Lists are the new search⁠↗

Showing every SKU, of course, is exactly the Amazon approach - ‘the everything store’, and it works well for some categories, and especially when you know exactly what you want. But knowing what you want is not necessarily the starting point - that’s what needs to happen along the funnel. Amazon’s relative weakness at curation, discovery and recommendation (I’ve seen data suggesting the recommendation platform is only 1/4 of its books sales) is, I think, a big reason why, after 25 years of ruthless and relentless execution, it’s still only got to 25% of the print books market in the UK and USA. A bookshop (or any shop) is, yes, the end-point to a logistics system, but a good bookshop is primarily a discovery platform. That is, it’s more about the tables than the shelves. And the tables are lists, not inventory.

But one thing I saw growing up in South London as supermarkets deployed was that small food shops tended to disappear, and then re-appear in new incarnations, providing service, curation and selection that supermarkets themselves couldn’t match, for people willing to search them out and of course pay the premium, and where there was the density to support this. They didn’t scale - they didn’t turn into chains of 30 artisanal butchers - but they often prospered.

This in turn reminds me of a story in the New York Times, many years ago, about small Japanese shops who wanted only word-of-mouth customers and so made themselves hard to find (even by Japanese standards). In particular, there was one denim shop in a back-alley of Tokyo called ‘Not Found’ - so as to be ungooglable. One can call this curation, or hipsterdom, or just a Veblen good. But in the past, such things were always geographically constrained - you had to live in a big city (while chain retail took homogenized versions of the same thing to everyone). I wonder, as ecommerce matures, how much will be carved out into exactly the kind of spectrum of large and small retail beyond the big aggregators, and how far this removal of geographic constraint might make it easier rather than harder for them to take sales from the giants, in part by removing that density problem. That is, there might be a lot more lists, they might be hard to find, and not be part of some global aggregator, and that might be OK.