This is pretty sad to read. Before Covid, the Amazon Go store experience was phenomenal. All the convenience of a 7-Eleven but with the pricing of a normal grocery store. The food options were really good and the BlueApron style meal-kits were amazing. The Alexa integration was also nice for being able to just verbally ask what's the next step on a recipe while you're busy stirring or chopping things.
When it rolled out to Amazon Fresh stores, it was a breadth of fresh air. The painful clunkiness of self-checkout was gone. The slow and pointless exercise of unloading and reloading your cart was gone. You could just bring your reusable shopping bags, throw stuff in, and walk home. By far the most hassle-free shopping experience to be had.
Scan as you shop is a big step backwards and feels like you've got the annoying self-checkout experience looming over you the entire time you're there.
The selection and operating hours both took a hit during covid and never recovered.
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Lots of services would be phenomenal when you can offload much of the cost to run them to cheap offshore labor.
Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when much of the cost of operating was offset by underpaid workers and VC funds? Now that they don't have unlimited piles of money and cities/states are making them pay more fair wages, the cost-benefit of those services has diminished. I was ok paying $5 for $20 of food to be delivered, but now it's more like $10 - $15 in fees/tip, plus fees hidden in menu prices making that $20 food cost $27.50.
"Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion. As this is an immortal pressure and negotiating tactic. It is incentivized, and therefore we will get more of it. That works both ways, but at some point there has to be a reckoning that accepts that it is better to have employed than unemployed unskilled workers. In the context of a massive and growing unskilled population base. Yet the same people who demand that everyone earn a living wage, sometimes punctuating their points with riots, tend to be the same crowd who wants to import unskilled workers by the millions.
There is no effectively borderless world in which most are both employed and not "underpaid". It won't happen both ways. In fact, the pay trend is about to tip massively against fairness. In a manner that even will make economic rationalists uncomfortable. These "fair pay" efforts are a distraction before that storm.
Fascinating that you can see "underpaid" and "fair" wages as political myths but not "unskilled labor."
The concept of "underpaid" and "fair" wages is fundamentally subjective. Is a burger flipper underpaid because he cant raise a family a buy a house on that wage, "underpaid"? Or is his labor simply not that valuable? Is a techbro making $300k "underpaid" because his employer is making $500k off his work?
On the other hand skilled vs unskilled labor, as well as the concept of human capital are well recognized concepts in economics.
Ah yes, the famously objective field of economics.
Are you suggesting that the difference in skill level between a burger flipper and an accountant is purely subjective?
Since that depends on the burger flipper, I'd say yes. Gordon Ramsay would likely agree.
That's just playing with words. Putting Gordon Ramsay in the same bucket as "burger flipper" makes as much sense as putting Linus Torvalds in the same bucket as "keyboard monkey".
Perspective actually. And what you perceive to be value.
Why are you pivoting to "value"? The original discussion was about skilled vs unskilled labor and whether that assessment is subjective vs objective. You might think that accountants are useless paper pushers whereas burger flippers are Hard Working People That Get Actual Things Done™, but that's orthogonal to how much skill[1] is needed to flip burgers vs be an accountant.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill_(labor)
Pivoting to nothing.
Value, import(ance); potatoe, potartoe.
So you're trying to derail the discussion to something about "value", because the page I linked about "skill" has a passage about how skilled laborers were historically important to the economy? What does this have to do with the subjectivity/objectivity of "underpaid", "unfair wages", "unskilled labor", or whether a burger flipper is more "skilled" than an accountant? As I said earlier, even if you think that accountants are useless paper pushers, the fact that they're pushing papers in a very specific way that takes years to learn, makes them more skilled.
First I'm pivoting now I'm trying to derail, when all I've done is answer you question; but to make it plain: yes, it's subjective. How else are certain skills valued more that others? There's no objective measurement to these. Comparing the skills of one disapline to another doesn't work, like apple to oranges.
The objective measurement for "skill" is how much training/experience/talent is required to carry out a particular job. Sure, there might be some fuzziness/ambiguity to this, and there's various degrees of freedom to how you compute a "skill score" or whatever (eg. what's more skilled an accountant or an auditor?), but it's hard to argue that a burger flipper is more skilled than an accountant. You can make the argument that the value of a burger flipper vs an accountant is subjective, but that's irrespective of the skill required.
Whether someone is getting "underpaid" or a "fair wage" on the other hand is entirely subjective, and you can come to whatever conclusion you want depending on your politics. On one side of the spectrum you could argue any sort of situation where the employer is capturing surplus value from the employee is inherently exploitative[1] and therefore "underpaid" and a "unfair wage". On the other end of the spectrum you argue that supply and demand curves are the ultimate arbiter of what's "fair", and any wage that is determined by the free market can't by "underpaid" or "unfair" by definition.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
The distinction I suppose is that what you really mean is "the difference in [necessary] skill level between a burger flipper and an accountant".
Not skill - that's an internal metric not an external one. The difference is between what people will pay for that skill.
With the two examples you chose, I‘d say there is not much of a skill gap.
If you‘d have chosen a burger flipper and an aeronautical engineer or a surgeon, I‘d have agreed with you.
Unless we're talking about really high end burgers, you can take almost anyone off the street and train them to flip burger patties within a day. They might not willingly do it on account of it being boring/tiring/poorly paid work, but it's not exactly hard to learn either. I doubt you can do the same for an accountant, unless your idea of an accountant is something like "manually copying entries into a ledger". Even teaching excel to someone who hasn't used excel ever, to a capacity where they can do meaningful financial reporting probably can't be done within a day.
The local Starbucks over the years has had many turnovers in the staff. It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job.
That makes it unskilled labor.
Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the instruction booklet and fly an airplane.
It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job.
Starbucks hires juniors and trains them to be good baristas. That takes a long time. Just because someone is able to work a coffee machine after a few days doesn't mean they're not skilled eventually. Your argument is like saying 'it only takes a few days for junior devs to be onboarded, so there's no real value in senior devs'.
Yes, and McDonalds hires junior burger flippers and turns them into senior and skilled burger flippers.
It doesn’t take a phd to make a coffee, no matter how fancy the cinnamon/cocoa heart is.
It doesn’t take a phd to make a coffee, no matter how fancy the cinnamon/cocoa heart is.
All you're saying here is that you've failed to see the value in customer service, hospitality, speed, accuracy, politeness, etc that go with a retail coffeeshop job. The coffee is the same in pretty much every Starbucks, but the experience can vary wildly depending on how good the baristas are at everything else besides making coffee. Those skills take years to master.
Yes, that’s what I’m sort of saying. I haven’t failed to see any of that. But it doesn’t take a phd to make coffee politely or less politely. All I want is the coffee. Don’t ask me what my name is. I don’t care about the „experience”.
You do care about the experience though. Everyone does. If you have a bad experience you'll complain, or stop going to that Starbucks, or moan to your friends. To you, by the sounds of things, a good experience consists of asking for your order, paying, and getting out fast. An experienced retail worker will be able to read all that from your cues - not engaging in small talk, having your payment ready, moving along quickly, etc. They'll factor those things into their interactions with you, they'll remember you next time, and they'll make the experience what you want. All that takes time to learn, and few retail workers get good at it. I will concede that it doesn't require a PhD though. Few jobs do.
I don't go to Starbucks anyway because they just keep that stupid ritual of "what's your name" and they can never understand what I'm saying so we are just standing there on the opposite side of the counter exercising our knowledge of the military alphabet. If that's the sort of skill required, sorry, anyone can do it. Tell me - how long does it take to serve your first coffee at Starbucks as a barista?
Just sell me the damn coffee and bugger off with "experience". It doesn't require a "skilled" person to politely serve me a coffee. Just make sure the coffee doesn't taste like shit and I'll come back to you unless you spit at me or offend me. Again - no need to be "skilled" to not do that.
I think people talk past each other because one side takes "unskilled" to mean basically "anyone could do it with some training" (I can't run an espresso machine anymore, but I learned how in a few hours when I needed to). You get better at unskilled labor (anyone knows this, there are baristas who are much faster than others; able to run the entire shop which normally takes two).
The other side takes "unskilled" to be a derogatory term that means the worker isn't a human being with thoughts and wants and needs, and deserving of a wage.
How could you possibly know that it takes “3 days” to get good at being a barista? You should try it out sometime, with a 50 person line. I’m sure it’ll be a cake walk and your labor will be fairly compensated. I’ll even give you a 3 day head start just to be fair!
They likely meant that onboarding takes three days. As there is no meaningful metric for competence beyond that (or at least no metric that is measured and used) "good" doesn't apply.
There are of course tons of ways a good, seasoned barista distinguishes themselves from a trainee with 3 days of onboarding but those are externalities. The difference between skilled and unskilled labor is not whether competence and experience can make a difference but whether that difference is measured as performance or only affects externalities.
I.e. "unskilled labor" is not about the worker but about the company. Notably these often do involve skill that directly contributes to performance but because the job is considered unskilled, it's instead treated as some nebulous a priori form of intelligence and personal aptitude. What's more, beyond a certain point skill is often actively punished (e.g. by raising quotas to take advantage of higher productivity, resulting in more work for the same pay).
You can onboard welding in less than 30 days too.
Barista quality isn't much harder to measure than weld quality. "and used" is a cop-out.
You can be doing useful work as part of a welding group in 30 days, but you will not be a master. Grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't and all that.
That part really stood out to me.
While a lot of us can agree that barista is an unskilled job, I heard people call barmen labor a skilled labor. Which is crazy, because it's essentially the same job (mix stuff up and serve in a cup). But it makes sense if "unskilled labor" is a function of an employer not an employee
You can do the basic job after 3 days and after a month rush hour won't be a problem either. I've done similar jobs, the skill cap is not that high. My labour won't be fairly compensated which is why i don't do jobs like that anymore, but they're not hard to learn.
To be fair, Starbucks purchases machines that are automated to a much higher degree than your standard high end espresso machine you'd find in a local shop. It's a lot more button pushing in the correct sequence, a lot less art. This is standard procedure for a multinational fast food service company: they want things automated and streamlined not only for speed of service and easy training, but consistency of the product.
From what I heard from a former Starbucks barista, the biggest challenge was to not scald the milk during steaming (which is not very difficult, basically just requires holding it at the correct angle to induce a whirlpool effect and keep things moving).
The skilled aspect is dealing with customers efficiently and pleasantly, and all the nuance/craziness that can entail.
Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs where any specialized skills required can be learned on the job in a short period of time, usually less than 30 days.
It doesn't literally mean the workers don't know how to do anything. It's certainly not a myth - it's a classification of work, at least in the US.
https://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/cfr20/416/416-0968.htm
This is nearly all jobs.
All unskilled labor jobs.
You're not going to learn welding in 30 days. Nor are you going to learn how to design a bridge. Or program in C++. Or diagnose a patient. Or be a lawyer. Or drive a race car. Etc.
I didn't say all jobs, did I? You successfully listed (some) jobs that might take longer than 30 days to learn.
The thing about "unskilled" jobs, everyone seems to look down their noses at, is that they facilite the people doing the lofty jobs of: lawyer, doctor, c++ programmer, etc. Without them getting done for you you couldn't do what you're doing.
Can the brickie work without their "unskilled" laborer? Sure, but good luck getting you house built in a reasonable time.
Bricklayer work isn't classified as unskilled labor nor are masonry helpers.
Neither are jobs like carpenters, roofers, pipelayers, cooks, truck drivers, clerks and many, many others.
I never said any of those were...
I don't understand your point. Yes, there's a lot of unskilled jobs, possibly a majority of jobs. Far from everyone looks down on unskilled jobs, and nobody is saying they're not important.
Credentialism has certainly gone too far in many fields, but I’d still like my doctors, lawyers, and engineers to have more than 30 days of training in their field.
Yeah, my point wasn't that every job can be learned in 30 days, just a good proportion, most, jobs can be.
Indeed, unskilled labor is a large part of the job market.
Are you saying that "unskilled labor" is like the other two in just being spin on "I don't approve of market forces"?
To me its funny that those who always talk about unskilled labour are the same who don’t have a driving licence, nor know how to make an omelette
What skills are required to drive, walk or bike a delivery to make $30+tips/hr in NYC?
I don't think they literally mean "unskilled" vs "something that can be learned within a month".
Where are all these js devs on minimum wage going paycheck-to-paycheck?
I think everything is easy, given the right approach and mindset, or everything is approachable given the right approach and mindset and will to put enough effort to get to a given outcome.
Do you have any statistics on that?
can you explain this a bit further please? also, what's the storm that's coming?
Yeah you’re leaving us hanging here! To me it seems like people are learning their worth a little bit more lately and are demanding a little bit more/less financial stress.
I took it to mean that whatever amount of money people currently think would be needed to be "fair", say, an increase from $20/hour to $25/hour, would within a year or so become "unfair" again, even if inflation was zero. Employers will always want more work for less money, employees will always want more money for less work. Same as the seller of any product would like more money for that product, and the buyer would always like to pay less for the same product.
So you can say the company is "greedy"...but that implies that the worker is also "greedy" - which is true for both IF you define it the way I described above. Or you could say that the company (owners) are trying to maximize their return on investment (time + money), and the the workers are trying to maximize their return on investment (of time).
Is that true though? I come from a family that works in the crafts, small business mostly (which is like 70% of businesses). Most employees are employed for life, what's being made generally costs a decent amount but quality is high, people are content when they make what's perceived as fair and enough to maintain a middle class lifestyle, and so on.
Nobody actually tries to rip each other off, cuts every penny and leaves for 5% higher salaries. People are around for decades. The MBA business logic isn't some universal truth, in fact it's not even how most people work.
This isn't what they meant apparently but in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value, i.e. making more money from selling the product of labor than you pay for that labor.
If I pay a worker $20 per hour to make 20 doodads an hour in my doodad factory and then sell those doodads for $5 a piece, I make $5 for every $1 pay my worker. Of course that extra $4 per doodad has to account for the cost of the doodad factory itself (initial investment, maintenance, material) and the literal cost of doing business (taxes, permits, fees, paying an accountant) and of course market fluctuation (warehousing, building a financial buffer to remain solvent if sales lapse or production has to stop) but if the business is meant to be successful, that needs to add up to less than the extra $4 I'm making. And the bigger that difference is, the more profitable my company becomes and the more spare money I have to expand my business and get ahead of my competition up to the point where I can sell shares in my business to other people and pay dividends from my profits to them.
So in other words not only can't you pay workers exactly "enough" (i.e. 100% of the value they contribute to the company) but you're actively incentivized to pay them as little as you can get away with (and perversely, paying them more by reducing your profit margin may actually be worse for them by making your company less competitive and less resilient). This is before we even get into the politics of what work is overvalued or undervalued (e.g. the idea that CEOs should receive massively disproportionate compensation for their labor, which again creates pressure to compensate for this by underpaying lowly workers).
This, by the way, is why collective bargaining matters. No matter how cool and nice your employer is, the market actively incentivizes them to do the least for you they can get away with and punishes them for doing more. So by not taking advantage of collective bargaining (i.e. using the pressure of all employees to your advantage rather than just yours individually) you're leaving money on the table. Note that is still true if your role is proportionally overpaid relative to other workers in your company unless you literally co-own the company.
That's a silly definition of "enough" to label as a fact.
I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect, I think most people will agree that the worker getting 90% of the surplus value is "enough". (just as an example percent) There's no reason the bar should be the absolute extreme.
There's no "factual" definition of "enough" as "enough" is subjective.
I'm also not sure what you're trying to argue. I already said that it can't be 100% for practical reasons and that the market actively incentivizes companies to aim for as close to 0% as possible instead. You pick 90% as an arbitrary percentage. So it might be 99% or 50% or 1%. But you're still agreeing that the measure for "enough" in this case is in relation to what the product of that labor can be sold for (after deducting the various costs). In reality that percentage is often much closer to 50% than to 90% - in many cases (especially so-called unskilled labor) it is closer to 1% than 90%.
A better rebuke would be that "enough" is normally about need, not revenue. Especially because it's nearly impossible to value the relative contribution to the bottom line for all labor involved (and in fact trying to minimize "cost centers" can lead to a rude awakening about this).
So if we define "need" as "enough to sustain a healthy existence in society and access to moderate leisure activities" (i.e. having a roof over your head, food in the fridge, access to medical care and transportation and enough spare change to spend on things like streaming services, books or the occasional trip to a nearby cinema, amusement park or restaurant) we can define a minimum monthly income and if we assume a 40 hour work week (which should be uncontroversial given that overall productivity has only gone up since its introduction and we need to provide some leisure time to accommodate family formation and the aforementioned leisure activities) we can translate that into a minimum hourly wage. Something tells me that this minimum hourly wage would be significantly higher than the legal minimum wage in the US, even if we don't actually consider the lackluster state of medical care affordability (note that I didn't assume public single-payer healthcare so Medicare/Medicaid is just a crutch to account for medical care being unaffordable otherwise at that level of income).
But of course the system is not set up that way. It's not about needs, it's about paying as little as you can get away with and this means that pay is proportional to power (i.e. C-level execs are paid a lot because they have a lot of control over the company and therefore "deserve" more even if all the value they "create" relies on the actual labor and competence of others) and the floor is theoretically infinitely low (i.e. you could realistically charge people to do labor for you, e.g. as a "training opportunity" to earn a meaningless qualification required to access other jobs) and ultimately the company needs to produce a lot of waste money (profits that are not re-invested in the company) that can be drained by its shareholders/owners (who ideally contribute literally no labor in return).
Maybe that "storm" is consequences of unchecked ML, make the rich richer and the powerful more powerful, push the poor out of jobs. I disagree that fair pay is impossible though.
No, and I'm guessing you're just under the spell of market fundamentalism. An unfair wage is something like when the worker either
1. can't achieve a socially-acceptable living standard with the job,
2. when there's too-great of a mismatch between the labor-theory-of-value price and the market-theory-of-value price for their labor, or
3. or when the wage is below the actual the market price.
I made those up on the spot, so there may be some holes, bit it gets the gist.
Being underpaid is different than "wants more money."
No. I'd never talk about a fortune 500 CEO or a FAANG engineer as being underpaid.
I see what you're saying, but the real world is a lot more morally complicated that the single-axis world where your comment here makes sense.
Is Marx really that modern?
A free market without political intervention is at least as much of a myth. If employees don't engage in politics with concepts like "fair wage" and "underpaid", employers certainly will with concepts such as "bottom quantile wages drive inflation". The Nash equilibrium is for both sides to engage in the market but also in the political context the market is embedded in. So complaining about workers demanding higher wages instead of letting the market sort it out is pointless, regardless of your political convictions.
looking forward to a world where everyone anywhere can make a decent living wage. The technology and productivity have improved so much but the wealth inequalities have only grown wider. If AGI arrives and we have abundance, lets hope that it is not only the few elites that control all of that wealth and power.
I mean it becomes a myth when you define it out of existence; I normally don't like semantic arguments but you're arguing against an idea of "underpaid" that means something different than what the people who say it are trying to convey. The notion of underpaid isn't weighed against the value of one's labor, it's weighed against cost of living and the value of one's time.
We've generally decided it's unreasonable for someone to need to work more than 40 hours a week so the minimum pay for 160 hours of labor had better be enough to live on without being on welfare or other government assistance. It might not be a glamorous life but you at least have to be able to make rent, pay for heat, AC, food, clothes, water, toilet paper, health insurance, a cheap cell phone, transportation to and from work, and some basic possessions like a bed. And if it's not then you're being underpaid. I think that's a pretty fair measure, it roughly represents the cost of a person's undivided labor.
And I think it's fair to say that for almost all Americans that cost has gone up and not insignificantly over the past 5 years. Folks that make good money by can take the hit but people on the bottom rung have nowhere to go. And people will given the opportunity begrudgingly sell their labor for unsustainable prices because it's better than nothing but that road leads to the record scratch in the economic game of musical chairs we're playing when money stops moving.
And that's when Socialist-inspired policies we have kick in and gov't has to forcibly redistribute wealth through higher taxes and even greater government spending to start the motor again. We've done it before and I'm sure we'll do it again. But I'm of the opinion that a little regulation to keep us out of the death spiral and letting the market allocate resources is better than when the government has to step in and do it.
With all the increased productivity and advances if we can't support decent living for every person then what's the point? Work yourself to death to make some motherfucker rich?
I wish it could all be managed intelligently; I'm hungry but I can wait, let orders collect and make them all at once or something.
Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive?
The people making the app need a much bigger cut than Domino's. Domino's cut only needs to be big enough to pay their delivery drivers, they make their money selling pizza and the delivery is just an additional service that drives business.
The app maker needs a cut big enough to pay their delivery driver and also be the main revenue stream for their entire business since they're not making money off the pizza.
The margins of the delivery business could be razor thin because the scale at which the app can operate is much bigger than domino's. There are ~7000 domino's in US, and hundreds of thousand on uber eats. I think as more apps offer the same service we'll see a race to the bottom and have a reduction in cost, but not to the VC subsidized levels we saw five years ago.
Picking up one order from a restaurant takes the same amount of time as picking up a dozen. This is a much more important economy-of-scale than having a large app country-wide install base to spread dev costs over.
So I think a third-party delivery business must seek exclusivity contracts to be competitive with an in-house solution.
So what we need is bundling of orders based on 1) restaurant location 2) recipient location 3) time
And if that could be done, maybe just 2 orders to start with (for example carpool benefits for 2 people), that will be awesome, but if you could pool 4-5 orders, that will make bank !
I guess this model, if scaled purely based on the model, will imply restaurants co-located (same parking lot) will benefit from such an arrangement.
That factor is driving the virtual restaurant (ghost kitchen) trend. There are commercial kitchens set up purely to service delivery orders. They use a single facility but have multiple different restaurant brands with different menus (burgers, Mexican, Italian, vegan, etc). These ghost kitchens have no dining rooms and you probably can't even directly order food outside of a delivery service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_restaurant
These are the worst quality-wise. Yes, you can write a review if something went really bad. But not having customers right there who can complain and might even get an extra or a replacement gives less incentive to keep quality up. "Specialising" in everything, pizza-burger-kebab-china, is also likely a warning sign.
This is a super good point. I didn't think about that.
IMO thats the most important point of delivered food. Just compare the process and you will instantly see the difference. In a restaurant, the waiter will openly serve you your food. You get instant feedback. And see right away if something is off. In the delivery case, you get a closed package at your door, say "Thanks" to the deliverer and close the door again. Only when the guy (who isn't responsible for the quality anyway) has left you open your package and are confronted with whatever you got. Maybe something spilled, maybe something misses, maybe something was wrong. And maybe its already cold... Whenever you use a delivery system, you take all these risks, and apart from a grumpy review, you can't do much about these... Personally, I think this is where the margin hides. Delivered food can generally have lower quality without customer complaints reaching the vendor.
At least in the UK this is the default behaviour from Deliveroo, standard delivery does cost money but might get your driver/biker go to multiple other houses on their way to you, or pay extra to get it direct. It made me stop using them, as there's no way to guess whether the normal option will bring the food fresh or not, and paying the premium each time made it feel too expensive.
Also paying the extra premium (whether Deliveroo, Just Eat or Uber Eats) for first delivery is kinda pointless (at least here in the South West) as the drivers seem to be delivering for all the apps at the same time, so your delivery takes 35 mins for the 10 min premium delivery and sometimes they even turn off GPS after they've picked it up if they're delivering for another app first.
So expensive for a frustrating cold food delivery.
I think that's the real difference under all this - Dominos employs drivers (and they get paid by tips, sure there are issues) but it's all one thing. If they deliver a cold pizza it's on them.
All the delivery app companies are NOT making the food so the blame game starts AND they are not employees so a bunch of gaming is going on.
I know my one experience with Uber eats is such that I'll never use it again, and instead travel myself.
I would contend that Dominos is a pizza logistics company rather than a seller of retail pizza (compare Pizza Hut).
https://biz.dominos.com/about-us/innovations/
They're not just selling pizza to make money - but also looking at making cars.
https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/why-dominos-dxp-d...
While I'm not going to claim that was a good idea, the point is that Dominos sees making and delivering pizza as one and the same business.
Is this not corpspeak kool-aid? Dominos and Pizza Hut do the same thing. They deliver pizza to people. Dominos knows how to hype the markets, though.
Pizza Hut has in store seating, Dominoes does not.
Plenty of Pizza Huts don't have indoor seating anymore. Some Dominos used to, not sure if any do now.
If Dominos is a logistics company then Pizza Hut is both a logistics company and a dine-in restaurant.
It’s a shame they did not name the car model Deliverator
Hopefully they were made of something nonferrous to prevent pooling by pesky Kouriers.
Edit: the Hagerty story was a nice read, thank you for linking to it
So if Uber buys out some small grocery store chains it could work, especially if its in major market cities.
I wonder if it could be solved with a decentralized system. You'd still need a way to vet drivers and handle refunds. I'm not sure other delivery apps bother with the former until bad reviews come in, and maybe the latter could be just between the customer and the store? Would be a big win for customers and gig workers if you could get past the obstacles.
After ton of investment investors are finally looking for returns now. And consumers have decided convenience reigns supreme. Right from the SAAS products to daily breakfast customers there is lot of premium on convenience.
We need a quippy phrase for this, but unfortunately "Pump and Dump" is already taken for a kind of stock-market manipulation.
Instead, I would like to coin/nominate "Tease and Squeeze".
First consumers are teased by the idea that the disruptive new service has invented a magic new secret to low prices and great value... But after the company as achieved some kind of market strangehold, those consumers are squeezed with price-hikes and quality-drops as the investors--who bankrolled the early predatory pricing [0]--try to recoup their investment plus additional profit.
[0] Note that the term "Predatory Pricing" usually refers to artificially low prices to destroy competitors, although I can totally understand why some may assume it means preying on customers with high prices.
What's wrong with enshittification[0]?
Granted, Tease and Squeeze has a nicer ring. Then again, the enshittification neologism became standard langue in no time and is understood by everybody.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
It's arguably less descriptive. "enshittification" only really says "things getting worse", whereas "Tease and Squeeze" describes the whole cycle.
The original definition of enshittification is a platform that squeezes the users then squeezes the suppliers.
But at this point I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to mean.
I did consider the term when writing my post, but they only partially overlap.
First, the issue of intent and overall history. Tease and Squeeze implies it was the plan all along, but an "enshittified" product doesn't have to be that way. For example, a company could have been successful without any "Tease"--no predatory pricing or monopolistic behavior--and then taken a nosedive later when the founder retired and sold it to a new owner, meaning it's Squeeze-only.
Second, "Squeeze" doesn't require a quality-drop, it can include purely a price-hike, but "enshittified" products almost always mean a drop in quality, regardless of whether prices rise or not.
I've been hearing of scams labeled "pig butchering" — fatten the pig and then slaughter it. The euphemism is pretty close.
It's called "dumping and monopolization" and is ancient and standard antitrust (illegal) and VC (highly rewarded) technique.
The company Weee which primarily sells Asian products does this sort of batch order, and their prices are the same as grocery stores because they rightly knew that their initial Chinese userbase (and other Asians in general) is extremely price conscious and won't accept such increased fees for delivery. I just listened to a podcast episode about them on How I Built This which is where I got this information, people should give it a listen.
Very nice suggestion. Thank you to share! Here is the open Spotify link to that episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/69PURAcVOhzBcRUQrjkDfc
There is some degree of that in these apps already, for example I believe both grubhub and doordash will group up orders so one courier can do multiple deliveries back-to-back in a single trip.
They do, and they also make that a profit center too by allowing you to pay another $3 to ensure a nonstop point-to-point delivery to you.
The VC industry is like Hollywood: both smart purveyors of a popular, highly value added service to begin with, both driven by nepotism and inertia via far more scope for capture than your average line of work, and both with a cost structure mostly about the lifestyle of the executive class.
when it’s just starting out in something, you get instant classics.
when it’s out of ideas but still has the levers of access tilted all the way to “got mine bitches”, you get the late MCU, Uber for X, and OpenAI Larry Summers Edition.
From my point of view, Uber and DD were always going to head in that direction because by any objective measure, they are worse than the solution that already existed. The introduction of a middleman created new costs for drivers, customers, and restaurants alike, yet it's actually worse at delivering food than the conventional "drivers work for the restaurant" model. Sure, you get one website where you can see all the delivery options in the area, but the cost is making all of those options shittier. I could rant about how stupid that industry is for hours, but I digress.
What Amazon is doing is different because they're actually doing something that adds value, and they're solving a problem that actually exists. Maybe I'm naive for believing any of this matters.
To be honest, I never thought much about how the whole system worked. I've only been in an Amazon Fresh twice. It had the "just walk out" thing but I don't have a Prime account so I never used it. I just figured it was UHF RFID. Seems like an obvious solution, but I'm not the engineer responsible for figuring out what to do if you put two exits next to each other.
It's true that delivery services add a middle-man, but you don't seem to be considering that they add a lot of value in some important ways:
1. The single website/app is not just useful for discovery, but also to provide a consistent ordering experience. An individual restaurant might take orders over the phone, via their website, or via their own app. Those options will vary from one restaurant to the next. Not great for customers.
2. In the old model, restaurants would have to decide how many drivers to have on hand at any given time. During quiet periods they would have to decide between not offering delivery at all, or having a driver sitting around doing nothing. A delivery service that aggregates demand & supply is very useful for restaurants & drivers. Pooling of resources & layering on surge pricing creates a lot of elasticity.
I would argue that what they should have done is tried to at this value at minimal cost to customers, drivers & restaurants. If they were leaner businesses the overall proposition could be a lot better.
You bring up an interesting point. Just thinking out loud for a moment here. Is the current VC business model potentially the problem area and not the actual businesses? The need for rapid growth/software company like profit margins when these companies need more time and potentially are like non-software companies in terms of profits?
Yeah, demanding software level margins for physical world businesses basically hasn't worked anywhere in the past ten years.
Like the only success I can see is AirBnB and that's because houses are expensive and in short supply.
I mean, AirBnB has contributed directly to the housing shortage in many areas, so I'm not sure it "worked".
I'm curious as to how food delivery worked in your country before Uber et al.
In the UK, outside of corporate chains, it was largely a cash in hand operation for both the restaurants and drivers.
Drivers would typically be paid a small sum for showing up on the night and then keep the delivery charge and any tips. The cost to the restaurant was pretty much negligible.
The middle-men, in addition to their own cut, have likely lead to a larger tax burden on many of the drivers and restaurants.
Under that model, wouldn't drivers only want to work for the busiest restaurants?
With delivery apps, a restaurant can have just a few orders per night and still be open for delivery.
I would bet that there's an order of magnitude more deliveries happening (and drivers working) these days vs pre-Uber.
Aye. Arguably this is why old-school streaming Netflix won so well -- all of your options in one place. Likewise, there is one app for all food choices nearby.
Also agree on the second point, though presumably larger chains in built up areas could play the same game; e.g. Domino's in a borough of NYC has an "all-drivers-in-Queens" pool.
Did you ever try getting groceries/food (other than pizza) delivered before the apps? Uber didn’t replace a better option, they made it literally possible to get these services in many places where it wasn’t an option at all. And in areas like Manhattan, where city cabs and delivery options abound - the the fact that many (most?) people still use UberEats/DD is instructive.
The value of convenience is significant. I happily pay to avoid the mental overhead of shitty restaurant websites or repeating a paragraph-long group order back and forth across a poor kitchen speakerphone call.
Yes the current system has many flaws but let’s not pretend it was utopia before.
UberEats and DoorDash are still money-losing operations that subsidize the actual cost of the service, despite rising prices, barely paying their workers, and abusing their relationship with restaurants.
These companies also made it possible for restaurants to be taken hostage and be registered for delivery services or marked as closed/unavailable on those platforms against their wishes, or pay even 60+% commission on an order for the service. Once only a couple of these companies are left standing and have all restaurants in a chokehold I'm convinced the situation will be even "better".
Yes, it says that too many people do what's best for them and them alone. It's not as instructive as you think. Many people had slaves because it was good for the owner. What did you learn from that case of "many people do it"?
You don't and don't even realize that. You get an overall cheaper service but someone pays. Usually the restaurant owner, employees, and delivery people. Maybe some VCs too, for now, while they don't completely own the market. Just like Amazon's same day delivery means some driver has to pee in a bottle for close to minimum wage but otherwise it's absolutely a huge win for everyone who is you, needing the delivery now.
Thankfully the local pizza place here still has their own drivers and it’s only a two dollar delivery fee. Totally fine with that. And everything always arrives fresh and fast and I know where and who to complain to and I know the drivers are at least somewhat vetted.
Fair warning to all who come after - the children comment for a decent distance below are a battle based on correct/ incorrect/ technical/ personal definitions of skilled labor.
Does that warrant a warning? That's just a natural occuring discussion, and selecting threads to follow is basic forum-reading skill. The rare gems of surprising insight are often found in the depths of slightly off-topic discussions.
Previously I've noticed another kind of meta-comment, the top level complaint by a self-appointed moderators about the overall shape of the discussion elsewhere, instead of engaging directly with the actual posts in question.
Yes.
With intellectual pursuits, you can always find diamonds in the rough. Simply due to the effort YOU are putting in, given your then state of mind, knowledge and experience.
You can wade through a conversation on creationism and evolutionary denial and understand humanity or even deepen your skills.
However that's you - your unique circumstances bringing more to the table.
Others would very much appreciate a warning, because they already have working definitions, have seen this argument before and would prefer spending their time on other pursuits.
With a little forum experience, who has trouble scanning a thread and seeing it meander away from their interest? So I question the need.
Even if there is the need, who should be the judge for others over the quality of a subthread? I would feel presumptuous to pass judgement beyond my vote for each comment.
Aren't those diamonds all that matter anyway? Recently I increasingly find new and curious beginnings dampened and limited by intellectually lazy attitudes, by comments that start with "I mean...", that reiterate the default state rather than entertaining a new thought. Inadvertently, well-meaning soft-moderation like yours might steer even more people away from interesting topics.
I'd say, leave your vote and move on.
I should have listened to your warning and just skipped it.
This is a weird take.
Cheap wages? Both of your examples paid decent wages, especially in the example of Uber.
It was just an unprofitable business model subsidized by VC money or Amazon corporate profits.
That sounds like a good thing?
It's bad because it redirects human effort into wasteful activity. Same season communisr central planning is bad.
How can you tell that it's wasteful? Seems to me that pointing at activities and saying they're wasteful is exactly the central planning you mentioned. Everything "decadent" looks suspiciously wasteful. Stage shows, exotic fruit, ball games, wedding photography, hats, flowers, songs, pets, tourism, novels, hobbies, diamonds ... it often puzzles me how economic activity makes a country wealthy when only a tiny part of it is efficiently providing health, nutrients and shelter. And in fact maybe 90% of it is wasteful, but nobody has the magic ability to identify exactly which 90%, and that's why central planning wrecks wealth, and VC funding apparently thrown down the toilet may in some mysterious way be beneficial to us.
wrt DoorDash (and Instacart etc), along with this squeeze I’ve observed the quality of service decrease severely. Could just be that my sample of a now wider employee pool is crappy, or workers are trying to “scale” to make a living wage with many concurrent orders, but I believe it’s part of the race to the bottom. I love the convenience, but the experience is worsening. How can these vendors continue to profit when lower quality leads to increased refunds?
Well in my observation people keep adjusting lower quality of service. I mean it is not going to be the case that people will start shopping in stores and/or cooking in kitchens.
more like $30-$35
Yeah, I plan on paying approximately double (100% markup) if I'm ordering delivery on an app. That's why I only do it when I'm in a hotel room on a work trip and I don't have the rental car keys. Hotel food is not cheaper, not tastier, and I have way less options (I am a vegetarian).
almost all the cost of doordash is overhead, they still aren't paying anyone that actually delivers food a decent portion of their take.
Case in point: LLMs that only work because of armies of underpaid offshore workers assisting in training.
Don’t forget moviepass
Problem is, when you get an economy acclimated to false prices set by adversarial “business” “strategy”, the only logical result is depression when it’s time to actually create money for investors
Wow - I did not know this. This makes it all a whole lot less impressive and interesting that it was just people off shore watching you.
Apparently this news came out in May 2023. I also was bamboozled into thinking that sophisticated computer vision algos -- that worked -- were doing this.
I'm now picturing the remote workers constantly switching between cameras, studying: Did he put down the can of kidney beans or the can of corn there? Wait, the man picked up the bananas, but then he handed them to the woman in the white shirt. Let's charge them to her account. Wait, she handed them back at 14:42 in aisle 16. Going to switch them back to the man.
All day long, day in day out, for years. I am the last to criticize 'low wage jobs' paternalistically, because I know they may be much better than what the workers might otherwise be doing: perhaps just toiling in the fields for 16 hours a day (or worse: something like 'melting down discarded PCBs to recover trace metals'). But still, I do not think I would want to do this job nor that it was worth it. I get that they were supposedly trying to train an algorithm to do it. I'm glad that they aren't keeping at it any longer though now that it's proven so unworkable.
Better than shipbreaking.
https://youtu.be/5jdEG_ACXLw
Thanks for that
Edit: On thinking about this tangent, it seems that if global regulation is the only solution, it would make sense to enforce regulation from the ship building side (in western countries), rather than the wrecking side (in developing countries) which will only displace the bad practices to less scrupulous countries. A solution might be sizable amount of money that had to be paid to escrow that could not be released back to the owner until the ship has been disposed of in an environmentally sound manner, incentivizing and funding the proper scrapping of ships. Or perhaps a levy which funds safety practices and equipment for scrapping companies
Globalization was largely a response to environmental movements in the U.S. We offshored our pollution generation.
Uh, really? I was certain that the aftermath of WWII was responsible for establishing a form of global governance (by consensus) via the UN, and then there’s the benefits of free trade agreements that drove economic globalization.
The free trade agreements came after the environmental movements. Claiming environmental movements caused this is too strong a claim. But it is not entirely a coincidence that one followed the other.
Specifically what movements and when? It’s a strange claim that globalization was caused (or even accelerated) by environmental movements. Certainly the UN came before the environmental movements of the 60s/70s. The World Bank and IMF were also established soon after the conclusion of WWII. The wiki article for globalization makes just a couple of off hand mentions of environmental issues. I’ve only ever heard of globalization in an economic context, and I think by convention this is the lens most people view it by
When Americans clamored for rivers that didn’t catch fire and for smog in LA to go away it became clear to corporations that it would be much cheaper and better for profits if they setup factories in poor countries that didn’t require them to stop egregiously polluting. Thus began the momentum for free trade agreements and breaking down of trade barriers.
I used the term “globalization” as a proxy for free trade. That was bad on my part.
Also industrial safety, worker hours, etc
You don't always even need to move things out-of-county to do regulatory arbitrage. For example Uber and Airbnb.
Most ships are built in Asia as well. The US basically doesn't have any sort of non-military ship building industry.
Sure. But the reputable multinational corporations that dominate the industry are easy to recognize and they’re headquartered in developed countries
The ownership structure for ships used in international shipping is anything but straightforward. For instance, for the the MV Dali (the ship that crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge) you might think we can go after Maersk, but in reality they're only chartering it. It was actually built by Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea for a Greek company but later sold to a Singaporean company, operated by a different Singaporean company, and crewed by 20 Indians and 1 Sri Lankan. In this complex web of ownership/relationships how do you exactly "enforce regulation from the ship building side "?
Well as I (naively) suggested whoever owns the actual ship (and thus disposes of it) can claim on an escrow that isn't released until the ship has been verifiable disposed of in an environmentally sound fashion. So if the ship ever is sold to another party, that would be built into the purchase cost (that they could claim this money), even to the final purchaser (the wreckers). Probably some huge loophole or perverse incentive that I haven't thought of, but that's at least one suggestion.
Is there a tl;dw? That's an hour long video.
Due to heavy regulations on the shipbreaking industry in Western countries, > 50% of ships worldwide are (or were, when the documentary was made) dismantled in Alang, India.
The industry is extremely polluting (to the environment and the workers) and the working conditions (incl. safety) are dire to put it nicely.
Thank you, appreciate it.
If you did some kind of shell game with 5 different people all passing around their items, then you don’t get charged correctly is it theft? Did anyone ever try that?
IANAL but I'm confident the legal answer is "yes", the same as if someone was using sleight-of-hand with objects at a cashier-and-conveyor-belt checkout station.
Whether charges are brought and how easily the case can be proved is another matter, but the intent is what makes it a crime.
I thought one of the marketing lines was that Amazon was so confident/comfortable in their implementation was that they assumed all liability for mistakes (though as I type this I realise they may have worded it to encapsulate only honest mistakes rather than people trying deliberately to break the system).
Being forgiven doesn't make it not a crime, or just reduces the chance of enforcement.
Exactly. Retailers generally assume liability for honest mistakes made by their system/employees and sometimes even their customers. However, when people knowingly exploit a loophole for financial gain it becomes fraud. Here's a real example - https://www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/local/greensboro-woma...
To get a little pedantic, assuming such a promise existed, it actually doesn't mean as much as most people think.
A merchant saying "we won't sue you in civil court for the missing money" does not prevent the local government from criminally prosecuting that same person for theft.
American TV dramas often show the police asking people "Do you want to press charges?", but the idea that the question matters is a myth, since victims of crime don't get to decide that. At best, it's a terribly misleading shortening of: "Just for my own private curiosity, do you plan to lobby or press upon your local government officials into pressing charges?"
It sounds different to me because each person can say they were just trying to buy the items they walked out with and didn’t get charged. Like if you scan an item at self checkout and the machine says it’s free, that’s not going to be theft. At least I sure hope not.
I worked for Amazon in Seattle when Amazon Go first launched. As you'd expect, lots of SDE teams made games out of trying to fool the thing in various ways.
A few attempts were successful early on (passing items back and forth, one person moving something to the wrong shelf and another person picking it up, people dressing in identical outfits, etc), but the success rate in fooling the system was very very low. No method of trying to trick it that I ever heard of worked consistently, and it definitely seemed to get harder to fool the longer the store was open.
At the time I thought that whatever algos were being run on the camera feeds were getting better. Knowing that it was basically all manual, I'm not sure what the explanation is for the store seemingly getting harder to fool over time. Possibly just placebo, or people lost interest in trying so hard to fool it.
You underestimated the silicon valley engineers
Seems a little cruel in retrospect considering it was humans watching you, but I suppose there wasn't an easy way to gain this information
Probably fewer patrons and similar number of employees in the sweatshops. More eyes per patron leads to fewer errors. Or maybe they trained the best grocery cv model around from having a big high quality dataset, and you were fighting it. But then I'd think the tech would've been passed to whole foods instead of packing up shop, so final guess is sweatshop singularity theory.
Thomas Crown Affair at the grocery store.
That is robber barron propaganda to make you believe their enslavement of people (by creating the right situation where the people have no choice) is actual good for them.
I originally wrote a long reply, but I'll just say that I don't buy your framing, and I don't think the people who depend on that foreign money flowing in to pay them for their work at the prevailing wage where they live agree with you either.
Who are the "robber barrons" in this case, and how did they cause "the right situation where the people have no choice"?
This factoid made its way through my social circles back in 2019. I'm a little surprised it wasn't more common knowledge.
I wonder if the same "tech" could be used for "self-driving" cars.
I'm pretty sure this idea has been kicked around, and is generally seen as not-super-useful because it requires a perfectly reliable low-latency connection.
To solve this issue you can integrate the person into the car.
Conjoiner Drives come to mind...
Now I'm imagining hiding drivers under the hood, or in a car following ...
Phantom Auto did this. They had cars ferrying people around CES 2018 in Vegas driven by remote drivers in LA. Apparently the company folded just a few weeks ago.
"Unidentified item in driving area. Calling police."
It's just a tech-illiterate journalist who can't seem to understand the difference between "annotators watching and labeling videos to validate the model" vs "people watching the videos live to remotely decide the cost of every user's purchase".
Or maybe they do know the difference, but wanted to bait audience.
Or it's a tech-literate journalist who knows that usually it's the latter and they have vague plans to transition to the former later.
always mturk all the way down
I thought so too, but the article says this:
If you required a high accuracy like 99.9% to charge a customer, you could have a system that was mostly automatic but still needed human review when the model isn’t confident enough. It’s hard to know exactly what this means without a lot more details, which Amazon is unlikely to provide.
Or not ...
Sounds like fake-it-till-you-make-it stuff right? This is exactly how I would bootstrap a startup that wanted to do this. Kind of impressed with their scrappiness to be honest.
"Scrappy" on a massive budget. Must have been fun to work at these tech companies when money was cheap!
It's the epitome of "do things that don't scale". (Just, after enough years and size, you eventually need to scale.)
This is like learning that there actually 1000 tiny elves inside of your television drawing the pictures.
This a real-life, genuine Flintstones-esque cartoon gag.
Pratchett comes to mind.
Pratchett really got technology, imo. Sometimes it really is high energy magic, but most of the time it's just labourers you can't see being exploited. I especially enjoyed the line "money dangled is far more effective than money given" or something like that... it's true.
Reminds me of the "delivery robots" that weren't really automated after all, they were remotely navigated by cheaper workers on playstation controllers in Brazil and the Philippines driving them on the streets through cameras.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/they-are-cute-pink-robots-w...
When Amazon Fresh first launched, it was just SWEs running to the grocery store when someone placed an order.
What I think is funny is that circa 2008 I had a manager who used to work at Amazon who told me that "a surprising amount of Amazon artificial intelligence is artificial artificial intelligence, low paid workers".
I heard this was behind mechanical turk. Sounds like the playbook remained the same.
That is absolutely dystopian and completely awful. Everything Amazon does / releases you should assume it’s evil in some way.
Regular grocery stores have really gone downhill as well. Whenever I shop, there’s at most 1 cashier doing checkout and usually 0 (only self-checkout being open). I consider myself pretty proficient about knowing what sets off the machine but still set it off 60% of the time (about some weight imbalance etc) that requires an attendant to come fix manually. I’ve gotten to dread the grocery store trips as they require so much overhead time. I really wish the “just walk out” could’ve been popularized and caught on at more stores.
Yeah, the "if anything goes wrong you now stand around with your thumb up your ass while one employee makes their way from broken kiosk to broken kiosk to manually resolve the problems" model has soured me on self-checkout. I find I have a very low "dealing with this bullshit" limit, to the point that if I have trouble I'm likely to just say fuck it and walk out of the store without completing my purchase.
Having used the UK/US type self checkout machines while travelling, I must say it is so nice to live in Northern Europe where the self checkout machines are largely just based on trust, with randomly sampling ~five items of every 100 shoppers. There is no weighing at any of the stores.
If you don't get randomly selected for inspection, there is nothing stopping you from just walking out with groceries you didn't pay for worth a hundred dollars easy. People just don't. Another benefit of having a proper social safety net I guess.
I’ve never been nor seen anyone in the US get inspected at a self checkout. Not once.
That's because all of the self checkouts in the US use the weight change to match against the scanned item and any discrepancy leads to having to wait for a self-checkout attendant to manually override to let you continue. That manual override is equivalent to the inspection you're talking about not seeing. And I in the US get blocked needing an attendant 60%+ of the time at some point in the process. Usually up front with the bags I brought from home.
At the Target next to where I live, the self checkouts don't weigh anything at all. I just scan something and put it in my backpack on the floor most of the time. And this is a Target where the toothpaste is locked up! I've never needed help from an attendant, and I've never been inspected either.
Obviously it varies location by location.
Objectively false. Some stores in some areas do that. Most don't.
At Walmart if I only have a few items (most of the time I go to Walmart) I'll just grab the scan gun and scan everything without taking anything out of my cart. I'll bag when I get to the car.
Literally not true. neither Whole Foods nor Gelsons weigh anything you scan.
That's happened maybe 4 or 5 times to me in the 200 trips or so (estimated, once a week for years) I've made since I started using the self-checkout every time. It's so reliable and fast for me (store: Jewel-Osco), I just don't have the problems others here are seeing. Usually while waiting in line I don't see anyone else have issues either.
Remove from basket, scan, put in bag. Remove from basket, scan, put in bag.
The scale is the entire bagging area, and it detects when things were removed or added without being scanned, as far as I know that's all it does here. No specific weights.
Might be your neighborhood -- stores with a low shrink rate might be more lax about inspections. I've only encountered it a few times myself but I'm also not the primary shopper in my household.
They recently installed a little door at my self checkout. I cannot even walk out of my grocery store without scanning a receipt or flagging an employee to open the door. It’s frustrating.
I know that Krogers has cameras that use some sort of intelligence. I held an object in my hand as I moved other items across the scanner, it set of an alarm and a bunch of still images of my checkout process came up with colored shapes highlighting different on screen items
I doubt it's as simple as this. People don't only steal because they could technically afford things. Just as people don't only kill in self defence.
Social safety net is more than just being able to afford it. It's a combination of not being able to afford it and general erosion of social values leading to "take what you can get away with" mentality. So even those that can afford it will still try to get more since it's everyone for themselves.
Instead of cooperation under a system with a social safety net, we get a game theoretic weighting on defection without a social safety net.
There is a safety net. Here's how I'd describe the situation:
There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was good that they were helped.
There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was not good that they were helped.
Most of politics around this topic is people's differing beliefs in the proportions of the above, and how bought in they are to minimising the latter count because they pay taxes.
I'm sorry, what? Only in the US helping someone can be sold as a bad thing. It's better to help a few more people that may not really need it than help a few fewer that actually did.
I think it's worth reading the complete comment and you'll see where what you said fits my wider point.
There's a causal arrow in the other direction, IMHO: People like to believe in the 'law of the jungle' mentality and thus vote to cut the safety net. IME it's especially wealthy people for whom it's a kind of game, not trauma, deprivation (of education, health care, food, housing, safety) and survival, and who also get to pay lower taxes, Didn't Jamie Dimon talk about how he liked how 'animal spirits' have been awakened?
A lot of house cats walking around imagining themselves to be lions.
A lot of the waiting is for age restricted items or machine errors rather than trust issues. I have never once been randomly sampled after self surface purchase in either the UK/US.
Without trust issues there would be no machine errors in my experience. Anytime there's an issue it's because I'm scanning too fast for the machine and it can't figure out how the weights work. Or I selected the wrong type of garlic and only the associate is allowed to remove items (why would you not let me remove items I personally added??).
Fair, the inability to remove your own items seems maybe a hang-up from an older view of privileged cashiers. The store I currently use doesn’t have weight checks except for weighed produce. You can leave your stuff in the cart and with the wireless scanner and a bit of forethought everything can stay in there. Different trust models makes things interesting. I have never been checked leaving the store and I don’t think social safety net or otherwise is the driving factor
Yeah, the not being able to remove items grinds my gears.
It's especially annoying when I am waving an item furiously, trying to get the poorly printed barcode to scan, and when it finally accepts it, it double scans the item.
Then when I have to stand there waiting for someone to remove the item is usually where I get disgusted with the process and give up on shopping, especially when it happens multiple times.
It’s definitely trust issues here in the Netherlands.
Buying something for under 5 euro bucks in a shop where middle school kids buy their lunches is almost guaranteed check. More than one in three times.
A different shop and a bigger amount — checks almost never
I was disappointed when my Waitrose at Kings Cross London got rid of the non weighing machines and replaced them with regular ones. I think the non weighing ones end up costing the store more either through people nicking stuff or having to have staff watch them.
Mandatory item weighting was standard procedure in many western europe self-checkout kiosks for years. The experience sucked and the solution felt over-engineered. They just dropped it recently and moved to a trust-based model overseen by a single employee. Now it's much faster.
The weighing thing seems to be an adjustable feature: in my /extremely/ low-trust Safeway in San Francisco, they started with narrow weight limits that were super-frustrating. Now that misfeature is turned off completely (but they have a little gate you need to wave your receipt at).
I imagine everyone is still playing around to get the optimum ease-of-use vs shoplifting ratio right.
Is it a social safety net or stronger legal protections for retailers? In the USA the store has no legal right to detain you and spot check your receipt. Membership stores can revoke your membership for noncompliance and then not let you in anymore without a membership, but that is the closest you’ll find here.
You can't makes broad, sweeping generalizations like "UK/US type self checkout." It varies so much.
I live in the US and the only place I ever go to where they weigh the items you scanned is Costco. Everywhere else I go (my local Walmart, Target, Aldi, two local grocery stores, and CVS) the self checkout is mostly based on trust with maybe one employee somewhat monitoring some machines. No random sampling.
The only issue I ever run into with the self checkouts is double scanning the product. You do need employee to void items.
It's really tunable and some stores are tuned to "Fort Knox" where even a fly landing UNKNOWN ITEM IN BAGGING AREA.
Others are so loose that you don't even have to take things out of your cart, scan and pay and go.
The Whole Foods location nearest to me has self-checkout stations that don't even have a scale under the bagging area. You just scan, put it in your bag and go. I assume they can afford to tank the shrinkage that results from this due to their high profit margins, or they just don't consider the costs associated with the scales to be worth it.
All the local self-checkouts where I am in London are just scan and go, no scales.
Probably a nicer area.
There was a news story a while back about how some chain stores were not going after most shoplifters directly but would keep the recordings on file and press felony charges once a certain total had been exceeded, so instead of getting a slap on the wrist for a few dollars of shrinkage here or there they'd drop the entire weight of the law on shoplifters once those few dollars added up to an amount that qualified for felony theft.
Given that "just walk out" apparently means "replace cashiers with offshore video analysts" I'd wager Whole Foods might do something similar and policing shrinkage in self-checkout is too expensive compared to just keeping track of cheats and throwing the book at them if they make a habit out of it.
That’s how the popular grocery chains in the Netherlands all work. You just scan a few things, put it in your bag, and leave. I almost never interact with anyone.
It uses your rewards card to determine your “risk”, I think. Just a theory. But whenever I’ve gotten a new card, they come check my bag a lot. Then after a dozen successes or so, they stop checking so often. Then hardly at all.
One of my friends forgot to scan an item once when they checked, and he had someone come to check his bag way more often for a while.
Where I live most stores started off in fort Knox mode but had to tone it down. The bagging area was usually miniscule and trying to fit all the groceries of even a medium grocery list on there without locking the system was nigh impossible
And it almost always DOES go wrong. Seriously 75% of the time when I'm done scanning and I press "pay now," it inexplicably says "calling for assistance" and refuses to do anything until an employee comes over. WHY?
And now assholes are intentionally taking alcohol through the self-checkout, deliberately taking up that one employee's time making him or her perform the workaround to check the items out.
And the 20+ years of "unexpected item in the bagging area" bullshit... just get rid of it.
Strangely that issue has almost vasnished for me in the last couple of years, here in New Zealand at least across the several supermarket chains I frequent (although they all seem to use the same self service POS supplier). Sure it was a big issue when these first came into stores but I think they've realised they need to increase the tolerances a bit (e.g. accept even if the weight is <1% off) and it all just works close to 100% of the time for me. I do however generally avoid adding bags to the weight area (as I've found these to trigger false warnings) and just load my shopping directly onto the weighted area and then once I've paid I'll just bag my shopping then. Works like a charm.
I do that, too (scan, pay then bag), but it's a tradeoff - you get smoother checkout experience in exchange for some speed. If everyone was throwing all their scanned stuff in a bag immediately, the checkout would be a lot faster.
OK, I will admit the "unexpected item" nonsense has diminished... only to be replaced by the "calling for assistance" out of nowhere.
I live in Western Europe and the self checkouts don’t have scales, except for weighing produce, and even for buying alcohol, they trust you to say you’re over 16. It’s always fast because you wait in one line for 4-8 self checkouts and take the first free one.
On the other hand, using the cashier is often frustrating. You have to self-bag anyway and the cashier won’t start scanning your items until the person in front of you has bagged all of their stuff, had a chat about the weather and counted their change. The bagging area is always way too small, making all of this take a while. A few times I’ve even waited while one cashier counts their float, leaves, and a new one comes and counts their float.
What happens every now and then to me is that the person in front watches open mouthed as their shopping gets scanned and piles up in the bagging area, then they pay and fuck around with their purse (honestly idk what they’re doing) then take forever to pack, while the cashier starts scanning my stuff and mixes it into theirs.
I don’t love self-checkout, it can be annoying when something doesn’t scan and I don’t have the ability to manually input the bar code like a normal cashier does. And sometimes there can be errors (“place the item into the bagging area” - when I already did), but I’m overall glad to have the option for self-checkout.
I feel this. It makes my blood boil. I wish I could flutter through life with such child like absent mindedness.
I've been to quite a few supermarkets where they have like a plank that separates the new shopping from the previous shoppers. Maybe advanced plank technology will spread and deal with this issue.
Honestly I think we’ve all been there at some point - just switching off for a few seconds when we’re stressed or distracted by other things in life. If not at the checkout then somewhere else.
But yeah when you’re the other person in this scenario it’s irritating as hell :-D
I travel extensively, and I think attitudes towards self-checkout vary heavily depending on what preceded it where you are.
In some places, you had smoke-stained cashiers throwing your groceries to their side without so much as looking at you, except to complain you're not bagging fast enough. I think it's fair to say that in those places, self-checkout is a huge improvement.
In other places though, where cashiers have traditionally been more friendly and expected to bag your groceries, it feels like a less obvious improvement. Whereas before you had chipper high school kids working their first job bagging your groceries, now you have menacing terminals accusing you of being a criminal every time their scales misalign.
Self-checkout is a convergence on mediocrity: some places are going to get dragged up, and others down.
Great point, I’m from Canada and lived in Japan for a decade, in those two places I would say it’s a downgrade. Especially Canada where there is usually a scale.
Damn I’m in Southern California and y’all have really bizarre checkout experiences to me
- I never have to weigh anything except produce
- I rarely have to wait on an attendant except for something like spray paint
- I rarely have been to a store with absolutely zero cashiers, especially for a grocery store
- Usually the cashier will bag for me
I’ve had similar experiences whether I’m in an urban part of LA or some rich Orange County suburb.
My only two complaints are (1) finding parking at like a Trader’s Joes or Tokyo Central and (2) when the store is super busy, there are a bunch of cashiers, and yet there are still long lines
FYI Austria and sometimes Italy have weighted self checkouts.
In Switzerland the age check is done by any cashier nearby. Sometimes so fast that you don't even notice that there was a check.
There is one grocery store near me that always has at least two staff members ready to work the checkout and no self checkout at all. There are virtually never lines more than two persons deep. The only time I ever go anywhere else is when I absolutely have to. Vote with your wallet.
Two of the main grocery stores in my area, one of which has sufficient cashiers, are trying to merge in order to make a worse shopping experience for everyone -- at least I assume that's the goal. The third, the only real alternative, is Walmart. Sucks.
I'm glad it's gone for good, if the process really works like how it's described in the article. Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout (eww- the horror!). The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.
Wanting to make your life more convenient and pleasant isn't "entitled".
99% of jobs are things people would rather not be doing (otherwise you wouldn't be getting paid for it). The point is that we can allocate this work in a way that minimizes the amount of time everyone has to spend doing undesirable work.
Are you mad that I sometimes pay "poor souls" to do the "menial work" of cooking me food so I can avoid doing it myself?
A very bizarre response to "darn, this was so convenient" - I wonder if this is a troll.
If you don't like going to the grocery store pay someone to go get them for you. Thousands of people remotely "following" you around and scanning things for you, just so that you can avoid using self checkout sounds ridiculous and excessive.
So does having somebody sitting next to the checkout machine watching me (directly or through security camera) while I finish my groceries ? I fail to see the major difference with somebody working physically in the shop that makes it ridiculous and excessive. One may even argue that remotely it could opens the job to more people (one could do that from home in their wheelchair while their baby is taking a nap )
There is a difference. In a typical grocery store, people only have to tally what you bought only once at the end during checkout. Where as in this "walk out" system someone has to follow you around "virtually" and keep track of everything you do in the store.
I've adressed that point with the security camera (or adequatly positionned mirror in old-fashion store)
And the workers just sit idle when there is no customer and you have to physically go there. So I dont see the clear advantage, i see it more as a "choose your poison"
It wasn't all manual.
An important question to ask is how many minutes of camera-viewing there were per customer. Let's not assume too hard before we judge the level of wastefulness.
I don't see where you're getting the impression that 1,000 workers are monitoring every single individual that walks into the store. The figure used was the total amount for the whole program (many locations), only one person was reviewing each case, and they were only even reviewing 70% of cases. Your argument is no different than saying that every time you go to McDonald's, you're entitled for expecting the hundreds of thousands of McDonald's employees globally to band together to make you your burger.
Is it more ridiculous than having someone standing at a cash register in the store doing the same task, while also having to bag for you and pretend to smile?
1. Not all work is equally undesirable and the way people are paid is not related to that in any way (in fact isn't usually inversely related)
2. Minimising the undesirable work done in total means some people end up doing almost all of it and some basically none (or, if you consider all work undesirable, some people do only the worst and some only the least bad work).
If before, for example, everyone would spend half an hour of their day to cook for themselves, which might be inconvenient but is overall not a big impact on your quality of life, now we have overworked and underpaid restaurant and related staff doing intense work for crazy hours, which is is a devastating hit to their (and their families') quality of life. The sum of human effort spent on cooking may have gone down in this example, but instead of everyone being a little annoyed by it, some people are living like kings and some are slaving away for their convenience (obviously this wording is exaggerated, but if we look globally, this is basically what's happening).
Sure but you seem to ignore that we don't exist in a socialist society.
Cashiers may have an undesirable job and self-checkout may distribute this undesirable labor among the many instead of burdening a single person with it but those people don't get paid for doing that job whereas the cashier did get paid. Self-checkout is also often slower than checkout at a cashier (it has to be because the cashier is trusted to ring up items correctly whereas the customer has a huge incentive to cheat).
The desirability of being a cashier also isn't inherent to the job. It has more to do with attitudes towards the person doing the job, both from customers and from their employer. Service staff often act as a lightning rod for all frustrations and disdain targeted at their place of work, i.e. they frequently get punished for things completely out of their control. They're also often seen as unskilled labor by their employers so they are treated as easy to replace meaning there is very little incentive to invest in their job satisfaction.
In other words, we have systems that not only require people to work even if the jobs they end up doing are undesirable and undervalued but also actively makes certain jobs undesirable by undervaluing them. If you want to change that, you need to change the system that makes those jobs undesirable, not just do away with the undesirable jobs. People seem to have fewer problems grasping this when talking about the virtues of overseas sweatshops (where changing the system is presumed impossible because the implication is that the system arises from a lack of economic development or cultural inferiority).
This is a great additional perspective, but we seem to be mostly in agreement.
I am quite aware (and rather disappointed) we don't live in a more socialist system, but as we seem to be pretty much stuck under particularly nasty version of capitalism at least for the near future. So unless someone finds a way to turn the whole system around any time soon, I still think at least trying to make some of the worst parts of capitalism somewhat less unbearable is a good thing.
I'm sure all those fired, new job seekers jn India agree fully with you.
If the system did end up working as designed, wouldn't they get the shaft anyways?
You were upset that due to the "entitled" west, Indians had jobs. You were glad the jobs were gone.
Now you're trying to redirect, and say "Oh well, those jobs would have lasted only a few years more anyhow!".
My respnse to that is the same:
I'm sure all those fired, new job seekers jn India agree fully with you.
Consider te perspective of those you aim to "protect".
It wasn’t pointless, they were training an AI that never fully worked. It’s ultimately the same kind of thing as people monitoring self driving cars, a boring task that may be pointless or possibly remove a lot of drudgery longer term.
According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.
That sort of thing seems to improve over time. The USPS has had automatic sorting machines for a long time. At first they could only read pre-barcoded mail. Humans had to key in zip codes. Then character recognition got good enough that printed and typed addresses could be read automatically. Some items were still rejected, and they went through manual stations that added a bar-code sticker.
Then manual reading was made remote. There were about 20 USPS remote envelope reading centers at peak. As the vision systems got good enough to read handwriting, then bad handwriting, those were cut back. Now there's only one remote envelope reading center in the US, and what gets there is really bad.
Tom Scott did a great video showing the last one in operation. They use totally unique keyboards with what is essentially a stenography system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c
Presumably these people applied for the jobs in question. I think it isn't for you to decide that their chosen job is pointless.
The point of the store was to provide the appearance of conventional retail while being exclusive to "members". This would theoretically cut down on shoplifting and boost profits at the expense of shutting out marginalized people.
Maybe Westerners are entitled, but this one isn't really our fault because we were led to believe it was magical automation instead of menial labor.
What never made sense to me with their go stores was why a store that only needed 1-2 people max to operate had such bad hours. Hearing now that getting the bill is a mainly manual process i guess their hours had to line up with their data entry team in india so people could get their recipes quickly. insane to think about
It's not manual. This is a case of mistaken journalism. The labeling is for training data of the models.
Before covid, the hours were much better too.
That's manual by any reasonable description.
I think it depends on how much each human reviewer did.
If they manually reviewed most of the items on each shopping trip, then it's mostly manual.
If they only manually reviewed an item or few per trip, I'd consider it to be mostly automated.
Well Amazon did not think so:
They didn't even agree with the 700 out of 1000 trips needing review figure
Even if the system was fairly accurate, if the vendor is charging Amazon too much for it, it can still be financially worthwhile for Amazon to switch to scanners in their carts.
"inaccurate" can mean lots of things here, from "actually it was 690 out of 1000" to some other minor technicality. Note that Amazon did not provide a figure of its own.
Large corporations tend to tell the truth, but push it as far as they can.
Might be "700 manual reviews per 1000 trips" getting misinterpreted as "700 out of 1000 trips needed manual reviews". If some trips were pathological edge cases that required near-constant reviews and a substantial majority took zero reviews, I could understand why Amazon would keep trying to fix its system.
If my memory serves me right, when I last visited the US right before COVID (SF) I wanted to see an Amazon Go convenience store but it closed down at 16:00 or 17:00.
That was quite unacceptable for a convenience store and it was then I got the feeling Amazon Go was still an experiment rather than a mature technology.
Self-checkout is seamless in Europe. I don't see anything that would stop the US from having the same.
It is for me too in the US. I think it's either specific stores/chains or user error.
Compared to simply walking out, packing everything into your bags right away without needing to scan with either a hand terminal or "repacking" at self checkout is a lot more friction. Didn't really think it would be until I tried a couple of times in a row and it was incredible.
It is NOT seamless. Same issues, and more, but worse service, as is customary in EU.
Shopping there always felt supremely weird to me. Scanning in, getting stuff, and walking out, but I always felt incomplete without a receipt being right there in my email, wondering if I'd done something wrong and had just inadvertently shoplifted.
I shop more often at Walmart, which has recently increased the number of manned checkout lanes and restricted their self-checkout to 15 items or less.
The local Walmart expanded self-checkout and it works surprisingly well (the bag scale seems to be very loosely calibrated or off). I wonder if they're doing things differently depending on how much product walks out the door.
Just in the past month or two, in my (low-crime suburban) area, Walmart appears to have closed the two large self-checkout areas entirely and replaced them with a (relative to before) army of cashiers. I have always found their machines to be very hassle-free, but the shockingly-adequate level of cashier staffing made my last visit surprisingly quick and convenient. I could live with this.
But this was an obvious sham and a fraud that couldn't scale. I don't think its demise is sad at all.
What's sad is putting cashiers out of work, and even worse is replacing them with outrageously piss-poor alternatives. Self-checkout is a clinic on incompetent system design, and has been for DECADES now. It's mind-bogglingly bad, all to take jobs away from people. Fuck that.
Why is it a fraud? Did they ever tell you it was entirely computer-driven? I thought their value proposition was you could just ... walk out. This feels pretty inescapably the future. Why have people do bad jobs like cashier work when computers could do them instead? This is why UBI is going to be critical. We're moving to a world where we'll have more people than work, and that's not just ok - it's fantastic.
They're not wrong, they're just early. Which you could argue is the same thing on a micro scale, but not on a macro.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Perhaps operating costs were more expensive than just hiring humans to run it like a traditional grocery store?
It could be worse. Imagine a smart gate that refuses to open for wheelchair users, or claims the child in your arms is an unpaid item - something that is getting rolled out in many Australian supermarkets.
How do the Amazon "Dash Carts" actually work though? If it were a traditional bar code scanner, I'd agree with you. But reading up on the tech makes it sound like you just place the item in your cart and that's it. If it worked like that I don't see at all what the problem would be.
I tried one in SF and never went back because holy fuck it was expensive
According to Bloomberg, Amazon Go wil continue. I'd bet they are more correct than Gizmodo.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-02/amazon-pu...
From Bloomberg:
"Amazon Go stores will still use Just Walk Out technology, and the company will continue to license it to other retailers. Smaller stores in the UK also will keep using the system."