If there is no inventory and no shipping and no handling, how does one receive the purchased product?

digital downloads or media produced on premises. I suppose the discs would be the inventory, but it depreciates far less quickly and is reusable.

could u explain bit more in detail?

The essential idea is to replace an FYE or Tower Records with a pure digital model that focuses more on the shopping experience and discovery of content. Gut these existing stores of their DVD or disc racks, the bulk of which is idle, unproductive and in many cases will not sell. You now have a barren store.

Now fill the store with two basic types of devices: (i) devices that help you discover content - big monitors, touchscreen terminals, stages for performers of various stripes, etc. and (ii) devices that deliver content like a kiosks that presses discs, or terminal that you can plug a firewire cable into to download music, or a wireless transmitter that could wirelessly (sp) deliver content to a laptop or other media player.

The economics are similar to a FYE without any shipping handling, inventory or give-backs for unsold merchandise.

I'd like this as a consumer. But I think you are stuck with either Open Source content, or engaging in lengthy negotiations with content copyright holders. Usually, they'll also be in the distribution biz (SONY), and so will have no incentive to allow you to sell digital copies of their product.

@Gordon,

unless maybe if the copyright holders would receive royalties per sale like is the case with for example iTunes, which is works as a business model.
Though lately i have read that the big music labels want to make the price for mp3's higher so that they get more royalties, but Apple wanted to make the prices lower, so they had conflicting business interests. Some of those labels even threatened to break contract with Apple and get all their content off of iTunes.

i really have little interest in helping people pay for data which can be copied at the push of a button. i think the whole software and digital media rights is an extortion racket -- one i'd rather tear down than support.

my favorite advertisement at the beginnings of all these damn DVDs (which made money at the box office, money off the rentals, money off the purchases, and money off the advertising they force u to watch): "you wouldn't steal a car, would you?"

well, no. but if my friend bought a jag and could make me a copy by pushing a couple buttons.. ya, i would. and i'd pay him for his time, cause i don't know squat about burning copies of cars!

refinement pls....

How would this be better than my sitting at home and downloading music, movies, videos etc from iTunes?

i agree. why would i go to a store when itoons already does this online

How is this different than Amazon.com? If you say the brick and mortar store, then how is your idea different than Barnes & Nobles or Borders?

I'm with ccozad - Amazon gives me recommendations, Facebook ets me know what my friends are listening to. Having to shlep to a store to do something I can do from home... Why would I want to do that? What's the attraction? Sorry to sound really harsh, I just don't see it...

ccozad is right here!

no problems. Thanks for the feedback. The idea was really to emulate and capture the tower records, virgin megastore crowd but to improve the economics for the retailer. Please check out my other ideas. Cheers!

"Please check out my other ideas." Now that just sounds like you've given up... Why should we vote you up now?

Ha, well, one can only allocate so much time to his or her ideas. We are finite creatures, no? Given the negative feedback here and the positive feedback for ParentMatch, I am more inclined to focus there, but feel free to weigh the idea on its merits.

Been done.