00:00:01 · Aman Narain, Zubin Vandrevala
[00:00:01] S0: Memphis, Tennessee 1916. A grocer called Clarence Saunders opens a shop with a turnstile at the entrance and a checkout at the exit. In between, there's no clerk fetching your flour from behind a counter. You walk the aisles. You take the tins off the shelf yourself. You carry them to the till. He calls it Piggly Wiggly. It's widely credited as the first self-service grocery, and the labor of choosing has just moved from the shop to the shopper. [00:00:34] S1: Now a Tuesday morning in Atlanta in 2030. This is a possible future, not a fact. Tamika Reid is 41, and she is a composite. Overnight, her phone did the weekly shop. Milk, bread, detergent, the usuals, and it stayed inside the $100 she had allowed it. It paid with a credit card number that existed for one purchase, and then it expired. And it paid the same shelf price she'd have probably seen if she had just walked down her aisle herself.
00:00:34 · Zubin Vandrevala, Aman Narain
[00:00:34] S1: Now a Tuesday morning in Atlanta in 2030. This is a possible future, not a fact. Tamika Reid is 41, and she is a composite. Overnight, her phone did the weekly shop. Milk, bread, detergent, the usuals, and it stayed inside the $100 she had allowed it. It paid with a credit card number that existed for one purchase, and then it expired. And it paid the same shelf price she'd have probably seen if she had just walked down her aisle herself. [00:01:12] S0: In 1916, choosing moved from the clerk to the shopper. In 2030, it moves from the shopper to software, which brings us to this auto. On the September 21, Amazon blocked Meta's shopping agent from its website. Exactly a month later, Walmart opens its doors to approved shopping agents. Two of the biggest retailers on earth, the same question, opposite answers. So three things to hold on to. There's one number in this episode that should make you doubt the hype. There's a payments trick from Hangzhou in 2004 that I think tells us how this ends. And there's a question. When the customer is the software, who is the customer? Welcome back to A2Z Fintech. I'm Aman in my living room in Singapore. [00:02:14] S1: And I'm Zubin, the z in A2Z. You're in my workspace in San Francisco where the guitars have heard this argument before. [00:02:23] S0: This is part two of the future of our three part series, work, shopping, banking. Part one asked who pays you. Today, we ask who you pay and through who. Part three then goes on to ask who holds the money.
00:02:23 · Aman Narain, Zubin Vandrevala
[00:02:23] S0: This is part two of the future of our three part series, work, shopping, banking. Part one asked who pays you. Today, we ask who you pay and through who. Part three then goes on to ask who holds the money. [00:02:38] S1: And Aman, the spine of all three of these is five words. See, move, borrow, grow, and protect. For a shopper, that's everything that happens in the, I don't know, half a second after you tap to pay. [00:02:55] S0: In part one, Divya had a dashboard her bank wouldn't underwrite. This time, the bank can't even be sure the customer is a person. [00:03:02] S1: Before we go any further, Aman, I'm gonna push on your premise. Your notes say every shopper revolution was a trust story. I think some of them were just cheaper. Self-service was, I don't know, cost cutting. Amazon was a price war with free delivery. [00:03:19] S0: Cost was the motive. Trust was the license, in my opinion, Zubin. Nobody lets strangers wander their shelves or post money to someone they've never met unless something makes it safe. [00:03:33] S1: The capitalist in me thinks otherwise, but prove it in act one, and I'll keep score. [00:03:39] S0: Deal. Well, if you're new to agents, by the way, there are three earlier episodes that sit underneath this one. BotWars, our session on Stripe sessions, and my solo on Anthropics Conversations. But before we dive into this episode, Zubin, I think you have some legal jargon to throw our viewers away.
00:03:39 · Aman Narain, Zubin Vandrevala
[00:03:39] S0: Deal. Well, if you're new to agents, by the way, there are three earlier episodes that sit underneath this one. BotWars, our session on Stripe sessions, and my solo on Anthropics Conversations. But before we dive into this episode, Zubin, I think you have some legal jargon to throw our viewers away. [00:03:59] S1: Alright. Alright, folks. If you've heard this podcast before, you know exactly what's coming. This podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed are of Aman and mine. They're two dudes drifting on topics that we care about and does not constitute financial advice, legal, tax advice, and definitely does not reflect the views of our employers. And by the way, if you use a shopping agent, however good its man is, stay smart. [00:04:27] S0: So there have been four acts today, the past, the present, the future, and what this all does for your money. The past comes down to one idea. Every revolution in shopping removed a friction, distance, information, trust. And there's a fourth, which is where this episode in its entirety lives: attention. Distance, I think, went first, as we said. In 1872, Montgomery Ward's catalog brought the city store to the farmhouse by rail and post with a printed guarantee to make strangers trust it. [00:05:02] S1: But, Aman, so which one did Piggly Wiggly remove? [00:05:06] S0: I know you love saying that. Now By the way, actually.
00:05:06 · Aman Narain, Zubin Vandrevala
[00:05:06] S0: I know you love saying that. Now By the way, actually. [00:05:10] S1: Yeah. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. I have a side story with Piggly Wiggly. Way back, this is, I'm talking, 2005 or 2006, I actually did a side project where I was at Kellogg doing business school with a dairy farmer out of Wisconsin, really analyzing his entire distribution, which led me to guess who? Piggly Wiggly. And I'd never ever heard of this brand before, and I've actually been to one of them. [00:05:31] S0: So to answer your question on which one Piggly Wiggly removed and take you back to your business school days, I think none, strictly speaking. It moved the work. But look at what it created. Once there's no clock recommending the soap, the box has to do the selling itself. Self-service forced the brands into packaging and national advertising your business school was very famous for, so they could sell themselves straight off the shelf. The shelf became a medium. Attention as a business was seeded, if you'd like, in 1916. [00:06:06] S1: So going back to the point I was trying to make, retail's media's founding father is a pig. [00:06:13] S0: A very successful pig. [00:06:16] S1: Alright. Then information and a date that every shopping or commerce person should care about. The June 26 in 1974, a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. A cashier scans a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum with a barcode on it. [00:06:35] S0: And and the store starts to know things.
00:06:35 · Aman Narain, Zubin Vandrevala
[00:06:35] S0: And and the store starts to know things. [00:06:38] S1: Every item, every lane, every day. That data lets stores automate, I don't know, replenishments. It powers the big boxes, Walmart and Costco, and category killers like Home Depot. The barcode's real gift wasn't a faster queue. It was a retailer who knew more than anyone else standing in it. [00:07:00] S0: And then, Zubin, came trust, is, of course, your patch. [00:07:03] S1: Yeah. Let's let's talk through that. Right? '9... Nineteen fifty Diners Club, 1958 Bank of America, which later became Visa, we've done an entire episode on it. A network now separates the moment you buy from the moment you pay. The merchant trusts the network to settle. The issuer trusts the cardholders to pay. Nobody in the store has to trust any [00:07:23] S0: And and a trust layer dressed up as plastic, if you'd like, which brings me to the story I want you to remember. China 2003. EBay is in the market through a local site, EachNet, with the brand, the technology, and the money. Alibaba out of Hangzhou launches Taobao against it. Zero listing fees, a chat tool so buyers can haggle with sellers, and in 2004, Alipay with one rule: The buyer's money sits in escrow, and the seller isn't paid until the buyer confirms the goods have arrived as described. [00:08:02] S1: In a market full of counterfeits, that's not a feature. That's a product.