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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.

It's a recurring theme throughout history that products or services there were once only available to the wealthiest elite of society eventually trickle down to everyone, often due to improvements in technology.

Think of a product, and it was once unavailable to the masses: refined sugar, spices, cars, etc...

A significant luxury that the rich enjoy is having personal shoppers that eliminate the hassle of having to wade through this crap themselves, deal with deliveries, and return things if they don't work out.

I can imagine a web site that works like that, but utilising efficiencies of scale to bring the cost of this service down to mass-market levels. Affordable by the upper middle class, instead of just the multi-millionaires.

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I'm not sure that would work quite the same. The personal shopper has very different abilities and incentives. They can actually be at your house to manage the delivery and potential returns, they will get to know your preferences in a way you probably wouldn't or couldn't express even on an open-ended form. And most importantly, their only incentive is you. There is no additional cost for them in rejecting an item and starting over. I'm not sure what common payment structures are, but it's even possible they are incentivized to be as picky as possible as long as they can do so quickly enough to not bother you.

The problem is that kind of incentive is really difficult, or maybe impossible, to do cheaply. How do you scale anything in a way that doesn't turn extra pickiness for a specific customer into a cost?

Oh, I don't mean a personal personal shopper! As you rightly pointed out, that wouldn't be cost effective, which is why currently only the rich can afford this.

I mean what the parent-to-my-post suggested: a curated shopping site, where all products are guaranteed to be high quality, end of story. No fakes. No drop-shipping from untrustworthy suppliers. No bargain basement products.

You could do this for basically anything! As a random example, my building was constructed using the cheapest supplier for electrical outlets and switches. Fully half are broken in just a couple of years, and one of them shorted so badly it nearly set the apartment on fire. That's absurdly dangerous, yet they did it to save something like $2 per outlet.

I went online and tried to do some research to find a reputable vendor, but I got lost in the sea of options. There is no review that is trustworthy. There's no site I can judge to be reliable by myself.

Steve Jobs told his team that all of the Apple products should fit on a table. There shouldn't be fifty models with varying levels of quality. There should just be one of each, the best, end of story. Customers shouldn't have to do research, or figure out which one has flaws that they can tolerate at a preferred price point.

Sure, this flies in the face of economic theory, but Apple become the world's biggest company under Jobs' leadership, and their brand is basically magic. Maybe he has a point.

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