Pizzamaps

Here's a thing I wrote 15 years ago; I think it may have turned out roughly true?

What mostly strikes me is how mad it is that there was a time before I had a smartphone, and was predicting what would happen in a world full of smartphones, and that world wasn't mine. The past is a foreign country, and I used to live there, and even still it feels alien.

Suppose you're in a big, touristy city - let's say New York - and you want to buy some pizza.... If the majority of customers in a particular area are tourists (who won't return to the store), it's rational for most of the pizzerias at a given price-point to offer low-quality pizza: one place in each neighbourhood will serve good-quality pizza to locals, and every other pizzeria is better off using cheap ingredients and serving the tourist market.  The high-quality pizzeria's profit margins will actually be lower, and they try to make up for it in volume (because they get all the locals, plus some random tourists, whereas everyone else just gets some random tourists).  This is why touristy food in touristy cities will tend to be bad, relative to the same kind of food in non-tourist towns (which rely on repeat customers).

This is reason #20934092 that smart phones are going to make life much better, by making markets more perfect-competition-like.  Once a significant number of tourists start checking out online reviews even before buying a $3 slice, big cities like New York will start to resemble touristless towns - even one-time visitors will act as if they were repeat customers (though in fact they're "repeating" someone else's visit). Expect the average (though not the maximal) quality of pizza in New York to increase significantly in the next ten years.