We all use professionals to provide us with advice in matters where we lack specific knowledge. If you get a horrible pain in your stomach, you go see your doctor. If you are setting up a business or getting a divorce you might go see your lawyer. If you need help with your taxes, you might see your accountant. If you can't figure out if you will have enough money when you retire, you may go see a financial analyst. What do all these professions have in common? They are all hegemonies of access. They are social institutions set up to control access to expert advice. I cannot, for example, hang out a shingle and start offering medical, legal or financial advice. In order to do this you have to be blessed by the hegemony.
This protects consumers from being taken advantage of by fakes and charlatans. So, I am not saying this is a bad thing. I am saying that it is changing. Many people will go to WebMD before they go to their doctor. They may go to Legal Zoom to set up their LLC. They may use Turbo Tax for their taxes. And recent news articles (I don't have the references handy) suggest that software providing financial advice actually does a better job than financial advisers.
What does this mean for the professions? Well, as their control over access to advice erodes, we will see three likely trends. First, there will be fewer jobs as the bulk of the advice they give is fairly routine and software can provide that advise more accurately and more cheaply. Second, the profession will divide between lower paying facilitating jobs where professionals help people use the software, and much few higher paying jobs for those that handle the non-routine cases and help design and enhance the software.
It used to be that being a doctor, lawyer, accountant or financial adviser was a really good job. But, those days are quickly slipping away.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Grocery Stores and Access to Food Products
One would think that grocery stores would be safe from all this. After all, everybody needs to eat and they want convenient access to the food products they buy. So, local grocery stores should be safe. Right? Wrong!
What people want is convenient access to a wide range of grocery products. But, local grocery stores may not be the best way to achieve that. Consider the following progression.
1) People start ordering more groceries online and have them delivered.
2) As more people use the delivery service, the cost of delivery goes down. This encourages even more people to take advantage of the delivery service.
3) Delivery services become enhanced with drone delivery so that it is easier to order a can of soup online than it is to hop in the car and drive over to the local store to run in and buy that can of soup.
4) As local stores loose traffic to online shoppers, grocery companies begin reducing the number of local stores in favor of larger warehouse stores which are more cost effective.
5) Eventually, warehouse stores become hubs that supply groceries to delivery channels and local stores focus on items that don't deliver well like fresh fish, deli, bakery, etc.
6) The local grocery store becomes an outlet for only specialty items while all staples are delivered from hubs directly to the consumer.
I know that some people will point out that they like going to the grocery store because they like to see new products. However, this is they same browsability issue that people raised about online bookstores. However, browsability in an online bookstore is far superior to browsability in a bricks and mortar bookstore. And that will be the same with online grocery stores.
To reiterate the theme of this series of posts, when a social or economic institution controls access to a product for which technology can provide better access, that hegemony of access will fold over time.
What people want is convenient access to a wide range of grocery products. But, local grocery stores may not be the best way to achieve that. Consider the following progression.
1) People start ordering more groceries online and have them delivered.
2) As more people use the delivery service, the cost of delivery goes down. This encourages even more people to take advantage of the delivery service.
3) Delivery services become enhanced with drone delivery so that it is easier to order a can of soup online than it is to hop in the car and drive over to the local store to run in and buy that can of soup.
4) As local stores loose traffic to online shoppers, grocery companies begin reducing the number of local stores in favor of larger warehouse stores which are more cost effective.
5) Eventually, warehouse stores become hubs that supply groceries to delivery channels and local stores focus on items that don't deliver well like fresh fish, deli, bakery, etc.
6) The local grocery store becomes an outlet for only specialty items while all staples are delivered from hubs directly to the consumer.
I know that some people will point out that they like going to the grocery store because they like to see new products. However, this is they same browsability issue that people raised about online bookstores. However, browsability in an online bookstore is far superior to browsability in a bricks and mortar bookstore. And that will be the same with online grocery stores.
To reiterate the theme of this series of posts, when a social or economic institution controls access to a product for which technology can provide better access, that hegemony of access will fold over time.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Retail and Access to Goods
Local bookstores and access to books was a specific example of a much larger trend. Access to retail products from cars and appliances to needles and pins used to be available only through local vendors creating a hegemony of access to goods in general with smaller hegemonies in specific areas. To flesh this idea out, I will focus on some specific examples.
When I bought my first car, many, many years ago, I walked into the dealership, found a car that I liked and paid sticker price for it. In those days the power was totally in the hands of the dealer. I had some power in the form of purchasing power. But, I was unaware of it. The dealer had all the information and a local monopoly on the kind of car that I wanted. They were not inclined to share any information with me other than the bits, such as good gas mileage, that would make me more inclined to buy that model. However, the information changed the availability of information, access to other dealers, and the balance of power. Now before I decide which car to buy, I can find an abundance of information on the web to help me make that decision. And I can compare prices as well. If one dealer doesn't have a deal that suits me, I can find another. And I can do all of this before I step onto the dealer's lot. When I do step on the lot I am informed about options both model options and purchasing options. My local dealer no long controls access to the cars I can buy. If the local deal won't deal, I can find another one.
Now let's go to the other end of the spectrum and consider vitamins, supplements and prescription drugs. For vitamins and supplements you used to have to go to a specialty store that, like the car dealer, gave you carefully selected information calculated to increase the chances of you buying the product. In addition, the vendor could charge as much as they wanted because price was determined, nor by competition but buy how compelling their information was. Now, with access to the web, you can get both better information and more choices of suppliers. Vendors know this and have resorted to many tricks to neutralize the information you have. They have carefully worded claims about the efficacy of the supplement. And they have taken price games to a whole new level. One of the vendors I am familiar with will double the price online and then offer half price deals. Another common approach is to offer one price for a certain pill count at a certain dosage with a certain expiration date. And then a different price for a different pill count at a different dosage and a different expiration date. They do this, I am sure, to frustrate your attempts to do comparison shopping. But, what is really going on is that we are seeing the death throes of another dying hegemony.
Things are getting even weirder with access prescription drugs. It used to be that you went to your doctor and got a prescription which you then took to a pharmacist to fill. Both the physician and the pharmacist represent restrictions on access. We will come back to the physician later. But for now, I will point out that the average person who watches TV will see numerous ads recommending medicines for them and further recommending that the see their doctor about the medication. So, doctors no longer always initiate prescriptions. The technology of television had begun to erode that somewhat.
In the case of your pharmacist, there is increasing competition from online sources. The CVS pharmacy competes with the CVS online perscription service CareMark. The online prescriptions are cheaper and more convenient as they are mailed to you. So, unless you actually need to talk to a person, the online alternative is hard to pass up.
In this post, I have given a few more examples where technology has eroded the power of traditional hegemonies of access. I could go on as examples of this pattern are everywhere. But, I believe the pattern is clear and in the next post we will look at an industry in transition and see if this pattern can give us any insight into what will happen.
When I bought my first car, many, many years ago, I walked into the dealership, found a car that I liked and paid sticker price for it. In those days the power was totally in the hands of the dealer. I had some power in the form of purchasing power. But, I was unaware of it. The dealer had all the information and a local monopoly on the kind of car that I wanted. They were not inclined to share any information with me other than the bits, such as good gas mileage, that would make me more inclined to buy that model. However, the information changed the availability of information, access to other dealers, and the balance of power. Now before I decide which car to buy, I can find an abundance of information on the web to help me make that decision. And I can compare prices as well. If one dealer doesn't have a deal that suits me, I can find another. And I can do all of this before I step onto the dealer's lot. When I do step on the lot I am informed about options both model options and purchasing options. My local dealer no long controls access to the cars I can buy. If the local deal won't deal, I can find another one.
Now let's go to the other end of the spectrum and consider vitamins, supplements and prescription drugs. For vitamins and supplements you used to have to go to a specialty store that, like the car dealer, gave you carefully selected information calculated to increase the chances of you buying the product. In addition, the vendor could charge as much as they wanted because price was determined, nor by competition but buy how compelling their information was. Now, with access to the web, you can get both better information and more choices of suppliers. Vendors know this and have resorted to many tricks to neutralize the information you have. They have carefully worded claims about the efficacy of the supplement. And they have taken price games to a whole new level. One of the vendors I am familiar with will double the price online and then offer half price deals. Another common approach is to offer one price for a certain pill count at a certain dosage with a certain expiration date. And then a different price for a different pill count at a different dosage and a different expiration date. They do this, I am sure, to frustrate your attempts to do comparison shopping. But, what is really going on is that we are seeing the death throes of another dying hegemony.
Things are getting even weirder with access prescription drugs. It used to be that you went to your doctor and got a prescription which you then took to a pharmacist to fill. Both the physician and the pharmacist represent restrictions on access. We will come back to the physician later. But for now, I will point out that the average person who watches TV will see numerous ads recommending medicines for them and further recommending that the see their doctor about the medication. So, doctors no longer always initiate prescriptions. The technology of television had begun to erode that somewhat.
In the case of your pharmacist, there is increasing competition from online sources. The CVS pharmacy competes with the CVS online perscription service CareMark. The online prescriptions are cheaper and more convenient as they are mailed to you. So, unless you actually need to talk to a person, the online alternative is hard to pass up.
In this post, I have given a few more examples where technology has eroded the power of traditional hegemonies of access. I could go on as examples of this pattern are everywhere. But, I believe the pattern is clear and in the next post we will look at an industry in transition and see if this pattern can give us any insight into what will happen.
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Journalism and the Access to News
When I was a kid there were two daily newspapers and three TV networks that provided daily evening news programs. That was all the news we got. And it felt like enough. Each day the editors would decide which news stories were important enough to print or broadcast. And they attempted to be fair and objective in their reporting. These journalistic corporations controlled access to the news. They were examples of hegemonies of access that I mentioned in the previous post.
Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing (or, most likely, somewhere in between) is way too complicated of a question to take on in this post. And the point of this thread is merely to show change occurring according to a pattern rather than to evaluate the change. So, as tempting as it is to get into an analysis of the merits of the old system vs. the new system, I am going step deftly around that question and proceed to explain how things have changed.
What changed the access to news was the access to technology. Once the World Wide Web became widely available there was no longer any control over the creation, dissemination or access to news. Everybody with a personal computer was, potentially, a reporter. Through blogs, forums, discussion boards and other similar means, anybody with an opinion could offer it to cyberspace. Anybody with a juicy tidbit of news could be the first to break a story. And anyone with with access to the internet could read those tidbits in their raw and unedited form. As mobile devices and social media became more prevalent, people on the street could make a video of news as it occurred and post the video online for anyone to view. The news papers simply could not compete. I know this because I Googled "how many newspapers went out of business" and immediately had access to numerous articled discussing the economic decline of journalism. I also know this from experience having known several ex-journalist who were forced to find other means to support themselves.
Along the way "objectivity" suffered as well. I put the term in quotes because I am not so naive as to believe that there really is such a thing as real objectivity. But, at least their used to be a sincere attempt to approach objectivity. Now, we have so called news programs that are unabashed propaganda machines for the polar extremes.
So, now we have much greater access to a much greater variety of news. We have to figure out a lot more for ourselves while extreme partisans can get a steady diet of what they want to hear.
Is this good or bad? Well, again, the question is too complicated to explore here.
But, the point is that technology brought down the journalistic hegemony of access. And, to end this on a positive note, I am convinced that it will all work itself out over time.
Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing (or, most likely, somewhere in between) is way too complicated of a question to take on in this post. And the point of this thread is merely to show change occurring according to a pattern rather than to evaluate the change. So, as tempting as it is to get into an analysis of the merits of the old system vs. the new system, I am going step deftly around that question and proceed to explain how things have changed.
What changed the access to news was the access to technology. Once the World Wide Web became widely available there was no longer any control over the creation, dissemination or access to news. Everybody with a personal computer was, potentially, a reporter. Through blogs, forums, discussion boards and other similar means, anybody with an opinion could offer it to cyberspace. Anybody with a juicy tidbit of news could be the first to break a story. And anyone with with access to the internet could read those tidbits in their raw and unedited form. As mobile devices and social media became more prevalent, people on the street could make a video of news as it occurred and post the video online for anyone to view. The news papers simply could not compete. I know this because I Googled "how many newspapers went out of business" and immediately had access to numerous articled discussing the economic decline of journalism. I also know this from experience having known several ex-journalist who were forced to find other means to support themselves.
Along the way "objectivity" suffered as well. I put the term in quotes because I am not so naive as to believe that there really is such a thing as real objectivity. But, at least their used to be a sincere attempt to approach objectivity. Now, we have so called news programs that are unabashed propaganda machines for the polar extremes.
So, now we have much greater access to a much greater variety of news. We have to figure out a lot more for ourselves while extreme partisans can get a steady diet of what they want to hear.
Is this good or bad? Well, again, the question is too complicated to explore here.
But, the point is that technology brought down the journalistic hegemony of access. And, to end this on a positive note, I am convinced that it will all work itself out over time.
Thursday, December 25, 2014
The Dying Hegemonies of Access
Here is an interesting pattern which we can use both to make sense of the past and predict what might be happening in the future. I call it the Dying Hegemonies of Access. For those of you who are not familiar with the word "Hegemony" it is defined by Merriam Webster as "the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group" It used to refer to the ruling families of Europe at the end of the 19th century. But, I am re-purposing the definition to describe a more modern phenomenon. I will begin, in this post, with a simple example. In future posts, I will elaborate on other examples. And I will use this pattern to make predictions beyond the more obvious ones of of today.
The example I want to begin with is one that is very familiar to everyone - the local bookstore vs. the online bookstore. A couple decades ago, if you wanted to buy a book, you would have to go to your local bookstore. Granted there were some exceptions. There were some used book stores. And some books were available through catalogs. But, the majority of books bought by individuals were acquired through local bookstores.
We can think of these local bookstores, along with their distributors, as a hegemony of access. That is, they were a social institution that controlled access to reading material. I don't mean this as a criticism. In fact, if it weren't for local bookstores, back then, most people would have almost no access to reading materials.
But, over time this hegemony of access, like the ruling families or Europe, began to crumble. First, there were discount book sellers who provided less costly access to high volume bestsellers. Then there were large bookstores that provided much greater variety. I can remember when the first Border's Bookstore came to town. Suddenly, I had access to a variety of books that I would have had to live downtown in a major city to get access to previously. Then, of course, the web showed up and Amazon.com provided everyone with access to everything. Eventually, the hegemony of access that was the local bookstore crumbled.
This is a patten we have seen over and over again. I will lay out examples in future posts. It is also a pattern we can use to anticipate what might happen in the future as well. I will provide some examples there too. I would also point out that not every local bookseller is gone. Barnes and Nobel is still around and still very solid. They adapted to the shift in access and there is a lesson to be learned there as well.
The example I want to begin with is one that is very familiar to everyone - the local bookstore vs. the online bookstore. A couple decades ago, if you wanted to buy a book, you would have to go to your local bookstore. Granted there were some exceptions. There were some used book stores. And some books were available through catalogs. But, the majority of books bought by individuals were acquired through local bookstores.
We can think of these local bookstores, along with their distributors, as a hegemony of access. That is, they were a social institution that controlled access to reading material. I don't mean this as a criticism. In fact, if it weren't for local bookstores, back then, most people would have almost no access to reading materials.
But, over time this hegemony of access, like the ruling families or Europe, began to crumble. First, there were discount book sellers who provided less costly access to high volume bestsellers. Then there were large bookstores that provided much greater variety. I can remember when the first Border's Bookstore came to town. Suddenly, I had access to a variety of books that I would have had to live downtown in a major city to get access to previously. Then, of course, the web showed up and Amazon.com provided everyone with access to everything. Eventually, the hegemony of access that was the local bookstore crumbled.
This is a patten we have seen over and over again. I will lay out examples in future posts. It is also a pattern we can use to anticipate what might happen in the future as well. I will provide some examples there too. I would also point out that not every local bookseller is gone. Barnes and Nobel is still around and still very solid. They adapted to the shift in access and there is a lesson to be learned there as well.
Friday, December 19, 2014
Change is in the air
I have been writing a series of posts in one of my other blogs ( Ranting and Reflecting ) about how we are approaching a period of change. While these posts focus on a shift from "Normal" times to "Chaotic" times, I also explain this as a recognizable pattern. I then go on a bit about how to recognize and validate patterns. If you are interested in patterns, you may want to have a look.
Saturday, April 26, 2014
What Is So Wrong With The Way We Do Things Today?
The current state of white collar work is not sustainable. We waste time in traffic driving to work and create pollution problems with our cars. You hear a lot of people talk about alternative energies due to the pollution caused by oil in general and cars in particular. But, you don't hear anyone suggesting that we just drive a lot less by giving up this antiquated notion of driving to work so you can be where the action is. Certainly working in virtual worlds provides an alternative to driving to work and that alone might be enough incentive to change the way we do things. But there are more reasons.
Today most people in white collar work do not know what they actually do. Through some sort of indoctrination they learned the rituals of their employing entity. But, how are those rituals connected to the value created by the entity and how are the efforts of individuals connected to that aggregate value? Nobody knows. It will be hard to explain to our grand kids that back in the beginning of the 21st century we got paid for showing up rather than for productivity and that showing up had serious costs in terms of both productivity losses and pollution problems.
We might also try to explain how we did not always have the best person doing each job and people did not enjoy their jobs nearly as much as they should. Or maybe we will just be so embarrassed by how things are done today that we might decide not to even bring it up.
I am going to take a break for a while from writing this blog. I have a seriously difficult philosophical paper to write and I need to concentrate on it. I will return when I am rested, recovered, and full of exciting new ideas once again.
Today most people in white collar work do not know what they actually do. Through some sort of indoctrination they learned the rituals of their employing entity. But, how are those rituals connected to the value created by the entity and how are the efforts of individuals connected to that aggregate value? Nobody knows. It will be hard to explain to our grand kids that back in the beginning of the 21st century we got paid for showing up rather than for productivity and that showing up had serious costs in terms of both productivity losses and pollution problems.
We might also try to explain how we did not always have the best person doing each job and people did not enjoy their jobs nearly as much as they should. Or maybe we will just be so embarrassed by how things are done today that we might decide not to even bring it up.
I am going to take a break for a while from writing this blog. I have a seriously difficult philosophical paper to write and I need to concentrate on it. I will return when I am rested, recovered, and full of exciting new ideas once again.
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