零售、租金和不具规模的事物

Morioka Shoten

盛冈书店

I generally think about retail as sitting on a spectrum from logistics to experience. At the logistics end, you know exactly what you want and retail’s job is to provide the most efficient way to get it. At the experience end, you don’t know, and retail’s job is to help you, with ideas, suggestion, curation and service.

我一般认为，零售业是处于从物流到体验的光谱中。在物流的一端，你确切地知道你想要什么，而零售业的工作是提供最有效的方式来获得它。在体验的一端，你不知道，而零售业的工作是帮助你，提供想法、建议、策划和服务。

Ecommerce began at the logistics end, as a new and (sometimes) more efficient way to get something. It’s not always more efficient - you don’t have your lunch mailed to your desk. Rather, the right logistics in retail is a matter of algebra. How much inventory is needed, how many SKUs, how big are the products, how fast can they be shipped, how often do you buy them, how far would you be willing to drive or walk, does the product need to be kept cold, or warm, what’s the cost per square foot - there are all sorts of possible inputs to the equation, and if you visualised them all you’d have a many-dimensional scatter diagram, that would tell you why Ikea has giant stores on the edge of town, why Walgreens has small local stores, and why you can buy milk on every block in Manhattan but not a fridge.

电子商务开始于物流端，作为一种新的和（有时）更有效的方式来获取东西。它并不总是更有效率--你不会把你的午餐邮寄到你的桌子上。相反，零售业中正确的物流是一个代数的问题。需要多少库存，多少SKU，产品有多大，运输速度有多快，你多久买一次，你愿意开车或步行多远，产品是否需要冷藏或保温，每平方英尺的成本是多少--有各种各样的可能输入到方程中。如果你把它们都可视化，你就会有一个多维的散点图，它会告诉你为什么宜家在城市边缘有巨大的商店，为什么沃尔格林有小型的本地商店，以及为什么你在曼哈顿的每个街区都能买到牛奶，但没有冰箱。

The internet adds a new set of possibilities to that algebra. Amazon sells anything that can be stored on a shelf in a vast warehouse and shipped in a cardboard box. It doesn’t so much have ‘infinite shelf-space’ as one shelf that’s infinitely long: it only sells things that can fit into that model. Grocery delivery is an entirely different model, that needs quite different storage and quite different logistics; so in turn is restaurant delivery (or take-away, which is at least a third of US restaurant spending). Meanwhile, the o...