The BankID service seems to trip up many people here.<p>Swedish residents have a personal identity number issued at birth or immigration. Format: YYYYMMDD-NNNN. More details: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_number_(Sweden)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_number_(Swed...</a><p>BankID is a service run by the Swedish banks that interfaces with the banks, individuals and third parties (like this chain of unmanned stores).<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID</a><p>The banks know the identities (personal identify number) of their customers via their physical offices. BankID offers an app to individuals and an online API to paying/approved third-party services. Third-party services are able to offer BankID authentication in websites and apps. In the end the third party receives an authenticated personal identity number.<p>There is growing awareness that this service should not be run by private companies/banks.
I'm hoping this can have even wider implications for society and the way people interact. In rural Sweden the last decade all the small local village stores have totally disappeared. This means that when people who are spread around the countryside could previously just cycle a few kilometers to a nearby shop, they now need to take their car and drive (say) 25 kilometers to the nearest town - which also has usually built an out-of-town shopping area that sprawls enormous car-parking over land that might previously have been forest or farmland.<p>The roads are therefore constantly clogged by speeding cars, and have become seriously bike-hostile, discouraging local interactions even more.<p>I think these small stores could actually become a focus for local activity again - even without staff.
I used to work at a major multi-billion dollar retailer. One of the biggest complaints from customers was waiting at the check out line, especially for small, quick orders.<p>This is the future of grocery stores, like it or not. Employees are expensive and make mistakes, whereas machines are cheap, don't take breaks, and work pretty reliably once you set them up correctly.
I believe Sweden has pretty good policing, and the Swedes are just about as honest as you could ever expect a nation to be, but if this was in "rural" Denmark and someone decided to raid the store, there would be very little stopping them. Police is in many cases at least 30 minutes away, if not more, and have no resources to investigate the theft of 10L of milk.<p>In many cases the staff is a store is just as much present to scare of any one wanting to steal. Even if we've seen gangs just walk out with massive amounts of goods, and the staff understandably choosing to not confront them.
There will be a market for both automated and manned grocery stores in the future.<p>Until we have developed artificial general intelligence, I wouldn't trust a computer to recommend a cheese to with a certain kind of crackers. In stores with a reasonably wide selection of goods, I usually have to ask for the location of at least one thing.<p>Although locating stuff _could_ be solved by looking it up with an app, I would rather pay the markup. And I'm quite certain that a lot of other people will, because as opposed to with a lot of other goods, you're often low on time when shopping for groceries. I guess the urgency of shopping is why online grocery shopping hasn't taken off as much as even I would have predicted a few years ago.
Ok but what if I wanted to shop without a smartphone, or don't own one?<p>Don't get me wrong this is great for the current situation but like all things it doesn't <i>only</i> have good things about it.
So this is basically run on a trust basis, right?
And if you steal, you will eventually get caught on video and be blocked from entering the store?<p>I can imagine this working well in small villages. You'll get a few thieves and vandals, but eventually you can weed them out.<p>Pretty genius.
I remember visiting a fully automated store already in the 90's in Tromsø, Norway. It was like an extended vendoring machine. It was quite fun watching the robot hand go up and down based on your order. I believe such stores were already common in Japan at the time. The shop didn't make it, though, and was discontinued after a year or two.<p>Today automated checkouts are popping up in more and more shops in Norway, though they're not present in all stores yet. You simply do your shopping as normal, but instead of having a shop clerk beep them for you, you have to do it yourself. It's pretty straightforward, and no app is needed. Sometimes there will be a guard overseeing the terminals, but mostly you're left to your own devices. Otherwise there's usually a normal teller on hand for questions or for products that don't scan. Or if you simply want to pay with legal tender, which Norwegian shops are still obliged to accept per law.
At least until a few years ago there were some unlocked open stores in rural Finland, where you just took what you needed and left the cash. The owner just turned up once a day or so to restock and take the money.<p>They may all be gone now, it doesn't take much to destroy that level of local trust.
Advocates of much higher minimum wages should understand that the eventual consequence will be automating many jobs out of existence, not just people doing the same jobs but for more pay.
This is potentially interesting... maybe.<p>A lot of retail has a trade off between small convenient stores and bing inconvenient ones. One is convenient. The other is better stocked, better priced, etc.<p>Software is eating the inconvenient stores. Better stocked, Better priced. Hard to beat. Maybe robots eat convenient stores.<p>Depending on how these scale and what price economics are like, this might work well.
I'm waiting on Automats to come back, esp. in a complex firm. Basically a bunch of little windows with stuff. Half expected the article to be about that.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat</a>
This change is being sped up by the fact employees don't actually deter anything anymore. If there is shoplifting they just call the police. In fact, intervening will usually get <i>them</i> in trouble.
Privacy (encrypt data at rest) requires global identifiers like BankID, RealID, or equiv.<p>It's a counter intuitive conclusion.<p>cite: Translucent Databases<p>source: worked on medical records and voter privacy stuff
- Retail jobs suck, so this is good.<p>- warehouses and public dispensaries are content-address-based networking for the physical world.<p>- I don't really care about purchases being deanonymized because money itself a public good.<p>- I do care about the private sector having the data, because they will surely do terrible things with it.<p>Back to the networking analogy, the post is classic local-address-based networking for the physical realm. Just as we have a state-run post service utility, we should have a state-run warehouse-and-store utility.<p>Even all you free market types: the point is of the free market is that the transacting <i>agents</i> are independent, not that the market itself is. Running the marketplace and goods distribution utility as a public good is perfect fine "market socialism".<p>The only thing to be mindful of is that there is a standard and fair procedure for new sellers to have their goods stocked and distributed to bootstrap the demand.
So how will the people who would have worked in a shop like this, afford to shop for food? In Sweden this probably isn’t as big of an issue, but not every country is as socially conscious.
> critics warning that it would make shopping a less sociable experience<p>This is a good thing. Small talk with cashiers who can’t walk away is borderline harassment
> BankID, a secure national identification app operated by Sweden's banks.<p>Wow, that sounds pretty racist. Do better Sweden, we all remember what you did in WW2.