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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.
The fact that they're "ex-Google employees" says it all to me. So they're 20-something tech-heads who think every problem can be solved by an app. It probably never even occurred to them that an app can actually CREATE problems. It's all about the VC funding and dropping tech buzzwords to angels. Who cares if it actually works or whether it puts real people out of work? It's an appy app, so give us our money that we haven't earned!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
hiring people enough to replace mom and pop stores
Yeah, they're "gig-economying" jobs that were already low-paid and uncertain. True pioneers.
lucm, indeed.
This. Nobody gets into this business to create jobs, they do it to sell stuff.
THE RULE: Profit = Sales minus Jobs (and other irritating expenses)
But TALK and LIES are free, so you can say you're creating jobs if it maybe creates/increases sales.
"create jobs" my fanny. Let the record show he talks shit to the public to make his business plan look good.
How long before hipsters (or Hispanic people) in the Mission start torching these?
Please, no fires. Fires lead to riot tanks, rubber bullets, jack-booted free-market police. Be sensible, and clever. A little super-glue and spray-paint works wonders on keypads and other devices, hypothetically of course.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
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...
I've actually went back to a full-service grocery store again. It was bad enough when most stores started making us bag our own groceries. Now they want us to check ourselves out too. Pretty soon they'll be asking customers to stock the shelves and clean the bathrooms.
Fuck that noise. I'll pay a few dollars extra to get real humans helping me, thanks.
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
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...
By independent contractor I mean what Uber does to shift the businesses costs onto their "employees". Many of which are really bad at estimating the total costs for their car loans, maintenance, etc. (I'm not a socialist, I just don't think it's very honorable to base a business off people making poor choices)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire