Episode 128 - New Urban Dynamics & Shopping Innovations Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought so many changes to the world, and much of our lives will never be the same. As we all try to keep up, many people have found themselves moving from the cities to the suburbs. Likewise, companies continue to innovate and create ways to make transactions safer and more seamless.
The episode centers on human migration patterns between the cities and the suburbs in the context of past and present issues surrounding the United States. Max and Aaron also share their experiences with smart shopping solutions. They discuss the wonders of Amazon Go and smart carts, trends that heightened as the world addresses the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tune in to learn more about the changes in urban dynamics and smart shopping solutions.
Sponsor: RION (Raw Internet Object Notation)
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Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:
Trace the living patterns of residents in cities and suburbs. Will the events of 2020 shift these behaviors?
Discover the value and future of contactless shopping solutions through Amazon Go and smart shopping carts.
Learn about the challenges and downsides to these shopping innovations.
Resources
NY Post: New York City hits “Phase 4” by Kate Sheehy
Wall Street Journal: Connecticut Bet Big on the Suburbs. That Might Finally Pay Off. by Joseph De Avila and Jon Kamp
Fox Business: More cashierless Amazon Go Grocery stores to open by Cortney Moore
The Verge: Amazon’s new smart shopping cart lets you check out without a cashier by Nick Statt
Tech Times: Antifa Protesters Break into Amazon Go Seattle Store, Police Label them 'Criminal Acts' by Jon Lindley A.
Katie Daviscourt on Twitter: Amazon Go Seattle Looted and Vandalized
Related Episodes
Episode 113 with the Predictions Panel with a followup to urbanization
Episode 38 with the Predictions Panel on The Outer Suburbs
Episode Highlights
Post-War Human Migration Patterns
In the years following World War II, large groups of Americans, mostly starting families, desired to buy a home. However, cities couldn’t necessarily support all these people.
This eventually triggered an explosion in suburban development in towns closest to the cities.
In a migration phenomenon known as “white flight,” numerous middle- and upper-class white families moved out of cities and into the suburbs.
While not necessarily a direct cause of the phenomenon, the civil rights movement and increased civil unrest is strongly correlated to white flight.
Migration is also technologically driven. As more adults became car owners, the suburbs became a more attractive residential location because they finally could travel around more easily.
Current Urban Dynamics & Human Migration Patterns
Since the post-war housing boom, America has experienced ebbs and flows in the housing development.
For the longest time, young families and professionals made homes out of big cities like New York while ignoring less adventurous, small suburban towns like Connecticut.
However, the ongoing pandemic and severe economic downturn challenge these patterns.
More people become motivated to escape the city, although this attitude may only be temporary.
Age and racial diversity is observed to be absent in the suburbs. Mainly, 20-somethings are more attracted to the excitement and culture of the cities.
Amazon Go Stores
Upon entering the store, open the Amazon Go app and scan it to get through the turnstile. Take the items you want and leave without the need to wait in line for the cashier to bag and bill your purchases.
Sensors track customer movements inside the store and calculate total checkout value without a human cashier. Instead, customers pay online via their Amazon Go account.
The latest trend in grocery shopping is here to stay and grow. Currently having 26 stores, Amazon Go is expanding in Washington D.C. and Seattle, where its main headquarters are situated.
This technology becomes highly valuable amid the pandemic as it offers a seamless and contactless way of doing your errands.
Smart Shopping Carts
Unlike Amazon Go stores, there are no camera sensors and other equipment in the store to detect items taken off shelves automatically. Instead, the carts come with components that track the things you get.
This innovation is simpler to roll out. Stores don't have to be shut down for a couple of months to make them compatible with Amazon Go.
With this innovation, the company wouldn't have to compete against all the large grocery chains like Walmart.
Instead, they can get their competitors to use the smart shopping carts. This would allow them to keep their niche (Amazon Go) and still compete in a different market.
The Challenges of Smart Shopping Solutions
Operating in the current political climate has recently made Amazon Go stores susceptible to looting and vandalism.
Sometimes, the presence of a person makes the process easier. Although these innovations are time-saving, the customer is left responsible for a task the company would have otherwise hired someone else to do.
However, this challenge is not new. Even the use of self-checkout counters can be challenging for some.
The system may not be a completely smooth process. A deviation from its ideal use can cause it to break down.
Nonetheless, these solutions reduce a lot of friction, especially amid the pandemic.
5 Powerful Quotes from This Episode
“Is this the pendulum swinging the other way? Is the gentrification movement functionally over, and we're going to see the suburbs taking a lot of that momentum?”
“There could be an opportunity for an urban renewal because things have been built up for many, many years. Now, with this pandemic, city living has just gotten to be really bad.”
“Automated stuff can feel more frustrating. They’ve offloaded on to you what they would have otherwise paid a person to do for you. You’re now paying with your own time.”
“Is your desire to avoid dealing with a human being stronger than your tolerance for dealing with a system that’s not completely smooth? Because anytime you have a deviation from the most ideal use case, the system starts to break down.”
“Reducing this friction of life is a big business opportunity, and it really does make a difference in the aggregate. When you feel confident that you could just run out and do things, it really does change the number of things that you can get done during the day.”
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To expanding perspectives,
Max
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum Episode 128. This episode of Local Maximum is sponsored by RION: Raw Internet Object Notation. You might not think that you're in the market for data formats, but you are. And RION by Nanosai is a new data format, and later in the show, we'll talk about why you might want to check it out.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max Sklar: You've reached another Local Maximum. Welcome to the show. Today is another news update. Let's call it the July news update. I'm joined, of course, by Aaron. Aaron, how are you doing today?
Aaron Bell: I'm doing well. Greetings, fellow listeners.
Max: Well, today, when this goes out, it will be Monday, July 20th. And that means that New York City is now going to be on, unless they change it this weekend, is going to be on phase 4 of the reopening of the city. And they're very triumphant about these different phases. Phase 4 is the last phase, but now . . .
Aaron: Think of this: they call it “phase” because if they call it “stage 4,” it would sound like a cancer diagnosis.
Max: Well, yeah. So phase 4 is the last phase, but now it's just like, “Oh, there's still different things that we're keeping open and closed. We're just not calling them phases; now we're just arbitrarily making rules.”
Aaron: Someday, we will be unfazed.
Max: Yeah. So you're still not going to be allowed to do an indoor, you know, indoor food or anything like that. Gyms, still out of the question, and a number of other things. So . . .
Aaron: I think we're in, like, 3A here in Massachusetts.
Max: Oh, my god.
Aaron: It includes most of that stuff in some form or another.
Max: You have letters and numbers?
Aaron: I think. To be honest, I haven't gone out much, so I haven't paid that much attention to it. But I believe that gyms and restaurants, you know, eating indoors have opened up, with special requirements.
Max: Right. They're just skipping that from New York City for now. New York, I've been traveling around. New York does look a little bit better than it has been—not quite back to normal, of course. Manhattan is completely emptied out because—which in some cases is good, you know—Manhattan, a lot of the population are the people who work there every day. And since they're not coming in, it's so empty.
So I have a little news—a personal news. In a couple weeks, I'll be moving out of Brooklyn to Manhattan, and that's sort of a big deal. I don't know. I really loved the idea of living in Brooklyn, and it's been great for a while. It hasn't been so great the last few months and, you know, the last couple years, this neighborhood has not been ideal, but I think it could get better again. But anyway, that's where I'm at.
Aaron: That's exciting. It could be exciting to be back in the heart of the city, but . . .
Max: I'm excited about it, but I'm sad to leave Brooklyn. I don't know. Brooklyn has a special type of creativity and personality that Manhattan just doesn't have.
Aaron: Well, I was gonna say it's always a short subway ride away, but I don't know how soon you're going to be riding the subway again.
Max: Oh, sure. No, no, but I'll be a short taxi ride or car ride or whatever I'm going to do. I've had a car here the last few months, and now I kind of want to keep it, and we'll see if I can make that happen.
Aaron: Sounds good.
Max: So speaking about human migration patterns, and maybe this will segue into some urban data science. We're not going to actually go into urban data science today, but I feel like we've talked about that on the show, and urban data science can help explain some of this stuff. But I want to talk about an article in the Wall Street Journal because it actually highlighted the town where we grew up—town of Weston. So, basically, the title of the article is Connecticut Suburbs. Well, actually, let me open up this because I was just trying to read the URL. It's Connecticut's Big Bet on the Suburbs That Might Finally Pay Off.
And just to give a little background, the idea was, “Yeah,” you know, Connecticut says, “Hey, we're great for those of you who live in New York, but, you know, you want to move out to Connecticut. Move out to Connecticut.” But then it turns out in recent years that people want to live in New York. People want to live in the big city; they don't want to live in Connecticut. And now that there's been this pandemic, people want to live in Connecticut again is the idea. Maybe this is very temporary, you know. Who knows?
But, you know, we've talked about the idea of a technological-driven, changed migration patterns. Most notably, I kind of consider the 1950s, the 1970s move to the suburbs or even a little bit before that. We kind of think of 1950s because it's post-war, but even before that, when, you know, people started having their cars, the suburbs started getting built because you had that ability to travel in and out a lot more easily or to travel around the suburbs a bit more easily.
Aaron: Yeah. And the Great Depression and the war years certainly put a damper on any of that in a meaningful fashion.
Max: Sure.
Aaron: But, yeah, as soon as the war was over, you had all the GIs coming back, starting their families and the baby boom, and a lot of them, you know, spread out. It was a combination of the cities couldn't necessarily support all of those people, but also, with a such a large group of people starting families and wanting to buy a home, that you get the explosion in kind of tract housing, the whole ticky tacky houses, they all look the same thing.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: A lot of sub developments. And not just the advent of the suburbs, but the whole suburban sprawl concept really grew out of that and may have had its ups and downs, but it never really stopped.
Max: Yeah. And, like, the quintessential example is always Long Island's more than Connecticut because . . .
Aaron: Mmm.
Max: But anyway, that trend is true, I think, in most places in the world, most of the developing world. Like, if you go to Europe, they probably had a very similar situation happen, or in Asia as well. It could not be exactly.
Aaron: I was about to say that China might be the exception to that, but I don't have enough transparency there. I just know that they're building a ridiculous amount of huge cities with intense urban density, but that doesn't mean that they aren't also seeing an explosion in suburban development.
Max: Right. Right. So anyway, I feel like the development since then, we've had ebbs and flows to and from the city, but they haven't been as dramatic as had occurred in those years. And that's why I go back to those years. So the question is . . .
Aaron: I think when we were living there, my impression—and I don't have statistics to back this up—but it seemed like, you know, maybe 50% of the the working folks in town commuted into New York City, and the other half maybe work more locally. But it wasn't purely a bedroom community; not everybody drove to the train station every morning.
Max: Sure.
Aaron: But it was a significant section of the population.
Max: I really would not want to do that. I mean, that's an hour on the train plus getting to the train in both sides. And I know we moved there because my dad had a job in town in Connecticut. And so if it was just a job in the city, we would have stayed on Long Island.
Aaron: Yeah. Well, I think it was a gradual process, to some extent, that a lot of companies were working in the city and people would move out to the closest suburbs, you know. You’re Greenwich and maybe a little bit further out than that. And they say, “Oh, I really like it here,” and then when they went and started their own companies, they would start companies, you know, based in Stanford or something.
Max: Right.
Aaron: And so, it kind of spread out the web a little bit further, and so it became a lot easier for people, particularly, I would say, in the finance industry, to spread across southwestern Connecticut.
Max: Yeah, yeah. One of the things that concerns me is, you know, I'd like to move out and get more space at some point, but could I have, you know, that creative job while doing that? And so, you know, there are few things I consider. One, I could podcast from anywhere. I could probably podcast a lot more easily out there, so that would be a plus. And I don't know, maybe now I can work something out where I could have a job that's in the city if I can't find something that I want to do in Connecticut where I don't have to go in every day.
But one of the quotes that stuck out of me in Neighboring Western—I think they were talking about Wilton or Westport or something—but the article had a lot more on Western. In Neighboring Western, many homes are tucked far back from the road behind the low stone walls, familiar throughout New England. Yep, we remember that. Real estate agent Vickie Kelly recently sold a $1.2 million home still under construction to a family relocating from Brooklyn. They're probably right around the corner here. Their need, she said, two home offices. Never gonna get that in New York City.
Aaron: Yeah.
Max: I'm just struggling to get one.
Aaron: Well, and I can tell you, as somebody who, in a household with two adults working remotely for the last several months, my wife definitely has office envy. Although when I offered to let her set up in my office, it kind of backfired because the kids just chased her in here too.
Max: But you still have two rooms, like, just separate.
Aaron: Yeah, we have plenty of space even if there aren't, you know, specifically designated to homeless offices. We have the flexibility.
Max: Yeah. I mean, I'm literally living in one room here.
Aaron: Yeah, we're not working with the actual physical space constraints that New York real estate imposes upon you.
Max: Yeah. So, I mean, I have an interesting question, and whether this sticks or whether this is a long-term trend, I feel like a lot of cities across the country have really not been well-run, and I don't want to get too much into the politics of it, but New York City has not been well-run. When I moved in, I felt like the city was . . . Well, we had Michael Bloomberg as mayor, you know. Love him or hate him, but he was bringing new businesses into the cities, he was always bringing more developments in, and he was always like, you know, less crime. I don't know. Maybe I'm seeing through rose-colored glasses, but I felt like every year I saw an improvement. And now, it's just turned 360 or 180, and I don't know if this is just a New York thing, or if this is a trend nationwide or even worldwide.
Aaron: Yeah, it's a little tricky to separate out the trend lines there. And is it something unique to New York? Is it all cities? Or is it an issue that we're seeing not restricted to the urban areas as well? Are some of those same challenges being faced in the more rural areas and just not getting nearly as much coverage? I've got two thoughts that I want to throw out on this and not discuss it all.
Max: Okay.
Aaron: So I'm just gonna state them and move on.
Max: Cool.
Aaron: So you mentioned that the big move to the suburbs seemed to happen in, you know, the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and we also, you know, kind of kicking off in the late ‘40s.
Max: Right.
Aaron: I'm not going to put causation behind this, but that movement aligns with something that sometimes referred to as “white flight” with a lot of the middle- and upper-class Caucasian families moving out of the cities strongly correlated with both the civil rights movement and increased civil unrest to things that, again, are not necessarily one causing the other but have strong correlation with each other. So is that perhaps a similar motivation to what we're seeing now? And kind of the flip side of that, we've been hearing for at least a decade, maybe more than that, a lot of this talk about the extreme gentrification, especially in places like Brooklyn. And is this the pendulum swinging the other way? Is the gentrification movement functionally over and we're going to see the suburbs taking a lot of that momentum? Or are these two trends that can continue to happen simultaneously and they're completely decoupled?
Max: Yeah. I mean, if those are the trends, I personally would not be very happy with it. I mean, it would be very sad. I like living in a diverse community with people who come from all over the world and who have many different backgrounds and who have, you know, many different ideas. Like, whether it's, you know, going around looking at the food or the cultural activities or, you know, just the people I work with, and you lose a lot of that in the suburb. I guess there are some more diverse suburbs, and it feels like, I don't know, we're almost destroying this diversity in the name of diversity.
Aaron: And not necessarily to focus on racial diversity, but perhaps a different kind of diversity is there's one particular group that is pretty poorly represented in communities like Western and some of those other similar suburbs, particularly in Connecticut, and that's 20-somethings.
Max: Hmm.
Aaron: That nobody who is between the phase of “I'm living with my parents and going to school” and the phase of “I've decided to settle down and buy a home and start a family” is going to be drawn to live in these places because they tend to have all the things that are exciting about living in—the city, the culture, the nightlife—all that stuff. The bohemian lifestyle is not a major factor, at least in kind of the outer suburbs. And so you don't have some of the people who might be most involved in some of the disruptive activism living in those communities.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: And that certainly has pluses and minuses to go along with it.
Max: I really hope that this could be seen as a tie. Like, you know, there could be an opportunity for, like, an urban renewal. Like, because things have been being built up for many, many years, and now, with this pandemic, city living has just gotten to be, you know, really bad—just with a pandemic itself—and then, you know, now, here in New York, we see such an increase in crime and graffiti and other vandalism.
And it doesn't feel like it should be that hard to get back on track. And, I don't know, if this pandemic is over, and it's in the rearview mirror in a few years and a lot of the 30-, 40-somethings have moved out, if I'm someone who's just graduated from college and the rents have come down, I don't know, maybe it would be a good time to move back into the city.
Aaron: You know, and it's the same thing that you saw with gentrification in the previous kind of cycle that it was adventurous. You know, young people moving into the more dangerous neighborhoods and making a go of it, and maybe that's not going to be a question of, you know, a rundown. You know, former tenement, it's going to be, “Oh, you're really taking the risks getting some of that cheap real estate in the COVID zone,” and it'll pay off big in a couple of years when that's not an issue anymore.
Max: Yeah, could be. Yeah. Alright. We could move on from that. I was thinking of whether I want it to go into a whole history of what it was like, what my grandparents told me . . .
Aaron: There's more to say, but I don't know if there's more constructive we can give to that discussion at this point.
Max: I'll talk about all the things that my grandfather told me about old Brooklyn, but I'll do that another time. That would be interesting, but I don't think we have time for that.
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Now, back to today's fascinating discussion.
Max: We're talking about trends today that were pre-existing trends but have been heightened because of all of the craziness of 2020. Another one are these Amazon Go stores. Now, we talked about these Amazon Go stores, I think, before, whether it was in our tech retreat episodes where we were making predictions. It turns out, yes, this is going to keep going. Not a huge surprise. Amazon Go will keep expanding. And for those of you who have not used an Amazon Go store, I'm telling you: I've used it. It is a magical experience. You go in; you take what you want; you leave.
Now, before you go in, you have to open an app and scan it, so that's kind of annoying. But look: the most annoying thing in recent, you know, in recent months to me has been going into a store being like, “I know exactly what I want,” getting the things and then waiting online, having them try to bag it for you. They have to touch everything, and they . . .
Aaron: The Amazon Go stores, are those literally, no cashier, like, no staff involved? Or there are staff there [and] you just don't have to interact with them?
Max: You don't have to interact with them. There's like a person standing there to answer questions.
Aaron: Okay.
Max: And maybe to watch you. But the one in Brookfield Place, I think, only had one person there when I was there. I don't think they really need security because Brookfield Place sort of has a very good security, to begin with. It's like the mall. So, it was really just one person. Like, if you have trouble with the app, or there are probably a lot of people like me, the first time I went in, “What? You mean I could just take it out, and I don't have to do anything?” Like, you sort of go to that person, you ask them, like, the first time, you look over there, and you ask them, like, “Is this okay? Am I stealing?” You know, “Is this really gonna be popped up three minutes later that I took X, Y, and Z, and how does it know what I took?” And so it is pretty amazing. I think it'll save people a lot of time, and I think it's something that people are going to want to use now. And it could increase interactions. I don't know. They'll still have someone there to chat to if you want to chat, but it'll just be more seamless.
And so there are 26 Amazon Go stores currently. They're expanding now into Washington DC and Seattle, which happened to be Amazon headquarters. And then now, they have this shopping cart, which I'm a little bit more skeptical of. The store itself maybe is amazing, but there's an article in The Verge about a smart shopping cart they have, and so does it make sense? I don't know. Let me read the quote:
“The store, first confirmed last year, is not an Amazon Go store, meaning it does not have the cameras, sensors, and other equipment built into the ceiling for automatically detecting items you take off the shelves. Instead, this is your standard, everyday grocery store, only it has smart Amazon-made grocery carts for you to use.”
The Amazon Go store that I had, you could basically take three or four things off the shelf and walk out of it. So there's no cart; you don't have a giant bag of stuff. This is more, again, this suburban setting, I imagine, where you have a large shopping cart of stuff. Maybe it works. I don't know.
Aaron: Yeah, a couple of thoughts on this. So it seems like it's kind of a hybrid model. So we're not completely cashier-less here, but it gives you the option to go cashier-less. The other thing is that there was some mention in the article of the ability to scale, which I think they were talking in terms of that—of going from, like, you know, bodega-sized store to like Target-sized store.
Max: Right.
Aaron: That maybe getting all the camera coverage and everything for that is tricky, but I was thinking more in terms of, it's a lot easier to roll out a fleet of smart shopping carts to your local supermarket and all of a sudden, boom, it's Amazon-compatible, rather than having to shut the store down for a couple of months to do renovations and put all the cameras in and set up the, you know, the server room and back, or however they run it. This could be . . .
Max: Why is it when you talked about shutting the store off for a couple months, I was like “Flatten the curve. Shut it down.”
Aaron: But this could practically be done overnight, you know. Just roll the carts off the truck.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: And the next morning, you're Amazon cart-compatible. And this can be particularly useful if they've decided that they don't want to go full hog into the market of competing. Walmart is one of the largest grocery sellers in the country. You've got, you know, Stop & Shop and, at least up here in Massachusetts, Market Basket, and a lot of other significant chains. They don't want it . . .
Max: Yeah. Star Market. Didn't you guys have Star Market when I was there?
Aaron: Star Market is now part of . . . are they part of Stop & Shop?
Max: Man. Massachusetts is slipping it very often.
Aaron: There was a merger, and I've lost track of what it is, but yeah, they're a bunch of different chains. And I think I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon has decided that with their Whole Foods line. They're comfortable with that niche, but they don't want to compete against everybody. However, if they can get their competition to use Amazon carts, then not only can they have their own niche that they make money in, but then they can get their competition to pay the money. So this is like when Barnes and Noble started—was it Barnes and Noble or maybe it was Borders—didn't have their own online store, and they were literally using Amazon to sell their books online. So their . . .
Max: It could've been Borders.
Aaron: What became their biggest competitor was getting a cut of all of their online sales. So this could be the approach that Amazon is taking there with these carts because it's not a new technology. Like you said, there's the Amazon Go store, but on the other side of the coin, I'm sure we've all had probably frustrating experiences with self-checkout at a supermarket.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: There's also some stores that, instead of it being a cart that you bring around with you, there's like a little scanner gun that you can bring around when you're shopping, and you scan things as you put them into your cart, and then you can you check it all out in one go instead of having to have, you know, take everything out and hand them to the person working in the register. But it sounds like this is a much more frictionless, you know, kind of slicker approach to solving that same problem, and Amazon has made, you know, billions, perhaps trillions of dollars on making things just the tiniest bit more efficient and capturing the market that way.
So I think it would be very on-brand for them. My frustration is that sometimes a person just makes the process easier. The classic example, I mean, we've already talked about self-checkout at stores.
Max: Yeah, some of that is . . .
Aaron: But also ATMs at banks, it's . . . I feel like they built a poorly performing machine to do the job of a human and removed almost all of the humans from my list of options. So now what would have otherwise been, you know, go to the cashier and say, “I want to deposit this,” you know, “this envelope of cash and I would like to,” I don't know, “withdraw X amount in these denominations,” and they just do it. Now I've got to feed bills into a machine one at a time and tell it exactly what I want. And I want to deposit, you know, these six checks, then I got to put each check in and then tell the computer, “No, you scanned the amount wrong,” and correct it. It may be that it actually is faster to use automated stuff . . .
Max: Yeah. Well, now, I do that stuff at home.
Aaron: But it feels more frustrating.
Max: Yeah. I mean, now I just do that, we can do that stuff at home. So it's like . . .
Aaron: Yeah, but even there, they've offloaded onto you.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: And now what they would have otherwise paid a person to do for you, you're now paying with your own time to do.
Max: Yeah, but I can tell you with the Amazon Go store, like, it's not just that you're doing it on your own. They completely— Like, you don't have to do anything.
Aaron: Yes, that's the ideal approach here.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: That not only is there not, you know, a cashier doing that job. It's that you don't have to do that job either.
Max: Right? A lot of places are like, "You do that job.” And then you’re standing there trying to scan your stuff, and it's like, "Put that back on the bagging area. Take it off the bagging area. What are you doing with the bagging area? No more bags." Yeah.
Aaron: Even at the human checkout, when we were growing up, it was pretty standard that there would be the person working the cashier, and then there would be a bag boy who bagged your groceries and put them in the car. And that is very much the exception to the rule now. If there's somebody bagging your groceries, it's because they have too many people working the shift by accident.
Max: If we have a second for an aside, because one thing that I've been doing, I usually shop at these bodegas here and take them home. But because I have access to a car now, and because of everything that's going on, one of the things that I've been doing is taking the car out at night, driving 30 minutes to Long Island to go to, like, a big Stop & Shop, and then loading the car up with groceries. And so, I'm not used to it.
So I went there, I loaded the cart up, and I have to scan everything, and then bag everything. And then I scan it, and then it goes into the conveyor belt, and everything starts piling up against each other. And then I try to take the bags, but they're out of bags at this one area. So I have to go to the other guy's area to take bags, and I’m horrible at bagging them. I'm like, trying to get the, like, all the seltzers in one place, but then they all fall out, and the bag is like a little bottom-heavy, and . . .
Aaron: That is one of my biggest pet peeves with the self-checkout.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: I probably whined about this before. I'm not a big soda drinker, but I have a regular, well, before the pandemic, I had a regular weekly event that I was responsible for bringing snacks to it. So I always had to bring soda.
Max: Right.
Aaron: So I'd go to the store, and I'd pick up, you know, a couple of 2-liter bottles and self-checkout, and you put it on the conveyor about it's like, “Oh, would you like me to roll the soda down the conveyor belt so that it's nice and shaken up before you put it in the bag?”
Max: Yeah, no, not only was that happening, but it was rolling in the opposite direction for some reason. So the conveyor belt was pushing it on, but it was rolling up the conveyor belt somehow. I don't know how that happened, so it took forever for it to come down.
Aaron: We could rant on this for a while, but there are two thoughts that I wanted to share.
Max: I just learned of this last week.
Aaron: There are two things here. So, right now, in the system that's not completely frictionless, but it sounds like it's reducing the friction, it comes down to a question of, is your desire to avoid dealing with a human being stronger than your tolerance for dealing with a system that's not, you know, completely smooth? Because anytime you have a deviation from, like, the most ideal use case, the system starts to break down. So the things that we were talking about there.
Max: I think not just dealing with a human being, though. It's also waiting in line with other people and being in front of someone who has to debate the cashier for 10 minutes whether they can use a 25 cent coupon, and . . .
Aaron: And none of those things are new.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: But they're all exacerbated by the current pandemic.
Max: Right.
Aaron: And I would say that, right now, I would probably be willing to deal with a little bit of technological hassle to reduce my direct interaction with complete strangers in a supermarket.
Max: Yeah, maybe it's just, labor is becoming, you know, so expensive that it's like, if there's only one cashier lane open and, you know . . .
Aaron: Well, yeah, that's part of the problem. The frustration is that that causes longer lines and more backup.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: And all things that make it slightly more desirable to go down to this other path.
Max: Right. A place that I like going to pre-pandemic was Whole Foods, which had it down to a science, I guess they could—they are Amazon—but it does get pretty crowded in there, and, yes, you have to wait online for sometimes a pretty long time here in the city.
Aaron: Yeah. So I guess two things to mention on that, and both of them are about actually gas stations. The last time I put gas in the car, which with the amount of driving I've been doing, that tank of gas lasts a long time right now. But it was the first time I used a contactless payment, which I've had the ability to do it for a long time, but normally, I just, you know, would take my credit card and stick it in the machine because that's the way I've always did it. But I use the little, you know, swipe it by the . . . I don't know if it's RFID or what it uses to do that, and so that was pretty slick. It's, you know, one less thing for me to worry about sanitizing when I get back in the car. And so, I think little tricks like that are getting used a lot right now, and people are going to be more likely to continue doing that when we come out the other end of this.
On that same note, I'm shocked that a gas station, you know, a chain of gas stations hasn't come up with a way to completely automate the refueling. So maybe not go full-service, like in New Jersey, where you don't even have to get out of the car, although they could do that with robots—that would be cool—but to completely remove the payment step out of it. Because they've already got cameras all over the gas station because they're watching to make sure that nobody, you know, gases up and scams out of there without paying or anything else. Why can't they use the camera to look at your license plate—because every car has a way of tracking it back to its owner—and then tie that, you know, that identification through license plate, to either a credit card or a bank account or something and build that directly, and just make that a completely, you know, seamless transaction phase.
But maybe now that Amazon is getting into the grocery store business, a lot of grocery stores will have—larger scale at least—will have a gas station attached to them. Maybe they'll experiment in this area.
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: And they've got the experience with robots that they could literally make it so you never have to get out of your car.
Max: And paying at the gas station can be a pain too, I mean, using those machines. I mean, nowadays, obviously, taking out your credit card and touching all the buttons and stuff is . . .
Aaron: Exactly, yeah. Or even worse, and I haven't had this happen in a while, thank goodness, but it seems, inevitably, there's one pump there where the machine doesn't work properly, and you try and scan it and you punch it, and it says . . .
Max: Yeah.
Aaron: "Oh, no. You got to go in and see the cashier." The whole point of trying to do this here was so that I didn't have to go inside and deal with a person and use cash.
Max: And then you go to the cashier, and there's a line of, like, three people there trying to buy soda, trying to buy Cherry Coke.
Aaron: And this is truly First World problems, but I don't like having to tell them, you know, "Put $20 on pump three." It's, no, I want to fill up the tank and it's gonna cost what it costs—don't make me go in and set an amount, and then if it's, you know, the tank fills up at $19, you got to come back in and try and get $1 from you. Or if it stops at 20, and I really need $25 worth of gas, I gotta do a second transaction. You know, First World problems.
Max: I know it sounds like First World problems, but really reducing this friction of life is a big business opportunity. And it really does make a difference in the aggregate. You know, when you feel confident that you could just run out and do things, it really does change the number of things that you can get done during the day or the number of things you need to think about during the day.
Aaron: And a lot of gas stations, I feel like, now, are, you know, run with a single attendant who's kind of overseeing everything. For a, you know, an owner-operated business, there may not be the incentive, but for some of the big chains, if they can completely roboticize that and not even need an attendant there 24/7, that could be a huge savings.
Max: Then we're in to Back to the Future.
Aaron: Yeah. Well, and you know, if mobile can, you know, have one guy sitting in a, you know, in a command center somewhere watching a dozen gas stations on video cameras and running those, that's pennies on the gallon that they can pass back to the consumer and savings.
Max Sklar: Alright, so that is today's discussion. There's a lot of angles to be covered on life today as it intersects with technological and social trends, particularly, with the future of our urban centers and our not-so-urban-centers. That will be a big theme in the 2020s, I think, and it'll be a big thing theme on the Local Maximum as we continue the show.
One follow up to this, basically, as we were discussing it, the antifa militants were breaking into the Amazon Go store in Seattle. I guess not everyone likes it. I guess that, I hate to say it, but the one thought I had was whether they sent the bill afterwards through their Amazon app if any of them had the app installed. But in all seriousness, you know, this says something about the issues we're facing today. It must look from the outside that our cities are just imploding. And even though these things are going on only in certain select areas, you also have the pandemic—we're living closer together, it’s tough—and I'm hoping there's a way out of this when the pandemic ends and order, you know, maybe order can be restored on the streets and maybe city life can resume one day. It's hard to see how this ends and what the long term effect is going to be.
I'd like to know what you think, specifically on the trends on city and country living as we head into the 2020s and also about these automated shopping solutions, like Amazon Go stores. The email to weigh in is localmaxradio@gmail.com. I'm working on some of your emails already. I know some of you are waiting on the Electoral College; I'll be getting to that.
If you can't tell, we continued the conversation that I had with Aaron, which you'll hear sometime in the next couple of weeks. I might try to sneak in an interview. We talked about the physicist Lawrence Krauss, who wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal about the corruption of science. We talked about some AI developments and also, you know, whether there's a role, or what is the role for the engineer, for the creator, in terms of ethics and activism, and that sort of stuff. Very important to listen to that. Make sure you stay subscribed. Have a great week, everyone.
Max Sklar: That's the show. Remember to check out the website at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host, or ask a question that I can answer on the show, send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. The show is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher and more. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe to the local maximum on one of these platforms and to follow my Twitter account @maxsklar. Have a great week.
