Category: Retail

  • Serendipity Engines

    In commerce, there’s an incalculable difference between search and discovery. Discovery requires serendipity, and there’s no better source of serendipity than independent bookstores. Wednesday, I was in Eugene, a small Oregon city a couple hours south of Portland. I dropped into the legendary Smith Family Bookstore, where I found a $4.00 copy of Violent Spring by Gary Phillips,…

  • 13 Ways of Looking at Brands

    Brands have different functions in our lives, some easy to understand and some that deserve extra pondering. A few days ago, my friend Om Malik reached out with these questions about brands: I am thinking about something and wanted to get a better idea of what it means to be a music artist or a media company…

  • Walmart, Vizio, Amazon, and Experience Stacks

    This week, WSJ reported that the grocery giant is in talks to acquire a TV manufacturer: why is this a good idea, and how does it help Walmart compete with Amazon? (Issue #106) Attentive readers will remember my earlier explorations of Experience Stacks, which are the idiosyncratic collection of prior experiences somebody brings to bear on…

  • Tribal Shopping

    How realistic is the idea that economic incentives will coax people to choose a single digital ecosystem? (Image created with Adobe Firefly.) Writing near future science fiction lets me exaggerate a handful of features of life today to see what life tomorrow might look like. When I put these exaggerations into a story, it makes…

  • Amazon, AI, and Ads on Prime Video

    The trillion dollar ecommerce giant is adding ads to its Prime Video streaming service because everybody else is, but the secret story is about Amazon’s growing AI capabilities.  On September 22, Amazon announced that it would follow Netflix, Max, and Disney+ and start running ads on Amazon Prime Video. Ad averse Prime subscribers can cough…

  • What’s Next for Apple and Amazon?

    The world’s most valuable company won’t buy Disney anytime soon, but there’s a giant caveat. Plus, what else will the ecommerce giant do with Amazon One, its new biometric payment platform? Being a futurist can be glum when other writers breathlessly announce new-to-them ideas that I’ve been talking about for years while missing the broader…

  • Frontiers of Scale

    As media continues to fragment in the face of changes in legislation and technology, where will new big audiences come from? A few issues back, I explored how changes in legislation and technology are signaling the end of cheap digital scale for media. (Don’t worry: you don’t have to read that issue to understand this one.) If…

  • Why Walmart Should Buy Paramount

    Note: I wrote and first published the following column on Sunday, August 14, before the rumors came true the following day: Walmart had signed an agreement with Paramount. You can find a review of that news here. However, nothing about the news changes my argument that Walmart is missing a bigger opportunity, which is the topic of what follows. …

  • Amazon’s New Pay-With-Your-Palm Tech and its Implications

    If you live in Austin and love experiencing the sharpest edge of technology, then head to the Whole Foods at Arbor Trails. There you can use a new service called Amazon One to pay for your groceries simply by putting your palm on a scanner. Here’s an excerpt from a fascinating piece in last week’s…

  • Amazon’s Secret Strategy with its new Department Stores

    Amazon never does things for only the obvious reasons, which makes me wonder what the company is up to with its latest retail foray: department stores.  Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported:  The new retail spaces will be around 30,000 square feet, smaller than most department stores, which typically occupy about 100,000 square feet,…