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[Image: Fiveminutemarketing]
Unbundling the high street
A “ghost restaurant” is one that makes food solely for delivery customers - you can’t go to one and get a table. That’s the US term - in the UK they’re called “dark kitchens”. Deliveroo Editions is dark-kitchens-as-a-service: Deliveroo provides them to existing food brands. For larger restaurant operators, dark kitchens can load balance the peak times. For small ones, the kitchens can test demand in a new location without the capital investment in property: “The property requirement is data driven. Deliveroo know exactly where their customers are, the amount they spend, the frequency at which they order and the types of cuisine that are most popular in an area. From the fledgling operator’s perspective, this can lower the risk of venturing into uncharted territories and drive sales up as much as 400%.”
What if this idea was expanded out into high-street-as-a-service? Could you have a high street without a retail shopfront? Or a shopfront with no stock? The internet and logistics have made it possible to separate the point of product discovery from the purchase from the inventory from the delivery/handover. And these points can be recombined in many different ways. IKEA’s warehouse, Argos’s front/back of store, Deliveroo, Amazon’s many forms - all possible variations.
Related: a 2011 experiment by Homeplus (Tesco in South Korea) in which a billboard is the shelf and a camera the shopping basket.
Facebook engagement, newsfeeds, the noble mission
Facebook has seen plateauing user engagement with ads and paid content for a while. Part of it may be that user growth is simply harder to come by when you’re at 2bn users. And part of it is down to the changes FB started making in the wake of the fakenews/election influence challenges since 2016 - these changes have made user newsfeeds more personal and less advertising-y. FB has reacted by starting to exert more influence over its Instagram and WhatsApp properties, tying them more closely to the back-end ad business. As adverts and sponsored content disappear from the user’s newsfeed, FB’s Pages are becoming more like functional websites inside Facebook.com. At the same time, Google is embracing the newsfeed form - a stream of content that will be relevant to you (if the algorithms have been well-behaved) that means you don’t need to actively search for content. (Related: the early history of newsfeeds on the internet.)
The founders of Insta and WhatApp found Facebook’s actions a bit chafing. The Insta founders quit FB this week, and a WhatsApp founder did an interview, and then a Facebook exec replied with an interesting rant that ended like this, which is certainly one way to describe Facebook’s business: “Facebook is truly the only company that’s singularly about people. Not about selling devices. Not about delivering goods with less friction. Not about entertaining you. Not about helping you find information. Just about people. It makes it hard sometimes because people don’t always behave in predictable ways (algorithms do), but it’s so worth it. Because connecting people is a noble mission, and the bad is far outweighed by the good.”
Elsewhere: a couple of days ago Facebook got hacked, 50-90m accounts affected. The problem is potentially amplified though because many other services on the internet let users select Facebook as their authentication mechanism.
Jack’s
Coverage of Tesco’s new chain Jack’s: A taste of Brexit in a windswept Tesco car park, Jack’s: an austerity brand for Brexit Britain. “Tesco chain prides itself on its British products – but it’s really selling the myth of post-Brexit self-sufficiency”. The commentary a bit hoarse at times - the new grocery brand may be a convenient outlet for some cathartic anti-Brexit rage.
Speaking of Brexit: 'No-deal' Brexit could cost food retail industry 9.3 billion pounds - Barclays study.
You know who and product discovery
That online ecommerce giant we sometimes talk about is experimenting further with product discovery: Snapchat partners with Amazon on a visual product search feature. You take a photo of a product or its barcode, and Snapchat shows you Amazon products that match it.
Amazon opened a store concept in New York where everything for sale is rated 4 stars or better, is a top seller, or is new and trending on the site. (Imagine a cut-down version of the website that only did 4+ star-reviewed products too, that might be good as well, though that said, product ratings are gamed enough as it is).
Metaphors
Here is an interesting piece about how the brain isn’t a computer, or even like one. Humans have always borrowed metaphors from technology to explain the brain - clay, hydraulics, mechanical machines, communication machines, the information processing computer, the network, and so on. Maybe this is because technology is often the new, ingenious thing - it seems most advanced, and advanced is how the human brain likes to think of itself. At the risk of perpetuating the brain-as-computer metaphor, that piece’s description of how the brain works (observations, pairing, punish/reward reinforcement) might sound a bit like… machine learning. We know that the brain/ML black box does things, we often don’t know why or how.
Spies and grocery
Moscow, 1985: Russian intelligence agent Oleg Gordievsky signals that he wishes to defect to Britain by carrying a Safeway carrier bag (Safeway is now Morrisons). A British agent acknowledges the signal by being seen eating a Mars bar.
London, 1999: “Granny spy” Melita Norwood gets her tea from the Co-op, possibly this one in South London.
Perhaps there is a study to be written on spies and grocery. Or at least a coded message, left in a dead letter drop in aisle three, behind the tea bags.
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Co-op Digital news
Karen Lindop: we’re hiring! Plus our ‘Federation Presents’ events.
Co-op Food news: replacing single-use plastic bags with compostable ones, and the wider Future of food 2030 plan.
Events
- Is a co-op right for you? - several sessions in several towns 11 Sep - 27 Nov.
- Delivery community of practice meetup - Mon 1 Oct 1pm at Federation House.
- Membership reporting - Tue 2 Oct 12pm at GF-C-23.
- Local.co.uk show & tell - Tue 2 Oct 1pm at Federation House.
- Diverse and equal tech conference - 3-4 Oct at Federation House.
- Engineering community of practice meetup - Wed 3 Oct 1pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Line management drop-in clinic - Thu 4 Oct 1pm at Federation House.
- Heads of practice community of practice meetup - Thu 4 Oct 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Delivery community of practice meetup - Mon 8 Oct 1pm at Federation House.
- Engineering community of practice meetup - Mon 8 Oct 1pm at Federation House.
- Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 9 Oct 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor.
- Web team show & tell - Thu 11 Oct 11am at Angel Square 8th floor.
- Line management drop-in clinic - Thu 11 Oct 1pm at Federation House.
- Heads of practice community of practice meetup - Thu 11 Oct 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Data hackathon - Thu 1 Nov at Federation House.
More events at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.
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Thanks for reading. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog.
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