🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (5 tweets)
Apparently Walgreens is testing, in Chicago, a “new” concept: almost all goods (save two aisles of “essentials”) behind a barrier, passed over it to the customer in response to an order entered on a kiosk. This is almost a return to the retail experience of the late 1800s.
(Waaay back in the day, because everything needs to be invented, we did not have the “packaging” part of “consumer packaged goods”, and so one responsibility of a retailer was taking an order for a pound of sugar and moving that sugar from a large container to a small container.)
It represented a major improvement for society that you did not need to have a bespoke negotiation for each item in your basket. We went back to bespoke negotiation recently, in some places. (I’m still miffed that I needed to ask permission to be allowed to buy a toothbrush.)
I’m naturally more inclined to endorse having the bespoke negotiation with a screen rather than a person but it seems like a worse experience compared to just taking the toothbrush and putting it into your basket then scanning at checkout.
If only we had some sort of societal technology where one could have toothbrushes, and other nice things, and those nice things would stay where one put them until they were taken by a paying customer. But we apparently lost that technology.