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Comment by vages | Hacker News Reader

There will be a market for both automated and manned grocery stores in the future.

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.

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>wouldn't trust a computer to recommend a cheese to with a certain kind of crackers.

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.

the cheese counter staff at whole foods are usually pretty knowledgeable (more so than me anyway).

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.

You'd be surprised how useful local butchers are at big chains. They really know their stuff and have been able to sort out cuts for me, even are happy to slice up some cheap big beef cuts into stir fry, they can make special orders of sausage, etc.

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.

oh for sure. I'm probably gonna go to an independent butcher if I want a nice ny strip, but otherwise I'm going to the local chain and asking the butcher what cut they recommend for the recipe I'm making.

I didn't call anyone an idiot, but if I'm a 19-year-old clerk I have other things on my mind than what type of cheese people like.

Nor would it be this 19-year-old's job to guess what your preferences are

> There will be a market for both automated and manned grocery stores in the future.

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.

As I said, many people are pressed for time when they shop for groceries. If physical staff could help reduce the stress of shopping, I still see a market for physical stores the next 20 years (longer than that is anybody’s guess).

My store will shop for you, and deliver to your car. So if you value the time, that's a solution here.

As long as it's not produce. Everytime I try a shopping or delivery service a good chunk of the produce is trash. Bruised, under ripe, over ripe. Yes I am picky.

The same happened to me. I just couldn't to trust them choosing vegetables or fruit.

You still have to make an order for everything you need and then go to the store to collect it. So the only time you really save here is the difference between collecting stuff from the physical shelves and the online counterpart.

Cant imagine that being more than a couple of minutes of saved time for me.

Some UK supermarkets have the same online user interface for delivery to your car and for delivery to your house.

That was the comment being responded to. That it takes an app to find stuff. Which is onerous and presumably takes more than a couple of minutes.

I like your sentiment but you are here on HN so assuming you are somewhere with food and an internet connection. Life is good. I see people around me begging on Facebook from the public library internet connection for cans to return so they can eat. They won’t care for one second about a human in the store they only care about getting the cheapest food they can. These automated stores I can really see being a hit especially if they can cut the costs of a regular store even by a small percentage.

I seriously doubt they are cost-saving. Small volume, expensive electronics, remote location == higher prices, not lower?

> Although locating stuff _could_ be solved by looking it up with an app

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...

>I wouldn't trust a computer to recommend a cheese to with a certain kind of crackers

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.

There can be one person making recommendations remotely for 10 stores. That same person can be sitting in front of an interactive map which allows them to look up the location of items and since there is a a camera in the store they will know where you are in relation to the item to direct you.

This seems like a strange counterfactual to insist on when the article is empirical evidence that, in this case, there wasn't a market for both kinds of stores and that people weren't willing to pay the markup.

> I wouldn't trust a computer to recommend a cheese to with a certain kind of crackers.

I mean, anyone who likes cheese just a little bit would never ever recommend you crackers with it ;-)

Couldn't this be replace with roaming alexa style bots on r even something stationary at the end of each aisle?

Given the quality and scope of most state of the art chat bots and personal assistants I can only imagine this being an immensely frustrating experience.

> Until we have developed artificial general intelligence, I wouldn't trust a computer to recommend a cheese to with a certain kind of crackers.

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.

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