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'Bodega' CEO Apologizes, Insists They'll Create More Jobs (cnn.com)
Remember those two ex-Googlers who started a company to replace mom-and-pop corner stores with automated vending kiosks? An anonymous reader writes:
The company's CEO has now "apologized in the face of mounting outrage," according to CNN. CEO Paul McDonald had shared a vision with Fast Company of a world where centralized shopping locations "won't be necessary" because there'll be a tiny automated one every 100 feet. Within hours McDonald was writing a new apologetic essay insisting he's not trying to replace corner stores, which carry more items and include a human staff who "offer an integral human connection to their patrons that our automated storefronts never will." In fact, he added that "Rather than take away jobs, we hope Bodega will help create them. We see a future where anyone can own and operate a Bodega -- delivering relevant items and a great retail experience to places no corner store would ever open." Promising to review criticism, he added his hope was to "bring a useful, new retail experience to places where commerce currently doesn't exist."
Bodega's CEO sees it as a way to beat Amazon by offering immediate access to popular products, and TechCrunch reports the company has already raised $2.5 million, while Fast Company notes "angel" investments from executives at Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Dropbox.
The company has already begun testing 30 Bodega boxes over the last ten months, and unveiled 50 more boxes last week, with hopes to have over 1,000 by the end of next year.
Bodega's CEO sees it as a way to beat Amazon by offering immediate access to popular products, and TechCrunch reports the company has already raised $2.5 million, while Fast Company notes "angel" investments from executives at Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Dropbox.
The company has already begun testing 30 Bodega boxes over the last ten months, and unveiled 50 more boxes last week, with hopes to have over 1,000 by the end of next year.
A vending machine with a person inside it?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So where's the form to apply for one?
#DeleteFacebook
Not likely. Everything about this says taking the distributors and inefficient parts of the supply chain out of the picture.
He may *say* "not taking away jobs", but that's just a saying -- not something he knows. Or at least, it's not going to be likely that the jobs created make up for the jobs lost.
How long before hipsters (or Hispanic people) in the Mission start torching these?
Instead of planting fancy vending machines, why not double down on "because... Internet!" and combine it with Uber. The driver would have a mini store in the trunk and the Magical App would connect the customer with the nearest driver with matching inventory. They could call it something like "web van".
A dingo ate my sig...
is part of a major chain. The only one that's not completely awful is Qwik Trip, which at least pays it's people moderately well. What I remember was they all ran 24-7 and the folks on the night shift were going to get shot sooner or later. It was never a question of if it was when.
I guess what I'm saying is, who still has a nice little mom & pop shop left that they can get mad at bodega? I watched all those get swallowed up by Circle K/7-11 in the late 80s. Even the immigrants don't run 'em any more.
On the other hand it's hilarious having this guy talk about making jobs with a business model who's entire point is eliminating cashiers. And you can damn well bet the guys that stock these things will be on the 'sharing' economy payscale where they somehow manage to earn less than minimum wage and it's still legal. I'd like to think the backlash is more about that than about actual bodegas.
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We're sorry. And we promise that we're going to immediately change our business model in no way. Did we mention that we're sorry?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Bodega's CEO sees it as a way to beat Amazon by offering immediate access to popular products
We've had that for centuries - it's called a store. These guys' model just potentially moves the pickup point slightly closer to us.
And, given the inherently higher maintenance costs of their business model (repeatedly stopping and restocking these small "every 100 feet" locations with tiny deliveries), even without on-site staff it's hard to see how this could be competitive with either a traditional store or with Amazon.
TechCrunch reports the company has already raised $2.5 million
Given the type of business they're trying to create, that's not actually very much at all.
#DeleteChrome
"...the right questions of the right people." What a sad sack of crap CEO. Kids, never apologize to people who feel slighted on other people's behalf. The obeisance they demand is never-ending and will suck you dry. Especially never apologize to people who use terms like "cultural misappropriation" unironically. And especially especially never apologize to people who were never going to be your customers in the first damn place.
Also never apologize to people who are angry over the loss of "character." They're the ones who bemoan the loss of public libraries they never visit.
A vending machine with a person inside it?
Standing next to it, to help people who can't work it, reset it when it breaks, print coupons when it eats money or mangles the goods, and call the cops when an angry consumer goes insane. Just like the guy standing at the "self-checkout" lanes at your grocery store.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
... big bullshitty PR drumroll. A completely staged pseudo-controversy. Nothing else.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Sorry a bunch of internet drama people freaked out about nothing. Sorry a news report created a false narrative and a mob of angry jerks believed it. Sorry you were trolled. Sorry that simple, entirely voluntary commerce is so upsetting to some people with a loose grip on rationality.
Let me make it up to you by telling you a completely different nonsense story full of soothing pretense. That's what shallow drama people understand.
If they were, as they're promising, hiring people enough to replace mom and pop stores then it would be happening already. What an idiotic claim, don't they think investors deserve realism? This is the age of horseshit.
If this succeeds their next project is a robot prostitute, the Ho-dega.
I hate dealing with staff in a shop so I I always go to the self-service checkout at the supermarket. Between going to a corner shop or a vending machine, I'd take the vending machine.
When human staff increase cost and reduce the quality of service, they represent a detrimental factor to the business. Vending machines are clearly a good business model and I'll use them as long as they match the price at the supermarket.
When you hear conservatives moaning about "food stamp" (or EBT or SNAP) fraud, a lot of the real examples behind their complaints come from what goes down at bodegas. Scams like buying a $5 item, having the register ring up $95 in sales and the bodega owner splitting the $90 with the welfare recipient.
There are still plenty of real bodegas out there, but they are primarily in lower income areas so if you didn't think they still existed then you are probably doing fairly well. This is also why most of their profits come from sale of age-controlled items such as cigarettes, alcohol and lottery tickets.
And if financial news reporters were better than cheerleaders in business suits, they would be ripping this business startup as doomed to failure because it's founders:
1) fail to understand the business they claim to want to disrupt
2) fail to offer a means of conducting the highest-profit transactions that business has
Only if they had even talked a smidge about having ideas for handling age-restricted sales could I see their venture as anything other than a vehicle to fleece venture capitalists. Shit, they could have just hand waved about "leveraging Face ID to reduce friction in high value sales" to demonstrate a minimal comprehension of their self-described target market...
We're sorry we named our new product line 'Buggy Whip'. We will immediately re-brand it as 'automobile'.
Have gnu, will travel.
My default stance is, if we have a way to do things that requires less jobs, that should actually be the goal. Other than ensuring that people have an income and are able to live, why would you want to CREATE work? Technology is about reducing the amount of work, and progress has always BEEN about reducing work. Domestication and agriculture changed society so that instead of everyone having to work for their food (and being mostly unable to do anything else) we could have some people handle the food and let other people do other things with their time. Whether by this kiosk system or the next, if you are a cashier start training for something else, because it's not going to be a career option in 20 years.
At the same time, I feel bad that we will lose it, as I do like interacting with people when I go shopping. We should consider what the goal of this efficiency is. What do we enable by getting rid of that obsolete worker? If, because of the way our society is currently structured, replacing a job with a robot hurts someone, and doesn't actually provide that person with a new opportunity, and is merely giving the rich more money and more ways to exploit the poor, then we should rail against those plans with everything we've got. While efficiency is a worthy goal, I think personal experiences and livelihood are more important than progress, unless we doom the race by ignoring that progress.
I don't think that replacing the corner store with a kiosk is going to be one of the advances that save us from the apocalypse.
Bodega's CEO sees it as a way to beat Amazon by offering immediate access to popular products
Best Buy offers you immediate access to popular products too, but that just makes them Amazon's de-facto showroom instead.
Given the *extremely limited* storage space constraints of a typical vending machine, that will be guaranteed to mean "Current inventory: two types of luke-warm soda of a flavor you can't stand, a cellphone charger that's not compatible with your phone, and a special deal on sombrero's. Oh, and don't mind the homeless people using the side of our unattended machine as a public bathroom".
Other thoughts:
It seems very unlikely that the particular machine that you're close to will carry what you're looking for, even when limiting themselves to 'popular products'. After all, it is an incredibly inefficient way to manage your inventory. Example: you want a cellphone charger. in a typical store, they'd have half a dozen sitting on a shelf. Depending on the size of the store, that serves customers anywhere from within the next few blocks, to half a city. With these vending machines, they'd needs hundreds of them to cover a similar size chunk of town that the current single store does. And even then, the odds that the machine you are standing next to won't have it are huge because at best they carried one or two, and it's not like they'll be restocking these multiple times a day... (And if they ARE continuously driving in circles restocking these all day, everyday, then expect that the price for any item is going to be a multitude of normal, it's WAY more expensive to drive around all day than to just pay a minimum wage worker in a traditional store to unpack a few pallets worth of products)
Meanwhile, they want to compete with Amazon, who carries 480 million different products on their website, and which on top of that already offers 1 hour delivery service in limited markets -- Good luck with that, not holding my breath...
Because wage slaves are better than independent business owners?
I got some jobs for this tool!
if you can get desperate people to do your stocking for you because they can't find full time work.Amazon's doing that right now with their delivery system. One of my brother's coworkers delivers packages after work for them because he doesn't make enough money at his full time job to make ends meet.
As long as we're giving companies a pass on minimum wage law because it's 'on an app' you'll see more of this. There's a whole universe of shitty business models that spring to life when the working class stops taking care of its own...
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For the same reason robot warehouses have more stuff in them: They don't need aisles for those troublesome fleshies.. Plus no AC or heat. And they're not trying to compete with Amazon, they're competing with 7-11. I don't buy coffee and stale donuts online.
You're right about the bums peeing, or more likely punks tagging the thing. Japan's had tons of vending machines selling damn near everything for ages. It works because they have very little vandalism. My guess is there'll be cameras everywhere and they'll track and prosecute people who tag the machines. Maybe get some laws passed for much, much harsher sentences for vandalism (in America that wouldn't be hard). After a few guys do 1-3 years hard time for spray painting a dick on these things word'll get around. Either that or they're gonna coat them in something that makes it really easy to clean spray paint off. But either way they've got to solve the vandalism problem somehow.
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I think if CEO's are smart, we'll see more outrage targeting like this. It's so easy to manufacture a single statement that will generate a huge backlash - to which the right response can easily defuse things and in the meantime you have just gained a lot of recognition...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The thing I haven't really seen talked about here is that traditional bodegas will *never* be replaced by this type of business model. (Perhaps that's why some are offended they borrowed the name.) Bodegas as they exist in places like New York City, cater to lower income urban citizens who don't necessarily have the money to purchase what they need right away. Bodega owners often extend credit to these people, relying on knowing them personally and their past history. Their customers are likely NOT to have forms of credit like a credit debit cards that can be swiped or read at a vending kiosk.
But even putting that aside? These automatic vending systems tend to suffer from mechanical breakdowns or loss of network connectivity (needed to verify the cards being processed). That's likely one reason they haven't become more popular a long time ago. This idea really isn't anything new at all. Pretty much any company who ever built a vending machine probably thought about it. It just doesn't make a whole lot of financial sense when you have to deal with people who may need to do returns or exchanges on whatever they buy, and who need basic necessities ASAP, so can't just "come back later" if the system can't vend them the loaf of bread or gallon of milk they're after for that night's dinner.
As I recall, large scale vending like this was actually experimented with in some big cities. I recall being told about such a system on a street corner somewhere in Memphis, for example? I think it was done as a drive-up thing? Anyway, it was removed after a year or two. Apparently not so profitable or well liked.
It's a fucking vending machine. My only complaint is that there is no opportunity here for me to part fools with their money.
We're entering the age of the war on automation. We now have ways to automatically do many things that have typically done by cheap unskilled labor (i.e. shelf stocking, cashier, not small business owner) and the people who hold these jobs are going to revolt. No one wants to be seen as redundant or unnecessary, but that is what is happening. For years we've been seeing a shift from service oriented jobs to high tech jobs because in a capitalist economy we understand the later is more profitable and less risky in the long run. I don't hate the change, nor do I blame Bodega for what they envision (although that is a terrible name) but I do understand the perspective of those being displaced.
Specialty vending machines, like Twice the Ice, and most gas stations these days, are awesome. Small drive-thru convenience stores like Farm Stores are becoming more automated, and could potentially go "operator free" for most of the 24 hour cycle.
Personally, I'd rather have one of these automated stores within 1km throughout the residential neighborhoods, instead of the junk-marts that currently accompany basically every gas station in the US. If you got the auto-mart density up to 0.3km, people could walk to the store for a liter of milk or juice instead of having to get in the car.
Is douchebaggery an official qualification requirement to work at Google? They are *surprised* there was outrage? I see this going the way of Soylent or that stupid juicer. Put *down* the LSD, kids.
Given housing prices in many major cities, I guess well all be renting a sitting spot in a flop soon, thanks I always wondered what the 19th century was like
Literally every 100 ft or there abouts, someone has a tienda (store because bodega means closet).
For some reason we don't do this in the USA anymore.
We don't stress entrepreneurship and this is costing us a generation or more of future business innovators.
Having lived in Mexico for 5 years now, I can tell you that Latin America is learning the lessons we in the USA discarded in order to sit in an office 60 hrs a week. But as these tiendas grow and as more people take their destiny into their own hands, they are coming to realize that they do not need corporate or banking masters and are beginning to throw off the chains of the USA style of social welfare and instead rely on their own ability to manage their own affairs.
It is absolutely amazing to drive through these neighborhoods many with homes costing the equivalent of 30 years salary or more and realize these people bought and built everything they have.
If you want a real eye opener I invite you to come on down here and take a look.
Signed one very happy expat.
Like every other vending machine owner they will need to strike deals to place their machines and deal with restocking and broken machines.
We all spend our money somewhere. We all have the right to choose where we spend it and what businesses we choose and do not choose to support. If you want to preserve the shops and character of your neighborhoods, choose with your wallet. Personally, I only look online as a last resort, I eat local, do my best to support local business and the culture they bring to my neighborhood. I get to know all the staff at the places I am a regular.
Obviously attitudes like that are rare and big business has made nearly every city a homogeneous place with set in a different location with different weather. Sure some cities still have something unique, but business and technology are quickly obscuring and erasing those things leaving them to stories of "back in my day."
Technology and big business are making it so Mom and Pop local businesses cannot compete because of volume and the better price points while simultaneously making the quality of our goods and services suffer. I have a few fans's from the early 1900's that still work today. If I go to Walmart and buy some cheap fan, I am lucky if it lasts 3 or 4 years of 247 operation, ending up in a landfill because its cheaper to buy a new one than fix the old one. I have a lot of shop equipment from the 40's and 50's I inherited from my father and work great to this day without ever needing a repair, beyond a little oil or grease every few years. I drive a 47 year old car, still with original paint and interior, and has only had handful of parts replaced. Runs like a champ and looks far better than modern cars. Oh and thanks to technology, I can play my music, use some map app, and use my cellphone via its FM radio.
There is good and bad to all this progress. Imho, most of its been bad for humanity in recent decades and I have been responsible for some very significant aspects of it and that negative impact on society/ Years ago, like many older tech folks, I wised up and now choose my projects with more thought and wisdom on its impact to humanity and human nature.
All those landfills with old tech. The marketing driven and builtin need to upgrade every few years. Think about the global impact of all the hurricane victims in the US. Millions of new TV's sold, cars bought, phones, shoes, clothes, dishes, toys, all those people will be buying new things that will end up in our environment in a few years because of the next hurricane or they break in a few years or whatever.
Disaster Economics and Planned Obsolescence at its finest.
The victim is humanity and quality of our goods. The earth will get along fine without us, while we keep supporting businesses and ways of living that will kill us all. Technology is not all bad, but the lack of ethics and morals and long term thinking about our future for stock growth and sales is what is creating these problems.
If you are going to buy something, buy it with the intent that you will own it and use it your entire life. Do you just want it or need it. In a world with exponential population growth, things people want create a lot more waste than things people actually need.
If you want to buy machine made food served in a box filled with germs, preservatives, and processed shit that causes health problems that's your choice. I'll go to my local farmers markets, stick with my fresh organic stuff that I know how it was grown and taken care of before coming home with me. Its the only way I can avoid the gluten, dairy, and yeast, that create disease in me and put me in the hospital if I consume to much of it. I used to think those issues were just getting old problems, until I figured it out and cut all of that out of my diet and ate in a manner more akin to folks 100 years ago when these common health and mental issues were not common as they are today.
Similarly blaming someone and suing a company for something you purchased like cigarettes or fast food making you fat. That was your stupid and you deserve all the health issues and problems that come into your life because of it, just spread your shit on my lawn and in my body in the process.
japan can also sell beer at them Can't do that in usa also what happens in japan when it jams and some beats the shit out of to un jam it??
Like every other vending machine owner they will need to strike deals to place their machines and deal with restocking and broken machines.
Ssssh, we're calling this one a "Startup."
And to be fair, there is room for innovation in the vending machine space.
Real lawyers write in C++
Here in Finland they have started to open Modulshops where you can get few 100's off goods from wending machines. I have not visited yet, but one is just opening near by later this fall. One can open the door with credit card, pic the stuff from machines and go home. There are few of the, already, they serve 24/7. They say small normal shop can not produce enough for employing two persons, in 1 person shop the problem is that shopkeeper should visit retailer etc. from time to time. Night time extras and weekend salaries make also 24/7 opening difficult for normal shops unless you are some very big supermarket. With this system the owner can concentrate to maintaing storage etc. As it is cashless, there are also no problems with someone trying to rob you in some suburb in the middle of night.
Company behind it: http://rivender.com/fi/etusivu/
Some pictures in google: https://www.google.fi/search?q=modulshop&client=firefox-b&dcr=0&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjg79mNna7WAhVsJ5oKHfDNA5MQsAQIMw&biw=1332&bih=699
Their promotional video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia8znILv6ZU
I asked about the beer and sake ones when I lived in Japan. The answer was they're all sitting out in the open, so any adult that sees a child buying alcohol would step in and stop them.
I never had a vending machine properly jam over there, but I did have one try to deliver a drink and fail. It tried to drop the can out 3 times before giving up, putting that item as out of stock and spitting my money back out.
We already have vending machines. You are not 'inventing' anything. We don't want just vending machines. We WANT convenience stores. GET A CLUE!
You know, until it can save them a nickel.
Wal-Mart has never destroyed a small town, people who shop at wal-mart did.
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