The new thing gap is the time and distance between encountering something new and being able to buy it. New York Times editor Eric Athas coined the term in his book Saying No to New. In 1995 that gap was roughly 30 minutes and five miles. Today it's about four seconds, and retail technology is the reason. Eric joined us on season 6 episode 12 of The Retail Razor Show to discuss.
What is the new thing gap ?
Eric defines the new thing gap as the time and distance between a consumer encountering a new thing and taking the action needed to obtain it. His 1995 example: you see a commercial for sneakers, you think about it over a couple of days, you drive half an hour to the mall. The gap is where the decision happens.
Three decades of retail technology closed the new thing gap deliberately.
One-click ordering, stored payment credentials, buy now pay later, cashierless checkout, shoppable video. Eric is explicit that he is not romanticizing 1995 and does not want the conveniences reversed. His argument is narrower and harder to dismiss.
What the new thing gap contained was time to think, and that's what got removed.
Why does closing the gap matter to retailers?
Because decisions made inside a closed gap are worse, and the retailer pays for them later. Eric points to research by Richard Petty separating two routes to persuasion: a central route, where someone is convinced after real deliberation, and a peripheral route, where they are convinced in an instant without thinking.
It is far easier to persuade someone on the peripheral route. It is also far easier to sell them something they will regret.
On the episode I described a UK mobile retailer that measured this directly. A large share of customers wanted to return or exchange their phone within two weeks, not because anything was wrong with it but because they had concluded they chose badly. The retailer built a tablet tool that walked customers through a structured set of questions before the purchase. Returns driven by buyer's remorse fell by half.
Read that next to the new thing gap and it is the same finding from the other direction. The retailer spent money rebuilding the deliberation its own channel had taken out.
Does frictionless shopping cause more returns?
The episode does not claim a universal causal number, and neither does the book. What both describe is a mechanism.
Faster purchase decisions are made with less information and less reflection, and decisions made that way are more likely to be reversed.
The UK pilot is one retailer's evidence that the reverse also holds: add structured deliberation and reversals drop.
If your returns rate is a line item you're trying to manage, that mechanism deserves attention, because most returns programs treat the symptom at the back door instead of the decision at the front.
Who is an agentic commerce agent optimizing for?
I asked Eric that question directly. His answer was that he doesn't know, and that not knowing is the problem. Casey Golden raised a third possibility: that the agent optimizes for itself, since an agent that never buys anything does not look useful to whoever built it.
Eric then linked it to motivated reasoning, the finding that people tend to reach the conclusions they already wanted to reach.
Do people know what they want from their agent?
He cited a study in which participants rated photographs, had some of their rejected choices quietly slipped back into the accepted pile, and then rated those same rejected options highly the second time without noticing the switch. People do not reliably know what they prefer.
Combine that with a model that agrees with the way you framed the question, give it purchasing power, and the result is a system that confirms an impulse at the exact moment no thinking time remains. In the book's language, that would supercharge the magic pill effect.
What is useful friction, and where does it belong?
Eric is careful that he is not calling for industry-wide redesign of the new thing gap.
Useful friction is something an individual installs in their own life, at the access points where new things enter.
His method is an audit. List where the new stuff comes in, pick the one or two sources you want more deliberation around, and add steps. Delete the app and use the desktop site. Remove the stored card so you have to go find it.
He wants a fast path to a work document. He does not want one to social media, and he does not want his kids to have one to online shopping. The placement is a choice, and most people have never made it on purpose.
Can a brand be built on rediscovery instead of replacement?
Casey put this question to him using research from Ed O'Brien at Chicago Booth.
People consistently predict they will not enjoy repeating an experience, then report enjoying it almost as much the second time.
We misjudge familiar things in a predictable direction, which means there is unrealized value sitting in products customers already own.
Eric's answer was to study the people who already behave this way. He pointed to the anthropologist Grant McCracken on how possessions carry meaning, and to a man he interviewed who prefers a film camera precisely because it will not show him the picture immediately, has finite capacity, and reminds him of his grandfather. Every feature that camera lacks is a feature the market assumes people want.
How do you tell real innovation from innovation theater?
Use what Eric calls the curb cut test.
Does this innovation make life better for a wide spectrum of people? Curb cuts were mandated for wheelchair users and turned out to serve strollers, suitcases, skateboards and scooters. Closed captioning was built for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and is now how everyone follows whispered dialogue.
He applies it to himself. He had written off AI smart glasses from the advertising he walks past in Times Square, then recognized that the same product could be life-changing for someone who is blind or has low vision. The test did not change his personal decision. It changed his confidence that his personal decision was the whole answer.
For anyone building retail technology, that's the version of the question worth carrying into a roadmap review. Not whether you would use it. Whether it helps a wide spectrum of people, and whether the price puts it out of reach of the people it would help most.
Frequently asked questions.
What is the new thing gap?
The time and distance between encountering something new and being able to obtain it. The term comes from Eric Athas's book Saying No to New. In 1995 it was about 30 minutes and five miles for a mall purchase. Today it can be four seconds.
Who is Eric Athas?
Eric Athas is Deputy Editor for Newsroom Development & Support at The New York Times and the author of Saying No to New (Balance, 2026). His first journalism job was at the retail technology blog Storefront Backtalk.
What is useful friction?
Deliberately adding steps between yourself and the places new things enter your life, so decisions get made with thought instead of reflex. Examples from the episode: deleting a shopping app and using the desktop site, or removing a stored credit card.
What is the magic pill effect?
Our preference for the fast miracle fix over the slower real one. Athas argues an AI shopping assistant that agrees with whatever you were already leaning toward makes the effect stronger, because it removes the last of the deliberation.
What is the curb cut test?
A question to ask of any new technology: does it make life better for a wide spectrum of people? Named for sidewalk curb cuts, which were mandated for wheelchair users and ended up serving strollers, suitcases, skateboards and scooters.
Does making shopping faster increase returns?
The podcast episode describes the mechanism rather than a universal figure. Faster decisions are made with less deliberation and are more likely to be reversed. One UK mobile retailer cut buyer's-remorse returns in half by adding a structured question flow before the sale.
Hear (or watch) the whole story.
🎧 Hear the full conversation with Eric Athas on his new book, Saying No to New, on season 6 episode 12 of The Retail Razor Show. You can find Eric's book at your favorite bookstore, and on Amazon. Learn more about the new things gap at Eric's website here.
Watch the episode on YouTube or Spotify. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Goodpods or your favorite podcast player.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ricardo Belmar is a retail tech analyst, top industry influencer and founder of The Retail Razor Show podcast, part of the Retail Razor Podcast Network, the #1 indie podcast network for retail, where he and Casey Golden help retailers cut through the clutter and the noise in retail. Ricardo writes and speaks on retail technology, AI in retail, retail media networks, marketing, commerce strategy, and the leadership behind real retail transformation. He has spent his career working with retailers and the technology companies that serve them. He is also a supporter of RetailROI and the charities they support helping children in need.
ABOUT THE PODCAST GUEST
Eric Athas is an editor at the New York Times, where he helps journalists learn new tools and skills they can use to tell stories. Before joining the Times in 2016, he worked at NPR and the Washington Post. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and the Nieman Journalism Lab. Athas lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn.
