TPSS Member-Owners,
If you don’t start your morning with half a dozen grocery industry trade emails, it’s possible you missed a story back in April about Amazon removing the Just Walk Out technology from their Whole Foods and Amazon Go grocery stores. In describing the strategy shift, the stories explained that the technology, which relied on cameras and sensors in the stores, was backstopped by 1000 workers in India who would rewatch individual customer shopping trips to ensure accuracy in the final charges. The image of a sci-fi tractor beam with a giant rope and pulley assisting comes to mind.
The grocery industry is constantly changing, but it also isn’t. Technology offers the opportunity to shop for food from your couch, but I determine mango ripeness with my thumb, not a jpeg. Stores have installed self-checkout lanes and uninstalled self-checkout lanes. Companies are letting AI dictate what maximum price levels customers are willing to pay for a product, not charging a fair margin across the board. Our food system is consolidated and complex, and there seems to be fleeting examples where technology is benefitting grocery consumers. Instead, it somehow seems that they are outsourcing jobs like checking out to the customer.
There is a human way of doing business that so many industries are gleefully leaving behind. I personally don’t think it’s too much to ask to call and get a person in the store that I called to speak with. A cashier that’s memorized hundreds of produce codes seems much more well-equipped to efficiently get me out of the store than guessing whether red potatoes are under P or R. Staff members will always have a more nuanced understanding of customers than feedback software. In short, the reports of the demise of humans at grocery stores have been greatly exaggerated, at least if you’re shopping with a co-op.
I think about these things a lot in the course of our ongoing remodel project. We didn’t eschew adding self-checkout out of technological ignorance. It’s because we chose to prioritize friendly familiar staff members to help get you out of the store quickly once you’ve selected your items. We’re not avoiding digital price tags because we’re stuck in the past. We’re sticking with tried-and-true paper tags because the digital ones break more often than you’d think and require costly replacements to the glee of the manufacturer.
I’ve been very pleased with the progress and frequency of communications from our construction and planning partners on the project so far. We’re on track still for our original timeline and we’re working hard to keep it that way. There are so many moving pieces that most days I feel like Mario in this scene, but I’m a very stubborn person so I’m determined to beat the game.
I truly appreciate all the member-owners and regular customers who have continued to support the store by shopping with us from the tent. Anything you can do to help support our sales from that operation this summer will help keep the co-op in good financial health. As we stated in our remodel FAQs, we did not lay-off or cut hours for any of our 45 staff members despite the lower sales volume. Our extremely human staff members work hard every day to make our grocery store what it is, and commitment is a two-way street.
Three weeks down and, knock on roofing timber, only nine more to go. Thank you all for the kind words of support that you’ve sent, they mean a lot to us as we navigate this project. We’ll see you this weekend in the tent.
-Mike Houston
TPSS Co-op General Manager