Future Shop: How New Technologies Will Change the Way We Shop and What We Buy - Hardcover

Jim Snider; Terra Ziporyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312063598 ISBN 13: 9780312063597

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1992

Synopsis

Argues that teleshopping will lead to the decline of retailers and advertising as individuals buy directly from manufacturers and obtain consumer information electronically

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Some day, consumer information sources like those envisaged by Snider and Ziporyn will materialize. The more this book is read, the sooner it will happen."
---F.M. Scherer, Professor of Business and Government, Harvard University

"Snider and Ziporyn powerfully describe the glass highways of the future, which will not only benefit consumers but will also provide fantastic opportunities for schools, hospitals, businesses, and the average American as we enter the Information Age of the 21st century."
---Conrad Burns, Chair of U.S. Senate Communications Subcommittee

"Future Shop is a look into tomorrow's world of household/buying. It is full of surprises, disconcerting ideas, and useful information. I would think that forward-looking businesses would profit from it as much as forward-looking consumers."
---Robert Heilbroner, Professor of Economics, New School for Social Research

"Future Shop describes a telecommunications age in which the foundations of our market economy will be radically different. The authors present a bold, innovative manifesto for change. It's amazing that work on a subject that means so much to consumers has not appeared before."
---Marvin Cetron, author of American Renaissance

"The authors have documented and quantified what most of us know through personal experience; that our retail distribution system has become increasingly inefficient and is fostering confusion and abuse to the consumer. The enormous conservation of resources in our society that this book describes makes its contribution significant."
---R.K. Snelling, Executive Vice President of BellSouth Communications

From the Inside Flap:

The past fifteen years has witnessed a revolution in e-commerce that has empowered consumers. Online sales grew from essentially 0% of GNP in 1992 to 3.5% in 2007. Giant online clearinghouses of product information, such as on Amazon and eBay, sprung from nowhere. Advertising as a percentage of GNP declined seven of the past eight years. Online third party reviews of products, mostly product reviews written by other consumers, which were non-existent in 1992, were used by 58.7% of consumers during the 2007 Holiday season. The number of products readily available to consumers skyrocketed while the incidence of misleading retail price and product claims plummeted.

Future Shop: How New Technologies Will Change the Way We Shop and What We Buy predicted much of this revolution in 1992. In 1992, average online data speeds were less than a thousandth what they are today, the world wide web had been invented only 13 months before, and online shopping, to the extent it existed, was text-based. Still, Future Shop could discern the implications of empowering consumer with better product information.

But Future Shop also argued that the free market was inadequate to complete the revolution. To complete the revolution, a "New Consumerism" was needed, including laws overhauling telecommunications policy and facilitating trust in Internet transactions.

In the new preface to this Authors Guild reprint of Future Shop, Snider and Ziporyn recount the first decades of the revolution and argue that now is the time to lay the public policy foundations for its completion.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0312063598
• ISBN 13: 9780312063597
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 316