[Image: a collage of Kuka/Ruscha/Burtynsky]

Hail and farewell

This is the last Co-op Digital newsletter. It has had an excellent and enjoyable run, thank you to everyone who helped get it going with decisions, everyone who kept it going with content, and everyone who read it. We’ve been wrapping up with 3 questions. Previously: more radical membership and more than a shop? 

Thank you all for reading and sending ideas. The Co-op story continues on the magnificent Co-op Digital blog. Rod will still be writing about climate change and carbon transformation at Holdfast and about money at Checksies. See you there?

What if shops didn’t sell things?

Supermarkets and many other types of retail businesses are often high volume/tight margin machines, looking to increase volume and find small gains and complementary products and services with higher margins. Will this always be the case? 

As climate change bites into the world, making it less predictable, will the cost and availability of materials change the dynamic for retail? Do supply chains fracture? Will managing the entire lifecycle of products and packaging add cost that makes retail unviable, or will it unlock new business? Can shopping fit into circular economies if recycling and reuse becomes central? What if shops bought things from you, instead of selling them to you?

2040

Aya looks the length of the warehouse. There’s a haze in the distance where the unfactory starts and above the superstructure is barely visible behind the ambient dayglow. A city inside a building.

She pulls the door shut on her housing unit and walks to the bus stop. There’s only a couple of minutes to wait before a driverless bus pulls up. These carbon grey boxes crawl the building, patiently looping between the different work, housing and leisure zones.

Aya gets on the bus and sits. Her glasses immediately pop up an interactive about hitting this month’s KPIs. With a glance she flicks it away, and looks the other way to access shopping. A carousel of plaid shirts flickering across the field of view, partly obscuring the view out of the window of apartment blocks, terraced 2-up 2-downs, community centres, and behind her in the distance parkland and the executive mcmansions. Aya considers buying a shirt that says 2005 and has all the confidence of that era. The checkout dances and says: “Hey you know you could put that 229.50 into something more long term? Say Pension to put it to work for you.” Aya sighs, shuts her eyes and whispers “Cancel”, the UI an afterimage in reversed colours.

Aya steps off the bus at the warehousing zone and passes through two layers of perimeter security: ID badge and then a tongue print which performs ID verification and a recreational drugs test. Now she is matter-side. She steps through the air wall into a cavernous space: kilometres of racking, ducting, assembly areas, disassembly areas, recycling, storage, cabling, transport, uncountable shelves of racking and gigantic bays of raw material.

10 years ago, at peak shopping, this building was Amazon’s largest fulfilment centre, the entire building performing inventory, pick and pack - all of it heading into cardboard boxes, out the loading bays and to everyone’s home via the Amazon-only lanes on the motorways. 

Since then, the building has grown and evolved in response to 15 years of carbon budgets and circular economy targets. The shadow of the smile logo is still faintly visible on the wall. The work is now two-way: they’re doing as much inbound for recycling as they do outbound retail: the increasing value of material feedstocks made disassembly and recycling higher margin businesses. Across the way, building crews are pulling out the pick and pack racking, and hauling in more recyc stations.

Conveyor belts of toys, consumer goods, electronics, plastic items, everything. Some things are automatically sorted, separated by size or material type into smaller flows on smaller conveyors, a river delta. The metal goes off along a conveyor to be remelted in a distant area. The plastic is ripped apart into uncountable white-edged grains of feed stock. 

Further away, and behind more layers of security, are the goop vats where the synthetic bio voodoo happens. There’s a smell of ammonia and long chain polymers everywhere, which the air ducting cannot ever remove entirely.

Here though, the river belt meanders through rows of stations, where human-robot pairs work next to each other, pulling objects off the main belt and moving them to several smaller tributary belts for onward sorting.

Aya walks up to the only unstaffed station. A fixed robot is at the wide conveyor belt. Its body is a 7-axis spine of rotatable stainless steel segments that look more like muscles than components. Its arm ends in an array of cameras, lidar sensors and rubber tipped and suction manipulators. Around the robot is a 2 metre no-go zone hashed out in hazard orange. It has placed several objects in that space around its base. A Casio watch. A christmas tree toy. A clown painting on black velvet. Lego pieces.

The supervisor approaches and shrugs at Aya: “You make it work, if you can. I in’t going near it though…” Aya swipes her badge into the work station. The robot’s arm monitors everything that passes on the belt under it, occasionally twitching as if indecisive. But it is not moving and not sorting items.

Aya watches the belt for a while and reaches out to pick up an old lunch box in blue and red plastic. She shows it to the robot, and then with great care Aya places it on the floor, inside the no-go zone, and steps back. The robot’s arm bends, the array inspecting the lunchbox for several seconds. 

Then it straightens, moves back over the belt, and starts grabbing objects and sorting them.

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters. Stay strong.

Anselm Kiefer, The High Priestess/Zweistromland

Newsletter news

Hello! The Co-op Digital newsletter ends this month after an excellent run. We’ve been wrapping up with 3 newsletters considering questions about membership being more radical, shops being more than just shops (this one), and the material world. 

Thank you all for reading and sending ideas. The Co-op story continues on the brilliant Co-op Digital blog. Rod will still be writing about climate change and carbon transformation at Holdfast, and about how to do personal finance at Checksies. See you there?

More than a shop? More than AI?

Shopping today is often convenient, quick purchase of both essentials and discretionary products, presented as inventory and merchandising (high street shops) or marketing and search (online), and an underlying goal: grow. What if shops did more? What if shops were slower? What if they were more meaningfully embedded into the communities they serve?

Related question: how does technology help? Typically technology makes products repeatable, processes automatable, data insight-able (etc), and reduces costs. Can it do more than that? Can it free up *all* of colleague time, to spend with customers?

Anyway, here is the newsletter and new conversational AI ChatGPT trying to write a story about a supermarket together. Assuming that tools like ChatGPT continue to improve, it’s also worth thinking about what the world looks like when machines can initiate human conversation. And when anyone can generate plausible text (or imagery or…), using tools whose models may have opaque biases and insufficient consent. What happens to trust?

2035

Let’s write a story together. I’ll go first and you respond. OK? Here’s the opening: Xavi parks their ebike at the rack outside the Freshco supermarket. It bloops to let Xavi know it’s secured and charging up. 

[ChatGPT] Xavi smiles to themselves as they walk into the Freshco. They love their ebike, it’s been such a game changer for them. As they enter the supermarket, they grab a cart and start to make their way down the aisles, picking up all the items on their shopping list. As they move from one aisle to the next, they can’t help but feel grateful for their ebike, which has made it so much easier for them to get around town and live a more sustainable lifestyle.

Inside, Xavi shivers after the cold draft of anti-viral air at the entrance.

[ChatGPT] They quickly make their way to the produce section, where they select a few fresh fruits and vegetables for their meals this week. As they move through the aisles, they notice that the Freshco is not as busy as usual. Xavi wonders if it’s because of the cold weather outside or if it’s due to the ongoing pandemic.

Down the right side of the store, shoppers are using the kiosks, and at the counter is a screen and a worker, both with a smile.

[ChatGPT] Xavi continues to make their way through the store, grabbing everything they need for the week. As they approach the checkout, they see that there are several kiosks available for self-checkout, but they decide to go with a human cashier instead. They approach the counter and greet the cashier, who smiles and greets them back. Xavi notices that the cashier is wearing a mask and gloves, and there is a screen between them to help protect against the spread of the virus.

Xavi checks out, but then remembers that he needs to talk to the community service team, and heads over to an open area with armchairs. Xavi puts the bag on the floor and drops into a chair. Evie, a staffer, joins him, says Hi, and the green padlock on the chair’s arm lights up, indicating that their conversation will be private. Evie: “How can I help?” Xavi: “Well, …”

[ChatGPT] Xavi pauses for a moment, gathering his thoughts. He looks at Evie, who is patiently waiting for him to continue. Xavi then says, “Well, I wanted to talk to you about the community service programs that Freshco offers. I’ve been thinking about getting involved and volunteering my time, but I’m not sure where to start. Can you tell me more about what’s available and how I can get involved?”

[ChatGPT] Evie nods and smiles. She begins to explain the different community service programs that Freshco offers, and how Xavi can sign up to volunteer. She tells him about the different causes they support, such as food banks, environmental conservation, and community outreach programs. She also gives him information about the schedule and requirements for volunteering, and how he can sign up online or in-store. Xavi listens intently, taking notes on his phone as Evie speaks. He is grateful for her help and is excited to get involved and make a difference in his community. He thanks Evie for her time and assistance, and they say their goodbyes. Xavi picks up his bag and heads out of the Freshco, feeling motivated and inspired to make a positive impact in the world.

He turns back and says “Yeah, but where to start?” Evie says: “Look, it’s more… dynamic than looking at what’s available. I can point you at a project right now, or you can look for a team online. Either way, they’ll need to decide if you can help make a difference to their mission happen.”

[ChatGPT] An error occurred. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

Evie sighs at the error message, and uses her team badge to restart the openai service.

Xavi leaves with the shopping, considering what “making a difference” means. Xavi forgets to collect the ebike.

[ChatGPT] Too many requests, please slow down

Are you ok ChatGPT?

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

Newsletter news

It has had an excellent and enjoyable run but the Co-op Digital newsletter ends next month. We’re going to wrap up with 3 newsletters considering questions about membership, shops, and the material world. 

Thank you all for reading and sending ideas. The Co-op story continues on the brilliant Co-op Digital blog. Rod will be writing about climate change and carbon transformation at Holdfast and about money at Checksies. See you there?

Could membership be much more radical?

Local stores offer a convenient geographic proximity - they’re just round the corner.

Could they offer a second kind of proximity, and be a critical part of communities? Could they help communities thrive with services, support, infrastructure as well as just the shop and the local causes bits?

Can a shop turn into a true member organisation? Can it help repair and maintain community? 

These questions matter because the world is changing ever faster, and everything (products, services, institutions, infrastructure, jobs, cities etc) will need looking after, improving or remaking.

2030

“Can you fix it? Because this bike and I have been through a lot.” says Reenie at the bike shop. 

Jim, behind the counter, nods. “Your battery has done a lot of kilometres and it is very tired now. I can swap it out for a new one for 499 which is the battery and the labour. Or I can sign you up for this Gobattery service which is a new battery every year for 199 annually and the labour’s free.”

“Which would you do?”, asks Reenie.

“Um, probably not Gobattery”, Jim murmurs quietly. 

“OK. What happens to the old battery?”

“And your old battery will go have a relaxing retirement doing grid backup for a shopping centre or somewhere like that.” Then more brightly, Jim adds: “We’re a member of The Co-op, are you? I can add you in the app, it only costs 20. You get discounts in shops, vote on decisions, and help each other out. I can give you a 50 discount right now, so the card will cost you nothing. But it’s like you’re part of” - Jim’s hands wheeling - “you know, a… Thing.”

“Yeah OK, sounds interesting? Thanks.”

Jim taps at the terminal and there’s a quick transactional handshake of lights and bings. An app downloads to Reenie’s mobile, which briefly pops a green tick saying that the app is properly signed and isn’t hoovering up too much personal data. Reenie opens the app - it has already onboarded her - which says both of their Co-op memberships have earned 200 points for the transaction, and a green leaf grows on the screen: a small but positive update to the carbon budgets of Reenie, of Jim, and of the Co-op itself.

“Nice. It all adds up, you’ll see”, says Jim.

Several weeks later, and late in the evening, Reenie’s Co-op app bleeps out a red alert. A fellow member needs help: their premises is flooding. Reenie shrugs, grabs a coat and heads for the bike. The map takes her back to the bike shop. 

Before she can make a joke about the emergency services arriving, Jim shouts: “The river burst its banks! Move things up, or put sandbags here, please?”. 

And Reenie and a couple of others get to work, placing sandbags, lifting everything onto higher shelves, bailing water out of the shop. The culvert is cleared and the flood water starts to recede. It takes two hours. The bottom layer of the shop is now a landscape of grey mud over unidentifiable product shapes. The same mud that coats them.

Jim says: “Thank you so much. This stuff needs to dry out but some of it’ll be ok. Hey, take anything you want too, seriously, thanks. And I’ll update the app and send you points tomorrow.”

“OK cool. But it’s not about the points.”

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it’s about what the internet is doing to retail businesses, people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter.

[Image: Wayne Thiebaud]

Searching the infinite shelf

“Online shopping is a total mess in that it barely takes the opportunity to create story and experience. “Drops” are the closest we get to excitement. Instead we shopping online is indistinguishable from filling in a spreadsheet. An infinite department store catalogue.” 

Ecommerce settled on “Searching for things you already know you want to buy” as the main way you shop online, and in some respects this is pretty sensible: if your shop is online you can have an infinitely long shelf. Long shelves take a long time to walk/scroll, so searching also makes sense. (Of course, this characterisation doesn’t account for the fact the shelf has moved to the warehouse, and a worker is jogging down it trying to hit their key performance indicators.)

There have been some interesting experiments with curation and some trying to make social media the front end for shopping. But other than that, ecommerce still struggles with discovery: how do you find out about things you *didn’t* already know you wanted to buy? And indeed how do you find out about brands and shops you didn’t already know you wanted to buy from? 

Having been hurt by Amazon’s infinite shelf and infinite delivery network, the high street sees the need for shopping to be an experience, or more convenient, or somehow different (though probably not cheaper). Not that it is consistently delivering on that promise yet.

Related: Amazon, aggregators, and the death of brands. 

Food and delivery

Food bank charity launches first-ever emergency appeal amid ‘devastating rise in need’. Through its support of 1,300 food bank centres, The Trussell Trust said it has already used up its reserve stock, which would normally help maintain supplies across the winter months. (See also: supermarkets cut food waste which hits food bank donations.)

Tesco raises meal deal price as food costs soar - this feels like a big signal. It’s the first time in a decade that the meal deal has gone up.

Aldi is developing its own online grocery platform - working with German ecommerce technology company Spryker on a service that reduces its reliance on Instacart.

Deliverycos struggling: The Fantasy of Instant Delivery Is Imploding - Gopuff Fires Hundreds in Third Round of Layoffs and Deliveroo struggles with acquisition after slashing marketing spend. A strong sense that there isn’t any customer loyalty in delivery.

Climate

COP27 is on in Egypt, and the opening statements are dark. The risk is that we make continual incremental improvements all to way to 2050 and beyond, but completely fail to ever improve things *enough*. The challenge and opportunity is to completely rebuild the human world (you know - products, infrastructure, jobs, cities, society etc), because the one we have right now was built for a level of atmospheric carbon parts per million that is long gone.

New fossil fuels 'incompatible’ with 1.5C goal, comprehensive analysis finds.

“I often say the most mind-bending fact about climate is that half of all emissions came in the last 25 years. Maybe even more startling: the weight of that carbon is more than the total mass of everything ever built by humans and still standing on earth.”

Twitter

Things continue to move so fast in Elonworld that it’s hard to summarise it all coherently. This was a good read on the irreducible difficulty of content moderation: Welcome to hell, Elon. And this is solid reporting on the current chaos, including this good bit:

“Managers agonized over the decisions, and jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for the most vulnerable among them: pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas among them”

Musk is busy reversing the classic retailing phrase “You broke it, you bought it”. But maybe he’ll remake it. Some people are moving over to Mastodon or adding it alongside Twitter (good primer). And some aren’t.

Quoted

“[Augmented reality] fundamentally shifts the nature of the human experience past [the inventions of mobiles/PCs/etc] because it turns perception programmable”. 

“I want to tell you that the SEC came in with spreadsheet-sniffing dogs.” 

Co-op Digital news

Why we should work in the open.

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc by replying or to @rod on Twitter. If you’ve enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it’s about what the internet is doing to retail businesses, people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Amazon]

Amazon: cargo bikes in, robots out

Amazon will spend €1bn to add thousands of electric delivery vehicles and micromobility hubs across UK and the continent, as well as installing fast charging points at warehouses. 

“The company currently has around 3,000 zero-emission last-mile delivery vans in Europe. Amazon doesn’t say what percentage of its vans are electric, but does say that these zero-emission vans delivered 100 million packages last year. This investment will allow the company to expand that number to 10,000 vans across Europe by 2025.”

Not just vans:

“Amazon also has “micro-mobility” delivery hubs in 20 European cities that enable delivery by cargo bike and on foot, and it plans to double this network of hubs. Amazon will also buy larger, heavy-duty electric trucks for “middle-mile” shipments. These are vehicles like the Tesla Semi, Freightliner eCascadia, and Volvo VNR electric that move large amounts of goods from ports to distribution centers. Finally, the investment will also cover installation of thousands of chargers at the company’s facilities around the continent.”

More detail on the micromobility hub plans:

“Amazon currently has micromobility hubs in more than 20 cities across Europe, including London, Munich and Paris, and expects to double that figure by the end of 2025. These smaller, centrally-located delivery stations enable deliveries via e-cargo bike and on-foot to bring packages to customers more sustainably.”

However, the home delivery robots are being retired (Starship might be happy at the news?), and 400 people will move to other Amazon teams.

Meanwhile, Uber turns to autonomous vehicle startup Nuro for Eats deliveries - Nuro’s vehicles are designed to carry packages and to travel on public roads.

“​​Uber Eats customers will be charged the same for delivery, regardless of if it’s a Nuro bot or a human gig worker. However, there may be some cost savings as Nuro bots can’t accept tips.”

Which seems a little unfair to the cute Nuro robotcars. Maybe people will chuck cash inside before the door shuts.

Can insurance fix climate change?

2019: Rising sea levels a manageable concern for re/insurers, says climate expert.

2022: “AXIS Re will completely exit its Property Reinsurance business, which it says is part of its approach to lower volatility from catastrophe risk”.

Insurers have to calculate the likelihood of Bad Things happening, a job that’s getting harder as we dump more carbon/heat into the world (more heat = more change = tougher to predict). So you could think of insurance as an early warning system for climate change. When insuring your house on the coast gets more expensive or impossible, your insurer is telling you it’s getting too risky to live there.

It’s not just buildings insurance. From Jan 2023 re-insurer MunichRe will no longer insure new oil and gas projects. There’s a good explainer of what that means here but basically: high carbon fuel projects are going to find it increasingly hard to get insurance. Insurers raising premiums or turning down oil business may strongly nudge energy firms in a lower carbon direction. (MunichRe’s slogan is “Not if, but how”, maybe they’ll update it to “Not if, but why”.)

Does it make sense to think of climate action *as* insurance?

Products and energy

On the other hand, here’s an useful explanation of just how much modern *stuff* is made from oil and gas industry byproducts: 

“Almost all synthetic materials in modern life start near the top of the ladder and are engineered downward in a controlled burn. This makes intuitive sense. The embedded energy to run the process is at least partially inherent in the starting material. Certain high-value materials are worth pushing up the ladder to obtain, but industry evolved the way it did for a reason – it is easier to slowly slide down than climb up.”

This is why swapping out carbon fuels for wind turbines is going to be a long slog. More reading: Vaclav Smil.

Food news

Dairy co-op Arla to pay farmers more for milk if climate targets met.

Making the Case for Intercropping - more than one crop in a field at a time decreases the need for fertilisers.

Dry weather sees Evesham vertical farm’s produce demand soar - thanks to weather getting more unpredictable.

Supermarket push to cut waste hits Fareshare food bank donations - demand for food banks surges but reducing waste vs charitable giving is a difficult dynamic.

Facebook meh-taverse

Facebook’s Horizon Worlds metaverse thing has 300,000 users and is gradually rolling out across Europe - “Build the World of Your Dreams”. Some insiders are a bit “grumpy about” it, and apparently it is riddled with bugs (which to be fair to organisations building new things is actually pretty common). 

But what isn’t common is that even the employees who are building it are barely using it, says the exec in charge:

“A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?””

2 weeks after those internal memos the Facebook metaverse overlords commanded its people to fall in love with Horizons:

“Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

Yes, a command is definitely the best way to get people to fall in love with something! Sometimes products have fatal flaws that everyone on the team can see but don’t want to discuss, usually because they hope the flaw can be overcome with hard work and inspiration. A cultural blindspot.

In the case of Horizons though, perhaps it is that the teams working on it can see the flaws, and rather than try overcome them by applying their genius they just think meh and go off to do something else instead.

Various things

“For this crew, the early success of their past companies or careers is usually prologue, and their skills will, of course, transfer to any area they choose to conquer (including magically solving free speech). But what they are actually doing is winging it” - reading the WhatsApp transcripts in the Elon Musk vs Twitter lawsuit.

Gen Z has cancelled the thumbs-up emoji because it’s ‘hostile’.

Paint one wind turbine blade to save birds and bats - it reduces collisions.

From the Scottish news desk: slightly blootered Glasgow pair heroically try pizza from a vending machine, in the wall of an abandoned shop. It is not a good pizza. 

Co-op news

How our users influenced our new forms guidance - part of Co-op’s much larger Experience Library.

Co-op trials reduced lighting in stores to lower energy costs - convenience store lucky dip!  Have Co-op ever trialled doors on the fridge displays?

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc by replying or to @rod on Twitter. If you’ve enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it’s about what the internet is doing to retail businesses, people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

Checkoutless shopping and talismanic technology

In 2019, a survey found that 73% of US consumers preferred self-service technology to engaging with store staff. But by August 2022: 

“The technology challenge of actually implementing it can overshadow the importance of the user experience. When that happens, it really takes something that’s supposed to be friction reducing and just creates a new way to frustrate customers.”

And from the same article:

“Out of 1,000 survey respondents, 67% said they’ve experienced a self-service checkout kiosk failure […] In a survey of U.S. adults, just 14% of women and 15% of men said they use cashierless checkout technologies regularly, according to an Insider Intelligence e-commerce survey conducted by Bizrate Insights in August. Meanwhile, 27% and 22% of women and men, respectively, have not used them and are not interested, per the survey. 

“Older shoppers also aren’t too keen to use cashierless technology. The same survey indicates that 21% of 18 to 34-year-olds used this tech regularly versus 16% for 35 to 54-year-olds and just 6% for 55 to 65-years olds.” 

In the UK, half of shoppers preferred to use self-checkouts (2018), and 

“One in three (37%) said that they would only want human interaction if they couldn’t find what they were looking for or if they had a problem with an item they had already purchased.”

But details matter: An analysis into early customer experiences of self-service checkouts: Lessons for improved usability (UK again, 2019) found that:

“the majority of respondents were motivated to use the technology because of time saving and convenience. However, the actual experience of using SSCOs [self-service checkouts] was not always considered quicker when compared to staffed checkouts because of technical issues, lack of staff assistance and the impersonal, sometimes stressful and controlled nature of the cramped SSCO environment. Following post-use reflections, the majority of respondents’ opinions did not change from their initial perceptions and indicated that they would prefer not to use the technology in the future”

And of course, Covid nudged everyone towards self checkout, as well as home delivery. This looked like it was going to permanently change habits: in 2020, 74% of shoppers said that they planned to continue using checkoutless in future. 

However here in 2022 Amazon has slowed the rollout of its checkoutless Go stores. And there’s a revolt at Tesco. Maybe: there was a now-deleted tweet going round that said: 

“I Want to applaud every soul who silently and quietly said NO in Bradley Stoke Tesco yesterday, who took the time to queue to be served and not be forced to the new self serve” 

But in truth that shoppers weren’t actually resisting the machines - it was just that there was a problem with the checkouts. But there is some resistance *somewhere*: nearly a quarter of a million people have signed this petition.

Maybe the learnings here are firstly that surveys can tell wildly different stories! And secondly, that implementation details really matter. Obviously when checkouts don’t work or are slow or keep erroring that’s frustrating, and gives shoppers a clear comparison: it was easier before with checkout staff running the machines.

The wider picture is that in retail but also the warehouse and the workplace, technology is often the very tangible symbol of change. When the change feels uncertain or negative, the technology often becomes a lightning rod or talisman for how you feel about the underlying change. “This doesn’t work”, you mutter at the self-serve checkout. “So this new website is why my colleagues got made redundant is it?”, an IT consultant is asked. So time spent on engagement with people and reliability of tech will rarely be wasted for digital and technology teams.

Related: Ben Brewer has an interesting 2018-era look at self-serve in Sainsbury’s. And in 2022, Sainsbury’s is pitching self checkout/scan as you go as providing better information to shoppers in tougher economic times: “know your bill before the till”.

Ecommerce does media

Morrisons reveals retail media network and dedicated internal agency. Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco have already done similar. Swiftly (ecommerce platform plus media network) raises money. And Instacart buys AI-powered pricing and promotions platform Eversight. 

Why this matters: retail chains and platforms recognise that they have valuable shopper attention and data, and that can be a source of new revenue.

Permacrisis: pensions and everything else

Recap: inflation is up, growth is flat, the war continues, energy costs are high (until 2030 or later?), supply chains are crunched, interest rates are up, the cost of living is painful. The UK government’s plan is to increase growth and lower taxes so that economic benefits can deliciously trickle down to everyone. The markets (which will lend the money to the gov) were unconvinced so it now costs the UK more to borrow money. This nearly crashed the UK pension system: 

“Executives told the Financial Times that markets barely dodged a Lehman-Brothers-like collapse – but this time with your mum’s pension at the centre of the drama. Problems with “pension plumbing” are what caused the mess. The culprit is said to be a popular pension strategy called, or LDI.”

(If you fancy some chunky detail on how liability-driven investing nearly ate your mum’s pension, here is some reading: Mikey Gow, Toby Nangle.)

Why this matters: very difficult times, and you might guess that “stagflation” is on the way: high inflation but no growth. Pensions (and indeed economies, right?) are supposed to be safe-ish. Questions: how much more government support will be needed? Do we need Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Energy and Universal Basic Services?

The queue

The Queen was the only monarch most people in the UK have ever known, so she had always been *there*. Regardless of your position on the monarchy or its entanglement with history, the dedication of service was extraordinary. The newsletter is most struck by her longevity and constancy, two qualities that are rare if you’re used to thinking about the technology world. This was an interesting piece and there’s a good round up of what was happening in that queue at ustwo Europe’s newsletter. (Funeral care note: the logo on the hearse was enough to take down the website of William Purves funeral directors.)

Why this matters: Everyone is trying to process so much that has happened in the last few years. The end of an era, or maybe of several at once.

Vertical farming

The promise of vertical farming is that it lets cities produce food more locally in dense urban environments. Farming in a tower right next to the consumers = less waste and travel cost. But critics point out that the electrical energy demands make vertical farming very inefficient when alternate energy sources (sunlight hitting plants in a field) are free. Elsewhere, Scotland is looking at using vertical farms to accelerate its tree planting programme, getting 18 months of sapling growth in 90 days by starting seedlings off in vertical farms.

Why this matters: farming must find more sustainable models. Vertical farming may be better at compressing time than it is compressing space.

Co-op news

From Twitter:

• What happens to the soft plastics collected by Co-op for recycling? 
• Co-op Digital teams provide accessibility training to operations product managers responsible for the tech our colleagues use in stores

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc by replying or to @rod on Twitter. If you’ve enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it’s about what the internet is doing to retail businesses, people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Max Ernst’s Swamp Angel 1940 - a drowned world]

Drowned world: floods and migration

Climate change isn’t something that happens in the future: we’re already living in it. We aren’t ready for the ways that the world has already changed. 

Heatwave in China is the most severe ever recorded in the world - extreme conditions over an extremely large area, for an extremely long time. But then: China’s Sichuan pivots from historic drought to flood warnings.

“Flood” seems insufficient for this: Pakistan floods: One third of Pakistan is under water - minister. The UN says that 33m people are currently affected. And of course there are heatwaves and floods happening in many other parts of the world (It is hard to visualise a third of your country flooded. Very roughly, to give UK readers a sense of it: a third of the land area would be all of Scotland. Or 33m population is about half the UK population: everyone who lives north of Birmingham.)

As weather becomes more temperamental, a significant proportion of the world’s population will migrate. The century of climate migration: why we need to plan for the great upheaval.

NHS ransomwared

At the start of August, hackers attacked systems run by Advanced, a key supplier of financial, staff, care and patient records systems to 36 NHS trusts in England. Systems in trusts went offline, NHS 111 was affected, and many customers had to fall back to pen and paper-based systems.

A month on, Advanced’s latest info says that some services will be out for another 4 to 12 weeks - several services are proving to be much harder than expected to restore, Oof.

And earlier in the summer, NHS systems went offline in the heatwaves. Zooming out a bit, when the world becomes more volatile, it tests infrastructure, revealing brittleness. So perhaps resilience, spare capacity and rapid response needs to move up the list for future system procurement.

Amazon is buying healthcare companies

What is Amazon’s plan in health? So far Amazon has:

• 2018: bought PillPack, an online pharmacy.
• 2018: formed Haven, a joint venture that would provide health services to US employees. Closed down in 2021 (why it failed: inadequate market power, US health care’s perverse incentives, the pandemic).
• 2019: bought Health Navigator, a digital diagnostics system.
• 2019: started Amazon Care which provided “telehealth”, 24/7 healthcare online/on the phone. The service struggled to recruit doctors, medical insurers and employers, and was controversial. A national rollout started in 2022.
• 2022: announced the purchase of One Medical clinics, and shortly after announced that Amazon Care would close at the end of 2022 - One Medical a better route to market?
• 2022: Amazon is bidding for Signify, which provides at-home health evaluations.

Healthcare has massive spend, so you can see why Amazon is interested (the newsletter’s naive model of Amazon is that it would ideally obtain a slice of *every* transaction in the economy). How one analyst sees it:

“​​Ultimately, Amazon’s M&A activity points to it assembling the building blocks for a large health service offering “value-based care”, said Rebecca Springer, a senior analyst covering healthcare at PitchBook. The term describes a business model in which health providers earn income based on patient outcomes - how well the patient is - versus merely providing treatments.”

Unions for tech workers

As inflation and interest rates increase and capital market tighten, tech companies are slowing recruiting or starting redundancies, and labour organising work becomes more important. Unions for tech workers:

• UK: United Tech and Allied Workers is a new UK branch of the Communication Workers Union, organising to improve the conditions of all tech workers.
• US: Tech Workers Union Local 1010.
• International: Tech Workers Coalition.

Battery EV bottlenecks

As new technology deploys to the market, bottlenecks emerge. EV car sales are going well in 2022. This is good if you pass this electric forecourt every day, but may be challenging if you’re on holiday in the Scottish isles where many of the chargers are slow, out of service, or “haven’t worked for years”. So one bottleneck is the geographic distribution of charging infrastructure. You could take a guess at how this looks a few years further on.

2025+: EV car sales are still ahead of the charging infrastructure, which has rolled out a bit more. Perhaps electricity distribution and generation become a bottleneck - the National Grid was worried about peak demand a few years ago, but is more optimistic now. Partly this is because newer electric vehicles can be used as batteries for other uses, which would help with local energy management.

2030+: Is the availability of lithium and other rare earths for batteries an emerging bottleneck? Or battery recycling?

Quoted

“Crypto has created a way to tokenize and trade the aesthetic experience of getting scammed” - Matt Levine, brutal.

“No-one expected creative AIs to come for the artist jobs first, but here we are!” - Simon Willison on AI generating images.

“If a project takes 10 years, an unfavourable outcome in just one of up to nine (!) elections could result in it getting paused, cancelled, relitigated or redesigned.” - Sean Boots on the need for speed in public sector projects. 

Co-op Group and Co-op Digital news

Co-op sells petrol stations to Asda in £600m deal. The money will be used to:

• “Reinvest into Co-op’s leading core convenience business centred around its retail estate, as well as its growing wholesale, franchise and e-commerce operations, including new convenience stores in the heart of more communities
• Invest in Co-op’s pricing, store operations, technology, and logistics
• Support the reduction of Co-op’s net debt”

Co-op and Uber Eats to provide rapid online home deliveries from 1,000 stores.

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc by replying or to @rod on Twitter. If you’ve enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it’s about what the internet is doing to retail businesses, people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: iRobot/Small Robot Company]

Amazon will hoover your carpets and your data

Amazon will buy iRobot for $1.7bn. iRobot makes Roomba robohoovers and robomops, and has been struggling a bit recently.

There are probably several ways to see this deal. One of them is that Amazon wants to diversify away from pure online retailing, and selling robots is a way to do that. Another way: Amazon wants to make sure that someone else like Google didn’t buy iRobot. Maybe.

A third way to see this deal is as a good way for Amazon to get deeper into the home. “In buying iRobot, the e-commerce titan gets a data collection machine that comes with a vacuum.” You can see that having good data on interior spaces could be valuable information to companies, and privacy campaigners are concerned. (Against that, on social media, critics are scoffing yeah who cares if Amazon knows where my sofa is placed in the living room…) 

Back in 2018 the newsletter imagined how Amazon might think about its future role inside the home:

2024: Amazon Prime Home team lead Karyn steps around a Freshco grocery delivery drone twitching on the path. It has been jammed by your home’s router for a breach of delivery licence, and will be released shortly. Your Amazon door authenticates Karyn, and she walks into your home. She sets the Dash scanner going in the living area. While it’s looking at your belongings, she disconnects your TV and pops back out to the truck to get a newer one. She reconnects your PrimeFire box to the new screen but puts the Google Chromecast TV dongle to one side, placing a helpful advice sticker on it. The Dash scanner meeps and identifies with a laser light a dozen items in the room that are on your Unwish list. She places these in a cardboard box, and once they’re sold in Amazon’s Seim Anew market your Prime account will be updated with a credit.

Karyn checks the Home schedule - the cleaner comes tomorrow and the Wardrobe re-stock is lined up for next week. On her way out, she gives a nod to Priyan, an Amazon ReFresh colleague who is filling your fridge, docking credit from your Prime account for each out-of-date good he’s removing. Karyn gets back in the truck and throws her terminal on the passenger seat - 14 minutes until the next home visit. When you get home, Alexa tells you what was Amazoned today. Alexa doesn’t tell you anything about Karyn or Priyan.

If the data is valuable, one wider question is whether regulators look at data in the same way as they look at market and pricing power.

Do robots make good farmers?

The field used to be the “atomic unit” of arable farming, more or less: you’d make a decision about when to plant, treat or harvest this field based on how it looked. But advances in sensors, automation and robotics mean that it is increasingly possible to zoom in to inspect, measure and make decisions at the level of a square metre or an individual plant. Two examples: The tech helping to bring you your morning coffee: 

“One such firm, Okuyama [uses] a computer app called Cropwise Protector, which is made by Swiss-Chinese agricultural tech firm, Syngenta.

Linked to ground sensors and satellite imagery, the tool gives the farm workers a visual analysis of the farm, or plantation, on a tablet device or laptop.

They can then quickly apply such things as drip-irrigation, or pest-control, to a very specific area that might need it, rather than a whole field or the entire farm.” 

And Small Robot Company offers “per plant intelligence” to arable farms. Again, robots on the ground, sensors, data. The promise is reduced costs because you’re weed-killing just the weeds rather than spraying the whole field. (And Small Robot will be looking for investors soon on Crowdcube.)

Inflation and shopping

UK inflation could reach 15% by start of 2023, experts say. High street inflation continues. The problem is that everyone - farmers, food manufacturers, wholesalers and supermarkets, distributors - has higher costs. Partly this is because so much of the modern economy is built on fossil fuels and their byproducts: plastics, fertilisers, pharmaceuticals etc.

Shoppers are understandably becoming more sensitive to price, and shopping behaviour is changing: own brand products and discount supermarkets are doing well. There are redundancies and cost-cutting programmes across the sector (sadly Co-op too), though that may affect fewer customer-facing roles because hiring has been harder there the last 12 months.

Related: Bank of England responds to inflation, increasing interest rates. 

Cost of living

Inside the ‘foodbank’ for data - The National Databank initiative offers free data to people struggling to pay for connectivity. Access to data is increasingly essential: GP appointments, prescriptions, appointment management, Universal Credit and so on.

New website speeds up help for Britons facing hardship - an online platform cuts the time it takes to get grants to needy households as their bills soar. 

“Instead of requiring people to fill out paper forms and send them off along with ID, Lightning Reach’s grants portal, developed with partners including the Royal British Legion and London’s Lambeth council, allows those in financial distress to do it all online, including ID verification”.

The crisis we’re seeing unfold - a new cost of living dashboard from Citizens Advice with loads of data and good insight. The headlines: ​

1. More people are hitting crisis point than in previous years. 
2. Cost of living issues will soon become the most common reason to seek help from Citizens Advice — for disabled people, this is already the case.
3. Energy debts have replaced council tax arrears as the top debt issue people need help with.

Various things

Electric bike and electric car sales in Europe - ebikes growing very quickly.

Ads for two UK funeral firms banned over ‘misleading’ eco-friendly claims.

New smart glasses designed to caption conversations in real-time.

What does it take to keep mosquitos out of Disneyworld?

Co-op Digital news

Simulating in-store experiences with physical prototyping. 

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc by replying or to @rod on Twitter. If you’ve enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it’s about what the internet is doing to retail businesses, people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: ​​the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula - Webb telescope - NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI]

Is rapid delivery too rapid?

In 1984, Domino’s Pizzas promised “30 minutes or it’s free”, a marketing campaign that worked too well. Years later, the internet and Amazon taught shoppers that you should be able to get everything in two days or less *and* free. “Instant commerce” or “ultra-fast delivery” startups have accelerated things - you can get it all *now*. Under an hour. In 15 minutes in some cases. But “now” is logistically complex and delivery is definitely not free. 

“Last mile” delivery has a number of classic problems: cost, co-ordination, complexity, speed, maintaining a good utilisation rate. “Rapid” delivery amplifies these challenges: if the task is to pick and pack a basket of goods and get it delivered in under an hour, everything’s harder. 

The delivery companies are all competing for the same shopper pounds as they try build enough scale to survive long term, but higher inflation led to higher interest rates, which has slowed the flow of funding. Hard times as the game changes from “growth at all costs” to “survive with low costs”. Some of the recent news:

15-minute-delivery grocery app JOKR is ending its US operations less than a year after launching. Consolidation has been happening for a while: Buyk and Fridge No More closed earlier this year (sanctions-related), Gorillas started layoffs in May.

Gopuff is laying off 10% of global workforce, closing 76 “dark stores” in the US:

“In a bull market, we were incentivized to scale our geographic footprint […] In assessing the business in light of today’s economic environment, we found that we can be more efficient by focusing on maturing our high-performing MFCs [fulfilment centres] to drive profitable growth in each market.”

And here’s are two data points on the numbers of rapid delivery:

“Each location costs an estimated $250,000 to launch, people familiar with the company’s plans said, and about half of Gopuff’s roughly 600 warehouses were launched in the last year”

And:

“Gopuff’s fulfillment centers need to bring in at least 400 orders per day to make money, but only about 10 to 20% are at that level”

Perhaps some of these rapid delivery startups will use their expertise in running dark stores to reinvent themselves as service providers, but there will be competition: DoorDash kicks off dark store-powered rapid delivery as a service, and Instacart is in that space already. 

Related: Amazon makes Grubhub deal to give Prime members fee-free food - the deal looks a bit like the one it had in the UK with Deliveroo: it gives Amazon a right to buy up to 15% of Grubhub, which parent Just Eat/Takeaway.com may be hoping for, because it has been looking to sell Grubhub.

Elsewhere in delivery: Co-op is rolling out its “walking delivery” scheme to 200 stores. It’s part of a wider plan to scale rapidly delivered convenience which also includes the use of delivery robots. This is the kind of thing that’s easier to do at scale if you have true proximity to communities, and Co-op has a lot of stores.

A postman a day keeps the doctor away

Royal Mail has launched a Health division. It has a partnership with Pharmacy2U that makes online prescription delivery free. Also an investment in a digital platform for independent pharmacies, and some plans to trial posties doing regular health checks on vulnerable people.

The proposition is local and trustworthy. Similar examples: In France, La Poste made its “Watch over my parents” service free during covid: weekly visits. And in Spain, postal company Correos trialled a similar service.

Magic checkout

A new type of self-checkout where no scanning is required - Mashgin’s 

“countertop system uses [cameras and] artificial intelligence to identify and ring up items automatically. That allows customers to check out in as little as 10 seconds—eight times faster than a regular self-checkout machine.” 

The “place, space, pay and go” slogan on the self checkout machine hints at how you need to carefully arrange the goods so the cameras can see them - probably making this solution better for quick convenience store buys than for anything larger.

A simpler, older version of this: RFID tags help Uniqlo make the checkout simpler. Stores like Decathlon do this too. You still have to put the goods into an area that has the sensors. When technology reliably simplifies how things work, it feels a little bit magic, even when the technology isn’t brand new.

Heat alert

Heatwave: Met Office issued its first ever “red” extreme heat warning. And this is going to be the coldest year of the rest of your life.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Where do Tory leadership candidates stand on net zero goal? Answer: unclear. And in the US, the Supreme Court tries to overrule the climate.

There’s so much to do. Here’s Celia Romaniuk on shifting the burden of sustainability from consumers to producers:

“we must reframe the idea that it’s the consumer that has to change their behaviour, carrying the cost and the inconvenience [of sustainable products]. Perhaps it’s not about shifting consumer demand from non-sustainable to sustainable. […] Rather than offer a separate sustainable alternative to the unsustainable mainstream, we can design and create products and services that are cost effective, good quality, and also intrinsically sustainable.”

Worth a lot/basically zero

Tesla chaoslord Elon Musk was talking to some owner/fans recently and said “The overwhelming focus is on solving full self-driving. That’s essential. It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.”  

He says binary stuff like this a lot, so be wary about treating it as new insight. But one challenge might be that, even despite the recent stock price drops, Tesla is *already* valued as if it had solved self-driving and won a good share of the robotaxis industry and protected a good margin. What if it doesn’t? 

In other worth a lot/not news, Musk is trying to get out of buying Twitter, or at least reducing the price a lot.

Various things

Trolley is a service that scans supermarket websites daily to continuously show where 166,000 groceries are cheapest - a service that gets more and more useful as prices increase. But it was also under threat of closure due to some unexpected data costs. Here’s how the fight to save Trolley is going.

Around 94% of the UK adult population live or work within one mile of a National Lottery terminal (pdf), and around 60% of UK adults currently play National Lottery games - Camelot May 2022.

Uncanny granny: Amazon shows off an Alexa feature that mimics the voices of your dead relatives - an idea that will polarise.

Co-op Digital news

Simulating in-store experiences with physical prototyping: 

“Our desktop walkthrough was a quick, cheap way to prepare for an in-store trial. Bringing our ideas to life in this way meant we picked up on things that might not work in stores and we could adapt our concepts without wasting time or money. A lot of this was down to 2 ex-store managers who joined us for the walkthrough – their input was invaluable. Their first-hand experience of working in – and running – stores meant they could sense-check our assumptions which made the scenarios we walked through far more realistic. We made changes to our experiment plan based on their insight and we believe this contributed to the success of our first store trial.”

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc by replying or to @rod on Twitter. If you’ve enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

On a store visit to a Co-op store in Bury in 1990, Tesco’s then marketing director Terry Leahy got the idea for Clubcard.

“And, being modest again, he gives the Co-Op credit for what is commonly known as being a Terry Leahy invention - the Tesco Clubcard, which arrived in 1995. He says: ‘It wasn’t a new idea. I stole it off Bury Co-Op. There had always been a dividend stamp, but Bury Co-Op tried to make it electronic. There’s nothing new under the sun. All the good ideas are already out there.’"

And from Scoring Points (2008):

“In 1990 [Leahy] had his interest grabbed by the news that the Co-op in Bury was experimenting with a loyalty scheme based on a plastic card with a magnetic stripe on the back. The Co-op was still awarding its customers the Co-op dividend but now, in return, it would be able to collect information on that store’s customers’ shopping habits. […] ‘If they can do it in one shop in Bury’, he said to his marketing team, ‘why can’t we?’”

A good reminder to encourage experiments - there’s unrealised potential in every organisation, sometimes in plain sight. That story about about Clubcard comes from this very entertaining retelling, which has loads of good quotes like:

“What scares me about this,” [Tesco CEO Ian] MacLaurin said, “is that you know more about my customers in 3 months, than I know in 30 years.”

And:

“[rival Safeway’s ABC] pilot team could see what they were sitting on. But they lacked […] senior leaders who could see how powerful the customer data benefits were. They just saw it as a loyalty scheme”

So Tesco became a data harvesting pioneer, launching Clubcard in February 1995. Almost exactly a decade later Amazon Prime would launch.

Cradle to cradle stores

Steeple Claydon Co-op launches with innovation built into the design to cut carbon and energy use: 

“Co-op has worked to adopt a ‘cradle to cradle’ approach for the build which will see between 80%-100% of the foundations, superstructure, glazing, cladding and insulation materials used in the construction of the store fully demountable and able to be used again. Sheep wool is used for insulation and solar panels are to be installed on the roof. The build also includes an external living wall built into the design which is made from recycled car battery housings, and can be irrigated through rainwater and shown to reduce noise, create habitats for wildlife and reduce pollutants occurring in the air through particle capture. The store also re-cycles the energy used by its fridges to heat the store and provide its hot water requirements.”

Related: Co-op’s sustainability report (pdf). 

Warehousing and recessions

Amazon is subletting about 5% of the warehouse space it added during the pandemic. Unlike inflation and interest rates, this probably doesn’t signal a recession - more that covid planning was tricky. And Prologis (one of Amazon’s landlords) is buying space, which suggests that they see the delivered/online shopping trends continuing. (What kind of warehousing is needed during recessions? Online shopping returns? Self storage?)

Elsewhere in commercial property, Government minister Nadhim Zahawi’s wife has added a Co-op superstore to the couple’s £100 million property empire - not the shop but the building it’s in :).

Layoffs.fyi is a website that tracks redundancies in technology companies. The food ones are mostly delivery companies - a tricky business to get right.

Community ownership

1. Ripple Energy run renewable energy co-ops. You pay in an amount that’s based on your current electricity bill, they get a wind farm built, and your “return” will be in reduced energy bills for 25 years (the life of the wind farm). You could think about this as a way to make your home run on greener energy, or a way to help the UK build out renewables and meet its carbon targets. Or even as a financial “hedge”: a way to insure yourself against rising energy bills - the discount increases if energy prices increase. Their next project.
   
2. Community ownership of a pub can restore a feeling of pride in place, and allow people to transform a closed business into a thriving community hub - but fewer pubs are community-owned in cities, probably because the cost bar tends to be higher.
3. 25 years ago, the community living on Eigg bought the island - quite a story. Scotland now has a community “right to buy” for sustainable development.
4. Design consultancy ustwo is now employee-owned as well as being a B corp.

More on co-ops: Co-operative news, and Power to change which supports community ownership schemes.

Sentient chatbots

A Google engineer reckons that an AI chatbot he worked with has developed genuine sentience. He had campaigned for LaMDA to be treated as an employee rather than as property worker and talked about it publicly, which Google didn’t like. The chatbot displayed (or simulated) vulnerability, and they developed friendship - which may have been a factor in his assessment.

There is an obvious question about how you’d prove that something is sentient in an era of solid machine learning language models: language-centric tests may be insufficient - the transcript of their interviews feels simultaneously fluent and scripted. Also: at what point should non-humans earn personhood and rights? Another question might be about the extent to which humans *want* to believe that things are sentient: 

“One implication of Lemoine’s story is that a lot of us are going to treat AI as sentient well before it is, if indeed it ever is. I sometimes call this forthcoming future “The Age of Oracles.” That is, a lot of humans will be talking up the proclamations of various AI programs, regardless of the programs’ metaphysical status. It will be easy to argue the matter in any direction — especially because, a few decades from now, AI will write, speak and draw just like a human, or better.”

See also: The soul of a new machine learning system (paywalled), whose title references a deservedly famous book of computing history.

Emissions reporting

Measuring our carbon output | Scottish Enterprise Design blog - this is good: Scottish Enterprise has created a dashboard to estimate the carbon emissions caused by its biggest websites.

However, emissions reporting isn’t consistent in the public sector: National Audit Office warns public sector emissions reporting is a mess.

Various things

“Nothing could have prepared me for turning away patients. I believe much of it could have been solved if we just had a few more doctors.” - What I saw working undercover at a GP surgery.

Morrisons raises pay as stores battle for staff - UK’s fourth largest supermarket says it will pay a minimum of £10.20 per hour to its workers.

How to make procurement docs people understand - to create healthy competition among a more diverse pool of providers, the Wales Centre for Digital Public Services has started to rethink the design of the documents we use to procure goods and services.

Event: Call for papers - Manchester Tech Festival, 17-21 October 2022.

Iceland has horses that will respond to work emails on a giant keyboard while you’re on holiday. I will be back in the office on Wedneighsday, etc.

Co-op Digital news

Improving customer experience with content design: how we joined up services in different business areas.

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc by replying or to @rod on Twitter. If you’ve enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.