brick-and-mortar

(brīk'ənd-môr'tər)
adj.
Located or serving consumers in a physical facility as distinct from providing remote, especially online, services: brick-and-mortar classrooms; a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

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Popular name for the fixed assets owned by a bank, either owned or leased, including branch offices, and the Back Office . Generally it refers to retail offices or branch offices in conventional multibranch banking. Branch banking has a high number of distribution points for retail customers, at a high fixed cost. Contrast with Automated Teller Machine; Home Banking.

The physical property; often contrasted with intangibles, sometimes contrasted with cyberspace.


Examples: An educational institution may choose to concentrate on instructional quality factors such as student-teacher ratio rather than on maintaining or adding to its physical plant, which may be described as a bricks and mortar issue. Barnes and Noble bookstore offers shoppers the opportunity to visit bricks and mortar stores as well as its Web site, whereas Amazon.com sells its wares only via the Internet.

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Basic and essential, as in Matthew Arnold's essay (1865): "Margate, that bricks-and-mortar image of British Protestantism." This phrase transfers essential building materials to other fundamental matters. It also may be used more literally to denote a building or buildings (whether or not made of bricks and mortar), as in The alumni prefer to see their donations in the form of bricks and mortar. [Mid-1800s]

This is a casino or cardroom where you play against players face to face, as opposed to playing online.

SoundPoker Says: The local casino, cardroom, or a players home are considered a brick and mortar because they reside in actual physical buildings. They differ from online poker because online poker does not have a physical location one must travel to in order to play poker.

See Also: Cardroom, Casino, Online Poker, Table