Creatures of Habit
We humans are creatures of habit. We favor routines, the familiar, the safe. Before it breeds contempt, familiarity breeds comfort. When we shop in the physical world, we favor a single commercial venue where many things can be found. This is not by accident–it costs more in resources for even the least technologically-advanced society to have to accumulate resources from multiple locations than it does from a single or few locations. Whether it’s a fertile watering hole or a bazaar or souk close to the docks, a trading post along a rail line, or a big-box store in a strip mall (or a big-box store that is a strip mall), we like our one-stop shopping.
And yet, when our one stop is the computer in front of us, it isn’t enough. Instead of one internet, we seek out one site. Now, granted, the modern version of resources (credit cards and identity) are still being preserved, but I have to wonder what it is in our logic that says a company that produces a product on the internet needs another company to distribute that product on the internet, when both companies are merely placing “buy” links and shopping carts to the same virtual product. With distributor discounts ranging from 15% to 65% I’m forced to ask, where’s the value?
In the print publishing world, distributors have an important job and many expenses that justify the distributor discount. Shipping, storage of physical stock, placement at actual points of sale, inventory management–none of that comes free, and I get that (oh, how I get that, from my days in lean manufacturing, I get that). But where is the cost associated with storing and shipping electrons? Are site hosting and credit card processing really worth 65% of a book’s cover price?
Distribution between creation and retail is a necessary model in physical stock inventory, but not so much in the digital world, and we need to think differently about the supply chain both as producers and consumers, or we risk missing an opportunity to redefine value and streamline a system that has been static and change-resistant, simply because we are creatures of habit.
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