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Reader question: Please explain “brick and mortar companies” in this question: How are online companies and retailers growing faster and earning more when compared to brick and mortar companies? My comments: Brick and mortar companies are traditional companies in comparison to the newly coming online companies, doing what’s known as e-commerce. Brick and mortar are basic building materials. Bricks are the hard block of baked clay while mortar is the sticky mixture of cement, sand and water for joining the bricks together. And together bricks and mortar are what give us walls and houses. In our discussion, “brick and mortar” stands for the presence of actual buildings housing traditional companies. A car factory, for example, has workshops and warehouses, as well as offices housing personnel. These are all concrete, brick-and-mortar buildings. Take a look. They are really there. Many new Internet companies, on the other hand, don’t have much of a similar physical presence to speak of in terms of having actual factories and warehouses. Take Alibaba, for example. Their Tao Bao business is making billions and billions of yuan in helping clients sell goods online every year, but customers have little idea where Alibaba the company is. That is a good thing for Ma Yun, its leader, and co. The real Alibaba and his forty thieves wouldn’t want you to know exactly where they were all the time, either. | 
