While enjoying the summer holidays in Italy, we decided to buy some fresh delicious focaccia. As soon as I wanted to pay, I noticed a humming big black box at the register: This strange machine turned out to be a state-of-the-art payment machine, which would use cash as input at the top, and return any change at the bottom.
This was interesting: Societies are rapidly moving to cashless transactions, and here we find a brand new machine explicitly designed to facilitate and improve cash payments.
It follows the boomerang rule in business: For every trend, there will be a counter trend. For example, in spite of growing digital services like Spotify, sales of vinyl record have increased by more than 100% in the past year. Businesses operating in the vinyl record niche have been doing very well.
Sometimes it’s a good idea to unfollow trends to avoid the trap of more-better-faster: Leave the herd and you will find that the grass is indeed greener when you go the other direction.