I have been reading the recent book by Chris Anderson called The Long Tail and it is a fascinating read. I now find myself taking the Long Tail concept and trying to apply it to everything.

Ok, so how is Target like Google. Google's primary value to the user is that it acts as a filter to try and help us all get closer to finding what we are looking for online. It uses all kinds of things to help prioritize web pages that will best serve me out of the millions or billions of web pages that exist.

Target Stores do the same thing. They attempt to filter to me the products I might be interested in and filter out those I am not. Of course sometimes they are accurate and sometimes they are not. That is why there are other retailers who try to filter for me what I might want to buy.

Our groceries stores do the same thing. I read where the average grocery store now carries 60,000 unique products versus 20,000 a few years ago. They are trying to filter for me more accurately.

As Chris Anderson says in the book, The Future of Business is Selling Less of More. What do you think?