
The coming retail apocalypse: some axioms - cstross
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/12/the-coming-retail-apocalypse-s.html
======
zipdog
This might be relevant:

In Scott Adams' The Dilbert Future (1997), he introduced the word confusopoly.
The word is a portmanteau of confusion and monopoly (or rather oligopoly),
defining it as "a group of companies with similar products who intentionally
confuse customers instead of competing on price". Examples of industries in
which confusopolies exist (according to Adams) include telephone service,
insurance, mortgage loans, banking, and financial services. [from wiki]

The central idea is that if companies made it easy to compare their products,
then those companies would be forced in to a detrimental competition on price.
So instead, if each company offers a slightly different package, with
different feautres and prices, then simple comparison doesn't exist.

~~~
TheEzEzz
This is still the spirit of collusion, and is prone to defectors. There should
be large incentives for one company to leave the cartel, make a simple
service, and sell it at the same price of their competitors. They would save
money by reducing their own internal complexity, and would gain money by
winning over customers.

------
spanktheuser
I worked on a mortgage search engine start up for a couple years. Mortgages
are a wonderful example of how well intentional pricing complexity can
succeed. Mortgage companies supply money - the most perfect commodity around.
In order to avoid a pricing race to the bottom, the mortgage shopping process
has become one of the most confusing possible. Obtaining an accurate price
quote involves filling out a several page application which most people can't
do accurately without the help of a broker. Pricing is a combination of
interest rate and fees which can range into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Fees are calculated in multiple steps and include certain closing costs which
are only known weeks into the process - often when it's too late to switch
mortgage brokers and still make your contractually-agreed close date. In the
small surveys I've done, more than half of mortgage applicants only learned
the total amount they'd be charged the day they close the mortgage. And many
were surprised to learn of unanticipated charges amounting to >$1,000 above
what they expected.

This strategy was very successful in extracting differential payments from
consumers. Prior to some recent regulatory reforms, the most successful 5% of
mortgage shoppers negotiated fees of $6,000 on a $200k mortgage. The least
successful 5% were charged fees of $18,000. These are borrowers with
equivalent financial circumstances and credit rating.

Much of this is due to the complexity of mortgages. So I'm dubious that this
sort of apocalypse will prove true for all types of products. But I do expect
to see it increasingly in categories where there is high product complexity,
the product isn't easily compared based on technical specifications, brand
reputation isn't important, and/or there is little value in cultivating
customer loyalty (for example, I may purchase a couch once every 15 years).

~~~
nradov
I think that has already come to an end, at least for simple residential
mortgages. When I refinanced my home mortgage a few months ago I just filled
out a short form on Zillow.com and it gave me instant price quotes. Then I
picked the cheapest one, filled out a longer form, and closed a few weeks
later with total fees of about ~$600.

With the tools and information available now only a fool would get stuck with
$6000 on fees (unless they're intentionally paying points to knock down the
interest rate).

~~~
spanktheuser
I hate to say this, but you likely paid a higher origination fee than $600. It
just wasn't due at close - instead it was baked into your mortgage payment
every month in the form of a slightly higher interest rate. At the end of the
day, brokers and bank branches want to earn a few thousand for "originating a
mortgage." This is fancy way of saying retailing a mortgage. Although they
often take less - maybe $900 - for a refinance. You can find out how much you
were charged by looking through your mortgage paperwork. The bulk of the
mortgage broker or bank branch retail mark up comes from something that is
usually labeled "origination fee."

That said, thanks to recent reforms, an individual brokerage can no longer
charge two borrowers will different commissions for the same mortgage.
However, two different brokers can each charge very different fees. Quicken
Loans, one of the largest mortgage originators out there, is notorious for
charging much higher commissions than nearly anyone else. And thanks to the
difficulty of comparison shopping, they're still successful in obtaining
premium prices... even in the age of Zillow and Google.

~~~
nradov
No, I know all about origination fees. My interest rate was rock bottom, the
absolute best available on a refinance of that type at the time. And based on
what I've seen, comparison shopping is no longer difficult at all. If suckers
are voluntarily paying higher prices then it isn't because of difficulty.

~~~
spanktheuser
What's easy for you may be quite difficult for others. I'm not sure the Hacker
News community should ever be considered the middle of the bell curve. To wit:
prior to the financial crisis, one of the largest mortgage search engines
conducted a large randomized survey of home owners. A little under 40% did not
know if they had a fixed or adjustable rate mortgage.

------
mechanical_fish
Airline ticket pricing is not a good general example: The airlines get away
with arcane pricing in part because they have successfully outlawed arbitrage
by prohibiting the resale or transfer of tickets away from the original buyer,
in the name of "security".

I'm dubious that this practice is going to work so well for, say, socks. There
is no law against trading socks on the secondary market.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Hm, though to argue against myself for a minute, it occurs to me that my
unhappiness with e.g. Amazon Kindle books might be poetically summarized as
"Kindle is like buying books from an airline's sales department." Non-
refundable, non-tradable, locked to me.

So maybe there's more mileage in the idea of "airlinification" than I
initially thought. Though Amazon gets away with it (to the extent that they
do) mainly because their "convenience" argument is pretty strong for virtual
goods: You don't have to warehouse the books, tote them around, re-buy them if
your house burns down, etc. These selling points do not apply so well to
airline tickets (though airlines will certainly try to sell you on the awesome
convenience of non-tradable non-refundable e-tickets), let alone my
metaphorical socks.

Still, though. More and more things can be virtualized or time-shared. It is
not at all hard to imagine carshares like Zipcar going the way of airline
pricing, for example. Yikes.

~~~
kijin
Rental car companies already use airline-like pricing schemes, with a
mandatory minimum rental period of 24 hours. One of Zipcar's selling points is
that their pricing scheme is simpler and more granular. If Zipcar changed
their pricing scheme, they'd become just another rental car company in the
minds of their customers.

I suspect that there will always be people who prefer the more straightforward
style of pricing. After all, knowing exactly how much you're going to pay and
knowing you won't be paying for any unnecessary hours counts as a feature for
a lot of people. It's like buying a Linode. It might not be the cheapest
option for all use cases, but it gives you peace of mind.

------
dhx
The problem with this article is that it only seems to present options for
intelligent selling agents. Where pricing inequality exists, so too does a
market for equally intelligent buying agents.

Personalised pricing, complex pricing structures (to prevent comparison) and
other newer retail tricks can be overcome fairly easily. For example, proxying
purchases through intermediate parties that have access to pricing closer to
the point of equilibrium. Or grouping buyers together to starve an industry or
supplier of cash flow until pricing requirements are met.

This is a game theory exercise where both buying _and_ selling agents are
involved. It is unwise to assume that sellers will have the upper hand. As
many cost comparison websites have shown, a market also exists amongst buyers
to force prices down to a level of equilibrium.

~~~
JamisonM
I agree that buyer have power too but there is disparity in resources on the
buying side where the buyers are at the retail level. The "easily overcome"
tricks require that consumers join the intermediate groups that a buying and
otherwise participate in more complex transactions in order to defeat them.
This can establish a different equilibrium that is better for consumers but it
still involves an extra cost in one form or another. The intermediary takes
their cut too (even a co-op would have overhead to address).

~~~
dhx
Agreed -- although the profit margins available to intermediaries will be very
small. Buyers and sellers have a mutual interest in squeezing the
intermediaries as much as possible. Thankfully the costs of operating an
intermediary on the Internet are small.

------
patio11
Variable retail pricing is a multi-billion dollar industry, the mechanisms are
just a wee bit different than revenue management in the airlines. Examples
include variable pricing by region, outlet, and season. Other examples are
sales, coupons, and rebates. You can _trivially_ pay five different prices on
the same day for bitwise identical copies of the same Chinese sock if you want
to.

A wrinkle for the retail apocalypse: wonder why X/Y/Z is closing but you can
find a bank branch and cell phone shop within one block of any arbitrary
location in a middle class neighborhood in an American city? Answer: lucrative
backends to their retail transactions. (Starbucks is essentially the same, in
that siting is less about selling coffee and more about selling _habitual
coffee consumption_.)

~~~
mr_luc
Thanks -- I was just going to come here to post this.

It's one of the things that WalMart makes their money on. They grow traffic to
their stores with huge discounts on visible necessities like toilet paper,
competitive grocery prices, etc.

But when I look at their prices for less common items, their audacity is
sometimes staggering. I remember once being unable to find a cheap surge
protector for less than $30, and thinking, "I wonder if that's by design. I
came here for milk and a car battery -- they know I'm not going somewhere else
for my 'in-between' items."

I seem to remember a discussion on HN once around the legality of variable
pricing -- it seems a fascinating topic and I'd love to read a writeup on the
process, and especially the software that WalMart or any other large chain has
for pricing their goods.

~~~
tptacek
Why would variable pricing be a legal issue?

~~~
polymatter
I imagine it would be a legal issue depending on how it is discriminated.

I don't know particular US laws, but I imagine it would be a legal issue for
me to have a separate "for whites" price and "for blacks" price where there
were significant differences.

~~~
alexgieg
In a way this already exists. For "most whites" (who happen to live in Europe
and the USA) prices are quite higher compared to what they are for "most
yellows" (who happen to live in continental Asia). One can spin this as being
racist if one's so included, although a quite odd kind of racism when we take
into account the usual usage of the word.

~~~
alexgieg
I see I'm being down voted for the above comment. I guess it's being
interpreted as racist? If so, I apologize, it wasn't my intention, quite the
opposite. I'm white, yes, but I live in Brazil, where goods, specially
electronic ones, cost 2 to 3 times what they do in the USA, and virtual ones,
such as ebooks, which could be cheap, are usually region locked out of our
reach. So, I meant the quotes as ironic, as my intention was to criticize
companies for doing these price games. As for Asians, I have the utmost
respect for them and their achievements, to the point of following Eastern
religions (I'm a Shintoist and a Buddhist), so it would never, ever, cross my
mind to even come near attacking them. Lastly, although somewhat I'm
articulate in English, it's a second language for me, and one I learned by
myself through books, not by attending classes, my native one being
Portuguese, so it can also be the case that the way I expressed myself didn't
come out as I intended (expressing sarcasm properly is way more difficult than
writing in a straightforward way). So, if that also came into play, please let
me apologize again!

And, if it'd be possible for someone to, taking into account the above, point
me what exactly I did wrong in the original comment, so that I can avoid such
mistakes in the future, please do so, as being a non-native speaker there's no
other way for me to know other than asking someone who is. I'd love to read
it, and be sure I'll start applying the lesson immediately!

Thanks!

~~~
djacobs
In addition to what tptacek said, viewing pricing through the race lens is
grossly oversimplifying the state of the world. Copyright protection laws,
cost of living, and other local market conditions are probably much more
important than race when firm X decides its pricing tiers.

~~~
tptacek
So, you disagree with him. Better to say why than to downmod to express the
sentiment. On the other hand, people are hair-trigger here about race, and for
somewhat decent reasons.

------
narag
Data point:

Last month I had to choose an ISP in Spain. The experience was painful. Every
company has only "special offers" in the front page and I had to dig to the
very deepest of their webs to find the real numbers and, even then, cut
through a lot of BS, intentional poor phrasing, and all kind of misleading
statements.

The provider I chose was not better than the rest. The real price was striked-
out and a lower price, only valid for exceptional circumstances presented as
the norm.

On the phone it's worse. They consistently scam people.

I spent several hours hating all them. But that's a recurring expense of forty
euros a month, plus a hundred up front. If this scheme was imposed for small
purchases, no way. Either I would choose a simpler retailer, even if more
expensive, or wouldn't buy at all.

~~~
greenyoda
Same thing happens in the US. Time Warner Cable's web site was offering
internet access for the "special offer" of $29.99 a month for the first year.
I actually had to call them up on the phone to find out what the normal rate
would be after one year -- it was nowhere to be found on their web site. Same
type of thing happens with cell phone contracts. Are people really stupid
enough to buy a monthly recurring service without knowing what it will cost
after the first year? Apparently, the people selling these services think so.

------
DanBC
> * I have, like most people, had the frustrating experience of trying to work
> out whether my mobile phone contract or the airline flight I'm been booking
> is actually the cheapest one that meets my needs,*

UK mobile phone contract pricing is very frustrating. Free market should mean
customers shop around to get the best deal. Providers thwart that by including
lock-ins of various forms (contract lengths, cost of new phones, making it
tricky to keep the same number, making it tricky to move a phone to a
different network.) and by having a bewildering array of different contract
types.

> _If you earn 50% more than average you can expect your grocery prices to
> begin creeping up, because your suppliers can infer what's in your wallet_

Or maybe the retailer wants your custom, and thus offers you cheaper prices to
secure it. Poorer people spend less money and generate more cost per visit,
thus are not as attractive. Retailers don't want to exclude those customers,
but do want to get more cash out of them.

~~~
mikeash
My grocery prices consistently creep up with my income. The retailers
accomplish this by presenting me with a trade off between price and
quality/convenience. In other words, they extract more money from my by giving
me more value in return. I don't see why that can't continue to work. If they
start fucking around with weird pricing schemes instead, that destroys the
tradeoff and with it my incentive to continue giving them more money.

~~~
DanBC
Ah, okay. So they're offering you cheaper prices, but on more expensive items?

~~~
mikeash
No, I mean that I tend to buy those more expensive items more often now,
because they offer additional quality or convenience which is now worthwhile
to me. I also tend to shop at more expensive stores, since they tend to have
better stuff and be closer to me.

------
teyc
This has been predicted before. However, human ingenuity will prevent it from
propagating to its logical conclusion.

Have you tried to compare prices of mattresses? One way mattress sellers
prevent price comparison is by identifying mattresses with unique names. They
may have the same brand, or even specifications.

In addition, we are now seeing a steady growth of private label offerings by
retailers. Initially these are in the low priced/budget segments, but
increasingly the retailers are moving into mid-range products, where margins
are higher, and effectively pushing out branded goods, where margins are
driven down by price competition.

~~~
dhx
The development of websites that group together different brand/name
mattresses according to physical properties would eliminate any advantage
sellers have of creating artificial value in model naming and numbering.
Widespread use of such websites would have a devastating impact on premium
priced products as consumers would no longer attach value to "premium"
marketing labels and branding.

If sellers want to make brand names, model numbers and other identifiers
redundant, buyers will eventually be the beneficiaries.

~~~
teyc
I believe you are handwaving the problem away here.

Have you ever tried to go to a mattress shop and ask them about spring
density, the gauge of steel used, and the spring layout on a mattress? These
information is totally proprietary and the average salesman wouldn't know
either.

~~~
dhx
This information could be obtained by users/consumer review companies by
reverse engineering (or purely testing) products to make numerical comparisons
of various properties.

In the case of mattresses, the size of springs isn't as relevant as the amount
of sag in the bed when a 70kg person is lying on it. A more advanced measure
could be the evenness of weight distribution across the mattress. These
measurements are unlikely to be performed by consumers because of the time and
effort required. However product review companies could generate revenue from
selling consumers detailed comparisons/analysis of products.

------
ef4
I almost wish retailers _would_ try to price discriminate more based on all
the personal information they gather. That would finally create a massive
financial incentive for people to defend their privacy.

Geek: "Hey, if you use this browser extension you won't get tracked."

User: <Yawn>

Geek: "Did I mention you'll also get better prices when you shop online?"

User: "Sign me up!"

~~~
ableal
Unfortunately, that will probably play out the other way around. Stross
mentioned "loyalty cards", trading privacy for prizes or discounts; online
that will be "loyalty cookies" ...

------
benvanderbeek
"More recently we've seen comparison sites with customer ratings to supply
metadata about, for example, supplier reliability: but these tread dangerously
close to defamation in some cases: see for example the class action lawsuit
against Yelp (alleging extortion: dismissed, but shows the shape of things to
come). Price comparisons are relatively safe."

As someone intimately familiar w/3rd party seller feedback on Amazon, I can
tell you that the feedback there is taken very seriously by 3rd party sellers,
by customers, and by Amazon. If a seller drops below a rating threshold, they
are warned, and if the poor ratings persist, they're given the kiss of death:
their "Featured Merchant" status is revoked.

I've never heard any suggestion of these ratings treading "dangerously close
to defamation."

IMO, online feedback / reputations are very successful at rewarding good
sellers and punishing bad ones. So this paragraph is a pretty weak dismissal
of customer ratings as a way of proving a value add.

~~~
jleader
I think the difference is that sellers opt in to sell through Amazon, and
probably sign a contract allowing Amazon to collect and display feedback; Yelp
is operating without the seller's explicit consent. So unless the rating site
can lock in a huge swath of consumer demand and so demand that sellers consent
to allowing feedback, the artcle's point about _independent_ rating sites
stands.

~~~
benvanderbeek
Good point, I stand corrected.

------
Tichy
I wonder about the editor aspect of small shops, like a book shop with a
special selection, or a shop with children's toys (one of those closed in our
neighborhood recently, apparently some former customers cried).

Amazon sucks for discovery of things imo. At least for serendipity - in an
extreme case, an acquaintance met his lover in a library...

Will those small retailers simply be replaced by affiliates who are content
with earning 10% on their referrals? Is 10% a fair price for that kind of
thing? And Amazon even seems to have a cap on how much you can earn, like if
the item is really expensive you won't even get the full 10%?

~~~
tokenadult
_Amazon sucks for discovery of things imo._

I have always been a library lover, and even took a library science course
(cataloging and classification) as an undergraduate elective. But from the
beginning on Amazon I have liked the "customers who bought this also bought .
. . " recommendations built from Amazon's database, and I have learned of many
interesting books by Amazon's recommendations that I later bought. In library
science, "browsing function" is discovery of books by scanning the shelves
where books of similar classification are put, which groups books differently
in each library (each library has a different collection, and some libraries
are classified by the Dewey system, and some by the Library of Congress
system, in English-speaking countries). Amazon does very well as a place to
apply the browsing function, because its collection size is huge, and
similarities of books can be scanned by author, by subject (Amazon has subject
classifications for most of its books), by what readers have written reviews
of them, and by what buyers have bought them. I now wish that my friendly
local public library, which I use VERY heavily and where my second son
volunteers, would implement browsing paths as varied and as powerful as
Amazon's, and my local public library is already famous in many parts of the
United States for having some of the most detailed cataloging and one of the
most powerful and convenient online catalogs in the country.

Compare

[https://catalog.hclib.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=elibrary#f...](https://catalog.hclib.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=elibrary#focus)

to

<http://www.amazon.com/>

starting with some of your favorite books to see what browsing turns up in
each online catalog.

~~~
potatolicious
Amazon desperately needs personalized rankings a la Netflix, particularly as
they expand into digital content.

I've been _trying_ to watch some of Amazon's free Prime video content, but
it's very difficult - I have to wade through page after page of My Little Pony
to get to anything I'm interested in. There is practically no discoverability
features besides "customers who watched this also...", which is generally not
very useful.

Moving ratings? They are so highly variable for media, and so subjective to
personal taste, that they are practically useless. Global reviews work fine
for electronics, but they fall apart utterly when applied to content. Go look
at the star rating distribution for any reasonably controversial book - all
over the place, and tells me nothing about how _I_ would like it.

The MP3 store is similar. iTunes does a pretty decent job with Genius, but is
still pretty poor discoverability-wise. Spotify's new-content discoverability
is also extremely poor. Rdio is pretty good, but I would _pay_ for a Pandora
that plugs into a music store/subscription service. IMO this is some pretty
lazy engineering - what works for selling DVD players does not work for
selling content, but Amazon's UI for browsing digital video is practically
identical to their physical-shopping UI, and that's entirely unacceptable.

~~~
gujk
Maybe you aren't giving Amazon the credit they deserve. MLP is huge in the
hipster geek set that frequents HN. Cf
<http://www.google.com/m?q=my+little+brony>

------
btilly
One of his examples is bad.

I'm pretty sure that the much publicized "different customers see different
prices on Amazon" debacle was just a simple A/B test, and not some complex
scheme along the lines of, "Joe can afford to pay more!"

~~~
smackfu
Usually it is that the sellers are actually different, like one is Amazon
itself, and the other is a third-party.

So you have a product that is priced like: Amazon.com: $14.99 with $5 shipping
(free for Prime) 3rd Party: $12.99 with $3 shipping.

Amazon will show Prime members the first one, and non-Prime members the 2nd
one.

~~~
benvanderbeek
Yes there's definitely the prime vs non prime vs 3rd party price differences.

But are you sure there's no evidence of what he references? He seems pretty
explicit, and it seems a very odd conclusion w/no specific evidence: "prices
on offer to different customers varying for the same product, presumably on
the basis of the customer's willingness to pay more for goods in prior
transactions."

~~~
gujk
When I hear an odd conclusion with no evidence, I usually disregard the
conclusion, not infer the existence of fascinating undetected evidence.

~~~
benvanderbeek
When I read an article linked from Hacker News, then read some comments that
are generally not tearing it to pieces, I assume the author must have some
credibility and therefore is not throwing out conclusions for fun. Also, I
have a minor in inferring existence of fascinating undetected evidence.

------
jaxn
This is not a very cohesive argument. Basically he is suggesting that we are
going to see tiered pricing in all retail, but doesn't explain what the tiers
will be based on.

A more likely scenario? Price will equal convenience. Retail stores will be
more connected to the internet so that you can see who has what item in stock
within 5 miles of where you are. The Big Box retailers do this already.

We will then see a new breed of startups based on adding impulse purchases to
the item that you bought online and are picking up locally (loss leaders
online).

------
nkoren
Interesting observations, but I'm inclined to think that the complex pricing
algorithms will have relatively limited applicability. The problem is that
they exert a non-trivial cognitive cost on the buyer; most consumers, given
the choice, would likely be happy to pay a few percent extra to _not_ have to
worry about the futures market for potatoes with each trip to the supermarket.

The key exceptions to this are with goods or services that are both highly
perishable and very expensive -- such as airline tickets. An empty seat on an
airplane is a non-storable asset which "perishes" the instant the plane takes
off; therefore the airline is highly incentivised to sell it at _any_ price --
but obviously as high as possible -- rather than let it expire. Meanwhile, for
most consumers, airline tickets are bloody expensive to purchase, and it's
worth no small amount of hassle to find a good price. Thus there's significant
motivation on both sides to fuel a constantly-evolving algorithmic war between
airline pricing schemes and intelligent price-comparison agents.

A seat at the barber's is also "perishable" in a sense, in that any time a
client isn't sat in it, the barber is losing potential revenue. However it's
only fractionally perishable: unlike an plane about to close its doors, a
barber's seat that is unoccupied in any given minute can still get a client
the next. So there's not the same do-or-die motivation to fill that seat,
which diminishes the need for clever algorithmic pricing. From the consumer's
side, meanwhile, a haircut is a relatively trivial expense -- not worth the
time or effort to try to scrounge a better deal. Any barber that doesn't
simply list its price in a sign on the window is one that wouldn't be getting
my business, in any case.

The cognitive simplicity of making a purchase is an asset that doesn't just
extend to pricing. One of the major successes of the iPhone and iPad, for
example, is the fact that there is effectively only one model being promoted
at any given time. Unlike other brands of mobile devices -- where the consumer
is essentially asked to balance out their requirements for price, UX/UI, app
availability, form factor, memory, camera, battery life, etc. -- the iPhone
customer is asked to make a single choice:

    
    
       Do I want one?
    
       [ ] Yes
       [ ] No
    

The simplicity of this choice has been a genuine factor in iOS's success. (NB:
I'm not an iOS fanboy; I just switched from an iPhone to a Galaxy Nexus and am
almost completely happy with it. But must give credit where it's due.)

Anyhow, I think that Stross is correct when he says that the disintermediation
of tradable goods will cause a price-based race to the bottom. This is
probably unavoidable. Furthermore, even for non-tradable goods/services such
as locally-delivered services, many of these will inevitably be automated and
will also be racing to the bottom. (I fully expect that most fast-food will be
cooked and served by automated systems within 10 years; interventions by
organised labour my forestall this for a while longer, but not indefinitely).
What interests me is how anything non-cheap/automated will survive: it will
be, as Stross suggests, anything which creates value in a way that is _not_
based on price. My believe is that the key ingredients in this will be
creativity and meaning.

In America, for example, I've seen anecdotal evidence that small local farms
are have been withstanding the recession, and even expanding fairly
considerably. If this is true, it's certainly not because they offer any price
advantage; rather, it's because they form relationships with their customer
base that provide layers of meaning that add value beyond the simple raw
commodity. Where this kind of relationship can be successfully cultivated, I
believe that there's a real future for locally-based retail. Otherwise, the
future is all about local automation and disintermediated global markets.

~~~
tommorris
An example of the simplification of this process. Over the holidays, my dad
needed to buy an external hard drive to backup his music collection. He has
one of these hi-fi devices that has a built-in hard drive and is slowly
transferring his music collection to it.

We bought it from a retailer because he wanted it right then, so he could run
the backup procedure and have me fix it if it didn't work (yes, family tech
support is a joy). We went into the shop, and none of the USB external hard
drive manufacturers actually tell you what speed the drive runs at. That is,
they don't tell you what RPM the drives run at. As it is a backup drive, it's
not like it needs to be fast (the first run may take all night, but
afterwards, it will probably only be a gigabyte or so of changed files every
few days). But the fact that none of the companies actually advertise the RPM
slightly shocked me. Not just on the boxes either, but if I scanned the
barcodes with the barcode/QR app I have on my phone, the manufacturers
websites don't list the RPM either.

------
funkah
An interesting discussion of what's coming. I agree that suppliers are in a
race to the bottom unless they can provide added value, but the author seems
to fixate on algorithmic pricing as the ultimate determinant of who wins. He
mentions Amazon in this context, but does not mention Amazon Prime, which is
just the sort of value-add he's talking about.

I think Bezos saw this coming a long time ago and so he got Amazon ready to be
more than a simple rock-bottom-price retail outlet. People love Amazon, and
once they get Prime, they start buying from Amazon because all the hurdles
have been taken away. In the meantime, Prime offers them additional benefits
like streaming movies & TV. I don't think you can really look at the future of
retail without this offering looming pretty large. And I don't even have
Amazon Prime!

