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Thursday: Garden in the Woods
Jun. 17th, 2021 08:58 pmI was alone in the house today! It was sort of weird. R. took A. to the Garden in the Woods, a botanical garden. A. likes to have R. identify plants for her, and this place has a good reputation and R. had never been, so off they went. He took her to McD’s afterwards.
I got a walk with M.
I later did the long walk by myself.
For dinner, I decided to actually try making a pulled pork flatbread, since I had a half of an Essential Baking Company crust and pulled pork. I was just going to add a little BBQ sauce and maybe some greens, but I went all out and added onions, brussel sprouts and bell peppers, too (they were sitting there, precooked. . . ). It was phenomenal. I am a pizza traditionalist, but this was tasty and I would do it again.
Apparently, sometime back in 2014, Walmart (and other retail like Target, Home Depot, etc.) started offering the ability to use your phone and the store app to figure out which aisle to find a product on. In theory, it would also give you an idea of whether the thing was actually there or not, but as near as I can tell, at least for the first several years, that was not super accurate (updated once a day, in the case of some chains; hourly in the case of others). There is a lot of difficulty in making this type of feature usable. Even if you got your cashiers to ring everything properly (!!!), and even if you had your registers integrated fully with … everything else, you would still be up against the fact that a customer (or employee hiding something to buy later with the discount) might remove an item from the shelf but not actually make it all the way through the checkout process with it, abandoning it elsewhere in the store. That’s an obvious problem with clothes and fitting rooms, but it is pretty global. As I thought through the implications of this problem, it dawned on me that what Amazon was trying to do with the Go stores was not the obvious Look You Don’t Have to Stop to Pay that everyone always talks about. They were actually trying to solve the insanely difficult problem of Where Did That Thing Go After It Left the Shelf. This is a problem that is legendarily managed in places like Japan with wayyyyy more employees. Lots to think about!
I got a walk with M.
I later did the long walk by myself.
For dinner, I decided to actually try making a pulled pork flatbread, since I had a half of an Essential Baking Company crust and pulled pork. I was just going to add a little BBQ sauce and maybe some greens, but I went all out and added onions, brussel sprouts and bell peppers, too (they were sitting there, precooked. . . ). It was phenomenal. I am a pizza traditionalist, but this was tasty and I would do it again.
Apparently, sometime back in 2014, Walmart (and other retail like Target, Home Depot, etc.) started offering the ability to use your phone and the store app to figure out which aisle to find a product on. In theory, it would also give you an idea of whether the thing was actually there or not, but as near as I can tell, at least for the first several years, that was not super accurate (updated once a day, in the case of some chains; hourly in the case of others). There is a lot of difficulty in making this type of feature usable. Even if you got your cashiers to ring everything properly (!!!), and even if you had your registers integrated fully with … everything else, you would still be up against the fact that a customer (or employee hiding something to buy later with the discount) might remove an item from the shelf but not actually make it all the way through the checkout process with it, abandoning it elsewhere in the store. That’s an obvious problem with clothes and fitting rooms, but it is pretty global. As I thought through the implications of this problem, it dawned on me that what Amazon was trying to do with the Go stores was not the obvious Look You Don’t Have to Stop to Pay that everyone always talks about. They were actually trying to solve the insanely difficult problem of Where Did That Thing Go After It Left the Shelf. This is a problem that is legendarily managed in places like Japan with wayyyyy more employees. Lots to think about!