So glad to learn the term for this! For ages I've been lamenting the elimination of sections in clothing stores. At some point if you needed new pants you could pop into the shop and head over to the pants section. Now they're strewn all over the place and you have to wander aimlessly hoping to stumble across a couple pairs hidden among the shirts and socks.
New to me as well. It’s not surprising me at all though. It’s ironic that peak capitalists seemingly spend all their efforts trying to circumventing the only things that make free markets actually efficient: eliminating competition and consumer choice, confusing and exhausting participants (this psychological warfare), reducing the ability to compare prices (anti-scraping, dynamic pricing, soft-paywalls).
I’m convinced that if you pitch building better products than the competition as a sustainable business plan to VCs today, they would laugh you out of the room.
