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.

I don't think your view is unpopular. Plenty of people here would agree with you but it's an overly romantic view of the world.

The problem isn't that Amazon is doing this and that this will drive out those mom&pop shops. The problem is that people will choose to go to Amazon and willingly destroy the mom&pop shops. The consumers are more culpable for the destruction of those mom&pop shops than Amazon. By placing the blame entirely on Amazon you are taking agency away from people which in my opinion sounds more wrong than a nice neighborhood losing its charm because of Amazon Go.

What people don't realize is that economic forces are completely within their control and it's their daily choices that add up to neighborhoods maintaining their charm or turning into Starbucks and Amazon Go automation factories. There is a sustainable way to drive innovation and it requires people to be cognizant of those daily choices. I don't think you can make people come to that realization by stopping or delaying progress.

No, economic forces are not completely in our control, not in any meaningful sense of control. The whole human agency thing is IMO mostly bullshit; faced with a modern economy, we have very little agency. Free will is a cool concept, but drop the prices in your store by 10% and everyone will come to you instead of your competitor - that's how trivial people as a group are to control. And companies are all about exploiting this.

So yeah, technically if you, and me, and everyone else agreed not to use Amazon Go and stick to our regular grocery routine, mom&pop shops would survive. But that doesn't take into account the fact that coordination is a super hard problem. One that's essentially impossible to solve for a group larger than a dozen people without creating some strong external incentive structures[0]. On the other hand, a company like Amazon is in a position to unilaterally change the incentive landscape. There's no consumer agency to talk about here, anymore than we talk about agency of sheep being herded.

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[0] - that's also why every society, as it grows, invents structured forms of governance.