Cross channel? Do you think from a customer point of view?

As my earlier posts suggest: we are investing in capabilities in our IT-solutions to ensure customers are recognised and served. We all know that the essence of our monetary economy evolves around gaining the trust and "euro" from our target audience.

So, we have invested in CRM and webpages. Followed by an online shop to ensure we can match the proposition of our competitors. It turned out we also needed to ensure "one source of truth for product information" (PIM) to base our promotions on.
However now we face the next challenge: cross channel integration. An example?

I used to be very happy with my Palm Treo. My first real smart phone based on the windows platform. Yes, a beauty (in my eyes :-)), because it was a mash-up of the smart Palm hardware and the "open" (I know, many other opinions state differently) Windows mobile platform.

When I was walking through a city center with my family I realised that I still wanted to have two cradles, to charge the gadget when-ever I sat at my desk, either at home or at the office.
So I entered the local electronics shop, no Palm. The competitor: no Palm. Another: no, but they could sell me another smartphone from ....... yeah right! That is a nice example of listening to your customer.... (not).
However, I did use time from these physically present and financially rewarded shop attendants. Economical return for them and return for me: ZERO.

So there I was, money in my pocket, clear desire...... But hey!!! I had a smartphone in my hand! Silly me. So, I opened the browser, searched for the desired accessories, compared some prices and added the desired topics to a shopping basket. I added a stylus, just in case this one would be lost.
Checked out, entered my creditcard number, done..... "Dad, are you coming"? Off we went, into the next street.
So there I was, in a physical shopping centre, buying online the product of my choice.

The motto of this story? More and more (online) shops offer long tail assortment. Given the growing amount of possible products physical stores have less potential to carry the wide range. They obviously focus on putting "fast running product" in the physical outlet to economically cover the cost of "in stock/on display".
Would it have been difficult for the electronics shop to offer me the desired goods and even make some margin to cover the cost of serving?
Do you think many customers will visit the physical store when they have a clear desire formulated?

Hypothetical questions of course, but think this through then: have you aligned the IT solutions to the desired customer proposition yet? For more about the role of the retail shop, read the Dutch book "het einde van winkels?" of Prof. Dr. C. Molenaar.
A related article (in German) from P. Zwyssig.