Afford Anything · Tuesday, July 14, 2026
David Bell discussed his book, 'Location is Still Everything,' which posits that a person's physical location significantly influences their online behavior. He used the example of an individual making different purchasing decisions in Manhattan versus suburban Kansas City, even with identical incomes and tastes.
“So I was thinking about online and offline, what people now refer to as omnichannel. And just a couple of things that might be interesting for your audience, Paula. So if you rewind back far enough, you'll hear very famous venture capitalists and some professors, when the internet was sort of first a thing, there was this idea that the internet's going to obliterate the physical world and we'll buy everything online and there'll never be any stores again. And obviously that's turned out to be completely untrue. Right?”
“So I was thinking about online and offline, what people now refer to as omnichannel. And just a couple of things that might be interesting for your audience, Paula. So if you rewind back far enough, you'll hear very famous venture capitalists and some professors, when the internet was sort of first a thing, there was this idea that the internet's going to obliterate the physical world and we'll buy everything online and there'll never be any stores again. And obviously that's turned out to be completely untrue. Right? What's actually happened is that the internet and the real world are not actually substitutes in the way people thought of them at the beginning. Is that they are actually complements. They serve different kinds of people at different points in time or the same kind of person at a different point in time.”
“So I think thinking about all these ideas, I ended up speaking to a guy from Amazon. So Amazon had this publishing thing that they just starting and he came up with this title and it was definitely not a best-selling book, but it was a fun book to write. And then I think a book that opened up opportunities for me with companies that I wanted to invest in, or or speaking, it was called location is still everything. And the idea was just as you express, that the physical world that you live in has a large influence on how you behave online.”
“So, you know, thinking about the concept of homophily, right? Birds of a feather flock together. If you drive through Beverly Hills, 90210, the kinds of people that live there in terms of their demographics, their education level, house size, income, yada yada, physical characteristics, have a degree of similarity. And the same way when I used to live in Philadelphia, 19123, those people might be different. But within the group of sort of similar. So you've taken that off the table, which is really good. Right. So the reason that I anchored it in the same individual in either Tribeca or suburban Kansas City is because often a person might live in a place that they wouldn't prefer to live due to either work or maybe family caregiving responsibilities. Perhaps they have elderly parents who need caregiving support and so they end up living in a place that they wouldn't have chosen as a result of these external circumstances.”