Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Swedish residents have a personal identity number issued at birth or immigration. Format: YYYYMMDD-NNNN. More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_number_(Swed...
BankID is a service run by the Swedish banks that interfaces with the banks, individuals and third parties (like this chain of unmanned stores).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID
The banks know the identities (personal identify number) of their customers via their physical offices. BankID offers an app to individuals and an online API to paying/approved third-party services. Third-party services are able to offer BankID authentication in websites and apps. In the end the third party receives an authenticated personal identity number.
There is growing awareness that this service should not be run by private companies/banks.
I don't agree. I'm a Swede too (as I assume you are), and I have basically never heard anyone complain of BankID being owned by the banks. I am really happy that our government does not own BankID, since they suck badly at developing software.
This leads to friction and situations where some people are essentially excluded from large parts of society.
The banks also don't seem to be all that interested in interacting with their invidual customers in the flesh.
I think the natural conclusion of this is that the issuing of electronic IDs becomes a government responsibility, decoupled from banking.
The feeling's mutual! I have been using the same bank for over 15 years and only visited once and by accident.
- 18 months ago I tried to facilitate creating a corporate bank account managed by a foreign CEO from a non-EU and very first-world country in order to be able to create a Swedish company (AB) with the goal of hiring software people here in Sweden. Tried two banks (SEB and Handelsbanken) before giving up and going another route.
My impression is that Swedish banks have tightened up things quite a lot in the past few years.
There might be tricks via Cyprus or so, but that will only let you create the AB - you still need a Swedish corporate bank account to pay your employees the proper way.
So since HN is a place primarily for technologists who like to push things forward, maybe you have a stronger argument than just saying that you’re a Swede?
If you actually mean a company using blockchain in other ways: do you have any examples?
I agree that something needs to be done.
They have been innovative in the past:
1996/1997: Mass adoption of two-factor hardware devices providing secure authentication for online banking.
2003: Leveraging the two-factor hardware devices to create BankID.
A service like this needs to be infrastructure, one way or another. Secure, reasonably neutral, trusted... You don't want it serving as a retaining wall for a monopoly.
They also have rules against being logged in for too long, and against identity transfer (directly or indirectly using BankID to authenticate for a different login method) [1], since that would result in fewer BankID logins and less revenue for them.
One result of the latter restriction is that any letters containing authentication codes need to be sent by physical mail, since all digital mailboxes such as Kivra and the government-run "Min myndighetspost" support login by BankID. The University Admissions service (antagning.se) were forced to stop sending codes through digital mailboxes due to this [2].
[1]: https://twitter.com/antagningse/status/1178957770978140160
[2]: https://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.643894/skatteverket-s...
Are you sure they can set the prices "freely"? Many regulated monopolies like this are restricted in their pricing.
(disclaimer, not a swede)
There is sadly little awareness of it being a private joint venture between banking and telecom.
I don't know if it is realistic to expect governments to come up/run this, but when they promote it, I think it should at least be open source.
But it's very expensive to integrate it and it's Ogone all over again ( most expensive option = the Belgian one) ~3€ / user/year for the most complete option for ( what is basically) a login verification.
At risk of sounding snarky, I'm growing in awareness that the anonymous nature of paper money and coin had a lot of advantages. I would be unhappy if the only option for groceries in my area required me to strongly identify myself to shop there.
I know this is the age old "I have nothing to hide" argument but I truly am curious why people are so afraid of saying where they're travelling (train tickets) or what they're buying (shops).
Don't you think that once that dystopian future comes - when that info might be used against you - we'll have much worse things to worry about?
so the most likely scenario is even if data will be collected on you, nobody will be able to use it in any meaningful way
First of all, you're being disingenious by putting up a strawman argument about "how much milk and eggs you buy." It is never about only milk and eggs. Advertising is only a part of it. Once you have an ID required to shop there, you can easily track who was there. You can follow their movements around the shop with cameras once you've identified them at the register. You can see who was with them. You can use this for your own gains, let's say you are a bank employee or police officer who wants to keep tabs on your spouse. Or maybe you are a politician who wants to run a smear campaign on your opponent.
Also whether we'll have much worse things to worry about doesn't mean everything else before guillotines on the street can be hand-waved away.
I think it's obvious that the data would not be public domain but stored strongly secured somewhere with very limited access. There are already very strict data privacy laws in Europe and the trend is clearly towards even more strictness.
I, too, don't see any issue as long the as the laws punish misuse of private data.
That plan has literally never worked throughout history.
That may be an obvious intent, but I do not believe it is obvious the implementation will succeed in achieving those goals. From past experience, it rarely has.
Never forget that while you may be one of the privileged now, your status will change throughout your life. If you’re lucky you will only become a more privileged individual, if not, you may wish to have a few more anonymous interactions on a regular basis.
Protecting privacy isn’t so much about not caring who knows the quantity of eggs you buy a week it’s about acknowledging history and the fickle winds of change. It’s sort of easy to believe that progressive attitudes will continue to prevail and that history tends to lead to increasing enlightenment, but there are often major backslides on issues of social norms and inclusiveness. It’s also about realizing that what you do today might not get you in trouble, but what you did last year might, even though last year no one would have thought twice about what you did.
None of it is critical information, but I'm not only handing it out, I'm wrapping it up into a neat, searchable bundle for bulk analysis. And more importantly, there will soon be no easy way to opt out; anyone who truly does have something to hide will be obvious by the lengths they must go to in doing so. This is one more step in a dangerous, inhuman direction.
Not in Sweden, because only state-run stores can sell alcohol (above 3.5% alcohol to be exact) - it's called Systembolaget and they already know exactly how much you drink!
The price is the same at all stores and there's a price list online: http://www.olcc.state.or.us/pdfs/monthly_alpha_price_list_c....
A lot of business is done in cash at these stores. They're traditionally a lucrative place to rob because of the cash. There seems to be some people who don't want to be tracked but mostly the cash customers seem to be people who deal more with cash themselves.
Not if you pay with cash they don't.
Bought four bottles of olive oil? You're going to get very fat, better make you pay a premium! Who cares if you actually used it to make soap?
Don't hold back technology and society just because of a few other issues - those other issues can be better resolved directly. In this case, with single-payer public healthcare.
conversely, don't presume that what you're advocating for is "advancing" technology and society, either.
What if this kind of technology helps create that dystopian future? What if this kind of technology makes it worse, or at least harder to fix? More sinister and more protracted, so to speak.
We aren't in that future yet, and it won't happen overnight or through one big rollout. We'll get to that future through small, incremental steps that all seem perfectly reasonable at the time.
It's just eggs and milk after all...
I might be the boring-est person on the planet - lets say nothing about me is of any value to anyone. It is still nobody's business to know even the most mundane aspect of my life. My life is my business, just like your life is your business. Thats all.
Yes I prefer that for everyone (not just me), including people in government, so that I don't have to worry about hiding the information. Hiding the information has its associated cost.
Transparency for everyone to level the playing field.
Sure its your business to be private but as times goes and as technology advances it going to be more difficult and expensive.
I don't understand why you should decide for others? If you want to put all of your info online, that is your choice. If I don't want to put my info online, that is my choice.
Its the data on why you suddenly stopped buying alcohol after buying a pregnancy test a month before.
Who works at the store? Your former teacher? A prior fling? A neighbor? Does it matter when it can all be leaked with everyones data by a hacker anywhere when the ransom isn't paid by the store?
Why use mobile phones or credit cards? Or ID cards? or ISP subscriptions? It could all be tracked! Let's just do everything by landlines and faxes like Germany...
oh, good idea. but i think that's quite literally the entire point of people's concerns in the first place.
You could use lots and lots of examples where market forces and banks could influence human behavior through this method. There is freedom and power in using cash.
If you know that, you already know why it is a specious argument.
They can see sexual activity, if you're a parent/expecting, a ton of health information, if you're a smoker, your physical location, and more.
This isn't about eggs and milk. The data in combination constitutes a greater breach of privacy than the most dedicated stalker could hope to achieve.
Maybe you should read some dystopian fiction. You can see just how much we have to worry about, even in a "paradise".
There kind of isn't, at least in Sweden. The option that does exist is a seedy borderline scam with exorbitant overhead and hidden usury fees, which will effectively confiscate your remaining money a few months in.
Also, in stark contrast to real cash, it still results in a log of all the transactions and ties them up to one weakly pseudonymous identity which will be re-identified at one single purchase with an identifiable connection, or could by from a collection of weaker clues. That is, for instance, goodbye to ever using it for anything with an account, unless you also want to announce you probably bought everything else the card was ever used for.
It's cheaper to dump toxic waste in the bay than to have someone neutralize it as well, and personally I'm positively delighted the resulting products cost more instead. There are lots discounts that should be shunned, and in my opinion this one is a prime example.
If you have the means to tally an order and a card terminal, though, you could have a kiosk with a note acceptor attached.
You can have a non-swedish Revolut/N26/Bunq/Curve account, and use that card instead, that way you are not directly linked to your cashless purchases.
The strongest reason for it would probably be the old 'power corrupts', as we can see just about anybody with access to it, be it a person or organization in the past. No reason to be so naive to think some other place is special and avoids it. And knowing basically everything about any individual is a massive amount of power and very personal. Also rarely are these kinds of laws repelled, in contrary, the data are just too sweet and there is always the next terrorist threat to prevent.
You did not reply to my first and main statement. Probably because you agreed with it. In the past shops had other methods of preventing shoplifting. Some of these methods also involved keeping track of what people did. Not information stored in databases, but in the heads of people. What I just wanted to say is that we are happy if some kind of system is used to catch the bad people, but not us, because we think of ourselves as being good. Many shoplifters also think of themselves as good, because they beat the system or have the right to do it because society treated them unfair. Or maybe just because of the fun of doing it. I understand that a high percentage of people did some shoplifting at some point in their lives. And many would do more if there would be no chance of being caught.
I simply wanted to point out that safety (as in preventing crimes) and privacy are in opposition with eachother and that each society has to find a way to balance them. It is also expected that your opinion on that balance is influenced on your position in that society.
This is a Pareto optimal action.
https://digst.dk/it-loesninger/mitid/partnerskabet/
It is a curious construction; we wouldn't accept a personal id card issued / owned by banks but for the digital equivalent we do so with little debate.
Passports only became legal IDs in the last decade or so.
Swedes also use the BankID app for online interactions with health care and other public services. Last year I did my taxes in under 60 seconds. (Get notification; BankID login; check prefilled values from bank, employer etcetera; BankID sign.)
We're not civilized enough here in the US for such nice things.
The other piece of the puzzle is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Enforcement_Authority
Basically the government runs debt collection in Sweden. They have the ability to withdraw money from your bank account.
All of this is enabled by every resident having a (public) personal identity number.
It's generally cheaper to call the cops and file an insurance claim than it is to deal with worker's comp or lawsuits if something goes sideways.
Yes. It's a bit cumbersome, so there are companies specializing in doing this for small debts (say < $5000).
> Are there any drawbacks/cases of misuse?
Hard to say. My impression is that having one trusted party to manage debt collection makes it easier to handle the edge cases in a more humane way, but I haven't really delved into this area.
> Does the government keep a credit score too?
No.
I've always had it turned off, never had an issue.
No you can use it on a PC too.
On Android.
Edit: because having your birthday right there as part of common ID number is an obvious transgression of privacy that wasn't probably thought of back when the number was established. How anyone could disagree with this is beyond me.
Having one's date of birth signalled to the world is an obvious breach of privacy in the modern age, and since there is obviously no need for it, it shouldn't be used.
That you have 'never heard of a concern' not hugelry if there are obviously people who are going to take umbrage - moreover - in this new information world order it can be used for all sorts of shady reasons.
There's clearly no need of it.
If the scheme were designed today, there's a 0% chance of DOB being used in the number.
I know from trips to sweden that a lot of people use a custom payment system called swish that only exists in sweden, but I never had trouble paying with a visa card (with cash is sometimes a problem in sweden).
The roads are therefore constantly clogged by speeding cars, and have become seriously bike-hostile, discouraging local interactions even more.
I think these small stores could actually become a focus for local activity again - even without staff.
This is the future of grocery stores, like it or not. Employees are expensive and make mistakes, whereas machines are cheap, don't take breaks, and work pretty reliably once you set them up correctly.
they seem (or pretend) in: costco, whole foods, trader joes
not so much in: walmart, target
And some are greeting me outside of the store. They have no obligation to do so.
If you want to pay for someone to be social with you why not do that separately to shopping? Seems funny to try to mix the two.
I enjoy seeing this group of young people given such a broad responsibility and I acknowledge them and their stellar job. And they acknowledge me.
But who am I, I just enjoy Old Europe.
Who do you optimize for? IMO, ideally not the company.
I don't know what your experience is, but I always find self-checkout massively more efficient for me and I'd always prefer it and would choose shops that offer it over those that don't.
I can just breeze through with my AirPods still in listening to my podcast, not having to wait for anyone else or have anyone else wait for me, not having to say anything, and just get on with the rest of my day and what I really want to spend my time doing.
It’s lower effort because talking is a bigger cognitive burden for me than scanning a few items. Over time with experience, you get as fast as an employee would be anyway.
I like human cashiers because they are faster than me+robot. So I tolerate the chitchat for their efficiency.
And I never really want to optimize for typing in codes for the price of lemons and whatnot.
The casual interactivity is what I would call the 'gravy' of society. They know I recognize/know them, and I know they recognize/know me.
I could never understood why should I, as a client, do the work that someone else can do for me (and more reliably, of course)? It's win-win, I'm not stressed at doing something wrong, I can do something else while my products are checked out and that person doing the product checkout also has a job.
But because it sounds tech-y and more automatic-y lots of tech-literate people fall for all of this, I don't see what's more automatic in me doing the same work that another person used to do.
But the point is we don't need the 'while my products are checked out' step. We could skip that. You save time, save more people handling what you're buying, save them having to staff a checkout and freeing them to do something else instead. That's the real win-win.
Yes, the'll be busy looking for other jobs.
The economy is developing in the wrong direction. We are not on track for happy automation.
Also, the stores that are most promising don't require checkout at all, so that's an entire category of human effort eliminated, for better or worse.
People who want the assistance of an employee can go that route, but I prefer the self-checkout process for the reduced waiting and self-service nature.
I don't think I've ever seen a discount for it?
The cost is included in the prices you pay for the products.
You're paying it whether you use it or not!
I would honestly be fine with making that permanent. It's so much easier to pick the things I want with fewer people between me and the shelves. All in all a much more efficient shopping experience.
At least at Safeway I can spot the kind of person who looks like they value their time and it'll usually go faster.
I'll literally never shop at Ross again because it takes forever to exit their damned queue.
The model works better at Trader Joe's in SF where it's mostly people who value their time. You can then be confident all the counters won't be used by slow people.
Is this really correct? Shouldn't one grand queue just decrease variance, not average?
Put another way: if the median is 1 minute, then half the time you'll wait less than 1 minute. The other half you might wait not just for 2 minutes, but significantly more. They won't "cancel out" to preserve the mean.
They'd really rather you not get in their way, anyway. It isn't awkward for them until you try to help. They enjoy the feeling of power/superiority they have over you. That's why they smile while you stand there naval gazing.
A checkout clerk just feels like a weird adjunct to the whole process. I walked to the store, pushed the cart around and grabbed all my items, yet somehow someone else has to do the quickest and easiest part for me?
However, considering that there are usually many more self-checkout terminals available with much less queue it means that the total time spent is less than on a service one. My local store, open until 23, usually closes down the self-checkout terminals the last hour since there are too few people to make it worthwhile and you rarely have a queue to the serviced station.
So I totally agree that the serf service checkout is slower for that actual station but considering that the store can cram in much more of those in the same space and they need much less personnel to manage it saves everyone time and money to use them, unless there is no queue to the serviced checkout (and personnel is manning it at the moment).
Typo or deliberate?
You then scan items as you pick them off the shelf - if you're really prepared you put the item directly into a bag you brought with you.
Payment is then a case of walking up to the till - human or machine - and scanning one final barcode. Your order is presented to you for a final review then you tap your card and leave.
Arriving at the till and paying instantly means my entire queuing experience is over within 5-10 seconds
(Unless you get subjected to an infrequent random poll of your items but these are worth the occasional hassle)
Hopefully you get something similar implemented!
Also, scales to price veggies and fruits are at checkouts in the states. If they had them in the veggie area, like in much of Europe, things might be really different.
The USA, this is always done at checkout. If it was a law making that happen, it would have to be at the state level.
Even if a machine is terrible and useless, you can collect that useless information/data and use it as a data point for other machines that are perhaps not so terrible, any data point is useful afterall.
Machines are the future for that reason alone.
on edit: evidently people would like their supermarket checkout experience to be as pleasing as the typical online shopping experience, thus a quick downvote.
There are queues online too. They are just at the delivery side, not at the checkout side.
On delivery its not really a queue as I dont have to spend my time doing it.
Here we have to suffer through websites like this:
https://www.rohlik.cz/c300102000-ovoce-a-zelenina
where you open a category, then you see a whole screen useless stock image for a category, then you scroll down through a bloated list of subcategories, then there's half a screen of recipes, and then quarter screen of filters, and then finally you get to a algorithmically selected grouped product lists.
And you have to scroll through this every time you change a category, which is also a hassle, because of all the huge multi-column popups and annoying category images everywhere and the constant scrolling you have to do to get to the subcategories from the product list.
Other websites are not that great either, due to this being the first mover in our market. So they copycat it: https://www.kosik.cz/maso-drubez-a-ryby
It takes more time to select all I want online, with this interface, than a bus trip to a shop and back + typical 15 minutes in the shop for a moderate grocery shopping session.
Most stores I visited don't even have scales and just trust you to put in the correct items. Especially the ones where you get a handheld device to scan while you walk trough the store. I would guess that fraud levels are much lower here so the stores don't need to do that.
the automated føtex near my house has this, or also put your item in the bag, you need to put an item in the bag etc. crash because you didn't put item in bag fast enough, or you took bag off scale to put new one on.
>the UX failures are not universal.
yes, because they do not have a universal interface which a human checker provides. By using a machine you switch from having one well understood, pretty standardized ui paradigm: put stuff on track, tracks goes to checker, checker checks them through, you pay and bag your stuff - to having as many ux as there are companies implementing automatic checkout machines and however many versions of their workflow are in distribution.
The UX failures for a self-service checkout are unique and unfamiliar to the user, just like the ux failures of a new checkout flow on an online retailer.
And I only regularly go to two different supermarkets, so once I know their flow, there's nothing new to it. In contrast, humans seem to like to change their interface quite regularly, even between customers...
On the other hand I think I may be abnormally sensitive to badly worked out human machine interactions since working out these kinds of interactions is part of my job as a programmer. So when something is poorly thought out I think that I feel it stronger than most people do.
Even this is not universal. In Sweden the checkouts have that divider so the checkout clerk can start scanning the next customer's products while you're packing.
In the UK, you can't move on until the other person has bagged and removed which you're expected to do before paying, which makes self-checkout considerably faster because you're already bagged.
I'm not sure if about 5% of our weekly supermarket spend would be negligible enough for you, but it's been worth it for us. One big factor for us is that we don't own a car, so we'd be (and previously were) hauling all that stuff by hand.
My understanding is that the chain is running the delivery service at a loss, though they probably make it up by people buying more at a time. It remains to be seen if they raise prices for the delivery when the pandemic passes.
It was already the present in most of Sweden before this too. Almost every store has automated checkout im addition to manual checkout.
The way it works is that you scan the bar codes with the Walmart app on your smartphone as you add items to your shopping cart. The scan function is very fast. If you are adding more than one of an item, you can either scan them separately or scan once and then set the quantity.
To checkout, you just go to an open self-checkout station, hit the "check out" button in the app, scan the QR code that is on the home screen of the terminal, tell it how many bags you are using (default is zero), hit "pay", and about two seconds later a confirmation appears in the app, and you can leave.
The confirmation can be shown to the person at the exit to show that you have paid, although usually they don't ask.
If you are buying anything sold be weight, it tells you when you add it to your cart that you'll have to weigh it at checkout. At checkout, it prompts you to put each such item on the scale, weighs it, and adds it in.
It is literally 10-15 seconds from the time I enter the self-checkout area to the time I'm pushing my cart toward the exit. (I don't bag in-store. I have my reusable bags and some boxes in my car trunk, and do my bagging and/or boxing at my car).
This has been great for pandemic shopping. It is fairly easy to avoid spending more than a few passing seconds around any given other shopper while going around gathering items, but when scanning and bagging a full cart of groceries at self-checkout, you might be around the same other shoppers for several minutes, some within 2 meters.
It's also nice, to talk to people, instead of talking down to them.
It seems like every year we are loosing more union jobs than ever.
Safeway has always been a hated place to work, but it used to pay their employees a decent salary with benefits.
Now—they have a weird semi union status. They load up the stores with desperate people, and still manage to make them maybe the most angry workers I have seen. I overheard one manager tell an employee yesterday to drive to a store two hours away, and be there by 7:00 am! The employee just looked crushed. That kind of crap didn’t happen in union shops.
I guess the future will be self checkouts, security cams everywhere, and facial recognition to track.
Seems hard to believe.
The problem is that they don’t make a living. People who work in grocery stores aren’t working there because they want to, but usually just because it’s their only option. If they quit their jobs they would be homeless by the end of the month. Do you understand what their living conditions are like? It’s really sad and it makes me uncomfortable to talk to them. Minimum wage workers in high cost of living cities are just slavery as a service.
If major chains is all a small rural community has left, then I'd liken this to cracking open the bones of a well-pecked carcass and sucking out the marrow before discarding the corpse
I could be anywhere in the midwest.
I still have have a preference for the station I use, because the staff and I at a couple of the stations recognize each other, and have developed rapports over the course of many 30s smalltalk sessions. It's superficial, but it helps build social trust. We exchange small favors. I forgot my wallet one day, and the guy behind the registered covered for me and told me to pay him back when I could. I've told off a belligerent customer or two in ways they couldn't without being fired. We've discussed the local jobs market, and at points turned each other on to different employment opportunities.
I'd pay higher prices if I knew it got them more money (and got rid of those damn telescreens).
Nevertheless, I wouldn't pay for that kind of interaction directly if I could. I have a couple groups of regular friends. If I wanted social interaction alone, I'd get with them.
It's not really about the interaction itself, it's about having some semblence of place and community in a world that's too big, too standardize, too indifferent, and too increasingly automated to think about you as anything other than an instrumentalizeable commodity, or a function to be optimized.
Every technological step forward like this puts us under increasing surveillance, dedifferentiates the spaces in-which we live, and obviates the labor of large segments of our society while reducing the power of all but a select few.
Hyperbolically, I feel like we're all just a few years from being stuffed in padded rooms with an ad-supported games console and permanently affixed morphine drips to optimize mortality, health, and quality of life metrics.
Oh but you can! A pin, paper clip, etc through a couple of the speaker openings will do the trick nicely.
Just for the record, I've found I can still mute them if I do the right combo of button presses.
Most of these pumps in my state have a column on either side of the screen of four or five unlabeled buttons. If I press the left side top to bottom (usually by running my finger straight down the line) on the left column, then the right, then the left, that shuts up 90% of them in my area.
Still sucks though
In many cases the staff is a store is just as much present to scare of any one wanting to steal. Even if we've seen gangs just walk out with massive amounts of goods, and the staff understandably choosing to not confront them.
I could also see a solution where you need to identify yourself in order to be let in through the doors. If you have been spotted letting someone else in who proceeds to steal or vandalize, that person could be held accountable.
The article explains that it requires BankID authentication and a pre-registered banking card to enter.
The stores can't be to secure, people need to be able to exit safely.
Just for reference [0], NYC police's response times for "serious" and "non-critical" 911 calls are close to or over 10 minutes. Responses to "alarms" (which I assume would be things like B&E to a shop after hours) is over 30 minutes.
[0] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/911reporting/reports/end-to-end-re...
This was true 30 years ago. Today the police is all but abolished, especially in rural areas. I wouldn't be surprised if there were police regions the size of Denmark with a single police car.
I would like to see how secure the entry points really are, because I doubt it a lock.
I think people are just people, wherever you go - neither more nor less honest than anywhere else (given the opportunity).
Even in Stockholm the 'local' police branches often close over the summer.
I've only needed to dial the emergency number twice (luckily) and both times I was placed in a queue. Another time when kids were smashing bikes on my street in central Stockholm on a warm summer evening, the police simply said there was no-one available to send.
Until we have developed artificial general intelligence, I wouldn't trust a computer to recommend a cheese to with a certain kind of crackers. In stores with a reasonably wide selection of goods, I usually have to ask for the location of at least one thing.
Although locating stuff _could_ be solved by looking it up with an app, I would rather pay the markup. And I'm quite certain that a lot of other people will, because as opposed to with a lot of other goods, you're often low on time when shopping for groceries. I guess the urgency of shopping is why online grocery shopping hasn't taken off as much as even I would have predicted a few years ago.
Cant imagine that being more than a couple of minutes of saved time for me.
What stores are you going to now where this is the case, every time I buy some food I need to know exactly what I want. I wouldn't expect some 19-year-old clerk to be a culinary expert either.
but even at a lower end store, the people that work there aren't idiots. they might not be able to tell you what cheese would go well with a california syrah, but they can probably recommend a good blend for homemade mac and cheese.
Same goes for the bakery, I stand by my local ACME bakery being the easiest and very tasty birthday cake around, even above mom and pop shops.
Nor would it be this 19-year-old's job to guess what your preferences are
I mean, anyone who likes cheese just a little bit would never ever recommend you crackers with it ;-)
It's already being solved with an app [0]. I think people will want different ways to interface with the store depending on their use case.
[0] https://twitter.com/InfopopHQ/status/1357719866149490688?s=2...
Supermarket employees, if you can find one around, have no clue about this and can indeed at most tell you the location of a type of item.
> In stores with a reasonably wide selection of goods, I usually have to ask for the location of at least one thing.
Which is easily doable through an app on your phone or touchscreen in store.
The reality is that as soon as the technology is there, and we seem to be very close, many supermarkets' staff will become redundant across the board.
Having real people providing real service will still be a thing, I think, but more of a luxury experience. To take a British example: There won't be many staff left at Tesco but there will still be at Harrod's.
Why not? Also, it's not necessarily a computer recommending anything. The decision of which cracker to pair with which cheese was already made by human experts employed by vendor, the computer just scales the suggestion of pairing to thousands or millions of people.
I don't think there will be. In countries like the Nordic countries with very high costs of labor, specialty physical retail locations of all sorts have been closing left and right, with people now ordering those things online. Certainly some consumers enjoy shopping in a shops with social interaction, but not enough to keep those shops solvent in the long haul.
Don't get me wrong this is great for the current situation but like all things it doesn't only have good things about it.
In another town the banks shared an office and each day of the week was for one of the banks to recieve customers lol. WeBank
Could have the same but backwards, give cash, recieve e-coupon, scan e-coupon in store.
Having a mobile bank that drives around is another solution.
In Netherlands we used to have ATMs in loads of places. Stores had semi-moveable ones. That stopped due to criminals blowing regular ATMs up. The explosives sometimes took out entire walls and made the entire building unsafe. Most stores removed those semi-moveable ATMs. Similarly, loads of regular ATMs were removed, especially ATMs close to a house.
As Netherlands tried to do something about it the criminals started to attack the ATMs in Germany more. The criminals also often stole really quick cars, so Dutch police recently and finally have a few quick cars again. Before the quick chase cars the criminals often just outran the police. Oh, Dutch police take safety into account (try to minimize the risk for others).
The largest store in every town is usually a "financial correspondent" of one or more banks.
The services available are: Remmitance sending/receiving, deposit and withdrawal using bank card, credit card payments, service payments (Eelctricity, Phone, University), service withdrawal, (Drive sharing driver withdrawals), among others.
The tricky part for banks and businesses is offering services with similar deposit/withdrawal amounts so cash is always available without having to organize cash delivery to/from the bank correspondent.
Smartphones are now cheap as dirt. The bigger problem would be having a bank account.
Do they have a work around for non Swedish users?
In other words, if you live in Sweden you'll likely have bankid. As a tourist or seasonal worker, not so much.
Shops without access ramps lose probably more customers, and yet there are plenty of them.
Your point about the access ramps also makes alot of sense, didn't really think about that case.
https://www2.deloitte.com/se/sv/pages/technology-media-and-t...
https://uxdesign.cc/the-ux-of-sainsburys-smartshop-f7b94af6e...
Sorry to disappoint aboringusername, but this is not a ploy to starve us all into carrying surveillance devices. Still, the tinfoil hat at least looks fetching.
In fact I wouldn't be surprised if these stores were cashless, in several Scandinavian countries shop attendants handling change manually are already on their way out
This drive to a cashless system has downsides for the more vulnerable, poor and elderly - it also pushes extra risks onto the customer (which is why I don't do online Banking the UK)
*edit* Banking for Baking
Germans are not luddites, they are careful with privacy. They have more than one reason to be careful with it [0, 1]. There's a tradeoff between "personal convenience" and "civil liberties" like privacy.
Being scared of Google street view and continuing to use fax machines are not wise worries about privacy, sorry
Yes I know about the historical reasons they're "worried" about privacy, but it's a misplaced worry because they don't address their real privacy shortcomings, like requiring registration of people (+ sensitive privacy info) who live in a city, using last names (and not apartment numbers) in mailboxes, limited anonymous internet access (to please the copyright lobby, etc) and their lax internet security capabilities (like the Berlin courts who were still on Windows 95)
So again, if they really worry about privacy they're addressing it through the wrong angle.
a) Expected to have, engage with and be active on a smartphone
b) Be accessible via the mobile network (have an active phone number that can get SMS)
c) Be "always online", frequently checking the bank in 'real time' to verify transactions, account balance etc
d) Have battery life on your device. It's no good if you have just 5% and your phone turns off, your smartphone to person uptime needs to be very very good (your phone needs to be online quite often to be a very good citizen!).
e) Be verifiable to you. The make, model and other information needs to be tied to you as a person. The SIM card needs to belong to you and you need to be traceable and trackable via your smartphone at all times, 24/7.
If you do not meet those requirements you WILL be locked out of some functions in society. This is already the case today and will be the case in the future. No smartphone? No digital cash? Not for you.
Our phones are becoming and will eventually be a part of "us", they will be a digital heartbeat and will need to output a "pulse", if your pulse stops, so will your societal inclusion (perhaps you can't go to a place without scanning a QR code, for example).
The levels of exclusion will vary depending on criteria, for example, Covid passports will likely use an "app" as most things do otherwise you'll be denied access.
Eventually, it'll be a law to ensure your digital pulse is active and working 24/7, every citizen will be issued a digital ID and a personal device that will need to be kept on your person at all times, it'll talk to various networks (telephony, GPS etc), and will act like a "tag". We're not there yet but the pathway to reach that point has been made obvious during the covid pandemic. "Health passports" are the next step, various smartwatches that record health data (Apple, Fitbit) are getting into that territory. Eventually you as a human will be constantly monitored and uploaded to a server 24/7
For example, "we" didn't collectively decide one day we absolutely need to have credit cards. But if you don't have one now, there are a ton of things you can't really do.
The claim "sorry you don't have a smart phone you can't buy food / clothes" has implications for people (children, the elderly, the disabled, the poor). Just replace "smartphone" with "stairs" (if you can't climb stairs sorry no food / clothes for you). Hey if its a problem, just order online, or get a friend to do it, why should we have to cater to people who aren't normal?
Combine that with a culture where your phone can be disabled for many reasons (failure to pay, socially unacceptable views, employer owned) and you're creating a rather distopian picture.
I'm all for a more streamlined version for people who are able, and that may well be the vast majority, but it makes sense to make provisions for those who aren't and not to say "sorry history has moved forward, if you don't have a car you can't have a job or go shopping." (as another example)
Those who cannot, do not or will not have a smartphone will become marginalized and excluded from society. The expectation and norm will be to obtain and fully use your digital extension (and there are many smartphones that are very cheap).
Eventually, smartphoneless people will become a percentile point of the population that are easily discarded and hidden, and from my perspective that's becoming more and more obvious as time goes on.
To me this is simply an observation, not a commentary as to whether it's good, bad, but it seems this is the direction society is accepting since I don't see any movements against smartphones or this type of future.
What makes you think that those are the same people? At first blush it seems like people in favour of easier access to vote and easier access for the disabled would be the same people that advocate for more inclusive access to shops.
Because (in the USA) the ADA exists, and has been shown to help even non disabled people. Elevators were mandated on multi floor buildings because of wheelchairs, but they have a benefit of also being available for non disabled people who have their hands full of groceries.
Also, what is “normal” to you won’t be the same as someone else. Is a wheelchair bound person normal? A highly autistic person? What about high functioning autism? If you’re going to define “normal”, you’d be drawing a line somewhere where you can’t please everyone.
They are saying that with the way society is moving forward, if you do not own a smartphone you are not considered "normal". We have the ADA in the USA for this reason, so that all aspects of society are accessible.
There is nothing currently that prevents you being excluded if you do not have a smartphone and are therefore not considered "normal".
And not just any smartphone: a smartphone controlled by Apple or Google. Further cementing their influence over society.
My issue is not that you need to be using Android in general for example (base Android is FOSS, so the user can in principle have full control over their device), but that often for these things you need to be using Android with Google services, with all the tracking and such that entails.
In Germany for example, that had resisted a lot of technological progress (online credit cards, Google Street View, etc.), I had to cancel my internet subscription by fax in 2015... It was hard enough to get a fax service, and then send personal details, etc. to prove my identity.
I'd rather have a streamlined experience with apps and technology than have to deal with loads of bureaucracy.
I can imagine this working well in small villages. You'll get a few thieves and vandals, but eventually you can weed them out.
Pretty genius.
You open the doors using the company's app, which works in conjunction with BankID, a secure national identification app operated by Sweden's banks.How else are they going to block you?
But just because they have your BankID it doesn't mean that they have your account balance or other banking data, if that's what you're referring to.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Enforcement_Authority
It's called "attachment of earnings" in the UK there is no special agency for that, it's just a court order sent to the debtor employer.
This also exists in most US states, I believe it's often called "wage garnishment" there.
Repossession or seizure of property also exists in the US and the UK (and indeed most countries). Here in the UK there's even a TV show about that, with the cool name of "The Sheriffs are coming"...
Hah, I guess for the vandals, being blacklisted by the network would be a big hassle...
Here's some info about it: https://sweden.se/business/cashless-society
No, from the OP: > works in conjunction with BankID, a secure national identification app operated by Sweden's banks
You are identified, so it should be easy to see on camera who steals and then they can send the cops on you.
My worry is more about tourists[1]. As someone who has travelled extensively in rural Europe I would not appreciate a growing network of stores that requires country-specific id.
[1] Technologically disadvantaged people are already mentioned in the article.
[0]I knew it because of course you had to use an app to start charging, and the app had a pre-filled and unchangable country set to Germany for billing details.
Weirdly, at the main station in Bochum (for example), there were some machines that would accept a Visa card - but even the staff in the in-person ticket office seemed to be completely ignorant of this. (And no, they wouldn't accept my card there, either. But eventually - no thanks to DB's staff - I found a machine I could use.)
Let's just say I wasn't impressed.
Non-swedes would be even more shit out of luck than I was, they wouldn't even be able to navigate the phone service. So weird.
I wonder if this regulation applies to these shops.
A couple of paragraphs are particularly interesting, #18 and #19:
(18) [...] traders should not, through the use of technological measures or otherwise, prevent customers from having full and equal access to online interfaces, including in the form of mobile applications, based on their nationality, place of residence or place of establishment. [...]
(19) In order to ensure the equal treatment of customers and to avoid discrimination, as required by this Regulation, traders should not design their online interface, or apply technological means, in a way that would, in practice, not allow customers from other Member States to easily complete their orders.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=15422088...
It's a pity, of course, but not a "new" problem.
So you gather your, say broccoli, look up the PLU code (it also might be on a sticker affixed to the item), put it on the scale, enter the code, and the scale prints out your bar code that you scan.
I'm a dozen miles north of Boston, MA.
The only "pain" is having to look up the produce and weigh it, but with a little practice I got to be pretty fast at that too.
I can't see a reason why self-checkouts should be forbidden. If people don't like them, don't use them. Why should people who do like them be forbidden from shopping in a way that they prefer?
Should Gentoo Linux that you have to compile the kernel yourself also be forbidden?
Should cooking at home also be forbidden?
Where does the line go where you have to pay someone to do something for you instead of doing it yourself?
Today automated checkouts are popping up in more and more shops in Norway, though they're not present in all stores yet. You simply do your shopping as normal, but instead of having a shop clerk beep them for you, you have to do it yourself. It's pretty straightforward, and no app is needed. Sometimes there will be a guard overseeing the terminals, but mostly you're left to your own devices. Otherwise there's usually a normal teller on hand for questions or for products that don't scan. Or if you simply want to pay with legal tender, which Norwegian shops are still obliged to accept per law.
They may all be gone now, it doesn't take much to destroy that level of local trust.
That's been proven not to be the correlated in various studies. Similarly, there's a huge discussion regarding minimum wage in the US, while actually minimum wage adjusted for inflation went down significantly over the last few decades.
Automation happens in any case, especially with technology continuously getting cheaper.
Anecdotal: In e.g. Netherlands the minimum wage is lower if you're 15 until 21. Different amount until you're 21 or so. As a result supermarkets often fire anyone over 18 while pretending it isn't about the age. The minimum wage is already extremely low for 15-18, raising it would encourage more people to work in supermarkets instead of the current situation. Further, supermarkets are fully focussing on self-checkout. Despite the super low minimum wages.
A lot of retail has a trade off between small convenient stores and bing inconvenient ones. One is convenient. The other is better stocked, better priced, etc.
Software is eating the inconvenient stores. Better stocked, Better priced. Hard to beat. Maybe robots eat convenient stores.
Depending on how these scale and what price economics are like, this might work well.
"There are 24-hour surveillance cameras too, which alert the store's manager Domenica Gerlach if there's a break-in or a stock spillage.
She looks after four stores in the region, usually visiting once a week to clean, stack the shelves and put together click-and-collect orders made online. Lifvs uses artificial intelligence to work out what stock to order for each store, based on the data it collects about locals' shopping habits"
The "AI" is an if test
if stock < stock_threshold:
buy_more(stock)It's a counter intuitive conclusion.
cite: Translucent Databases
source: worked on medical records and voter privacy stuff
This makes sense since they're not "in full prod" so to speak, unless that's changed.
- warehouses and public dispensaries are content-address-based networking for the physical world.
- I don't really care about purchases being deanonymized because money itself a public good.
- I do care about the private sector having the data, because they will surely do terrible things with it.
Back to the networking analogy, the post is classic local-address-based networking for the physical realm. Just as we have a state-run post service utility, we should have a state-run warehouse-and-store utility.
Even all you free market types: the point is of the free market is that the transacting agents are independent, not that the market itself is. Running the marketplace and goods distribution utility as a public good is perfect fine "market socialism".
The only thing to be mindful of is that there is a standard and fair procedure for new sellers to have their goods stocked and distributed to bootstrap the demand.
> The store is part of the Lifvs chain, a Stockholm-based start-up that launched in 2018 with the goal of returning stores to remote rural locations where shops had closed down because they'd struggled to stay profitable.
You say that like it is a universally accepted truth, yet the American worker allegedly takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant[0]. Going even further back, prior to agriculture we likely had even more "free" time[1].
Efficiency is a goal is nice, but the modern work day does not strive for efficiency.
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/american-worker-less-vacatio...
[1]: https://www.earth.com/news/farmers-less-free-time-hunter-gat...
Well then it's a good thing adamcstephens didn't suggest that, is it not?
> If it becomes a problem then we have to deal with it by finding new avenues
That's the correct approach, but so far the strategy has been a combination of denial (which I hear an echo of in the word "if") and inaction. Protectionism is a dead end, but so are denial and inaction. It's going to get worse before it gets better.
Since alphabet's invention put ancient egyptian hieroglyph writers out of jobs, we as a society has put up with it just fine.
I mean what do the 1000 people in the town do for a living to buy food?
The people who would have worked at this kind of shop will find other jobs created or otherwise enabled by the lowered costs of automation.
Automation doesn’t create jobs, it shifts them, generally towards less well paid options. Sure there are a few engineers who make more money, but what about the non skilled laborers?
That’s a political problem. Obvious solution is to transfer wealth from those who have it to those that don’t. Make higher education free, pay people to learn, or to do research, universal basic income, etc.
I’m on board with your suggestion. Let’s implement it. Alongside the progress in automation, not as an afterthought.
I think you answered your own question.
You’re welcome to ignore the questions I raise, but hungry people won’t give a shit about your philosophy when they upend the systems that have abandoned them.
This is a good thing. Small talk with cashiers who can’t walk away is borderline harassment
Wow, that sounds pretty racist. Do better Sweden, we all remember what you did in WW2.