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]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: automation, bagel man, clerks, clerks 3, naraffar, paul feldman, retail, self-service, shoplifting, stores, trust, white collar crime

Making Movies 20 Years Ago vs. Today: A World Of Difference

from the two-podcasts dept

I recently listened to two very (very) different podcasts, but which really highlighted something kind of amazing: it's so much easier to make a movie today. We're talking a completely different world. Of course, most of us knew that already, and it's why we see things like many more movies being made today than ever before in the past. But between these two podcasts, what's driven home is how much the old system relied on gatekeepers, and how little the new system needs such gatekeepers.

The first podcast was a recent episode of Kevin Smith & Scott Mosier's Smodcast, in which Smith digs (deep) into his archives to find a ton of old voicemail recordings that give you a taste of the process of making his original film, Clerks and actually getting it picked up and shown in theaters (it comes after the discussion of the war against sharks at the beginning, which is entertaining too...). At first I just thought it was kind of awesome to get that kind of behind-the-scenes look (or, listen) to all the people that had to "appreciate" Clerks before it was picked up by Miramax and became that indie film classic it shall forever remain. It's amazing to listen to all of those voicemails and go back 20 years and learn about what happened. But there are all sorts of people who have to get involved and become boosters of the film. Smith and Mosier were lucky that one influential guy caught the movie at their original showing in NY, and then he helped get a writeup by an influential reporter, who helped get others interested in the film, but each step of the way, a champion had to say "hey, you should send a tape to so-and-so."

But then I thought about just how different the world is today. While people can go through gatekeepers, we see an entire new generation of filmmakers (and other content creators) who don't need to hope that someone influential catches the flick in its only theater showing. They don't have to find "the" guy who sold indie films to studios. They don't have to find "the" reporter who writes about indie films. Yes, some of those things can help, but they can now use sites like YouTube and Vimeo to post the work (or snippets of it) online for free. They can use social media to build a following. They can use Kickstarter and TopSpin and other tools to make money. It's an entirely different world.

And that point was driven home when I listened to the very next podcast in my playlist, from Alec Baldwin's Here's the Thing podcast, in which he interviews two documentary filmmakers who basically made (controversial) films on effectively no budget at all. While the types of movies are quite different from Clerks, listening to the two podcasts, one after the other, you realize that the documentary filmmakers probably wouldn't even have attempted to make those films two decades ago.

It's an amazing new world for creative arts, with tremendous new opportunity. Those who are complaining that things are worse these days seem to be living in an alternate reality. If things are "worse," it's only because there may be more competition for attention -- which is a real challenge. But there's so much more opportunity and so many fewer gatekeepers needed, that it's difficult not to be excited for the kinds of creativity we're seeing today and will inevitably see in the future.

Filed Under: alec baldwin, clerks, documentaris, history, kevin smith, movie making, movies