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19 Dec 2022: What if shops didn’t sell things?

[Image: a collage of Kuka/Ruscha/Burtynsky]

Hail and farewell

This is the last Co-op Digital newsletter. It has had an excellent and enjoyable run, thank you to everyone who helped get it going with decisions, everyone who kept it going with content, and everyone who read it. We’ve been wrapping up with 3 questions. Previously: more radical membership and more than a shop?

Thank you all for reading and sending ideas. The Co-op story continues on the magnificent Co-op Digital blog. Rod will still be writing about climate change and carbon transformation at Holdfast and about money at Checksies. See you there?

What if shops didn’t sell things?

Supermarkets and many other types of retail businesses are often high volume/tight margin machines, looking to increase volume and find small gains and complementary products and services with higher margins. Will this always be the case?

As climate change bites into the world, making it less predictable, will the cost and availability of materials change the dynamic for retail? Do supply chains fracture? Will managing the entire lifecycle of products and packaging add cost that makes retail unviable, or will it unlock new business? Can shopping fit into circular economies if recycling and reuse becomes central? What if shops bought things from you, instead of selling them to you?

2040

Aya looks the length of the warehouse. There’s a haze in the distance where the unfactory starts and above the superstructure is barely visible behind the ambient dayglow. A city inside a building.

She pulls the door shut on her housing unit and walks to the bus stop. There’s only a couple of minutes to wait before a driverless bus pulls up. These carbon grey boxes crawl the building, patiently looping between the different work, housing and leisure zones.

Aya gets on the bus and sits. Her glasses immediately pop up an interactive about hitting this month’s KPIs. With a glance she flicks it away, and looks the other way to access shopping. A carousel of plaid shirts flickering across the field of view, partly obscuring the view out of the window of apartment blocks, terraced 2-up 2-downs, community centres, and behind her in the distance parkland and the executive mcmansions. Aya considers buying a shirt that says 2005 and has all the confidence of that era. The checkout dances and says: “Hey you know you could put that 229.50 into something more long term? Say Pension to put it to work for you.” Aya sighs, shuts her eyes and whispers “Cancel”, the UI an afterimage in reversed colours.

Aya steps off the bus at the warehousing zone and passes through two layers of perimeter security: ID badge and then a tongue print which performs ID verification and a recreational drugs test. Now she is matter-side. She steps through the air wall into a cavernous space: kilometres of racking, ducting, assembly areas, disassembly areas, recycling, storage, cabling, transport, uncountable shelves of racking and gigantic bays of raw material.

10 years ago, at peak shopping, this building was Amazon’s largest fulfilment centre, the entire building performing inventory, pick and pack - all of it heading into cardboard boxes, out the loading bays and to everyone’s home via the Amazon-only lanes on the motorways.

Since then, the building has grown and evolved in response to 15 years of carbon budgets and circular economy targets. The shadow of the smile logo is still faintly visible on the wall. The work is now two-way: they’re doing as much inbound for recycling as they do outbound retail: the increasing value of material feedstocks made disassembly and recycling higher margin businesses. Across the way, building crews are pulling out the pick and pack racking, and hauling in more recyc stations.

Conveyor belts of toys, consumer goods, electronics, plastic items, everything. Some things are automatically sorted, separated by size or material type into smaller flows on smaller conveyors, a river delta. The metal goes off along a conveyor to be remelted in a distant area. The plastic is ripped apart into uncountable white-edged grains of feed stock.

Further away, and behind more layers of security, are the goop vats where the synthetic bio voodoo happens. There’s a smell of ammonia and long chain polymers everywhere, which the air ducting cannot ever remove entirely.

Here though, the river belt meanders through rows of stations, where human-robot pairs work next to each other, pulling objects off the main belt and moving them to several smaller tributary belts for onward sorting.

Aya walks up to the only unstaffed station. A fixed robot is at the wide conveyor belt. Its body is a 7-axis spine of rotatable stainless steel segments that look more like muscles than components. Its arm ends in an array of cameras, lidar sensors and rubber tipped and suction manipulators. Around the robot is a 2 metre no-go zone hashed out in hazard orange. It has placed several objects in that space around its base. A Casio watch. A christmas tree toy. A clown painting on black velvet. Lego pieces.

The supervisor approaches and shrugs at Aya: “You make it work, if you can. I in’t going near it though…” Aya swipes her badge into the work station. The robot’s arm monitors everything that passes on the belt under it, occasionally twitching as if indecisive. But it is not moving and not sorting items.

Aya watches the belt for a while and reaches out to pick up an old lunch box in blue and red plastic. She shows it to the robot, and then with great care Aya places it on the floor, inside the no-go zone, and steps back. The robot’s arm bends, the array inspecting the lunchbox for several seconds.

Then it straightens, moves back over the belt, and starts grabbing objects and sorting them.

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters. Stay strong.

9 Dec 2022: More than a shop? More than AI?

Anselm Kiefer, The High Priestess/Zweistromland

Newsletter news

Hello! The Co-op Digital newsletter ends this month after an excellent run. We’ve been wrapping up with 3 newsletters considering questions about membership being more radical, shops being more than just shops (this one), and the material world.

Thank you all for reading and sending ideas. The Co-op story continues on the brilliant Co-op Digital blog. Rod will still be writing about climate change and carbon transformation at Holdfast, and about how to do personal finance at Checksies. See you there?

More than a shop? More than AI?

Shopping today is often convenient, quick purchase of both essentials and discretionary products, presented as inventory and merchandising (high street shops) or marketing and search (online), and an underlying goal: grow. What if shops did more? What if shops were slower? What if they were more meaningfully embedded into the communities they serve?

Related question: how does technology help? Typically technology makes products repeatable, processes automatable, data insight-able (etc), and reduces costs. Can it do more than that? Can it free up *all* of colleague time, to spend with customers?

Anyway, here is the newsletter and new conversational AI ChatGPT trying to write a story about a supermarket together. Assuming that tools like ChatGPT continue to improve, it’s also worth thinking about what the world looks like when machines can initiate human conversation. And when anyone can generate plausible text (or imagery or…), using tools whose models may have opaque biases and insufficient consent. What happens to trust?

2035

Let's write a story together. I'll go first and you respond. OK? Here's the opening: Xavi parks their ebike at the rack outside the Freshco supermarket. It bloops to let Xavi know it’s secured and charging up.

[ChatGPT] Xavi smiles to themselves as they walk into the Freshco. They love their ebike, it's been such a game changer for them. As they enter the supermarket, they grab a cart and start to make their way down the aisles, picking up all the items on their shopping list. As they move from one aisle to the next, they can't help but feel grateful for their ebike, which has made it so much easier for them to get around town and live a more sustainable lifestyle.

Inside, Xavi shivers after the cold draft of anti-viral air at the entrance.

[ChatGPT] They quickly make their way to the produce section, where they select a few fresh fruits and vegetables for their meals this week. As they move through the aisles, they notice that the Freshco is not as busy as usual. Xavi wonders if it's because of the cold weather outside or if it's due to the ongoing pandemic.

Down the right side of the store, shoppers are using the kiosks, and at the counter is a screen and a worker, both with a smile.

[ChatGPT] Xavi continues to make their way through the store, grabbing everything they need for the week. As they approach the checkout, they see that there are several kiosks available for self-checkout, but they decide to go with a human cashier instead. They approach the counter and greet the cashier, who smiles and greets them back. Xavi notices that the cashier is wearing a mask and gloves, and there is a screen between them to help protect against the spread of the virus.

Xavi checks out, but then remembers that he needs to talk to the community service team, and heads over to an open area with armchairs. Xavi puts the bag on the floor and drops into a chair. Evie, a staffer, joins him, says Hi, and the green padlock on the chair's arm lights up, indicating that their conversation will be private. Evie: "How can I help?" Xavi: "Well, ..."

[ChatGPT] Xavi pauses for a moment, gathering his thoughts. He looks at Evie, who is patiently waiting for him to continue. Xavi then says, "Well, I wanted to talk to you about the community service programs that Freshco offers. I've been thinking about getting involved and volunteering my time, but I'm not sure where to start. Can you tell me more about what's available and how I can get involved?"

[ChatGPT] Evie nods and smiles. She begins to explain the different community service programs that Freshco offers, and how Xavi can sign up to volunteer. She tells him about the different causes they support, such as food banks, environmental conservation, and community outreach programs. She also gives him information about the schedule and requirements for volunteering, and how he can sign up online or in-store. Xavi listens intently, taking notes on his phone as Evie speaks. He is grateful for her help and is excited to get involved and make a difference in his community. He thanks Evie for her time and assistance, and they say their goodbyes. Xavi picks up his bag and heads out of the Freshco, feeling motivated and inspired to make a positive impact in the world.

He turns back and says "Yeah, but where to start?" Evie says: "Look, it's more... dynamic than looking at what's available. I can point you at a project right now, or you can look for a team online. Either way, they’ll need to decide if you can help make a difference to their mission happen."

[ChatGPT] An error occurred. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

Evie sighs at the error message, and uses her team badge to restart the openai service.

Xavi leaves with the shopping, considering what “making a difference” means. Xavi forgets to collect the ebike.

[ChatGPT] Too many requests, please slow down

Are you ok ChatGPT?

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

25 Nov 2022: Could membership be much more radical?

Newsletter news

It has had an excellent and enjoyable run but the Co-op Digital newsletter ends next month. We’re going to wrap up with 3 newsletters considering questions about membership, shops, and the material world.

Thank you all for reading and sending ideas. The Co-op story continues on the brilliant Co-op Digital blog. Rod will be writing about climate change and carbon transformation at Holdfast and about money at Checksies. See you there?

Could membership be much more radical?

Local stores offer a convenient geographic proximity - they’re just round the corner.

Could they offer a second kind of proximity, and be a critical part of communities? Could they help communities thrive with services, support, infrastructure as well as just the shop and the local causes bits?

Can a shop turn into a true member organisation? Can it help repair and maintain community?

These questions matter because the world is changing ever faster, and everything (products, services, institutions, infrastructure, jobs, cities etc) will need looking after, improving or remaking.

2030

“Can you fix it? Because this bike and I have been through a lot.” says Reenie at the bike shop.

Jim, behind the counter, nods. “Your battery has done a lot of kilometres and it is very tired now. I can swap it out for a new one for 499 which is the battery and the labour. Or I can sign you up for this Gobattery service which is a new battery every year for 199 annually and the labour’s free.”

“Which would you do?”, asks Reenie.

“Um, probably not Gobattery”, Jim murmurs quietly.

“OK. What happens to the old battery?”

“And your old battery will go have a relaxing retirement doing grid backup for a shopping centre or somewhere like that.” Then more brightly, Jim adds: “We’re a member of The Co-op, are you? I can add you in the app, it only costs 20. You get discounts in shops, vote on decisions, and help each other out. I can give you a 50 discount right now, so the card will cost you nothing. But it’s like you’re part of” - Jim’s hands wheeling - “you know, a… Thing.”

“Yeah OK, sounds interesting? Thanks.”

Jim taps at the terminal and there’s a quick transactional handshake of lights and bings. An app downloads to Reenie’s mobile, which briefly pops a green tick saying that the app is properly signed and isn’t hoovering up too much personal data. Reenie opens the app - it has already onboarded her - which says both of their Co-op memberships have earned 200 points for the transaction, and a green leaf grows on the screen: a small but positive update to the carbon budgets of Reenie, of Jim, and of the Co-op itself.

“Nice. It all adds up, you’ll see”, says Jim.

Several weeks later, and late in the evening, Reenie’s Co-op app bleeps out a red alert. A fellow member needs help: their premises is flooding. Reenie shrugs, grabs a coat and heads for the bike. The map takes her back to the bike shop.

Before she can make a joke about the emergency services arriving, Jim shouts: “The river burst its banks! Move things up, or put sandbags here, please?”.

And Reenie and a couple of others get to work, placing sandbags, lifting everything onto higher shelves, bailing water out of the shop. The culvert is cleared and the flood water starts to recede. It takes two hours. The bottom layer of the shop is now a landscape of grey mud over unidentifiable product shapes. The same mud that coats them.

Jim says: “Thank you so much. This stuff needs to dry out but some of it’ll be ok. Hey, take anything you want too, seriously, thanks. And I’ll update the app and send you points tomorrow.”

“OK cool. But it’s not about the points.”

8 Nov 2022: Searching the infinite shelf

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it’s about what the internet is doing to retail businesses, people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter.

[Image: Wayne Thiebaud]

Searching the infinite shelf

“Online shopping is a total mess in that it barely takes the opportunity to create story and experience. “Drops” are the closest we get to excitement. Instead we shopping online is indistinguishable from filling in a spreadsheet. An infinite department store catalogue.”

Ecommerce settled on “Searching for things you already know you want to buy” as the main way you shop online, and in some respects this is pretty sensible: if your shop is online you can have an infinitely long shelf. Long shelves take a long time to walk/scroll, so searching also makes sense. (Of course, this characterisation doesn’t account for the fact the shelf has moved to the warehouse, and a worker is jogging down it trying to hit their key performance indicators.)

There have been some interesting experiments with curation and some trying to make social media the front end for shopping. But other than that, ecommerce still struggles with discovery: how do you find out about things you *didn’t* already know you wanted to buy? And indeed how do you find out about brands and shops you didn’t already know you wanted to buy from?

Having been hurt by Amazon’s infinite shelf and infinite delivery network, the high street sees the need for shopping to be an experience, or more convenient, or somehow different (though probably not cheaper). Not that it is consistently delivering on that promise yet.

Related: Amazon, aggregators, and the death of brands.

Food and delivery

Food bank charity launches first-ever emergency appeal amid 'devastating rise in need'. Through its support of 1,300 food bank centres, The Trussell Trust said it has already used up its reserve stock, which would normally help maintain supplies across the winter months. (See also: supermarkets cut food waste which hits food bank donations.)

Tesco raises meal deal price as food costs soar - this feels like a big signal. It’s the first time in a decade that the meal deal has gone up.

Aldi is developing its own online grocery platform - working with German ecommerce technology company Spryker on a service that reduces its reliance on Instacart.

Deliverycos struggling: The Fantasy of Instant Delivery Is Imploding - Gopuff Fires Hundreds in Third Round of Layoffs and Deliveroo struggles with acquisition after slashing marketing spend. A strong sense that there isn’t any customer loyalty in delivery.

Climate

COP27 is on in Egypt, and the opening statements are dark. The risk is that we make continual incremental improvements all to way to 2050 and beyond, but completely fail to ever improve things *enough*. The challenge and opportunity is to completely rebuild the human world (you know - products, infrastructure, jobs, cities, society etc), because the one we have right now was built for a level of atmospheric carbon parts per million that is long gone.

New fossil fuels 'incompatible’ with 1.5C goal, comprehensive analysis finds.

“I often say the most mind-bending fact about climate is that half of all emissions came in the last 25 years. Maybe even more startling: the weight of that carbon is more than the total mass of everything ever built by humans and still standing on earth.”

Twitter

Things continue to move so fast in Elonworld that it’s hard to summarise it all coherently. This was a good read on the irreducible difficulty of content moderation: Welcome to hell, Elon. And this is solid reporting on the current chaos, including this good bit:

“Managers agonized over the decisions, and jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for the most vulnerable among them: pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas among them”

Musk is busy reversing the classic retailing phrase “You broke it, you bought it”. But maybe he’ll remake it. Some people are moving over to Mastodon or adding it alongside Twitter (good primer). And some aren’t.

Quoted

“[Augmented reality] fundamentally shifts the nature of the human experience past [the inventions of mobiles/PCs/etc] because it turns perception programmable”.

“I want to tell you that the SEC came in with spreadsheet-sniffing dogs.”

Co-op Digital news

Why we should work in the open.

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc by replying or to @rod on Twitter. If you’ve enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

19 Oct 2022: Amazon: bikes not bots. Can insurance fix climate change? Facebook meh-taverse.

[Image: Amazon]

Amazon: cargo bikes in, robots out

Amazon will spend €1bn to add thousands of electric delivery vehicles and micromobility hubs across UK and the continent, as well as installing fast charging points at warehouses.

“The company currently has around 3,000 zero-emission last-mile delivery vans in Europe. Amazon doesn’t say what percentage of its vans are electric, but does say that these zero-emission vans delivered 100 million packages last year. This investment will allow the company to expand that number to 10,000 vans across Europe by 2025.”

Not just vans:

“Amazon also has “micro-mobility” delivery hubs in 20 European cities that enable delivery by cargo bike and on foot, and it plans to double this network of hubs. Amazon will also buy larger, heavy-duty electric trucks for “middle-mile” shipments. These are vehicles like the Tesla Semi, Freightliner eCascadia, and Volvo VNR electric that move large amounts of goods from ports to distribution centers. Finally, the investment will also cover installation of thousands of chargers at the company’s facilities around the continent.”

More detail on the micromobility hub plans:

“Amazon currently has micromobility hubs in more than 20 cities across Europe, including London, Munich and Paris, and expects to double that figure by the end of 2025. These smaller, centrally-located delivery stations enable deliveries via e-cargo bike and on-foot to bring packages to customers more sustainably.”

However, the home delivery robots are being retired (Starship might be happy at the news?), and 400 people will move to other Amazon teams.

Meanwhile, Uber turns to autonomous vehicle startup Nuro for Eats deliveries - Nuro’s vehicles are designed to carry packages and to travel on public roads.

“Uber Eats customers will be charged the same for delivery, regardless of if it’s a Nuro bot or a human gig worker. However, there may be some cost savings as Nuro bots can’t accept tips.”

Which seems a little unfair to the cute Nuro robotcars. Maybe people will chuck cash inside before the door shuts.

Can insurance fix climate change?

2019: Rising sea levels a manageable concern for re/insurers, says climate expert.

2022: “AXIS Re will completely exit its Property Reinsurance business, which it says is part of its approach to lower volatility from catastrophe risk”.

Insurers have to calculate the likelihood of Bad Things happening, a job that’s getting harder as we dump more carbon/heat into the world (more heat = more change = tougher to predict). So you could think of insurance as an early warning system for climate change. When insuring your house on the coast gets more expensive or impossible, your insurer is telling you it’s getting too risky to live there.

It’s not just buildings insurance. From Jan 2023 re-insurer MunichRe will no longer insure new oil and gas projects. There’s a good explainer of what that means here but basically: high carbon fuel projects are going to find it increasingly hard to get insurance. Insurers raising premiums or turning down oil business may strongly nudge energy firms in a lower carbon direction. (MunichRe’s slogan is “Not if, but how”, maybe they’ll update it to “Not if, but why”.)

Does it make sense to think of climate action *as* insurance?

Products and energy

On the other hand, here’s an useful explanation of just how much modern *stuff* is made from oil and gas industry byproducts:

“Almost all synthetic materials in modern life start near the top of the ladder and are engineered downward in a controlled burn. This makes intuitive sense. The embedded energy to run the process is at least partially inherent in the starting material. Certain high-value materials are worth pushing up the ladder to obtain, but industry evolved the way it did for a reason – it is easier to slowly slide down than climb up.”

This is why swapping out carbon fuels for wind turbines is going to be a long slog. More reading: Vaclav Smil.

Food news

Dairy co-op Arla to pay farmers more for milk if climate targets met.

Making the Case for Intercropping - more than one crop in a field at a time decreases the need for fertilisers.

Dry weather sees Evesham vertical farm's produce demand soar - thanks to weather getting more unpredictable.

Supermarket push to cut waste hits Fareshare food bank donations - demand for food banks surges but reducing waste vs charitable giving is a difficult dynamic.

Facebook meh-taverse

Facebook’s Horizon Worlds metaverse thing has 300,000 users and is gradually rolling out across Europe - “Build the World of Your Dreams”. Some insiders are a bit “grumpy about” it, and apparently it is riddled with bugs (which to be fair to organisations building new things is actually pretty common).

But what isn’t common is that even the employees who are building it are barely using it, says the exec in charge:

“A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?””

2 weeks after those internal memos the Facebook metaverse overlords commanded its people to fall in love with Horizons:

“Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

Yes, a command is definitely the best way to get people to fall in love with something! Sometimes products have fatal flaws that everyone on the team can see but don’t want to discuss, usually because they hope the flaw can be overcome with hard work and inspiration. A cultural blindspot.

In the case of Horizons though, perhaps it is that the teams working on it can see the flaws, and rather than try overcome them by applying their genius they just think meh and go off to do something else instead.

Various things

“For this crew, the early success of their past companies or careers is usually prologue, and their skills will, of course, transfer to any area they choose to conquer (including magically solving free speech). But what they are actually doing is winging it” - reading the WhatsApp transcripts in the Elon Musk vs Twitter lawsuit.

Gen Z has cancelled the thumbs-up emoji because it's 'hostile'.

Paint one wind turbine blade to save birds and bats - it reduces collisions.

From the Scottish news desk: slightly blootered Glasgow pair heroically try pizza from a vending machine, in the wall of an abandoned shop. It is not a good pizza.

Co-op news

How our users influenced our new forms guidance - part of Co-op’s much larger Experience Library.

Co-op trials reduced lighting in stores to lower energy costs - convenience store lucky dip! Have Co-op ever trialled doors on the fridge displays?

Thank you for reading

Do people want checkoutless shopping?

Checkoutless shopping and talismanic technology

In 2019, a survey found that 73% of US consumers preferred self-service technology to engaging with store staff. But by August 2022:

“The technology challenge of actually implementing it can overshadow the importance of the user experience. When that happens, it really takes something that’s supposed to be friction reducing and just creates a new way to frustrate customers.”

And from the same article:

“Out of 1,000 survey respondents, 67% said they’ve experienced a self-service checkout kiosk failure [...] In a survey of U.S. adults, just 14% of women and 15% of men said they use cashierless checkout technologies regularly, according to an Insider Intelligence e-commerce survey conducted by Bizrate Insights in August. Meanwhile, 27% and 22% of women and men, respectively, have not used them and are not interested, per the survey.

“Older shoppers also aren’t too keen to use cashierless technology. The same survey indicates that 21% of 18 to 34-year-olds used this tech regularly versus 16% for 35 to 54-year-olds and just 6% for 55 to 65-years olds.”

In the UK, half of shoppers preferred to use self-checkouts (2018), and

“One in three (37%) said that they would only want human interaction if they couldn’t find what they were looking for or if they had a problem with an item they had already purchased.”

But details matter: An analysis into early customer experiences of self-service checkouts: Lessons for improved usability (UK again, 2019) found that:

“the majority of respondents were motivated to use the technology because of time saving and convenience. However, the actual experience of using SSCOs [self-service checkouts] was not always considered quicker when compared to staffed checkouts because of technical issues, lack of staff assistance and the impersonal, sometimes stressful and controlled nature of the cramped SSCO environment. Following post-use reflections, the majority of respondents’ opinions did not change from their initial perceptions and indicated that they would prefer not to use the technology in the future”

And of course, Covid nudged everyone towards self checkout, as well as home delivery. This looked like it was going to permanently change habits: in 2020, 74% of shoppers said that they planned to continue using checkoutless in future.

However here in 2022 Amazon has slowed the rollout of its checkoutless Go stores. And there’s a revolt at Tesco. Maybe: there was a now-deleted tweet going round that said:

“I Want to applaud every soul who silently and quietly said NO in Bradley Stoke Tesco yesterday, who took the time to queue to be served and not be forced to the new self serve”

But in truth that shoppers weren’t actually resisting the machines - it was just that there was a problem with the checkouts. But there is some resistance *somewhere*: nearly a quarter of a million people have signed this petition.

Maybe the learnings here are firstly that surveys can tell wildly different stories! And secondly, that implementation details really matter. Obviously when checkouts don’t work or are slow or keep erroring that’s frustrating, and gives shoppers a clear comparison: it was easier before with checkout staff running the machines.

The wider picture is that in retail but also the warehouse and the workplace, technology is often the very tangible symbol of change. When the change feels uncertain or negative, the technology often becomes a lightning rod or talisman for how you feel about the underlying change. “This doesn’t work”, you mutter at the self-serve checkout. “So this new website is why my colleagues got made redundant is it?”, an IT consultant is asked. So time spent on engagement with people and reliability of tech will rarely be wasted for digital and technology teams.

Related: Ben Brewer has an interesting 2018-era look at self-serve in Sainsbury’s. And in 2022, Sainsbury’s is pitching self checkout/scan as you go as providing better information to shoppers in tougher economic times: “know your bill before the till”.

Ecommerce does media

Morrisons reveals retail media network and dedicated internal agency. Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco have already done similar. Swiftly (ecommerce platform plus media network) raises money. And Instacart buys AI-powered pricing and promotions platform Eversight.

Why this matters: retail chains and platforms recognise that they have valuable shopper attention and data, and that can be a source of new revenue.

Permacrisis: pensions and everything else

Recap: inflation is up, growth is flat, the war continues, energy costs are high (until 2030 or later?), supply chains are crunched, interest rates are up, the cost of living is painful. The UK government’s plan is to increase growth and lower taxes so that economic benefits can deliciously trickle down to everyone. The markets (which will lend the money to the gov) were unconvinced so it now costs the UK more to borrow money. This nearly crashed the UK pension system:

“Executives told the Financial Times that markets barely dodged a Lehman-Brothers-like collapse – but this time with your mum’s pension at the centre of the drama. Problems with “pension plumbing” are what caused the mess. The culprit is said to be a popular pension strategy called, or LDI.”

(If you fancy some chunky detail on how liability-driven investing nearly ate your mum’s pension, here is some reading: Mikey Gow, Toby Nangle.)

Why this matters: very difficult times, and you might guess that “stagflation” is on the way: high inflation but no growth. Pensions (and indeed economies, right?) are supposed to be safe-ish. Questions: how much more government support will be needed? Do we need Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Energy and Universal Basic Services?

The queue

The Queen was the only monarch most people in the UK have ever known, so she had always been *there*. Regardless of your position on the monarchy or its entanglement with history, the dedication of service was extraordinary. The newsletter is most struck by her longevity and constancy, two qualities that are rare if you’re used to thinking about the technology world. This was an interesting piece and there’s a good round up of what was happening in that queue at ustwo Europe’s newsletter. (Funeral care note: the logo on the hearse was enough to take down the website of William Purves funeral directors.)

Why this matters: Everyone is trying to process so much that has happened in the last few years. The end of an era, or maybe of several at once.

Vertical farming

The promise of vertical farming is that it lets cities produce food more locally in dense urban environments. Farming in a tower right next to the consumers = less waste and travel cost. But critics point out that the electrical energy demands make vertical farming very inefficient when alternate energy sources (sunlight hitting plants in a field) are free. Elsewhere, Scotland is looking at using vertical farms to accelerate its tree planting programme, getting 18 months of sapling growth in 90 days by starting seedlings off in vertical farms.

Why this matters: farming must find more sustainable models. Vertical farming may be better at compressing time than it is compressing space.

Co-op news

From Twitter:

What happens to the soft plastics collected by Co-op for recycling?

Co-op Digital teams provide accessibility training to operations product managers responsible for the tech our colleagues use in stores

Thank you for reading

31 August 2022: Drowned world. NHS ransomwared. Amazon buying healthcare.

[Image: Max Ernst’s Swamp Angel 1940 - a drowned world]

Drowned world: floods and migration

Climate change isn’t something that happens in the future: we’re already living in it. We aren’t ready for the ways that the world has already changed.

Heatwave in China is the most severe ever recorded in the world - extreme conditions over an extremely large area, for an extremely long time. But then: China’s Sichuan pivots from historic drought to flood warnings.

“Flood” seems insufficient for this: Pakistan floods: One third of Pakistan is under water - minister. The UN says that 33m people are currently affected. And of course there are heatwaves and floods happening in many other parts of the world (It is hard to visualise a third of your country flooded. Very roughly, to give UK readers a sense of it: a third of the land area would be all of Scotland. Or 33m population is about half the UK population: everyone who lives north of Birmingham.)

As weather becomes more temperamental, a significant proportion of the world’s population will migrate. The century of climate migration: why we need to plan for the great upheaval.

NHS ransomwared

At the start of August, hackers attacked systems run by Advanced, a key supplier of financial, staff, care and patient records systems to 36 NHS trusts in England. Systems in trusts went offline, NHS 111 was affected, and many customers had to fall back to pen and paper-based systems.

A month on, Advanced’s latest info says that some services will be out for another 4 to 12 weeks - several services are proving to be much harder than expected to restore, Oof.

And earlier in the summer, NHS systems went offline in the heatwaves. Zooming out a bit, when the world becomes more volatile, it tests infrastructure, revealing brittleness. So perhaps resilience, spare capacity and rapid response needs to move up the list for future system procurement.

Amazon is buying healthcare companies

What is Amazon’s plan in health? So far Amazon has:

2018: bought PillPack, an online pharmacy.

2018: formed Haven, a joint venture that would provide health services to US employees. Closed down in 2021 (why it failed: inadequate market power, US health care’s perverse incentives, the pandemic).

2019: bought Health Navigator, a digital diagnostics system.

2019: started Amazon Care which provided “telehealth”, 24/7 healthcare online/on the phone. The service struggled to recruit doctors, medical insurers and employers, and was controversial. A national rollout started in 2022.

2022: announced the purchase of One Medical clinics, and shortly after announced that Amazon Care would close at the end of 2022 - One Medical a better route to market?

2022: Amazon is bidding for Signify, which provides at-home health evaluations.

Healthcare has massive spend, so you can see why Amazon is interested (the newsletter’s naive model of Amazon is that it would ideally obtain a slice of *every* transaction in the economy). How one analyst sees it:

“Ultimately, Amazon’s M&A activity points to it assembling the building blocks for a large health service offering “value-based care”, said Rebecca Springer, a senior analyst covering healthcare at PitchBook. The term describes a business model in which health providers earn income based on patient outcomes - how well the patient is - versus merely providing treatments.”

Unions for tech workers

As inflation and interest rates increase and capital market tighten, tech companies are slowing recruiting or starting redundancies, and labour organising work becomes more important. Unions for tech workers:

UK: United Tech and Allied Workers is a new UK branch of the Communication Workers Union, organising to improve the conditions of all tech workers.

US: Tech Workers Union Local 1010.

International: Tech Workers Coalition.

Battery EV bottlenecks

As new technology deploys to the market, bottlenecks emerge. EV car sales are going well in 2022. This is good if you pass this electric forecourt every day, but may be challenging if you’re on holiday in the Scottish isles where many of the chargers are slow, out of service, or “haven’t worked for years”. So one bottleneck is the geographic distribution of charging infrastructure. You could take a guess at how this looks a few years further on.

2025+: EV car sales are still ahead of the charging infrastructure, which has rolled out a bit more. Perhaps electricity distribution and generation become a bottleneck - the National Grid was worried about peak demand a few years ago, but is more optimistic now. Partly this is because newer electric vehicles can be used as batteries for other uses, which would help with local energy management.

2030+: Is the availability of lithium and other rare earths for batteries an emerging bottleneck? Or battery recycling?

Quoted

“Crypto has created a way to tokenize and trade the aesthetic experience of getting scammed” - Matt Levine, brutal.

“No-one expected creative AIs to come for the artist jobs first, but here we are!” - Simon Willison on AI generating images.

“If a project takes 10 years, an unfavourable outcome in just one of up to nine (!) elections could result in it getting paused, cancelled, relitigated or redesigned.” - Sean Boots on the need for speed in public sector projects.

Co-op Group and Co-op Digital news

Co-op sells petrol stations to Asda in £600m deal. The money will be used to:

“Reinvest into Co-op’s leading core convenience business centred around its retail estate, as well as its growing wholesale, franchise and e-commerce operations, including new convenience stores in the heart of more communities

Invest in Co-op’s pricing, store operations, technology, and logistics

Support the reduction of Co-op’s net debt”

Co-op and Uber Eats to provide rapid online home deliveries from 1,000 stores.

Thank you for reading

8 Aug 2022: Amazon will hoover your carpets and your data. Do robots make good farmers?

[Image: iRobot/Small Robot Company]

Amazon will hoover your carpets and your data

Amazon will buy iRobot for $1.7bn. iRobot makes Roomba robohoovers and robomops, and has been struggling a bit recently.

There are probably several ways to see this deal. One of them is that Amazon wants to diversify away from pure online retailing, and selling robots is a way to do that. Another way: Amazon wants to make sure that someone else like Google didn’t buy iRobot. Maybe.

A third way to see this deal is as a good way for Amazon to get deeper into the home. “In buying iRobot, the e-commerce titan gets a data collection machine that comes with a vacuum.” You can see that having good data on interior spaces could be valuable information to companies, and privacy campaigners are concerned. (Against that, on social media, critics are scoffing yeah who cares if Amazon knows where my sofa is placed in the living room…)

Back in 2018 the newsletter imagined how Amazon might think about its future role inside the home:

2024: Amazon Prime Home team lead Karyn steps around a Freshco grocery delivery drone twitching on the path. It has been jammed by your home’s router for a breach of delivery licence, and will be released shortly. Your Amazon door authenticates Karyn, and she walks into your home. She sets the Dash scanner going in the living area. While it’s looking at your belongings, she disconnects your TV and pops back out to the truck to get a newer one. She reconnects your PrimeFire box to the new screen but puts the Google Chromecast TV dongle to one side, placing a helpful advice sticker on it. The Dash scanner meeps and identifies with a laser light a dozen items in the room that are on your Unwish list. She places these in a cardboard box, and once they’re sold in Amazon’s Seim Anew market your Prime account will be updated with a credit.

Karyn checks the Home schedule - the cleaner comes tomorrow and the Wardrobe re-stock is lined up for next week. On her way out, she gives a nod to Priyan, an Amazon ReFresh colleague who is filling your fridge, docking credit from your Prime account for each out-of-date good he’s removing. Karyn gets back in the truck and throws her terminal on the passenger seat - 14 minutes until the next home visit. When you get home, Alexa tells you what was Amazoned today. Alexa doesn’t tell you anything about Karyn or Priyan.

If the data is valuable, one wider question is whether regulators look at data in the same way as they look at market and pricing power.

Do robots make good farmers?

The field used to be the “atomic unit” of arable farming, more or less: you’d make a decision about when to plant, treat or harvest this field based on how it looked. But advances in sensors, automation and robotics mean that it is increasingly possible to zoom in to inspect, measure and make decisions at the level of a square metre or an individual plant. Two examples: The tech helping to bring you your morning coffee:

“One such firm, Okuyama [uses] a computer app called Cropwise Protector, which is made by Swiss-Chinese agricultural tech firm, Syngenta.

Linked to ground sensors and satellite imagery, the tool gives the farm workers a visual analysis of the farm, or plantation, on a tablet device or laptop.

They can then quickly apply such things as drip-irrigation, or pest-control, to a very specific area that might need it, rather than a whole field or the entire farm.”

And Small Robot Company offers “per plant intelligence” to arable farms. Again, robots on the ground, sensors, data. The promise is reduced costs because you’re weed-killing just the weeds rather than spraying the whole field. (And Small Robot will be looking for investors soon on Crowdcube.)

Inflation and shopping

UK inflation could reach 15% by start of 2023, experts say. High street inflation continues. The problem is that everyone - farmers, food manufacturers, wholesalers and supermarkets, distributors - has higher costs. Partly this is because so much of the modern economy is built on fossil fuels and their byproducts: plastics, fertilisers, pharmaceuticals etc.

Shoppers are understandably becoming more sensitive to price, and shopping behaviour is changing: own brand products and discount supermarkets are doing well. There are redundancies and cost-cutting programmes across the sector (sadly Co-op too), though that may affect fewer customer-facing roles because hiring has been harder there the last 12 months.

Related: Bank of England responds to inflation, increasing interest rates.

Cost of living

Inside the 'foodbank' for data - The National Databank initiative offers free data to people struggling to pay for connectivity. Access to data is increasingly essential: GP appointments, prescriptions, appointment management, Universal Credit and so on.

New website speeds up help for Britons facing hardship - an online platform cuts the time it takes to get grants to needy households as their bills soar.

“Instead of requiring people to fill out paper forms and send them off along with ID, Lightning Reach’s grants portal, developed with partners including the Royal British Legion and London’s Lambeth council, allows those in financial distress to do it all online, including ID verification”.

The crisis we’re seeing unfold - a new cost of living dashboard from Citizens Advice with loads of data and good insight. The headlines:

More people are hitting crisis point than in previous years.

Cost of living issues will soon become the most common reason to seek help from Citizens Advice — for disabled people, this is already the case.

Energy debts have replaced council tax arrears as the top debt issue people need help with.

Various things

Electric bike and electric car sales in Europe - ebikes growing very quickly.

Ads for two UK funeral firms banned over ‘misleading’ eco-friendly claims.

New smart glasses designed to caption conversations in real-time.

What does it take to keep mosquitos out of Disneyworld?

Co-op Digital news

Simulating in-store experiences with physical prototyping.

Thank you for reading

18 Jul 2022: Is rapid delivery too rapid? A postman a day keeps the doctor away.

[Image: the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula - Webb telescope - NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI]

Is rapid delivery too rapid?

In 1984, Domino’s Pizzas promised “30 minutes or it’s free”, a marketing campaign that worked too well. Years later, the internet and Amazon taught shoppers that you should be able to get everything in two days or less *and* free. “Instant commerce” or “ultra-fast delivery” startups have accelerated things - you can get it all *now*. Under an hour. In 15 minutes in some cases. But “now” is logistically complex and delivery is definitely not free.

“Last mile” delivery has a number of classic problems: cost, co-ordination, complexity, speed, maintaining a good utilisation rate. “Rapid” delivery amplifies these challenges: if the task is to pick and pack a basket of goods and get it delivered in under an hour, everything’s harder.

The delivery companies are all competing for the same shopper pounds as they try build enough scale to survive long term, but higher inflation led to higher interest rates, which has slowed the flow of funding. Hard times as the game changes from “growth at all costs” to “survive with low costs”. Some of the recent news:

15-minute-delivery grocery app JOKR is ending its US operations less than a year after launching. Consolidation has been happening for a while: Buyk and Fridge No More closed earlier this year (sanctions-related), Gorillas started layoffs in May.

Gopuff is laying off 10% of global workforce, closing 76 “dark stores” in the US:

“In a bull market, we were incentivized to scale our geographic footprint [...] In assessing the business in light of today’s economic environment, we found that we can be more efficient by focusing on maturing our high-performing MFCs [fulfilment centres] to drive profitable growth in each market.”

And here’s are two data points on the numbers of rapid delivery:

“Each location costs an estimated $250,000 to launch, people familiar with the company’s plans said, and about half of Gopuff’s roughly 600 warehouses were launched in the last year”

And:

“Gopuff’s fulfillment centers need to bring in at least 400 orders per day to make money, but only about 10 to 20% are at that level”

Perhaps some of these rapid delivery startups will use their expertise in running dark stores to reinvent themselves as service providers, but there will be competition: DoorDash kicks off dark store-powered rapid delivery as a service, and Instacart is in that space already.

Related: Amazon makes Grubhub deal to give Prime members fee-free food - the deal looks a bit like the one it had in the UK with Deliveroo: it gives Amazon a right to buy up to 15% of Grubhub, which parent Just Eat/Takeaway.com may be hoping for, because it has been looking to sell Grubhub.

Elsewhere in delivery: Co-op is rolling out its “walking delivery” scheme to 200 stores. It’s part of a wider plan to scale rapidly delivered convenience which also includes the use of delivery robots. This is the kind of thing that’s easier to do at scale if you have true proximity to communities, and Co-op has a lot of stores.

A postman a day keeps the doctor away

Royal Mail has launched a Health division. It has a partnership with Pharmacy2U that makes online prescription delivery free. Also an investment in a digital platform for independent pharmacies, and some plans to trial posties doing regular health checks on vulnerable people.

The proposition is local and trustworthy. Similar examples: In France, La Poste made its “Watch over my parents” service free during covid: weekly visits. And in Spain, postal company Correos trialled a similar service.

Magic checkout

A new type of self-checkout where no scanning is required - Mashgin’s

“countertop system uses [cameras and] artificial intelligence to identify and ring up items automatically. That allows customers to check out in as little as 10 seconds—eight times faster than a regular self-checkout machine.”

The “place, space, pay and go” slogan on the self checkout machine hints at how you need to carefully arrange the goods so the cameras can see them - probably making this solution better for quick convenience store buys than for anything larger.

A simpler, older version of this: RFID tags help Uniqlo make the checkout simpler. Stores like Decathlon do this too. You still have to put the goods into an area that has the sensors. When technology reliably simplifies how things work, it feels a little bit magic, even when the technology isn’t brand new.

Heat alert

Heatwave: Met Office issued its first ever “red” extreme heat warning. And this is going to be the coldest year of the rest of your life.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Where do Tory leadership candidates stand on net zero goal? Answer: unclear. And in the US, the Supreme Court tries to overrule the climate.

There’s so much to do. Here’s Celia Romaniuk on shifting the burden of sustainability from consumers to producers:

“we must reframe the idea that it’s the consumer that has to change their behaviour, carrying the cost and the inconvenience [of sustainable products]. Perhaps it’s not about shifting consumer demand from non-sustainable to sustainable. [...] Rather than offer a separate sustainable alternative to the unsustainable mainstream, we can design and create products and services that are cost effective, good quality, and also intrinsically sustainable.”

Worth a lot/basically zero

Tesla chaoslord Elon Musk was talking to some owner/fans recently and said “The overwhelming focus is on solving full self-driving. That’s essential. It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.”

He says binary stuff like this a lot, so be wary about treating it as new insight. But one challenge might be that, even despite the recent stock price drops, Tesla is *already* valued as if it had solved self-driving and won a good share of the robotaxis industry and protected a good margin. What if it doesn’t?

In other worth a lot/not news, Musk is trying to get out of buying Twitter, or at least reducing the price a lot.

Various things

Trolley is a service that scans supermarket websites daily to continuously show where 166,000 groceries are cheapest - a service that gets more and more useful as prices increase. But it was also under threat of closure due to some unexpected data costs. Here’s how the fight to save Trolley is going.

Around 94% of the UK adult population live or work within one mile of a National Lottery terminal (pdf), and around 60% of UK adults currently play National Lottery games - Camelot May 2022.

Uncanny granny: Amazon shows off an Alexa feature that mimics the voices of your dead relatives - an idea that will polarise.

Co-op Digital news

Simulating in-store experiences with physical prototyping:

“Our desktop walkthrough was a quick, cheap way to prepare for an in-store trial. Bringing our ideas to life in this way meant we picked up on things that might not work in stores and we could adapt our concepts without wasting time or money. A lot of this was down to 2 ex-store managers who joined us for the walkthrough – their input was invaluable. Their first-hand experience of working in – and running – stores meant they could sense-check our assumptions which made the scenarios we walked through far more realistic. We made changes to our experiment plan based on their insight and we believe this contributed to the success of our first store trial.”

Thank you for reading

23 June 2022: “I stole it off Bury Co-op”: the story of Tesco Clubcard.

On a store visit to a Co-op store in Bury in 1990, Tesco’s then marketing director Terry Leahy got the idea for Clubcard.

“And, being modest again, he gives the Co-Op credit for what is commonly known as being a Terry Leahy invention - the Tesco Clubcard, which arrived in 1995. He says: ‘It wasn't a new idea. I stole it off Bury Co-Op. There had always been a dividend stamp, but Bury Co-Op tried to make it electronic. There's nothing new under the sun. All the good ideas are already out there.’"

And from Scoring Points (2008):

“In 1990 [Leahy] had his interest grabbed by the news that the Co-op in Bury was experimenting with a loyalty scheme based on a plastic card with a magnetic stripe on the back. The Co-op was still awarding its customers the Co-op dividend but now, in return, it would be able to collect information on that store’s customers’ shopping habits. [...] ‘If they can do it in one shop in Bury’, he said to his marketing team, ‘why can’t we?’”

A good reminder to encourage experiments - there’s unrealised potential in every organisation, sometimes in plain sight. That story about about Clubcard comes from this very entertaining retelling, which has loads of good quotes like:

"What scares me about this," [Tesco CEO Ian] MacLaurin said, "is that you know more about my customers in 3 months, than I know in 30 years."

And:

“[rival Safeway’s ABC] pilot team could see what they were sitting on. But they lacked [...] senior leaders who could see how powerful the customer data benefits were. They just saw it as a loyalty scheme”

So Tesco became a data harvesting pioneer, launching Clubcard in February 1995. Almost exactly a decade later Amazon Prime would launch.

Cradle to cradle stores

Steeple Claydon Co-op launches with innovation built into the design to cut carbon and energy use:

“Co-op has worked to adopt a ‘cradle to cradle’ approach for the build which will see between 80%-100% of the foundations, superstructure, glazing, cladding and insulation materials used in the construction of the store fully demountable and able to be used again. Sheep wool is used for insulation and solar panels are to be installed on the roof. The build also includes an external living wall built into the design which is made from recycled car battery housings, and can be irrigated through rainwater and shown to reduce noise, create habitats for wildlife and reduce pollutants occurring in the air through particle capture. The store also re-cycles the energy used by its fridges to heat the store and provide its hot water requirements.”

Related: Co-op’s sustainability report (pdf).

Warehousing and recessions

Amazon is subletting about 5% of the warehouse space it added during the pandemic. Unlike inflation and interest rates, this probably doesn’t signal a recession - more that covid planning was tricky. And Prologis (one of Amazon’s landlords) is buying space, which suggests that they see the delivered/online shopping trends continuing. (What kind of warehousing is needed during recessions? Online shopping returns? Self storage?)

Elsewhere in commercial property, Government minister Nadhim Zahawi's wife has added a Co-op superstore to the couple's £100 million property empire - not the shop but the building it’s in :).

Layoffs.fyi is a website that tracks redundancies in technology companies. The food ones are mostly delivery companies - a tricky business to get right.

Community ownership

Ripple Energy run renewable energy co-ops. You pay in an amount that’s based on your current electricity bill, they get a wind farm built, and your “return” will be in reduced energy bills for 25 years (the life of the wind farm). You could think about this as a way to make your home run on greener energy, or a way to help the UK build out renewables and meet its carbon targets. Or even as a financial “hedge”: a way to insure yourself against rising energy bills - the discount increases if energy prices increase. Their next project.

Community ownership of a pub can restore a feeling of pride in place, and allow people to transform a closed business into a thriving community hub - but fewer pubs are community-owned in cities, probably because the cost bar tends to be higher.

25 years ago, the community living on Eigg bought the island - quite a story. Scotland now has a community “right to buy” for sustainable development.

Design consultancy ustwo is now employee-owned as well as being a B corp.

More on co-ops: Co-operative news, and Power to change which supports community ownership schemes.

Sentient chatbots

A Google engineer reckons that an AI chatbot he worked with has developed genuine sentience. He had campaigned for LaMDA to be treated as an employee rather than as property worker and talked about it publicly, which Google didn’t like. The chatbot displayed (or simulated) vulnerability, and they developed friendship - which may have been a factor in his assessment.

There is an obvious question about how you’d prove that something is sentient in an era of solid machine learning language models: language-centric tests may be insufficient - the transcript of their interviews feels simultaneously fluent and scripted. Also: at what point should non-humans earn personhood and rights? Another question might be about the extent to which humans *want* to believe that things are sentient:

“One implication of Lemoine’s story is that a lot of us are going to treat AI as sentient well before it is, if indeed it ever is. I sometimes call this forthcoming future “The Age of Oracles.” That is, a lot of humans will be talking up the proclamations of various AI programs, regardless of the programs’ metaphysical status. It will be easy to argue the matter in any direction — especially because, a few decades from now, AI will write, speak and draw just like a human, or better.”

See also: The soul of a new machine learning system (paywalled), whose title references a deservedly famous book of computing history.

Emissions reporting

Measuring our carbon output | Scottish Enterprise Design blog - this is good: Scottish Enterprise has created a dashboard to estimate the carbon emissions caused by its biggest websites.

However, emissions reporting isn’t consistent in the public sector: National Audit Office warns public sector emissions reporting is a mess.

Various things

“Nothing could have prepared me for turning away patients. I believe much of it could have been solved if we just had a few more doctors.” - What I saw working undercover at a GP surgery.

Morrisons raises pay as stores battle for staff - UK's fourth largest supermarket says it will pay a minimum of £10.20 per hour to its workers.

How to make procurement docs people understand - to create healthy competition among a more diverse pool of providers, the Wales Centre for Digital Public Services has started to rethink the design of the documents we use to procure goods and services.

Event: Call for papers - Manchester Tech Festival, 17-21 October 2022.

Iceland has horses that will respond to work emails on a giant keyboard while you’re on holiday. I will be back in the office on Wedneighsday, etc.

Co-op Digital news

Improving customer experience with content design: how we joined up services in different business areas.

Thank you for reading

29 Apr 2022: Amazon as a service. Cultured meat. Corporate raids: Twitter and Beanstalk.

Image: Future Meat

On the high street

Supermarkets are rationing cooking oil - Ukraine exports a lot of the world’s supply.

The shifting sands of shopping: High street shopping numbers are returning to pre-covid levels, but not evenly. Many challenges remain.

Wales' hospitality businesses struggle to recruit staff - rising costs, dropping footfall and shortages of staff are increasing pressure on hospitality businesses.

'Sip and shop': The retailers tempting you in with alcohol - a growing number of stores are offering customers a glass of wine. The wider trend is experiential retail.

The wider picture: UK government is considering forcing landlords to rent out commercial property that has been empty for 6 months. This is an interesting idea, and may push landlords otherwise inclined to sit on empty property to avoid marking them down in value on the books. But there will probably be many unintended consequences, so maybe reforming business rates would be better, or making it easier to change the use class to residential?

Amazon as a service

Amazon announced Buy with Prime: if you have an ecommerce site you can use Amazon’s fulfilment/logistics/returns operation, without having to be on amazon.com with its 2003 design and irritating algorithms etc. The announcement is being spun as bad news for Shopify (which makes an ecommerce platform one of whose selling points is that you don’t have to be on the Amazon site), but it is possible that Amazon’s plans will encourage existing customers to leave amazon.com.

No news whether Shopify will allow Buy with Prime on its platform, but a smaller rival BigCommerce is going to say yes. Related: Shopify is looking at buying Deliverr to beef up its own logistics capability. What Shopify probably needs is reach as well as capacity: maybe theory should start an advertising network.

Climate/change

Internet payments company Stripe announced a plan to speed up the development of long term carbon reduction technology.

“Frontier is an advance market commitment (AMC) that aims to accelerate the development of carbon removal technologies by guaranteeing future demand for them. The goal is to send a strong demand signal to researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors”

Obvious questions:

Why not just plant trees? Because carbon removal will be needed as well.

Would aggregating supply of carbon removal/mitigation be better than aggregating demand? Maybe that’s phase 2.

Why aren’t governments doing this, and on a much bigger scale?

Elsewhere, climate changing the world:

Heat wave in India leaves millions struggling to cope.

'We're making wine in Norway'.

the Financial Times released a climate change policy game. It’s pretty good. And it’s no spoiler to disclose that the way to do well in this game is to act boldly - you already knew that.

Two corporate raids: Twitter and Beanstalk crypto

Elon Musk is buying Twitter. It was a semi-hostile takeover that played out over a fortnight or so like a season of Succession by text message. Elon bought some Twitter shares (and then notified the SEC late), Twitter announced Elon’s joining the board, the next day Elon decided not to, Twitter’s board set up a “poison pill” to make a hostile takeover harder, Elon said he had funding and asserted “I have moved straight to the end”, Twitter said Go on prove you have the funding, Twitter probably failed to find someone who wanted to pay more for the business, Elon proved he had funding (loans from banks secured against his Tesla shares), the board said OK fine yes.

Why does any of this matter? Because Twitter is an important social media platform - it and some other social media platforms have become critical global infrastructure. So whether this ends up being good or bad for free speech, for online abuse and content moderation, and the company itself is all TBC. Elon has a history of being quite impetuous and fighty online, and sometimes quite casual on the details and legals, so watch this space.

But that isn’t the only way to do a corporate raid these days. You can also compress that season of Succession down to a 13 second movie by using computers and crypto.

Last week, someone took $182m from a crypto project called Beanstalk (warning: some salty language). They noticed a loophole in the governance protocol, got a $1 billion “flash loan”, used the loan to get a majority of governance tokens which gave them power to change the rules, voted that the project’s reserves should be sent to their wallet, sent the reserves, paid back the loan 13 seconds later. Job done. While they were doing it, the attacker donated $250,000 of the estimated $75m proceeds to Ukraine.

Why does any of this matter? Because it reminds you that if finance becomes more software-is-codey, more blockchainy, there will be a clear need for more regulation and redress (and security!).

Vending machines

A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world - good, long read.

“There is a logic that underpins the will to vend to other people. It’s that allure of passive income. The operator of a vending machine gets to experience the idle fancy of exhausted shopkeepers everywhere, selling their wares without getting up early in the morning, without necessarily getting up at all. But what is behind the will to be vended to? This is more complicated. I think it has something to do with the proffered combination of convenience, novelty and nostalgia.”

Cultured meat?

In western supermarkets, shoppers are getting used to seeing plant-based meat substitutes - veggie burgers and so on. But over the horizon might be “cultured” or “lab grown” meat: real meat that is grown in a lab from cells taken from live animals, rather than cut from an animal raised for food. There’s a big list of the methods, considerations, issues and the participants on Wikipedia.

The separation of “meat” from “animal” raises many interesting questions. Newsletter’s first half dozen:

Does it feel weird to talk about meat grown in a lab? Is that a temporary reaction because it’s a new thing? Is a fungi product that simulates meat different/better/worse?

Could you call it vegetarian or even vegan? - strictly, no, because it contains animal cells, but you might argue that meat without suffering has some or the same qualities as vegetarian food?

One reason food producers highlight their organic/free range/parsley-fed credentials is that the living conditions mean happier animals and better taste. Can you get that taste in a vat?

Would cultured meat farming require less land and water? - maybe: Cultured Meat Is Coming Soon: Here’s What You Need to Know.

It is ethical? - from an animal suffering perspective, probably yes? In terms of access to technology and cost - unclear yet.

Is it greener? Maybe: it might require less land and water, but it is unclear about the carbon footprint.

Is it viable? - very unclear: Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.

Will it be approved by regulators? Singapore approved lab meat in 2020, no-one else yet.

Would you eat it?

Interesting.

Anyway, WTFood?! Here’s a food startup that’ll be a litmus test for your feelings about cultured meat: Primeval Foods says it’s about to start selling lab-grown tiger steaks to restaurants.

“Today, we consume beef, chicken, fish, and pork not because they are the tastiest, healthiest, or most nutritious species; they are just the easiest to domesticate. Since a lot has happened since our last domestication of an animal (we went to the Moon-yeah!), we can now discover what is beyond domestication through technology. [...] Our cultivated lion meat tastes like lion, because it is cultivated from lion. The cells and tissues that form the animals grow the same way, except outside the animal. It's a copy and paste of the taste without slaughtering the animal.”

If it’s ok to eat cultured tiger meat because it doesn’t involve the suffering of an endangered species, then are other kinds of meat are also ok? You can imagine all manner of controversial meat.

Co-op Digital news

The similarities and differences between content design and other content disciplines.

Thank you for reading

12 Apr 2022: Fragile food and energy networks. Amazon union. Department stores.

Image: Sean Hecht. “Difficult situation on campus. Traffic jam of automated food delivery robots, apparently all stuck behind a carelessly discarded scooter. I just observed a couple of students clearing a path out of pity for the robots. This is our future, I guess”

Fragile networks: food

Rising energy bills, increased prices of raw materials, labour shortages, and supply chain disruptions are all factors in increasing food prices.

Surging costs for UK food producers point to higher prices ahead.

Food prices single biggest issue facing UK, warns Iceland boss.

A fertilizer shortage, worsened by war in Ukraine, is driving up global food prices and scarcity.

Industry sectors where energy is a big cost input are going to be affected: paper and packaging.

And in 2021, 75% of all seasonal fruit pickers in the UK were from Ukraine and Russia.

One of the obvious supply chain disruptions is the invasion of Ukraine. Here is a world grains and oilseeds map for 2021, which tells you that Ukraine and Russia produce a lot of sunflower, oil and grain products. That map is probably going to look quite different for the next few years: 25-33% of global wheat exports came from Ukraine and Russia in 2021. That might not be quite as apocalyptic as it sounds, because it’s a lower percentage of *total* wheat production. Nonetheless.

Knock-on effect: rises in both prices and exports of US corn and wheat. “US farmland is reaching its agricultural frontier, which may prevent further expansion of major crop production. As a result, strong competition for US acreage will continue.”

Fragile networks: energy

Importing Russian gas and oil is a difficult situation in 2022. Russia provides 4% of UK’s gas and 8% of its oil (and 40% of EU gas and 27% of its oil).

The new UK energy strategy attempts to balance energy security with long term energy aims. The security aim is to stop reliance on Russian oil imports by 2023, and to “explore” ending gas imports. The long term energy policy aim is more nuclear power (expensive, slow and risky), more North Sea oil and gas exploration (fossil fuels!), new offshore wind ambitions, some planning rules to be relaxed on onshore wind farms (cheap, fast and certain!) and domestic solar panels. It’s disappointing that there wasn’t more policy on energy efficiency and on supporting households to make changes that can cut their energy bills now. Little or no mention of home insulation or transport.

The wider context: a few days earlier, the IPCC’s latest report said that we’re not on track to meet our targets, and yet it *is* possible if we act faster and more boldly. The full report is about 3,000 pages, so the press release or this explainer from Carbon Brief will be quicker reads.

The best time for a massive renewable energy strategy was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. But this UK Gov’s strategy feels like a missed opportunity. Climate action and renewables *are* energy security.

Other food and retail

The privilege of being able to confidently just walk out - Saturday Night Live on Amazon Go stores.

Sainsbury’s to close 200 cafes putting 2,000 jobs at risk - the supermarket chain says it is planning to close 200 of its in-store cafes in April.

Ocado sales hit as workers return to the office - sales have fallen in recent months as people revert to pre-pandemic habits. The current quarter might be OK then if the offices empty again.

Fast grocery-delivery apps face backlash from cities - authorities are increasingly questioning the use of so-called "dark stores".

B Corp UK on LinkedIn: #BehindtheB - a venue in London showcasing the B Corp Community.

Unions

How Two Best Friends Beat Amazon - after Amazon cracked down on a worker Covid safety protest, warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York voted to unionise. Amazon is appealing.

New York Times tech workers vote to certify union - 600 tech staff will make the largest tech union in the United States with collective bargaining rights (there are more unionised staff at Google, but that union doesn’t have collective bargaining rights because it isn’t certified with the National Labor Relations Board).

*Union membership increases if employers treat their staff poorly* is clearly an insufficient simple model of unionisation, because there are too many examples where unionisation didn’t grow. But if you account for power, maybe this works: *Union membership increases if power is shifting to staff*. Power is shifting largely due to staff shortages, itself caused by several factors: post-pandemic economic bounceback, Brexit, etc.

Towns and department stores

High street department stores can be hard to reinvent because of their size, layout and the local role they played, pulling communities into town centres. One way to reinvent is to be bold instead of trying to replace the department store with more retail commerce: In Paisley, near Glasgow, the former Allders Department Store is being turned into a three-storey creative space as part of major plans to transform the Paisley Centre.

Hacking

A good summary of “LAPSUS$, a juvenile data extortion group whose short-lived, low-tech and remarkably effective tactics have put some of the world’s biggest corporations on edge”. They hacked into Nvidia, Okta (an identity management company, oof!), Microsoft and Samsung. The tactics: directly targeting employees with social engineering attacks, and bribery.

Elsewhere, Scottish Association for Mental Health targeted in cyber attack - SAMH is one of Co-op's charity partners.

IKEA

Techniques to get you to buy more stuff - “It’s estimated that 60% of Ikea purchases are impulse buys. And Ikea’s own creative director has said that only 20% of the store’s purchases are based on actual logic and needs.” And adapting to Indian market - user and market research considered useful!

Ukraine

How you can help: donate money to the Disasters Emergency Committee, which will distribute to other charities.

“From today, @Coop_Foundation pledges the value of all #donations of @coopuk Member Rewards to the #Ukraine @decappeal”.

Co-op Digital news

The similarities and differences between content design and other content disciplines.

It’s an ‘Experience Library’ (because ‘design system’ implies it’s only for designers).

Thank you for reading

11 Mar 2022: Ukraine invaded, Russia disconnected, retail politicised.

[Image: Photo by Tina Hartung on Unsplash]

Ukraine

Since the last newsletter, Russia invaded Ukraine. An appalling humanitarian catastrophe. Even if you watch a lot of the news coverage, it’s hard to imagine how terrible it must be.

How you can help: donate money to the Disasters Emergency Committee, which will distribute to other charities.

Some of the news headlines:

Western brands and retail in Russia pulled out or closed shop - a list of larger brands known in the UK.

Over 300 companies have withdrawn from Russia - but some remain - a much bigger but US-centric list.

Co-op and Morrisons remove Russian-made vodka from shelves.

Sainsbury’s renamed chicken Kyiv.

Facebook relaxes Putin hate speech - and Russia blocks FB.

Ukraine invasion worsens UK inflation trade-off, says Bank of England policy maker.

Once some brands had boycotted Russia, there was a signalling effect: not boycotting started to feel like support for the invasion. Uniqlo said they’d stay in Russia, then reversed course. (Although there are also pragmatic reasons to pause trading: you can’t be sure if or when you’d get paid, or be able to move funds.)

Elsewhere, western fossil fuel companies have slowed or stopped buying Russian oil and gas. The US has stopped importing Russian fossil fuels, and other countries are planning the same.

Hackers have been busy, but perhaps there are fewer effects of “cyberwar” than you might have naively expected.

The crypto companies are not sanctioning Russia. You can understand why: their whole thing is “uncensorable financial activity”. But it’s a bad look. (Related: Russia can't & won't use crypto to evade sanctions.)

Fracture

The number of displaced refugees keeps growing. Countries in Europe that give them support and a new home will benefit from their spirit, skills and desire to rebuild. Hopefully the UK will be among those countries - an area where we have been shamefully slow to act.

The economic sanctions are very significant. What does it mean to economically ostracise a country? Perhaps it means collapse. Downstream effects for the UK: expect sharper and continued inflation across the board. Obvious impacts on retail businesses. And both policy and spending to shift in favour of defence and foreign policy.

This also looks like the end of globalisation: financial systems, media and internet separating into different “worlds”.

Disconnected from modernity

One interesting thing is that companies and other organisations are increasingly taking political positions, for ethical and/or self-interested reasons. This is mostly happening because consumers like to shop with companies that take positions, and because the world is changing more quickly. Faster change means more unexpected consequences, more cascading effects, more scrambling to reposition and recover.

Related, this may be the first “networked” war. Political blocs, national governments, financial markets, individual companies, hackers and dock workers have decided in aggregate that Russia should be disconnected from modernity, or the global West. But it wasn’t co-ordinated from the top, or not all of it. The US president didn’t tell Apple “I want you to stop selling stuff in Russia”, Apple decided that on their own, perhaps out of principle, perhaps thinking with self interest that it was better to act early.

One of the concerns is that the disconnection of Russia has a lot of momentum now. The loose network or coalition is driving some of the policy, wants victory, and isn’t controlled by any one leader or organisation. So it’s not clear how easy it would be to get the network to reverse course, and how “off ramps” that would allow a managed de-escalation or retreat to a more stable position are possible for either side.

Help here

Again, how you can help: donate money to the Disasters Emergency Committee, which will distribute to other charities.

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc by replying or to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

16 Feb 2022: Faithful shopperbots. Age verification. Disloyalty schemes.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter. Forward it to a friend who’d like to read about what the internet is doing to retail businesses, people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Gita]

Faithful shopperbot follows you carrying your stuff

A packhorse robot is an interestingly narrow job. Follow this pair of legs wherever they go, carry stuff safely. That’s it.

“The robot at rest resembles a wheeled drinks cooler, with a spacious interior designed to hold up to 40 pounds of whatever you choose to toss inside. Stand before your Gita, tap the app, and the robot awakens with an optimistic little beep. Five cameras on the front of the robot register the shape of your legs and their relative depth from other objects in the environment. The robot then follows those legs wherever they go. It’s a self-propelling, hands-free shopping trolley”

Gita may encourage walking, but it also reveals the way towns and retail are not designed for people who are different or disabled.

“Many new Gita owners will probably also head out on sidewalks they remember as walkable, only to find them as narrow and unreliable as wheelchair and stroller users already know them to be.”

These robots are currently expensive. But maybe you could imagine a future in which cheaper versions could live in shops, but be borrowed and used collectively.

Age verification

Supermarket cameras will guess the age of alcohol buyers - supermarkets are testing automated age-verification: cameras that can tell if you’re old enough to buy alcohol and other age-restricted products.

“Asda, Co-op and Morrisons are installing the system in some shops. The same technology is already used in Aldi's checkout-free shop in London. If customers consent, the camera will guess their age, using algorithms trained on a database of anonymous faces.”

Notable: the system doesn’t record any faces or attempt to recognise individuals.

Disloyalty schemes and networked membership

When does a loyalty scheme become a disloyalty scheme? When it makes unhelpful suggestions or irrelevant offers that make customers ask “how can they know me at all?”

Related: when is a membership scheme different to others? Supporting local causes is brilliant, but can membership be more than that? Could it encourage local activity and trade between fellow members in a way that doesn’t even touch the Co-op Group? Networks of members.

Is the Co-op membership badge the Blue Peter badge of retail?

Department stores

The death of the department store - an interesting long read on John Lewis in Sheffield, and what happens to cities and big department stores when they close, and how buildings are reinvented.

“In total, since 2016, according to a study published last summer, 83% of the UK’s big department stores have closed.

Because of their size, purpose-built department stores are hard to put to new uses. A few have been successfully reinvented – as arts centres, indoor trampoline parks and education settings. But the rapid spread of vacant stores raises a huge question: if urban centres are not going to be dominated by shopping, what do we want them to be?”

BHS, Fraser, Debenhams, all gone. Some John Lewises, some M&Ses too. Out-of-town retail parks, online shopping and changing consumer behaviour mean that the high street is always changing.

“The trick will be to generate the same sort of love for whatever happens there next,” he told me. “Is it a space people can go and enjoy? Is it free to use? You could go into John Lewis and wander around, you needn’t have bought anything. People would meet in the restaurant, or go and have a coffee. All those things, to do with meeting people – how can that be recreated?”

Related: Bloqs, the “UK’s first open access factory” - a light industrial space in North London has been reshaped to provide space, machinery and tools, materials and community for people and small organisations who need to get things made. Does this approach - fractionalising and opening up capacity - point at a way forward for under-used department-store-shaped spaces in towns and cities?

Tesco

Tesco using electric lorries in 'UK first' - 2 of its 2,000 truck distribution fleet are now electric (many of Tesco’s separate home delivery fleet are electric already). Electric vehicles are still more expensive than combustion ones (3x the cost for these lorries!), but the lower operational costs and better carbon emissions mean a switch is inevitable, eventually.

Cost control:

Tesco puts 1,600 jobs at risk as it ends overnight restocking.

Tesco to shut down its Jack's discount stores. Jack’s was introduced to win customers back from Aldi and Lidl, but the current Aldi price match campaign is now doing that the job.

Worst to come for food price rises, Tesco boss says. Costs will rise further and the plight of people on low incomes "troubles us".

Various things

How technology can help maximise a competitive advantage “looks at the success of the Financial Times’ interactive coronavirus tracker which brought millions of people to the FT for the first time. Technical limitations meant the team wasn’t exploiting its competitive advantage, and Martin explains how they reframed the problem.” - from the excellent Public Digital newsletter.

What would happen if all young people gave up 'luxuries' to buy a house? - “Young people would also have to save [for a house deposit] for almost double the time today as they would have done 20 years ago, and that’s if they put away a hefty 15 percent of their take-home pay.”

Perils of remote job interviews? the new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed.

New York Times spends “low seven figures” to buy Wordle.

Facebook users drop for first time ever.

Make your own train guy script - bella expando, seeya Col!

Co-op and Co-op Digital news

Co-op food leader Jo Whitflield is taking some time off to help her family with exams.

Co-op has launched a new food business incubator.

How and why we redefined our purpose at Co-op Experience and Co-op Digital is now the ‘Co-op Experience’ team. Whenever orgs reshuffle, teams need to pause and revisit their purpose. Spending time articulating it helps individuals and teams align.

Thank you for reading

31 Jan 2022: Do checkoutless stores and EVs end shopping?

[Image: Ed Ruscha, Varieties of Internal Torment. The internet likes to make it easy for you to own fractions of expensive things, like this painting. This isn’t investment advice, but it is a good painting.]

Do smart supermarkets herald the end of shopping as we know it?

… asks The Guardian. The short answer is yes, but but that said *everything* is heralding the end of shopping as we know it. Retail is changing everywhere. Checkoutless stores might be quicker and more convenient - we’ll know in a few years when more experiments are in. One good question is: what are those staff free to do if they’re not working the checkout? Can they create more value elsewhere? Does it allow a store to offer different and new services?

(Also in that piece several things the newsletter has previously covered: Go, approaches to checkoutless stores, Go again, Lifvs.)

Aldi opens its first till-free supermarket.

Will electric vehicles change the local convenience store dynamics?

Why convenience retailers are gearing up to win in foodservice. In this interesting piece, the argument is that in the US local convenience stores haven’t seen much competition from online shopping because of they’re, well, convenient and, critically, because the local convenience store is where you refuel your car, so you’re pulled there often [*]. Because of this, a combination of rapid ecommerce delivery and EVs (which are of course more often charged at home) might threaten that. Prescription: add food service, so there’s another reason to go to your local store.

[*] This argument may not hold for all territories: the internet reckons that 7,395 convenience store sell petrol, out of 41,695 total. So under 20% of them.

Grocery robotics: I see what should have happened two minutes ago

Meet the billionaire robot overlord reinventing Walmart’s warehouses - a slightly gushing profile of Symbotic, a warehousing robotics co that supplies Walmart and announced in December that it would go public. It was born in the warehousing operation of a US grocery wholesaler. You don’t often hear about deep tech companies coming from big grocery wholesaler (though maybe if you squint Ocado also looks a bit like that), but the explanation seems to be its leader:

“Cohen had spent so much time in warehouses that he claims he was able to quickly see what was working and what wasn’t. “It’s how my mind works. . . . I can see things in three dimensions in both time and space,” says Cohen, who once built a computer from a kit. “When I’m walking the warehouse, I see the motion, but I also see what should have happened two minutes ago and why it didn’t happen.”

Another interesting bit:

“Because of how tightly items can be stored in Symbotic’s cage for the bots to pick up, its system allows a retailer to expand a warehouse’s capacity without increasing its real estate footprint. A typical manually operated grocery warehouse might hold 10,000 or 12,000 individual items, while one that uses Symbotic’s existing technology could pack up to 300,000 into two thirds the space.”

One interesting question is how big organisations succeed (or fail) in incubating new businesses that demand very different approaches than the parent organisation.

Other news from deliveryworld

How can the last mile gig economy be improved? Workers and vans are criss-crossing each other’s routes unnecessarily, and job allocation is inefficient. Counter-intuitively, rather than giving delivery staff contracts or making them employees, academics find it may help if workers have *more flexibility* to switch between delivery platforms. Fairwork’s Labour standards in the gig economy report offers a good scorecard for delivery companies.

“I didn't sign up for this”: DoorDash is requiring engineers to deliver food and they're upset. Also: AND The value - and limits - of eating your own dog food (eating your own dogfood is a graceless tech industry term for using your own product as a customer so that you learn what needs to be improved).

As traffic roars back, neighborhoods outside Manhattan feel the pain - with public transport use dropping and truck deliveries and car ownership rising, congestion across New York City is likely to be worse after the pandemic than it was before.

Walmart to bring in-home delivery to 30M US households this year.

Pedalme, an on demand cargo bike service for moving packages and humans around London. And their take on the economics of urban logistics is an interesting read.

AmazInstacart expansion?

Amazon’s very well known for selling its own groceries from Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and Go. But it also sells groceries for third parties like Morrisons and Co-op [*].

Amazon began offering this new Instacart-like service in the UK this past year. Amazon Prime subscribers are able to order same-day deliveries of groceries from two popular UK supermarkets, Morrisons and Co-op, using the Amazon app and website. Amazon reportedly plans to expand that model across Europe and into the US next year.

For Amazon, the underlying philosophy is something like: “we’d like to take a piece of *every* consumer transaction, and grocery is a big sector, so let’s try every way to sit in between consumers and everyone else”.

[*] “Co Op”, sigh!

Inflation and food

Inflation rose to 5.4% in the 12 months to December 2021, driven by increasing energy and food prices, and energy bills will jump again in April.

Food poverty activist Jack Monroe created a lot of news coverage about cost of living increases and pushed the ONS to make its inflation figures more granular, breaking them down by how much income you earn.

Some commentary suggests that availability may be driven by ranging decisions and store sizes more than inflation, and that prices aren’t necessarily rising everywhere by the same amount. Nonetheless, good to see the attention on cost of living increases.

Various things

Are supermarkets underpricing super-rare house plants?

Funeral costs drop for first time in 18 years - although direct cremation, the simplest type of funeral, is rising in price.

Nearly 20% of all professional jobs are now remote.

Perfect for instore merchandising

Co-op Digital news

Life as a QA at Co-op.

Hello from Engineering.

Thank you for reading

3 Dec 2021: Sainsbury’s goes with Amazon Just Walk Out. M&S clothing ++. Gucci in aisle 3.

[Image: Sainsbury’s]

Sainsbury’s goes with Amazon Just Walk Out

Sainsburys has converted a convenience store in London to use Amazon’s checkoutless tech from the Go stores. A few interesting things: it’s the first third-party “Just Walk Out” deployment outside the US. Second, it’s the first retrofit of an existing store. Amazon describes it like this: Sainsbury's becomes first international third-party customer to use Amazon's Just Walk Out technology.

Third, Amazon Go is a technology layer in the background - shoppers will use Sainsbury’s SmartShop app. The Sainsbury’s news story puts it like this: Sainsbury’s introduces contactless, checkout-free shopping with SmartShop Pick & Go.

The Sainsbury’s story also has some interesting stats on how in-store app shopping is going: “SmartShop is available in around 1,400 Sainsbury’s stores, with sales up 173% versus last year. In supermarkets with SmartShop handsets, 30% of sales are now generated through the app, more than twice the level of last year and SmartShop Mobile Pay is available in nearly all convenience stores.” (The SmartShop handset is a barcode scanner.)

Amazon Fresh leaders will be used to Amazon’s practice of providing the same technology to competitors, but the meetings in Sainsbury’s that agreed to bring a competitor’s tech into the stores may have been a bit scratchy.

More Amazon news:

In the US, Starbucks is trialling a “pick-up” cafe in New York that uses Amazon’s Go technology.

Amazon has plans to open hundreds of convenience stores in the UK - it will be interesting to see how this goes and the reaction from other big c-store players.

And warehouse workers in Alabama will get a second chance to unionise.

Retail media: advertising in your shopping

If you are a social media platform with a lot of users, your revenue model is probably selling advertising against the interest profiles of your users. If you’re an ecommerce platform, your revenue model is probably taking a cut of transactions on your platform (example: Amazon), but because you have loads of interesting behavioural and spend data, you might add an advertising revenue stream (also Amazon). And if you are a supermarket, your revenue model is probably selling goods with a retail markup. But grocery is a tough business with slim margins, so it is tempting to look elsewhere in the business for newer, higher margin opportunities, and data and advertising is an obvious area to explore.

Tesco ramps up ‘retail media’ offer with more ad space and analytics for brands - the new analytics service (catchily named “Tesco Media and Insight, powered by Dunnhumby”) will let advertisers use Tesco’s 20m Clubcard customer loyalty database for ad targeting and insights. This bit is interesting:

“Ad professionals will also be able to make use of Google, Facebook and Sky datasets – the latter of which the supermarket chain is working in partnership with – to build audience profiles and predict their behaviours.”

And “retail media” has been growing for a few years. Walmart, Target, CVS, Kroger and others do a lot. Retail media isn’t just ads in stores. Instacart is an online shopping delivery platform with a lot of customers, particularly in the US. Many people pulling together their online shop means that you can offer a search/discovery platform - shoppers are searching for things they know they want, but your ads help them choose from multiple options or discover things they didn’t even know they wanted to buy yet. More on Instagram and ads:

Featured Product Ad Strategy for Winning on Instacart.

Instacart starts self-serve ad platform to connect brands with shoppers (2020).

Co-ops

Invest in The Drivers Cooperative: A ridehailing platform owned by workers, not billionaire founders and venture capital - it’s worker-owned so here “invest in” means “earn an interest rate” rather than “own shares”.

Interesting talks on platform co-operatives - what’s a platform co-op? “Platform co-ops offer a near-future, alternative to platform capitalism based on cooperative principles such as democratic ownership and governance.”

Co-op Group launches £3m carbon innovation fund with Co-op Foundation “to support UK entrepreneurs, start-ups and groups with funding for projects that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deliver added social value”. More details at Co-op Foundation.

Gucci in Asda aisle 3

Asda hid 30 items of preloved Gucci among its George range, for sale at £12-15 - a film tie-in campaign that got a fair bit of news coverage. But the newsletter hasn’t yet seen anyone on social media saying they found some Gucci treasure.

Asda becomes first UK supermarket to launch draught beer concept - previously tried by Waitrose a few years ago, changes to licensing laws make this more viable now.

Asda charters own cargo ship to prevent Christmas shortages of decorations and toys - John Lewis, Costco and Walmart have also chartered directly.

M&S clothing ++

M&S has had a choppy few years and is getting interesting again. The food business with Ocado is going well, and the store estate is being reshaped and refitted. They recently invested in Nobody's Child, a fashion label that puts responsible, sustainable design first.

Even better: the rent-a-christmas-dress trial with Hirestreet. It pulls a non-traditional demographic into the stores, it feels modern, it’s also about the circular economy and sustainability. (And they have a stake in Hirestreet's parent co Zoa, which went through M&S's accelerator programme a few years ago.)

Consumer spend on carbon reduction: (only) 100/month

A 20-year study into ethical buying habits from the Co-op Group shows households are on average spending only £100 a month on lowering their carbon impact. Co-op Group’s Steve Murrells:

“The world can’t hold its breath waiting for global leaders to make statements on how to tackle climate change, action is needed now. Our Ethical Consumerism Report is a barometer on consumer behaviour and the report offers clear evidence to policymakers that they can positively influence change. The rise in electric car sales is a direct result of a favourable tax regime while the continuing sales and installation of gas boilers shows even more needs to be done to help consumers and businesses make positive changes for the good of the environment.”

Co-op and Co-op Digital news

How we’re prioritising responsible design.

Co-op Funeralcare leads the way on price transparency as first national provider to join funeral director comparison site.

Thank you for reading

11 Nov 2021: COP26 and carbon transformation. Shrinkage in staffless stores. Cloud unservices.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter. Forward it to a friend who’d like to read about what the internet is doing to retail businesses, people, communities and society.

[Image: Luke Tugby, Retail Week]

COP26 and carbon transformation

“Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Co-op and M&S said they would reduce carbon emissions, deforestation and the food waste and packaging they produce. Their efforts will be monitored by the WWF conservation group.”

The wider context is COP26, the most important conference... ever? The new announcements on finance, methane and forestry are progress. Though not enough progress. The effect of the plans is also unclear: 1.8C last week, or maybe it’s 2.7C. Neither meet the 1.5C Paris target.

The COP work now is turning announcements into detailed plans - though at draft stage the language is of “urging” rather than “requiring”. And after that, the work will be implementing the plans. Much work to be done.

The problem is that everyone still prefers the idea of a managed, orderly transition in which everyone’s normal ways of life can continue as is. The truth though is that orderly transition probably hasn’t been possible since the 1990s. What’s needed now is a massive, disruptive “carbon transformation” effort. It will need to be fast and to deliver climate justice, otherwise it won’t work.

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