Cashey

In a post written by Gizmodo (https://gizmodo.com/why-self-checkout-is-and-has-a) they touch on the history of automation and retailers attempts to streamline services to remain competitive.

The post frames the drive to automation as primarily being about off-loading labor to the consumer. Although that's a large part of the reasoning behind businesses adopting it, I think that it's not the only reason.

There's a myriad of reasons from the businesses and consumers perspective about why automation is inevitable. First, yes, as labor costs continue to go up businesses will be forced to either raise prices or cut costs - usually both. There are other reasons as well though, reasons that are harder to quantify.

In the age of online shopping, people are becoming more comfortable shopping without the need for human interaction. Why do I need to have a discussion, even a limited one, to buy a box of condoms or a head of lettuce? The answer is I don't. It's not just a generational thing either. My family and I are Muslim. The amount of bigotry, snide comments, and micro-aggressions we have experienced from cashiers and clerks are too high to count. My mother, an American born hijabi, is much more comfortable at self-checkout than she is interacting with a bigot who only sees her head scarf.

Another reason checkout automation is inevitable is that wages are decreasing due to inflation and have been. This means that the quality of employees has decreased as well. Historically, you could maintain a knowledgable and higher caliber employee because you could attract better talent. Service levels reflected the higher caliber employee and customer satisfaction was high. Here is an interesting article about wage growth: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickwwatson/2018/09/25/real-wage-growth-is-actually-falling/#1cc8a1f67284

I didn't mean to write this much in this commentary but I want to touch on one last thing before I end. At the beginning of this post, I mentioned retailers having in their tool kits the ability to raise prices or cut costs. With wages across the board not growing, retailers can only raise prices so high before their inventory just sits and collects dust. Costs have to be cut in order for retail brick and mortar shops to remain viable. Self-Checkout among other technological innovations is not always viewed as great. It has a lot of maturing to do.

The paradigm for automated brick and mortar businesses is still being iterated over. It takes time and many attempts to get something like this right. No matter what your opinion of automation may be in regards to its effects on labor, one thing is certain. Technology to help lower costs and keep brick and mortar businesses alive is not going anywhere. I'd argue that automation is going to be the key to brick and mortar shops survival.

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on any of this :)

For the past month, I've been oscillating between building the client app in either React Native or Swift. I don't really know either so I did a little bit of work getting acquainted with them. Everyone says RN is supposed to be easier but I don't know. So far, Swift is making more sense to me.

I've been doing a Swift tutorial and hope to begin actually laying out my views by next week. I do have a few endpoints I realized I need to build on the backend to help with category and item sorting for display on the front end but should be able to get those out of the way in the next couple of days.

Initially, I thought I would have everything done by Jan 1st lol... Now, I'll be lucky if I hit April 1st.

A short guide for non-technical founders.

A post about shutting down one of my startups.