I’m currently reading this fascinating book, “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More” by Chris Anderson. His book talks about how, in the 20th Century, retail was dominated by hits(Top 40 music, book bestsellers, movie blockbusters, etc.) but the 21st Century will be dominated by niches due to the sheer amount of options available to the consumer provided by the internet. For example, there’s little comparison between the extraordinary amount of products available at Amazon.com to say a typical Wal-Mart or the number of albums on iTunes to any neighborhood music store.

It’s a very interesting book for its premise alone but what I read today just staggered me. Mr. Anderson talks about all the advances over the past century that have led up to the hit/niche reversal and one of the first ones he mentions is Sears. They started out as a catalog business before opening retail stores but here’s the part that I found so stunning. Their very first catalog, the Wish Book, was printed in 1897 and contained over 200,000 items and variations with something like 6,000 illustrations. Two… hundred… thousand…!

Here’s a sample of the first ten pages: sixty-seven kinds of tea, thirty-eight kinds of coffee, and twenty-nine kinds of cocoa. Next come several hundred different spice and extracts, and an equal number of canned and dried fruits, followed by a small supermarket’s offerings of other foods. By the eleventh page, it is time for more than sixty kinds of soap, and then on for another 770 pages of everything from drugs to guns(including a revolver for sixty- eight cents!) to clothes to buggies to two dollar violins.

This was mind-blowing stuff for a rural farm family. With the heavy thunk of a single mail drop, the choice of available products increased a thousandfold from the typical inventory at the general store. What’s more, the catalog also represented a drop of often 50 percent or more in price, even after shipping.

Mr. Anderson conjures up what the scenario must have been like. Imagine you’re a farmer living way out in the country, you’re several hours away from the closest general store with its high prices and then one day the Sears catalog gets dropped on your doorstep. It seems unfathomable to me.

The closest I can get to that feeling is remembering when I discovered file sharing back in the days of Napster. Suddenly I had the most amazing music store in the world right on my computer. No longer did I have to spend hours browsing through dusty racks of at first LP’s then CD’s to find what I was looking for, or not finding it as was often the case. I could now just type in a query and up it comes. And the best part is, it was free. To a music fan like myself this was huge but I’m sure nowhere on the level of a farmer getting the Sears catalog for the first time. It blows my mind to ponder it.

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