Lists Are the New Search
"Something that sits in the back of my mind when thinking about this is that department stores and supermarkets, the Amazons of their days, didn't kill small retail. They were not winner-takes-all models. They did kill people who couldn't match their service, selection and price, and were simply end-points to a logistics chain out-competed by a more efficient end-point. 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. One saw something similar with bookshops: Waterstones put many out of business, but many also got created (just before Amazon took 25% off the top of the market, of course)."