. But it is a big concern for bricks-and-mortar retailers, whose prices are often higher than those of e-tailers, since they must bear the extra expense of running stores. Happily, however, conventional retailers are in a better position to fight back than last year, when overstocking forced them to resort to ruinous discounting.
The most obvious response to the growth of e-tailing is for conventional retailers to redouble their own efforts online. The online arms of big retailers are performing well, on the whole. Retailers are also trying to make shopping seem fun and exciting to counteract the economic gloom. One common tactic is to set up "pop-up” stores, which appear for a short time before vanishing again, to foster a sense of novelty and urgency. Following the lead of many bricks-and-mortar outfits, eBay recently launched a pop-up in New York where customers could inspect items before ordering them.
Stores are also trying to lure customers by offering services that are not available online. Best Buy, a consumer-electronics retailer, has started selling music lessons along with its musical instruments. Lululemon Athletica, which sells sports clothes, offers free yoga classes. The idea is to bring people back to its shops regularly, increasing the likelihood that they will develop the habit of shopping there.