As any kind of retailer, the question I get asked most often is how do we retail in the Age of Amazon? I hear that a lot. Conventional retailers sold stuff. Piles of stuff.
Pile it high and sell it cheap was the motto of Michael J ‘King’ Cullen, founder of the modern supermarket. But a shop without overheads, with ultra cheap postal rate deals, with shonky records on taxation and employee welfare. Yeah, yeah, we meet all federally mandated obligations, while lobbying to keep those mandates low impact to our bottom lines.
But the games industry had a model.
Games Workshop had perfected this model of boutique stores that had play space. Once it was freed from the limitations of only stocking one manufacturer – via a network of independent stores doing pretty much the same thing – this idea of what we call experiential retail – organised play activities surrounded by stock to purchase to enhance those activities – became dominant going into the 2007 global downturn and the rise of Amazon.
Just games. Tabletop games. And we prospered when all around us the conventional retail chains, the out of town malls, the bookstores and record stores and other hobby stores burned.
We were Apple stores before they were even a pip.
Experiential retail before hipsters.
You see, as a species we crave third spaces. We crave places to go, to inhabit, to create culture in. From the forums and cauponas of ancient Rome to the salons of Paris and the coffee houses of Regency London. To the pubs and the bars and the youth centres. Society requires social spaces to happen, and social spaces cannot be delivered by drone from a warehouse where the staff have to piss in bottles.
Why quantum retail though?
Erwin Schrodinger had a cat. It wasn’t a real cat. It was a hypothetical cat, and it lived in a hypothetical box. It’s the thing everyone knows about quantum physics. Is the cat alive or dead? It doesn’t matter. It’s only through observation that we know. Light can be a wave and a particle. The fundamental building blocks of the universe are malleable. What we take for certainty is untrue.
It’s a trap. A logic puzzle.
Now, if you are impatient and want to cut to the chase, here’s the punchline. The easy money is in the path everyone else is going. That’s the received wisdom of retail. Do it bigger, do it better, do it cheaper. If that seems achievable as we head towards a monopoly, be my guest. How did that work out for Best Buy? For Toys R Us? Prove everyone wrong by proving them right, or right be proving them wrong. That’s the problem with received wisdom. It’s like telling a toddler to stay up past their bedtime “Well daddy, I am just going to prove you WRONG by going to bed early, so there!”
There’s an important lesson here. You see, business often presents us with a logic trap. And like the cat, you cannot see the box from the inside.
Amazon teaches the quantum retailer one important lesson from the get go. Because a political lobbyist doesn’t just back a single side. As a species we crave the Manichean simplicity of duality. Good versus evil, left versus right, light versus dark, male versus female. Open your window and look outside – that’s not our world anymore. Certainty has left the building.
All is chiaroscuro. Our world is quantum now. And the secret is, it always was.
If you back both candidates you own whoever gets in power. From a game playing point of view, this seems an optimal strategy. And we are good at games, and we are good at logic puzzles, and we know a bit about bravery from all those years playing Dungeons & Dragons.
Our quest for meaning through sales and sales through meaning is an adventure through two hundred thousand years of retail, from the plains of the Serengeti to the man machine interface.
To the singularity and beyond.
Together we will answer the question of what it means to be human. And more importantly, how to sell to those fuckers.
My name is Dave Salisbury. I am a quantum retailer.
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The Quantum Retailer 