Amazon Go

Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad.

I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement)..

I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables.

I know all the people who work in these supermarkets. The cashier in the supermarket downstairs always sings a quiet song while she scans my products, she knows my daughter and she's always nice and friendly.

The cashier in the other store talks to the customers. She stops scanning and starts talking while the line waits. Some customers might join the conversation. I know she has an old cat that eats an unlimited amount of food if allowed to do so...

There are similar stories about other shops in the neighbourhood - they come to work, they serve the people in the neighbourhood, they go home. They do this until they retire.

These people like their jobs because we respect them for what they do, so they feel useful and they work hard.

I don't mind waiting in line for 3 minutes. Or 5. It's never longer than that, even if the cashier discusses the latest news with the old lady.

The humanity of it has value for us here and that value is greater than the time we'd save by removing the people from the shops.

Trying to save jobs that are no longer the most efficient way of solving a problem is not the way to promote the value of humanity, in my opinion. People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible. They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay extra for something that only the minority get value out of is not a competitive strategy.

If humanity were to take your opinion, we'd never evolve as a society, lest we remove a need in society and with it, someones job.

"They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction..."

False. Sometime I go to the grocery store for social interaction. You know, to get out. I generally go to a particular wine shop cause I like chatting with the guy at the counter. The idea that we do all this "stuff" ("processes") to get "stuff" done, and then separately we go somewhere for the express and sole purpose of socializing, is just clearly wrong. It's all mixed in. We're social creatures. We socialize while at the barber shop. We socialize at the grocery store. We socialize at work. At church. At football or soccer games. If we attempt to "refactor" out the "process" to make it more efficient, fine. But, don't pretend like whatever we replace that effort with we're not going to be socializing while we do that new thing.

It's frankly really sad that we have all these people that used to be persons we knew and visited with at the checkout counter, now they're in some warehouse being super efficient having no time to visit with coworkers while they work, meanwhile, we pretend that stuff magically shows up at grocery stores and we can walk in and walk out and magic and future wow.