After 60 years, I’m relearning Morse Code to get back into amateur radio. Walking down by the river yesterday, I was thinking about how essential mail-ordered radio parts were for me back in the day. There just weren’t any radio-parts stores out in the middle of Kansas. The only one I ever saw was on a high-school trip to Kansas City. I eagerly walked a mile from downtown only to find it closed (not unusual on Saturdays then).
But thanks to Rural Free Delivery, everything I wanted was available by mail order. As I was walking along, it occurred to me that Rural Free Delivery was the 19th Century precursor of Internet commerce. And Sears Roebuck was the Amazon of the day.
There still aren’t any amateur-radio stores in most cities, for example in Spokane. Even the fairly useful Radio Shack (once mail-order only) stores are gone. All that changed in 60 years is the Internet and FedEx replaced the mail order system.
Now here’s a bit of weirdness: Today, I stumbled across an article, where else but the Internet? that paralleled my thoughts. It’s all about how Amazon is emulating (perhaps unconsciously) Sears Roebuck, the once King of Retail. The best part of that is that the wait for your order to arrive has shrunk from a week or more down to two days.
The article describes how Jeff Bezos’ strategy parallels the original Sears strategy. Amazon is disrupting retail sales again to become King of the Hill. I could say the coincidence of that article shows that great minds flow in the same channel, but that would be immodest.
Didit.Live 