Consumers Love The Sharing Economy, But Are Ambivalent About eCommerce

Most Americans think ride-sharing — à la services like Lyft and Uber — has been good for the U.S.  Online shopping, on the other hand, seems to cause a wave of much more mixed feelings, according to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Fifty-three percent of respondents say that the ability to hire someone to drive them someplace has been a positive boon for the nation, whereas only eight percent of the country had a negative reaction. One-third of respondents had a “mixed” reaction.

Home-sharing services like Airbnb also had a fairly positive impression, though it did not do quite so well as ride-sharing: 42 percent of Americans think such platforms are a positive good, 9 percent think they are bad and 41 percent are ambivalent.

Sharing going digital — and getting monetized — seems mostly to make Americans happy (or happyish), but online shopping doesn’t quite do so well.

According to survey results, 23 percent say the trend of buying groceries online — instead of at the supermarket — has been positive, versus 25 percent who say it has been negative, and another 50 percent who are mixed.

And even much beloved Amazon took some heat. While 22 percent of respondents said that online shopping via Amazon and other online retailers has reduced the number of department stores and shopping malls nationwide and that they think that is a good thing, a large percentage — 25 percent — think the effect has been bad. And only 9 percent think Walmart and Target reducing the footprint both in number and size of stores is a good thing, as opposed to the 35 percent who think it’s a negative.