I have an old text file knocking around on my drive with a collection of quotes that I found interesting. Here’s an apt one, although unfortunately I did not save the name ofthe person who wrote it:
It is a great mystery of late-stage capitalism that, in a marketplace of hypothetically unlimited choices, consumers should all want the same things.
Despite my having hung onto this quote, I actually think that the opposite is true. Everyone wants different things. Retail stores, however, try to persuade us
that we all want the same things. Especially the larger ones. Stores, that is.
Case in point: there’s a few things I’ve needed to buy for the apartment. Nothing particularly wild or unusual: More clothes hangers. A new sugar bowl to replace the one I broke. A couple of baking pans to replace ones that have rusted out. In short, standard household items. Here in the SF Bay Area, with stores of all sorts in every direction, getting this stuff should be a matter of a couple hours, tops.
But it’s not. Take the sugar bowl I broke a few months ago