Tag: retail

If DoorDash wins, what do we lose?

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In the first-ever season of Sesame Street , in 1970, cast member Bob McGrath appeared in a memorable sketch where he receives a delivery from his local grocer, a grumpy blue muppet. “Did you get everything I ordered?” McGrath asks. “No,” comes the reply, but he’s helpfully supplemented the delivery with other fresh veggies. McGrath breaks into song, a version of the now iconic “People in Your Neighborhood,” to explain to kids the role a grocer plays in the community. The grocer is the bearer of sustenance. A few weeks ago, during Super Bowl LV, “People in Your Neighborhood” got remixed into an anthem for the app-based delivery platform DoorDash to signal to the world that it is expanding from restaurants to convenience and grocery. In a crisp 60 seconds, a tap dancing Daveed Diggs ( Hamilton )—directed by French auteur Michel Gondry ( Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind )—wanders through a hyperrealized Sesame Street urbanscape with Big Bird, Elmo, and Super Grover, pointing out all the great local businesses. His message: Your neighborhood is a bounty of bakeries, grocery stores, restaurants, and smoothie stalls. And in 2021, DoorDash is the bearer of sustenance. For DoorDash, its Super Bowl bet paid off. It informed tens of millions of viewers that DoorDash could bring them everything from both “big shops and mom and pops,” as Diggs crooned. It told investors that the company had a strategic plan to live up to and grow into its lofty valuation. Finally, it put a happy face on what’s a highly challenging, cutthroat business which has yet to produce a successful company built to last. The ad may have cost somewhere north of $10 million to produce and air, including a $1 million donation to Sesame Workshop, but DoorDash’s market cap increased by $10 billion, to more than $65 billion, in the 10 days after the ad debuted. For almost all of DoorDash’s seven-plus years, two things about the company have been true: It has aspired to be a logistics company that did more than restaurant delivery—one of the first articles ever written about the startup, in March 2014, was headlined ‘DoorDash enters food-delivery fray with much grander ambitions’—and it’s been controversial as it’s pursued those dreams. It has been accused of “ swiping “delivery driver tips, and restaurants have sued it for listing their eateries on its platform without their consent. DoorDash has also fielded complaints from the restaurants it aims to serve for taking too fat a slice of their revenues. Finally, it took part in a $200 million-plus campaign last year to convince Californians to legalize the use of contract labor in delivery, via ballot Proposition 22, thereby preventing workers from attaining the protections that come with employee status. So when DoorDash went public just over two months ago and stock-market investors bid the company’s shares up to 92% higher than its IPO price on its first day, the fervor, which valued the company almost four-times higher than its last private fundraising in June 2020, only further stoked the debate around DoorDash. Read More …

Fry’s is dead, and it’s taking part of Silicon Valley culture with it

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Fry’s Electronics is dead. The chain of computer and consumer electronics superstores is closing its 31 remaining stores , thereby joining Circuit City, CompUSA, and my own beloved RadioShack among the once-mighty retailers of technology products that went into decline and finally collapsed. If you live in one of the 41 states that didn’t have a Fry’s, or you don’t consider yourself much of a nerd, this news might mean nothing to you. But for some of us, Fry’s demise—though inevitable—is a shock. (Happily, Micro Center, another venerable chain skewing more to the eastern half of the U.S., is still with us .) Fry’s eventually had locations as eastward as Indiana, but it began in the Bay Area in 1985, where it was cofounded by three brothers whose father had sold his grocery empire (also called Fry’s ) and given them some of the proceeds Read More …

How to prevent the next GameStop disaster

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The mind-numbing inanity of last week’s GameStop hearing on Capitol Hill was just as predictable as the worthless result. Of course members of both parties wanted in on the media frenzy surrounding Robinhood and WallStreetBets, the Reddit forum where thousands of amateur investors mounted a historic campaign to pump (and dump) the stock of a left-for-dead video game retailer. Talking heads on CNBC were alarmed, and so the House Financial Services Committee ordered hearings, subpoenaed witnesses, and played for the cameras at every turn. By the end of last Thursday’s spectacle, the consensus was clear: We learned absolutely nothing. Not surprisingly, Congress focused on the wrong culprit. Yes, Robinhood’s marketing as “the platform for the average investor” ended up conflicting with their treatment of the average investor once they had to stop taking GameStop trades, making them look like greedy hypocrites. (Fast Company has a brief explainer here .) And yes, the use of Reddit and Twitter to drive market forces and propel certain stocks is new and a little scary. But Robinhood, Reddit, and Twitter were all using their platforms in the exact ways they were intended: to spread and drive information and access. If there’s a villain in the GameStop saga, it’s the federal regulators—in this case, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—who failed to notice that the world was changing and didn’t bother to update the rules accordingly. By definition, regulation will always lag behind innovation. Regulators can’t know what rules are needed until an entrepreneur first thinks of the new idea, turns it into actual technology, turns that technology into a business, and then starts selling its product or service. But once that happens, it’s not necessary to wait for a debacle before updating the rules. In the case of GameStop, the two-day settlement requirement meant that Robinhood couldn’t keep taking trades absent raising more capital. That two-day waiting period made sense in a previous era—one before blockchain and the cloud. But that waiting period still exists because of inertia and complexity—and, historically, because it produced extra revenue for brokerages—not because it’s technologically necessary. Real-time settlement is not only feasible, it would have prevented all of the harms caused to Robinhood’s investors. The SEC knows that, but it didn’t act on it. That was a mistake. GameStop is but one example. Take something more significant like self-driving cars and trucks Read More …

A patent shows how facial recognition drones could identify you from above

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An Israeli biometrics startup called AnyVision with ties to Israel’s military has applied for a U.S. patent on technology that tells drones how to maneuver to capture better facial recognition images of people on the ground. Facial recognition technology has become widely used by law enforcement around the world, but the technology is controversial in part for its accuracy issues, especially when recognizing Black and brown faces. Activists are now calling for ending its use entirely , and police use of facial recognition has already been banned in a host of U.S. cities. The patent application, titled “Adaptive Positioning of Drones for Enhanced Face Recognition,” describes a computer vision system that analyzes the angle of a drone camera in relation to the face of a person on the ground, then instructs the drone on how to improve its vantage point. The system can then send that image through a machine-learning model trained to classify individual faces. The model sends back a classification with a probability score. If the probability score falls below a certain threshold, the whole process starts over again. A future defined by this type of mass surveillance would “obliterate privacy and anonymity in public as we know it,” said Kade Crockford, head of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts who’s led the charge on banning facial recognition in Massachusetts cities, in an interview with Fast Company last year. “Weirdly this is not a hugely controversial issue for voters. People don’t want the government to be tracking them by their face every time they leave their house.” People don’t want the government to be tracking them by their face every time they leave their house.” Kade Crockford As with any patent application, there’s no guarantee the technology will show up in a real product. But it does address a very real technical problem with existing facial recognition systems. Such systems usually process images captured by stationary cameras. Capturing a clear angle on someone’s face, and compensating for bad ones, is always a challenge with these systems. Shooting video from drones that can move around and intelligently zero in on the right angle is a way of taking the chance out of the process. The application, which was originally reported  by  Forbes cybersecurity writer Thomas Brewster, was filed last summer and published by the U.S. Patent Office on February 4. AnyVision , which was founded in 2015, sells artificial intelligence designed to let cameras in retail stores recognize the faces of people on “watch lists” who have been convicted of theft in the past. Read More …

Why is it so hard to buy a PlayStation 5 right now? ‘Grinch Bots’ are probably to blame

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Phil Nichols, 45, of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has been very good this year. In a concession to the pandemic, he’s managed his information technology job for the Internal Revenue Service from home and forgone weekly game nights, as well as restaurant and movie outings. To break up the monotony and also distract from his chronic pain, the disabled veteran plays video games. “You get to get out of your bubble, so to speak, and see a whole new world,” he said. So, when Sony released the new PlayStation 5 game console in mid-November, he decided to reward himself with an early Christmas present. But when we spoke, Nichols had been trying for more than a week to buy the console online without success. He blames bots, automated computer programs that people use to buy up in-demand items that they then resell for a profit. They function like ticket scalpers who have expanded into sneakers, toys, and electronics. While the nefarious software plagues e-commerce sites all year long, so-called “Grinch Bots” are especially active over the holidays, snatching up the season’s hottest gifts. When the PlayStation 5 consoles first dropped on November 12, the traffic crashed Walmart’s website . Nichols is sure that bots were beating him to the punch because every time Walmart and other retailers released more consoles, the products were gone in less than five seconds Read More …