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[Image: Ged Quinn]
Amazon is trying mini Go stores
Amazon aims to open checkout-free Go stores in office lobbies. This is Amazon pointing its checkoutless infrastructure more directly at convenience stores, but also building lobbies, bus stations etc, so you could think of a small Go like a vending machine that you can walk into. Or rather Amazon is looking at the convenient-and-quick job that local stores have traditionally done so well: “customers are busy, they’re in a rush, they want good food, they want to be in and out really quickly”.
It doesn’t mean that Amazon are *committing* to small convenience stores yet, because Amazon will try out every idea to see what sticks, and they’ll shrug and cancel if the ideas aren’t working out. That tiny Go store was Amazon’s eighth Go store (they’re at nine now, in 11 months).
Meanwhile, back on the UK high street…
“You have to tax the internet for the good of the high street”
”The main stream high streets are already dead. Dead! They can’t survive [...] Dead. In the bottom of the swimming pool. Dead.”
“Ok, so how do you resuscitate it?”
“No. That person’s died.”
Sports Direct boss Mike Ashley’s evidence at the communities select committee managed to be entertaining, madcap and insightful. The whole thing is worth watching for a festive laugh. (Spoiler: Ashley reveals that he is not Santa Claus. “I don’t know if I’m making any sense, but I make sense to myself.”)
Ashley’s main prescription is a VAT-like sales tax on sales made on the web: “You have to tax the internet [sales] for the good of the high street.” And he had some other ideas that were interesting: in-store click and collect being a credit against that web sales tax. Matching local investment spend to rebates on business rates.
The two dominant high street narratives are probably that “business rates are killing retail” and that “the internet is killing retail”. Online fashion retailer Asos isn’t doing well, which shows that it’s probably not quite as simple as that.
Experiences
Sales on the internet aren’t the only problem. The pressure is increasing because *everything* is gradually turning into a shop. Here is an argument that all media are becoming stores. Where adverts, TV, home assistants etc used to direct your attention to places you can shop, soon they’ll just say “tap to buy now”. The ad media will let you buy instantly. The product wrapper becomes the buy now button or your kitchen bin orders automatically for you.
Given that, how do physical shopping locations stay relevant? By providing distinctive experiences. “Experience” doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do electrical safety improv theatre with circus jugglers before you’re allowed to buy hedge trimmers. It might simply mean providing experiences that are better or are missing from online shopping [1].
Convenience stores have always been about speed. What if they were designed so the grocery bit was still quick and convenient, but there was another bit of the store where you didn’t have to rush? Maybe there would be an area where you could sit a while. Or a bit where you could get advice or help with a task that takes some time and consideration, like checking that you have the right insurance to cover your family, or fixing a community problem. (For places that are good at simultaneously doing fast and slow, see coffee shops.) Could something like that make a distinctive, customer-attracting, spend-increasing, social-fabric-strengthening experience?
[1] Picking just one high street example, Waterstones should let you present your Amazon wish list to a thing which goes “Voooop those books are [here] and [here] so they can be in your hands in 2 minutes and why not consider these other books which we think go really well with those?” (Or to a skilled bookseller! But they wouldn’t need to say the Voooop part.)
Data is the new X again
Last week we talked about metaphors for data, and a smart reader pointed the newsletter at the source of the “data is the new oil” line, Tesco clubcard creator Clive Humby. His fuller quote says that, like oil, the data needed to be refined to be valuable. This gives the data is oil metaphor a bit more force but still doesn't resolve the difference between non-renewable, fungible, rivalrous, physical things that and infinitely multipliable, non-fungible, non-rivalrous non-physical things. Other smart readers suggested: data is the new waste and data is the new time. And this is a useful list of X is the new Y metaphors. Perhaps data’s metaphoric journey is one of gradual abstraction, from objects to ideas. Eventually, data will be the new data.
How to account for data
How do we *account* for data? The US Financial Accounting Standards Board is thinking about how intangible assets like data, brand value etc might be more explicitly represented in a company’s balance sheet.
In a post-GDPR world, perhaps you should be ready to flip that around because if Something Bad happens the data might leap across the balance sheet in an instant, going from asset to liability. Data as potential liability might be a safer and user-friendlier way to think about it. You might ask: “What could we get wrong with the data here? How do we safeguard the users’ data? How *little* data can we do our work with? What data could we responsibly *dispose* of?”
Recently, a journalist sold their personal data to see what it was worth. The answer: not much. There’s a value asymmetry there: your personal data is only worth lots if it can be aggregated with personal data of many other people, so only organisations with lots of data have access to that value.
Where the data is generated by user behaviour (Facebook et al), the data could instead be seen as user labour and therefore a cost that sits in the company’s profit and loss rather than an asset in the balance sheet. If Facebook are able to aggregate the data to create value, then maybe they could compensate users for their data labour. Tbh, that seems about as likely as Facebook charging for a no-data-mining version. Maybe users and other data labourers should unionise.
The shock of the new (and the old) at NHS
The NHS was once famous for having the world’s largest fleet of fax machines, but they are finally destined to be retired: NHS has been banned from buying any more fax machines. This seems like a good thing doesn’t it? Progess, healthcare in the twenty-first century, etc. But unless other things also progress, there may be risks: the fax machine is still a key part of many health workflows, eg GP-to-pharmacy.
On the other hand, this week the Health Secretary announced he’s now a (apologies) fridge magnate. The NHS currently the world’s leading purchaser of fridges as it gets ready to stockpile 6 weeks of medicines because Br*x*t.
NHS Spine (a central piece of IT infrastructure for health and social care) handles 1 billion transactions monthly.
Amazon of finance
Zero-trading-fee stockbroker Robinhood announced it would offer current and saving accounts paying 3% interest, and then unannounced them when it became clear that its account wouldn’t have the deposit protection you’d expect on a savings account.
Robinhood is one of a few fintech giants who are quite determined to become the Amazon of personal finance (see also: Revolut, which now has an EU banking licence). The impulse is to do every money thing - banking, investing, credit, money transfer etc, and the general approach seems to be announce everything, apologise if necessary, build things, see what works, apologise if necessary again. But this “move fast and break things” method (copyright Facebook) may be easier in a less heavily-regulated industry.
Wall coins
A sense that cryptos and blockchain are attracting increasingly crazy political ideas these days: “Brexit could be the trigger the UK needs to embrace the fourth industrial revolution and unlock the potential of blockchain”. Riiiight.
And: “I've offered a modest compromise called Buy a Brick, Build a Wall that we introduced, which lets the American people, or whomever should choose to donate - Mexicans or otherwise - to donate to the program. [...] You could do with this sort of, like, crowdfunding site. Or you could even do blockchain, and you could have wall coins.” Ok then.
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Co-op Digital news and events
One year of How do I?
Events at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.
Thank you for reading
Thank you and the very happiest of holidays to the newsletter’s beloved and thoughtful readers and contributors. The newsletter will return in January. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements. last-minute present ideas etc to the newsletterbot’s flunky @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading please consider telling a friend about it!
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