Too late, I’m afraid… http://www.seriouseats.com/images/20080701-individual-wrapped-bananas.jpg
i remember this same basic idea being touted 7 years ago with RFID chips. just put everything in your cart and pass through the checkout scanner and go. i’ve never been to a store where that is true. don’t get me wrong i love this idea and having a single pilot store to work out the bugs is great, i’m just not very optimistic about it.
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Hello,
So, basically Amazon copied Robert Ilijason’s idea for an unstaffed grocery store and brought it over from Sweden to Seattle?
When I was a small child in the 70s the grocery carts stayed inside the store. As your checker was ringing you up, a “bag boy” was bagging your groceries and putting the bags into fiberboard tubs. Which were then placed on a conveyer belt/gravity roller to be sent outside while you were getting your car and driving to the pickup lanes. Which seems like a crazy amount of extra labor on the store’s part for little benefit to the customer, but that was the expected level of service.
Hey, do you live at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, too?
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Nope. 742 Evergreen Terrace.
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How much extra labor is currently spent chasing down the carts that are strewn all over the parking lot? How much inconvenience does it cause customers to try to find a spot that doesn’t have a cart in it?
The moment grocery stores put the cart returns outside was the moment people’s legs stopped working.
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Far fewer man hours involved wrangling carts these days than the number of bagboys in the old days… especially when for may stores you still can’t take the carts into the parking lot, but you roll your own cart outside to the curb loading area.
Really? It used to be that way up until the 1980s or so, but then when they moved the cart returns into the parking lots people’s legs stopped working. It was as if the cart return in or next to the store subconsciously signaled that they’d have to make a special trip back to the store to put the cart back where it belonged. Now that the cart returns are in the lots, people don’t have this expectation, and just leave their shit everywhere. Now that the expectation has been broken, we can’t ever get it back.
I’m also amused by people who sit in their cars trying to get the parking spot closest to the doors, even though there may be plenty of spots in the next row. This is what we’ve come to. We’ve got people with the 26.2 stickers on their car bragging about how much they can run, and then we have people who can’t be arsed to walk from the middle of the parking lot, and not much in between.
/rant
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I’ll add this to my list of jobs that we’re just not going to have in the future. New York has 42,000 taxi drivers that are going to be looking for work one day when we get driverless cars. Add all the driverless trucks and we literally can’t put those people to work in careers that don’t exist any more, nor can we just make up new jobs.
Universal basic income has to be in the future. There’s no other way around the reality that’s going to happen when there’s no cash registers anymore. Not everyone can suddenly train up to be an architect or work on a construction crew. Wouldn’t it be interesting if capitalism’s drive for fewer workers ended up bringing about communism?
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I’ve actually had this very thought experiment for myself for the past few years. People find value in their lives from work, but when work becomes less relevant or less available then what do they do?
I believe that there will always be things for people to do, but with the more menial things out of the way i can’t think of how people’s efforts and time will be distributed in the future.
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Personally, I have books to write (and read).
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True, but remember that students paying their way through school, families who need a little extra money from the second parent taking a part-time job, people with various handicaps that impact what jobs they’re able to perform, and retirees who need a little extra income and an excuse to get out of the house need these sorts of dead-end jobs.
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In a number of countries that fit your description, cell phone apps are used to transfer money between accounts without an actual “credit card” or “bank account” involved. There’s more than just one way to create a financial system for average citizens.
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I’m not arguing with this but we need better opportunities than subsidized Walmart greeter for the future.
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There’s a good many reasons why Bitcoin is dead to the “unbanked”.
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I don’t get where the misconception came from that everyone working these kind of jobs is 25 and under. Over 50% of the front end staff at my store have children, and at least 50% of those staff have grandchildren! On top of this, most of the employs are working as cashiers full time, I am one of the only part time employees in the entire department.
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Republicans who don’t want you to feel bad when they don’t raise the minimum wage because “it’s not hurting real employees, only those starting out!”
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I agree, it would be great to move into a utopia where we have fewer menial tasks and people only have to work on what they want to work on, but I worry we’ll end up like Snowpiercer with people that live in the back of the train for no goddamned reason.
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They love Elderlies!!!
