Of course, a lot of those people are fleeing the deployment of the explodey kind of technology we’re so fond of. And I know people with degrees who have shit jobs who aren’t recent immigrants from countries they’ve fled for whatever reason. Rarely is that their fault.
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I excluded refugees from this in my first statement. And degrees don’t equal skills.
It’s crazy how every month or so some ‘tech’ startup manages to break into the new cycle out of nowhere. IMO, they are intentionally creating this “replace bodegas” narrative to generate the controversy… It’s a triumph of PR over any business logic. I mean, this is just a cheaper version of a vending machine that in no way approaches the ability to replace a corner store. As others have mentioned, the crucial products aren’t even available in their unrefrigerated box: cigarettes, booze, milk, coffee, and lotto tickets (which you can buy from actual vending machines). At least it could have condoms, coconut water and muscle milk (the silicon valley staples). Still, they wish it was competition for bodegas.
Lets just all take a deep breath and curse the PR gods, then we can just quietly move along…
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Well that answers my question.
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What a powerfull line to end on, makes me sad 
I’m afraid we are the problem… This recently came by here and the full story is worth reading:
TL;DR talking to people is awkward, removing this from the equation makes your app/business/startup popular and successful.
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Yup. As I said, it strikes me as an idea trying to solve an already adequately solved problem only not as well.
As I understand it, no real damage necessary. It’s just a cabinet with glass doors. I can’t even tell if it’s locked in any meaningful way. It’s hard to see how it could be.
But yes, someone will just smash it bits for the hell of it. In that case, the insurance pays out and/or the box gets withdrawn.
My main issues with the idea are:
a) what’s to stop anyone putting up similar boxes?
The technology is nothing special and certainly nothing beyond what is already done by the people who provide the charity snack boxes that were quite common recently (I don’t know if they were a thing in the US?)
b) They clearly cannot stock anything like the stock a corner shop can/does.
I don’t know what US alcohol sale licensing requirements are but an essentially unsecured box with no human oversight would not be a suitable venue for the sale of alcohol in the UK so that’s the most profitable and common purchase gone. Same goes for tobacco products.
On that basis if they take a few sales of biscuits, sorry, I mean cookies, at 2 am, I can’t see corner shops crying too much over that. They’re more worried about supermarkets coming in and setting up corner shops of their own.
c) The only benefit they seem to have over a shop is that the person taking your money is gone so you don’t have to pay them.
But you will still need to make deliveries and physically stock the box. Unless there’s been some massive breakthrough in robotics I’m not aware of, that is still going to need a person.
The more of these boxes you have, the more piddly little deliveries you have to make. All that costs.
On top of that, the corner shop often doesn’t actually have to pay the person taking your money anything. They own the shop and pay themselves out of the profits.
If you’re hiring someone to do the deliveries, you have to pay them whether the box sells enough or not.
Unless of course you’re going to go the obvious capitalist route and franchise out the boxes.
That way you find some schmuck who will buy - sorry, lease - one of these boxes from you, buy all the crap you tell them your data says will sell and do the restocking in the hope of making a profit eventually.
That way it’s their problem when they don’t make enough and you can get more money off them for replacement machines each time you tweak something.
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I wish that the automated checkout would stop fecking talking to me.
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And right on time (as previously discussed) automating jobs for “the little people” out of existence, here come the trucks.
To a certain extent I’ve started being ok with using the automated checkouts. It’s the only way I can see of being sure that the stores keep staff on.
You can guarantee that any time I go near one of those things with the intent to try and buy something using it, it will start beeping and calling for human assistance.
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I always make the effort to thank the Checkout Wrangler on my way out.
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What a second - are these just self serving kiosks? We already have those!
Before we moved buildings, down stairs was a refrigerated unit with drinks, sandwiches, salads, and other snacks, and a rack with candy, chips, and other snacks. You scanned the items, then paid with either your prepaid card, or your debit card. There were multiple cameras with signs saying that theft was a terminable offense. (though everyone in the building had a job, so it wasn’t like random people were going by.) Sure they made a killing.
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This seems pretty standard fare for techbro disruptions. Reinvent the wheel by cramming already existing industry tech into an industry product that they remember “being a thing” when they were young, write incredibly optimistic business plans to pitch to investors, rake in sweet investor scratch and blow it all, produce a faulty product with a logistics model that fails on all merits after customers buy into the concept and dump the existing industry product (or just have no customers), shutter the company’s doors within the year, and move on to the next company to repeat the cycle.
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Yeesh, whatever…
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That’s a good point. I do see a market for something like this in places like hotel lobbies, airports, hospitals, etc…
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Hotel lobbies already have unmanned bodegas in sight of the front desk.
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Honestly I have long had the thought of vending machines as cheap ‘before you hit the register going in or after the register going out’ to sell items that are quick in/out. As in ‘oh hey I want a flash drive, or a cheapo stick MP3 player, or batteries, or a pen’ and the like. Cheap ‘smalls’ in a location where you could get impulse buys from people just walking by. Then you have the rest of the store space for the actual store.
Then again I’ve also wanted to pair something like that wit ha used book store… which I have seen over and over again especially in a small town setting, is a dead business proposal.
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I see these things potentially falling victim to roving gangs of teenage boys.
Scooter bandits in London, gangs of pickpockets in Rio, motorcycle heists in southeast Asia. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
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Wow…they even co-opted the cat. How lame.
Hope their machine gets beat up by an irate gang of Redboxes.
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Unforseen consiquence of the Machine Uprising: Automat turf wars.
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Companies paying the destitute to buy products from their rivals, carefully chosen by AI to tweak the other company’s AI’s stocking decisions to a less profitable selection.
Prompting the targeted AI to tweak its stock so as to force the first company to buy only more profitable stock and so on, thereby ruthlessly maximising shareholder profits for both firms with none of the boxes actually stocking anything humans want to buy.
Sounds very plausible.
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