Needless to say, much of this information was of questionable reliability. In the vast majority of cases it was anything but comprehensive. As for understanding the “fair” price to pay, there really was no practical way to run a comparison. In virtually all cases the gathering of truly useful information was either impossible or a major hassle.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
—Herbert Simon
Today we face a veritable tsunami of information, and our challenge is often how to separate the signal from the noise. A shopper can readily find a vast amount of data and perspectives from a plethora of sources, including fellow shoppers. Most retailers’ websites contain highly detailed product information pages, and many now include customer reviews, demonstration videos, and the ability to do side-by-side product comparisons. Sites that aggregate product or service information like TripAdvisor, eBay, and Rakuten do much of the same but typically add the ability to compare products across different retailers. There are seemingly endless product review sites, expert blogs on just about anything you can imagine, and “listicles” of every conceivable iteration.
Years ago it was hard to feel truly empowered by information. Today the consumer holds most of the cards.
Access Is No Longer Scarce
Before online shopping existed, the stuff you could buy was pretty much limited to the stores in your town. If you lived in a big city, you usually had a decent range of options. At the other end of the spectrum, if you lived in a rural area, your options were quite restricted. Sure, you could drive to the big city, but most of the time that wasn’t practical or would be reserved for special occasions. Mail-order catalogs could meet some needs, but product offerings were narrow, delivery times long, and shipping costs could often be prohibitive.
Access was also constrained by the hours you could utilize available retail locations. The 7-Eleven might be open much of the time, but most stores had far more limited hours and many weren’t open on Sunday.
Today, most consumers have access to just about anything they might want from just about anywhere in the world just about any time they want. Since the advent of smartphones we no longer even need to go to our home desktop or office workstation to gain access. Access is often at our fingertips almost everywhere we go. And we don’t have to worry about a particular store’s hours or whether they happen to be open on Sundays. The internet never closes and we can now shop anywhere, anytime our smart device is with us.
Not only has access expanded radically and been digitally enabled, many of the channels are different. Shopping is often embedded in news, blogs, and other content, and many social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, et al.) are now effectively retail shopping channels.
Choice Is No Longer Scarce
Even if you were fortunate enough to have a wide variety of stores near your home or place of business that were open reasonably convenient hours, most of them didn’t carry a big enough selection to meet your ideal needs or desires. Just carrying a breadth of in-stock colors and sizes remains an issue for even the largest stores in the largest markets. If you were in a smaller market, your choices were far more limited.
By comparison with traditional brick-and-mortar models, where premium location rents and the cost of distributing inventory across many locations constrained how much product physical retailers would stock, it is much less expensive to carry inventory in an e-commerce warehouse. This gave rise to new business models like Zappos, which could dramatically increase its assortment compared to a local department store or shoe specialty store. The growth of marketplaces, and the advent of direct-ship models from manufacturers’ warehouses, also greatly expanded the availability of products.
Today, in many circumstances, choice is no longer constrained by how many aisles the various stores within a reasonable drive time contain. The aisles are virtually endless, and the long tail of selection is often taken for granted. Choice is now so abundant that even the most idiosyncratic of tastes can be satisfied.
Convenience Is No Longer Scarce
Having worked in several direct-to-consumer and home-delivery businesses, I have to laugh about the hurdles we faced even in the fairly recent past. Could we deliver furniture or home appliances in under a week and shrink our promised delivery windows from four hours to two? Should we charge a premium to get a package delivered in two or three days instead of the usual five to ten? Could we recover most of our expenses through our delivery charges?
Given how much has changed in the past few years, at some point we will probably stop calling 7-Elevens and their brethren “convenience stores.” What made them convenient was largely that they were open twenty-four hours a day and were likely closer to your home and office than most stores. Today that notion seems increasingly anachronistic.
Besides being able to order virtually anything we want 24/7 from a device that is practically tethered to us, we are benefiting from a revolution in convenience. Products that used to take weeks to get delivered can often be delivered the same day and sometimes, with the advent of Prime Now from Amazon, within an hour or so.
Products that had few, if any, viable options (or were prohibitively expensive) are now routinely delivered by retailers or delivery services like Uber Eats or PickUpNow. And lead times on custom products continue to shrink.
What former J.Crew and Gap helmsman Mickey Drexler calls “the de-schlepping of retail” is now a key driver of e-commerce growth. Consumers increasingly choose to have big, bulky items like pet food, bottled water, and large multipacks of toilet paper delivered instead of hauling them home in their cars or minivans or via public transportation.
Subscription services help make sure that our wardrobes are current (Stitch Fix and Trunk Club), that we have a new head and battery for our ultrasonic toothbrush (Quip), that we don’t run out of razor blades (Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club), and many more.
While voice shopping is still in the early days of adoption, instead of pulling out our phones or getting on our laptop, more and more of us are simply telling Alexa and Google what we want, and before we know it, products show up at our doorstep.
Connection Is No Longer Scarce
Before the turn of this century, if you wanted to track down a long-lost high-school friend or figure out your genealogy, you were likely going down a rabbit hole. If you wanted to update your parents on what was going on in your life, your options were a (potentially expensive) long-distance phone call or writing them a letter, which would take days to arrive.
Today, many of us have hundreds, if not thousands, of Facebook “friends” and/or social media followers. Response time can be virtually instantaneous via SMS and direct messaging within the various platforms or Snapchat, WeChat, and the like. Rich media with sharing functionality not only allows for vast networks with rapid iteration, but enables a new depth of connection when augmented by photos, videos, and sound files.
We can (and should) argue about what this all means for emotional health and the development of certain social skills. But the redefinition of what “connection” means over the last few years is profound and undeniable. The boundaries that limited connection between individuals and brands have come down, and much of the friction, be it in cost, time, physical distance, or complexity, is now gone. We can source the wisdom of crowds to get feedback on just about anything, understand the price we should pay, glean advice on whether we look good in an outfit, get help determining the best dish at that restaurant to which we have never been, and so much more. We can tweet to a company customer service Twitter handle to voice a concern. Via an app we can almost instantaneously get connected to possible mates, find someone with whom to share a taxi, or see who is attending the same concert or play.
For retail, this shifts power away from brand-controlled marketing to individuals and those