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.

Editorial Reviews:

"Some day, consumer information sources like those envisaged by Snider and Ziporyn will materialize. The more this book is read, the sooner it will happen."

─F.M. Scherer, Professor of Business and Government, Harvard University, 1992.

"Snider and Ziporyn powerfully describe the glass highways of the future, which will not only benefit consumers but will also provide fantastic opportunities for schools, hospitals, businesses, and the average American as we enter the Information Age of the 21st century."

─Conrad Burns, Chair of U.S. Senate Communications Subcommittee, 1992.

"Future Shop is a look into tomorrow's world of household/buying. It is full of surprises, disconcerting ideas, and useful information. I would think that forward-looking businesses would profit from it as much as forward-looking consumers."

─Robert Heilbroner, Professor of Economics, New School for Social Research, 1992.

"Future Shop describes a telecommunications age in which the foundations of our market economy will be radically different. The authors present a bold, innovative manifesto for change. It's amazing that work on a subject that means so much to consumers has not appeared before."

─Marvin Cetron, author of American Renaissance, 1992.

"The authors have documented and quantified what most of us know through personal experience; that our retail distribution system has become increasingly inefficient and is fostering confusion and abuse to the consumer. The enormous conservation of resources in our society that this book describes makes its contribution significant."

─R.K. Snelling, Executive Vice President of BellSouth Communications, 1992.

"Future Shop is well-intentioned, well-reasoned and intentionally provocative--Snider and Ziporyn deliver on their promise to remake the very idea of consumerism."

─Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Feb. 12, 1992:8

“[J.H. Snider and Terra Ziporyn’s] ‘visionary manifesto,’ which aims to create a promotion-free society, is impressively researched and daringly innovative.”

─ Stuttaford, Genevieve, Publishers Weekly, 1992, Vol. 239(4):56-7.

“Snider and Ziporyn argue that growing consumer confusion cannot be alleviated by consumer protection agencies (which lack the resources) or by the mass media (which are often beholden to advertisers. The answer lies in a more advanced information infrastructure…. Future Shop is a thoughtful and provocative work about a subject that affects everyone.”

─ Wagner, Cynthia, The Futurist, 1992, Vol. 26(4):47.

“Snider and Ziporyn write well. You will find many of their ideas novel, many worthy of consideration, and some persuasive.”

─ Maynes, E. Scott, Review of Industrial Organization, 1993, Vol. 8(2):640.

“In 1992, J.H. Snider and Terra Ziporyn published Future Shop. Two years later, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon. Fast forward 27 years, and he’s arguably the most successful entrepreneur in history, while Americans rely on ‘new technologies’ to guide just about every purchase we make.”

─Mike Ross Kane, Chief Executive Magazine, March 1, 2021.

From the Author:

The cover shown here is not the actual cover of Future Shop; it is the pre-publication placeholder for the actual cover. Future Shop was published in 1991 (despite the 1992 date on the book), approximately three years before Amazon's launch. Back then, online versions of books, especially with high-end graphics, were a nullity. By the time Amazon got around to placing Future Shop on its website, the book was no longer in print. How Amazon got hold of the placeholder rather than the actual cover of the book, I do not know.

Future Shop 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 "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. For example, its predictions about the decline of advertising were too sweeping. The type of 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.

This is the first edition. The second edition, an Authors Guild reprint, includes a new preface.

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