The bottom line
Commerce is increasingly designed around removing time, delay and friction from the customer experience.
Why it matters
Payments, delivery, replenishment and service move toward anticipation and near-invisibility. The strategic asset is not simply convenience but the ability to eliminate transactional pauses before the customer experiences them.
From the foresight archive
Jim Carroll first published this as Megatrend #19 on 2025-07-22. He revisited it one year later on 2026-08-31, using the retrospective to test the original call against what had happened since.
In that retrospective, Carroll’s own shorthand assessment was: Ahead of schedule on payments and delivery, still early on the household edge cases. The checkout and the courier disappeared before the smart fridge ever showed up.
This page treats the 2025 article as the original foresight call and the 2026 article as the first evidence checkpoint. Later signals and scorecards can be attached without rewriting the historical record.