Theory: there is a technological great replacement as well
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I live in Florida and work on the front line of this article.
Nope. Curbside and home delivery are down from the height of covid. Store walkins are up.
Home delivery from Kroger's robot factory are down and the service has severely taken a hit. Their sales are down. Their quality of product is down. Their lack of products is up. They haven't had a decent sale in 9 months.
For a while during and after covid I was doing curbside pick up for groceries. And when everything I ordered was in stock it was typically great. 15 minutes ordering online, show up the next morning wait less than 10 and my car is loaded up and I’m ready to go home. Huge time saver. But as things started to open back up and inflation started kicking in things got worse. Those working curbside pick up became insanely slow. Could take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour before they’d bring my stuff out. As soon as that consistently became less convenient I was back in the store.
Very much so, but not in how the article paints it I think.
It's all about turning previously owned property into rented ones. It's happened with games, movies, music. Most entertainment. When it comes to other technology it's all about treating the customer as a product. Constant online connections and oversight, with them in full control, just like with rented products. SmartTV's, SmartFridges, SmartPhones, etc. Even cars are online and digital today.
Them renting and controlling the product means they can remove it at any time, for any reason, as well.
Even the internet itself is under the control of an oligopol collusion between Big Tech. Mostly google, but also Microsoft, and cloudflare. Sadly, many people support this by using google's tech. Like Brave or Firefox, or having their site cloudflared, or using a google/bing search engine. Even throwing in google scripts, cookies and XHR's on their site. If you want to see the extent of it, use the e/uMatrix addon. Preferably with Pale Moon.
Food delivery apps are in a competition loss spiral. They burn capital like crazy. Delivery isn't worth its price for most people. It's fad. After everything settles, only lazy rich people will continue to use them.
Low volume micro-logistics don't work, economically. This is why Amazon is shrinking its warehouses and adding days to it's Prime delivery estimations.
There have been a lot of technologies held back because people didn't want to change. Covid happened, and those things get pushed. Is part of the replacement theory for tech?
Eat your bugs, and say the words, or your social credit score will drop and the grocery stores won't sell you food anymore.