The Future Of Retail: What I Want, When I Want It, As Long As I Need It

The Future Of Retail: Immediate, Exact, Temporary

I was sitting on my deck the other day, reading an article on my iPad when I glanced over at my lawn. Hmm, I thought to myself. That needs cutting. So I thought — what are my options:

1. Get out my lawnmower and cut the grass. Would probably do me a lot of good physically, get me out from behind a screen, breathe some fresh air, get some exercise, and since I have a push mower and a pretty small lawn, it wouldn’t take too long
2. Call up a service on my iPad to send someone to cut my lawn. Easy, fast and done. I don’t need a lawnmower, I’ll just have someone bring theirs. But then I don’t get the benefits of mowing my lawn: the fresh air, the cost savings, etc.

What if I don’t have a lawnmower? I’ll have to order one from Amazon, wait for it to show up, assemble it. Such a hassle. In the future, I suppose that I’ll have a 3D printer and I can 3D print a lawnmower. But that will take a long time and material, then when I’m done with it, it will sit there gathering dust until I need to use it again. That does not sound like the future of retail. At least in the Star Trek universe you could recycle it back into a block of matter that can be converted into something else. Like…