DailyDirt: Do It Yourself Shopping -- Stores Without Employees?
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Maybe you've been to a store with the self-check-out lanes where you have to scan and bag your own groceries. Some stores have had success with this kind of self-serve technology, but others haven't. Still, brick and mortar stores need to try out different ways to be more convenient for shoppers in order to compete with same-day shipping from various online retailers.- In Sweden, a new grocery store (called Naraffar) doesn't have any cashiers and lets customers shop its aisles using a smartphone app. The store is open 24/7, and pre-registered customers unlock the store with their phones to pick out items that are charged to their credit cards automatically. It's basically a walk-in vending machine, but presumably there are some human workers who re-stock the shelves (or maybe not someday). [url]
- The job of a convenience store cashier isn't exactly glamorous, but about 22 years ago, a classic movie was released about a couple of guys working behind a counter. If you haven't seen Clerks, check it out before Clerks III comes out in 2018. [url]
- Paul Feldman started a bagel business that trusted people to pay for the bagels they ate -- relying only on gentle reminders and homemade, plywood money boxes to collect the cash. Perhaps surprisingly, his payment rates were generally more than 80% -- and Feldman kept detailed records over about a decade and for over a million bagels served. Pleasant weather correlated with higher payment rates (and less bagel theft), but perhaps this economic experiment shouldn't be generalized to white collar crime or other businesses. [url]
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Filed Under: automation, bagel man, clerks, clerks 3, naraffar, paul feldman, retail, self-service, shoplifting, stores, trust, white collar crime
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When asked to do the right thing, with no penalty or people watching over them, the majority of people are more likely to pay.
It's kind of like the pay what you want model.
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Even though the market determines price, markets differ. One decade says one price. Another decade says another. Which one is right? Is either right? Is there a difference in value in the different decades, or is there just a difference in price? Is the perceived value the same or is the price the same given inflation? Is a used car the same value as a round trip airplane ride even if they are the same price? Is value in the eye of the beholder? Is time a factor?
Should all retailers trust the market to treat them fairly? Should all manufacturers? Should all service companies? Should government? What is the relative value between each of those?
Hmm...
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Who will have money if its all automated?
This only ends with a ton of Jobless people and a bunch of automated fast food joints with no customers because you automated your customers out of jobs...
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Re: Who will have money if its all automated?
Now extend that to all driving and delivery jobs, warehouses, stocking, basically any relatively simple repetitive job. And that's just the first wave of automation. Eventually we'll be able to automate customer service, medicine*, management, construction... give it 100 years, and there will basically be no jobs in industrialized countries. Either that, or we will have burned our society to the ground because people can't eat and we failed to cope with the change.
* presumably there will still be some people involved, until we can make robots indistinguishable from people
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Re: Who will have money if its all automated?
We may never actually get that far, for various reasons not excluding simple entropy - but at some point, you really do reach a point where it makes more sense to give everyone a basic income than to leave those who can't find work with nothing to live on.
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Re: Re: Who will have money if its all automated?
Absolutely, the question is will we be able to make that fundamental shift in our society quickly enough? The changes to employment are coming (IMO), and the change from required work to citizen stipend or whatever it's called needs to start soon after or we're going to have major problems.
Some think this revolution will be just like the previous ones, where more jobs are created than lost, but I don't see it that way. At best, there will be few or no menial jobs left, and our (speaking of the US) education and training systems are woefully inadequate to retrain menial workers for whatever high-skill, high-knowledge jobs remain. And even if we solved that somehow, and assumed that all those people are even capable of doing those jobs, there probably won't be enough of them for everyone.
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It's better than nothing, and the best many people can get. And yes, that's a serious problem. It used to be just teenagers worked at fast food and maybe a couple of managers, but now adults are competing with teens for these jobs because they can't find anything else that they're qualified for (either they're not qualified for anything or can't find a job in their field).
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I assume this specific grocery store doesn't work with Hollywood (shocked I tell you). It's too modern. And surely the pirates are plundering it empty.
Ahem.
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Kroger is best
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