How Sears outdid their main competitor

And it inspired competitors - notably Sears Roebuck, which soon became the market leader. (The story goes that the Sears Roebuck catalogue had slightly smaller pages than Montgomery Ward’s - with the intention that a tidy-minded housewife would naturally stack the two with the Sears catalogue on top.)

By the century’s end, mail-order companies were bringing in $30 million a year - a billion-dollar business in today’s terms; in the next twenty years, that figure grew almost twenty-fold. The popularity of mail order helped fuel demands to improve the postal service in the countryside - if you lived in a city, you’d get letters delivered to your door, but rural dwellers had to schlep to their nearest post office.

If the catalogue story is true, Sears won the top of the pile by being slightly smaller. Gloriously petty. Entire strategies have achieved less with a great deal more vocabulary. The trick changed no headline, offer or product. It changed what gravity and tidiness did after both catalogues entered the house. Every neatly stacked pair became another piece of distribution, performed free by the customer.

Modern commerce is full of these quiet advantages. Eye-level cereal. The card already loaded into a phone. The first result beneath the search box. The product comparison that opens with one column preselected. People can choose anything, in theory; meanwhile the environment keeps passing them one thing first. Marketers love claims because claims look like marketing. Position feels operational, almost beneath the glamour. Yet a distinctive message buried on page two remains a beautifully written secret. Availability includes being physically and mentally nearest when the decision wakes up.

Defaults become rotten when reversal is hidden or the convenient option is worse for the person choosing. That is a design judgement, not a reason to ignore position altogether. In an ordinary choice, two nominally equal options can arrive at the hand at different times. The decision may happen before a headline gets the chance to help.