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Tesco: 3D Printing Will Come To Supermarkets 'Within a Few Years'
TinTops writes "The IT chief of supermarket giant Tesco has said he believes there is a market for 3D printing in large supermarkets, and that it will be 'good for customers.' Mike McNamara told V3: 'I think it will help Tesco as a company, I don't think it will be a bad thing. It'll be a great thing for customers, we'll have 3D printing in our stores. As retailers you'll always adapt. So new things come along — the internet came along, we adapted to that one. We kind of have the internet version two with smartphones now, which has been a bigger impact than the wired internet, we'll adapt to that, we'll adapt to 3D printing, we'll adapt to RFID. You live, you change.' McNamara thinks 3D printers will be commonplace in stores before they start showing up in significant numbers at people's homes. This could 'give shoppers a new reason to visit shops for quick access to niche items.'"
I could see cake decorations being printed on-demand in your local supermarket. Dad likes Game of Thrones? Print him a cyvasse set and put it on his birthday cake.
3d printing with sugar is well on its way to becoming a mature technology already, so yeah, a few years and I wouldn't be surprised to see it at the bakery.
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I don't think we're all that far off from home 3D printing entering the range of "affordable" for most people. The technology keeps making significant jumps, with everything from shower curtain rings to guns being printed. Once wider adoption becomes a reality, the economic reality of greater mass production will bring it down in short order.
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It'll be akin to existing photo printing at supermarkets. Send your design from home, it'll be ready in a number of hours. It'll appeal to the same people who don't want to buy a decent quality colour printer, and photo paper, and ink, etc to print their own photos.
People will print things that aren't already mass-produced and available at the dollar store next door. Vacuum cleaner part broke? I'll get one 3D printed in 2 hours rather than send $50 to the manufacturer and wait for it to ship, if it still exists.
Also, given a market for drawings there might actually be something to print. Of course every pop culture firm is going to be suing every one to death for every depiction of mickey mouse or jar jar binks or the enterprise. I suppose that they will have trouble with toy manufacturers if they wanted to license such templates. I am not sure how many people will go and design their own. I practice by designing a chess set, but I got some high end software for free.
Then there is the cost of the resin, which is really why Costco wants to go into the business. I would assume that 3D printers are going to end up like ink jet printers. Many will have then, as they might only cost a few hundred dollars, bug the sticker shock might put them in a corner. Or like label makers. I have one, but I am not really willing to shell out the cost of a cartridge.
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No one makes their own clothes, very few people have a computerized sewing machine and buy clothes plans, what makes you think that something more complex and more esoteric is going to catch on like this? Too much sci-fi?
This is an excellent point. 3D printing is a potentially transformative technology that is very much in its infancy. How many things are there that are made out of a single material, or even a small number of materials suitable for 3D printing?
Can you print chips? Capacitors? Can you make a metal latch on a plastic body? Right now I think the answer to all those things is no. 3D printing is great for modelmakers, and some specialty niches, but it is a very long way from replacing any significant manufacturing. And even when it evolves to that point I would be surprised if a capable printer would be something that it would be worthwhile to buy for your home.
Very insightful, using that term in the usual sense of 'I was going to say that, damn your eyes.'
I would point out as well that regardless of how good home printers get, commercial centres such as supermarkets will always be able to afford better, or at least more full-featured, ones---it's quite possible that few households will need the ability to print high-quality aluminium things (e.g., jaw-bones or derailleurs) on a regular basis.
My local photo shop still does better than any colour printer we could well afford can do. (It looks like a photo shop---I can tell by some of the sales-people and customers, and having see quite a few shops in my time.)
Can you make a metal latch on a plastic body?
Not with a single print head. But you can print the metal latch with a sintering printer, print the plastic with an extruding printer, and then have a robot retrieve and assemble the parts. In the near future, multi-process printing will be more common: you will be able to print the metal latch with one print head, and then switch print heads and print plastic into and around the metal part.
I remember sending my first email over a modem in the early 80's. By the time I was in college 10 years later Usenet, BBS'es, MUDs, and the like were old hat to me, but the general public had no real use for computers and even many of my classmates still used actual typewriters to write their papers. It wasn't until the Dot-Com era was in full swing that the general public started to pay attention to computers and the Internet. Even then, though, many people of my generation and older smirked to refer to themselves as "Roadkill on the Information Superhighway." That only really disappeared around 2005 when social media started to take off.
So the point is, from the perspective of the general public there is a significant lag between when a transformative technology changes the world and when your average Joe wakes up to the fact that a revolution has already happened. I suspect it will be much the same with 3D printing, and the other significant, significant technologies that are birthing now such as wearable computing or implantable electronics, RFID or the "Internet of Things."
However in this case the real transformation is not technical, but psycho-social. Getting people to transform from the brain-dead, passive consumers they've been conditioned to be the past 100 years to the self-directed, creative makers 3D printing and these other technologies will enable them to be (at a lower barrier to entry than before, naturally), will take a lot longer than the 30 years it's taken the Information Revolution to get truly underway. That does mean early adopters will enjoy a significant, significant competitive advantage for a generation because now more than ever they can talk to other like minds via the Internet and multiply their native talents. And, now more than ever, they can say who gives a shit if Joe Sixpack next door doesn't get it? I can run circles around him before he even knows there's a race on.
Amid the totalitarian shadow of the NSA and the counter-revolutionary tendencies of the Powers-That-Be, it's the one thing that gives me hope for the future.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.