And the digital divide deepens.
Imagine your grandparents live next to this store. You are required to setup and maintain their accounts, as with all other digital technology. When there is an inevitable mistake in the system, you must submit multiple forms and wait hours on hold to get back the charge for that $20 organic cheese they picked up and put back.
Now imagine that these are not your grandparents, and they dont have a tech savvy grand child, so they cant setup an account in the first place. They decide that they would rather drive to the further away grocery store rather than deal with the intimidating new social-technical construct on the block. Then the grandparent who drives because they dont yet have cataracts breaks their hip and cant drive anymore.
Technological development is not bad. Rather, we are bad at estimating how valuable something is to our society because we cannot instinctively understand the needs of people with experiences different than our own. But the capitalist system responds actively to the most valued demographics’ perceived needs, pushing us all towards systems that further marginalize the needs of people who are already being under served.
The same technology that makes this proposed store possible could be used to make existing stores more accessible to people with mobility restrictions, non-visual people, etc. But that is not considered exciting enough, it does not ignite that sense of ‘future’ that has built up in our culture, that thing you think of when you ask Siri to tell you the weather report.
