My responses to Adam Greenfield’s market essay:

One of the major benefits of a market (as opposed to more dispersed merchants) is the immediacy of comparison shopping - I can weigh not only prices from different merchants, but different products as well, and have a much better chance of coming out with the best product that fits my needs. This is, of course, possible online, and I don’t know anyone who would make a major purchase online without consulting multiple sites first.

In Shaping Things Bruce Sterling imagines that consumers of the future would never think of making any purchase without such information (and more, including details of the product’s manufacturing history and ecological lifecycle), and posits that our connected devices will act as interfaces for capitalism beyond just making the financial transaction. It’s a logical step that as wireless broadband proliferates (and it will in cities first, of course) some aspects of the market - including comparison, social consultation with other shoppers, and bargaining with possibly distant merchants - could leak into every potential purchase. Simplistic versions of such services are already here - Ringfo will check the Amazon price for an item via text message.

The interesting notion is that rather than a diamond district in every city, the internet subsumes them all, and no matter how remote the shop you’re in, you have access to some of the benefits of the entire market. On the other hand, much of the positive effects of the market for the retailer are undermined in this scenario, as it becomes less likely that any one vendor will be browsed through, and clustering benefits (such as security) are eliminated.

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Contrary to my previous comment, one of the things that I, as someone who would buy most anything online, value about markets is the possibility of discovering something wonderful that I hadn’t know existed until I found it. It mostly ties in to my cultural association between twisty, out of the way markets and magical artifacts, as well as my experience of finding beautiful old electronics - a different kind of magic - at flea markets.

There’s currently not a good way to do that kind of exploratory browsing online or in dispersed retail stores. Ebay may have many of those types of items, but the interface is pretty awful when you’re not looking for something specific. And individual stores become frustrating because it’s highly unlikely that a specific one will have that unknown item that you will want. (There are exceptions, of course, tucked all over the city, but, like Alex’s record stores, they act almost like a distributed market in themselves.)

Jeff Bezos once described Amazon’s goal as being to show you, on the front page, the object that was exactly what you wanted, but which you never new existed until that moment. Until we’ve got such interfaces for stumble-shopping online and as a filter for other retail stores, markets have that niche cornered.

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Another benefit of markets in the traditional sense is accessibility - there’s a relatively low barrier of entry which allow, say, that merchant who only sells antique typewriter parts. While the internet has a low barrier of entry, as well, it lacks good interfaces for accidental discovery, as I said above, and it’s easy for a niche merchant to got lost in the fray. I’m interested to see digital transactions move into the physical space, as Adam points out (ie, point your phone and click “ok” to buy), and to see if such merchants can also benefit from a digital back-end (ie, a physical display area linked to a central shipping center). In my imagination, markets like this could become like 21st century Avon ladies, dispatched to different real-world locations, selling the wares of a distant merchant. I like this scenario because it leverages the advantages of a connected world and the benefits of physical interaction with a product and a merchant.