The Most Reviewed Thing in the Shop Is a Mug

The Emma Bridgewater Cow Juice half-pint mug has sixty reviews. That is more than any food line in the shop, more than the honey, more than the burger sauce with its ninety-five — no, the burger sauce has ninety-five, which is more, and it is a £4.80 jar of sauce.

Look at the top ten most-reviewed products and a pattern appears immediately: nine of them are under six pounds. The expensive things get admired. The cheap things get bought, used up, replaced and reviewed.

That is not a criticism of the expensive things. It is an argument for the price architecture — condiments clustered hard between £4.80 and £5.85, T-shirts uniformly £26, soft toys flat at £19 — because a customer who never has to compare relative value can spend their attention on whether they want the thing.

And then there is Richard Ham: a nineteen-pound plush pig with fourteen reviews that has been out of stock for most of a year. Four of the five named-beast soft toys are permanently cleaned out. We are under-supplying the exact thing people most want, and we have known it for some time.