FUTURE SHOP

About the Book

Product Description:

For hundreds of years, the marketplace has grown more complex and confusing for consumers to navigate. Published in 1992, long before the Internet became a household word. Future Shop argued that new information technologies, combined with innovative public policies, could help consumers overcome that confusion. A prescient manifesto of the coming revolution in e-commerce and the need for new public policies to fully realize its potential. This reprint of Future Shop includes a new preface.

From the Author:

This is an Authors Guild reprint of the original Future Shop published by St. Martin's Press in 1991 (but dated 1992). The book is of historical interest only, in that it foresaw the explosion of Internet shopping when the Internet was used primarily by the academic community, and neither the World Wide Web nor Amazon had yet been launched. In light of emerging shopping technologies, its central goal was to rethink the set of public policies associated with what it called "consumerism." The title, chosen by the publisher, is misleading because it does not capture the book's public policy aspects.

As with any set of predictions, it got some things right and some wrong. One big thing it got right was that emerging information technology would radically change shopping, including leading to a cornucopia of consumer choice and a reset of power relations between consumers, manufacturers, and retailers. Another big thing it got right is that internet-based shopping would entail many new public policy considerations, including the importance of easily accessible broadband technology (what the book labeled "omnimedia"), consumer privacy, and trust in technology-based information agents.

Alas, it also got many things wrong. Its predictions about the decline of advertising were too sweeping. The type of misleading price-based advertising it focused on did indeed decline dramatically (as it has become easy to compare prices online). But other types of advertising are as strong as ever. 

Its prediction of a revolution in product reviews for consumers would not come from experts but from peers. And the accountability mechanisms for the peer reviews would come not from government (although Congress and the FTC would provide some) but from their sheer number and the safeguards developed by ratings websites, including previously unknown ones such as Amazon, Walmart, YELP, TripAdvisor, and Google, which took the world by storm in the years after Future Shop was published. Section 230(c)(a) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 would grant libel immunity to peer review product sites and thus make a major contribution to the development of peer reviewing.

One technology Future Shop totally missed was AI-based product reviews. AI promises another revolution in product reviews, as AI agents create trustworthy and cost-effective top-level "expert" agents that provide advice customized to the individual consumer rather than consumers in general. No such consumer advice agent has ever been possible at scale before, and Future Shop would have considered such agents magic, not technology.

Future Shop’s prediction of a revolution in product price and transaction clearinghouses would come not from any then-known entity but from gigantic, comprehensive e-commerce websites such as Amazon, Walmart, and Expedia, with historical price information available from browser "extensions" such as Keepa, CamelCamelCamel, and Honey. AI now promises yet another revolution in price-comparison technology.

In short, Future Shop often identified important consumer needs that new information technology, combined with public policy, could meet. But it often failed to identify the specific mechanisms by which those needs would or could best be met.

About the Author

J.H. Snider, MBA, Ph.D., is the President of iSolon.org and a Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He received his MBA from the Harvard Business School and Ph.D. from Northwestern University