In this episode, I start with a trip back to 1916, when Clarence Saunders launched the first self-service supermarket, Piggly Wiggly, and everyone thought it was a ridiculous idea. Customers serving themselves? Paying cash instead of running a tab? Madness. Yet, it reshaped retail forever.
I use that story as a lens to explore today’s 'crazy-sounding' innovation: agentic shopping (AI agents shopping on our behalf). Drawing from retail analyst Andrew Lipsman’s critiques, I unpack why skepticism toward new retail tech is healthy, but can also blind us to early versions of world-changing ideas. From Webvan to Amazon to TikTok, I show how many 'failed' technologies weren’t wrong — they were just early.
Then, I dig into what needs to align for AI-driven shopping to go mainstream: better tech, real consumer pain points, frictionless distribution, sustainable economics, and cultural trust.
Will agentic shopping become the next self-service revolution, or just another voice commerce flop? Let’s find out.
This episode is sponsored by Connected Commerce at Acosta Group
Timeline
[00:00] – The wild story of Clarence Saunders and how Piggly Wiggly reinvented grocery shopping.
[02:05] – The lesson: the future doesn’t arrive by request, it’s created by those who rethink inefficiencies.
[02:32] – Introducing today’s topic: why agentic shopping feels 'too weird' and why that’s familiar.
[03:13] – Andrew Lipsman’s skeptical take: retail tech hype cycles and a graveyard of failed innovations.
[04:17] – Why some 'failures' (like Webvan) were just early, not wrong — lessons from timing and execution.
[05:12] – Amazon’s early struggles: when buying books online seemed absurd until it wasn’t.
[07:24] – The TikTok lesson: from lip-syncing app to global phenomenon, how tech evolves beyond its first use case.
[08:14] – My firsthand experiment: buying a lavender candle through ChatGPT’s instant checkout (clunky but promising!).
[09:00] – What needs to align for agentic commerce to succeed: technology, pain, distribution, economics, and trust.
[12:33] – Back to Piggly Wiggly: irrational innovations often look crazy, until they become inevitable.
[13:28] – Final takeaway: better to prepare for possibility than assume limits based on early imperfections.
Links & Resources