Checkout FREE supermarkets

[SiliconWizard]

Note that, just like constant growth, constant cost reduction will reach limits, it's not infinitely sustainable. So it's just one of those short-term goals that ends up backfiring.

[TimFox]

Decade ago, I read a case study about how a major cell phone manufacturer got out of making phones after it lost most of it's customers  because "just in time inventory management" failed for a duration (few months) due to a supply issue further down the chain.  It was great until snag hits_[1].

If their supply problems persisted for months do you really think it was JIT that killed them? People with a negative attitude to JIT tend to treat it like its equivalent to penny pinching. Its quite the opposite. It means taking a really realistic attitude to the supply chain, and tuning for its potential strengths and weaknesses.

Industrial engineering can do a good job of optimizing the process (including assembly line parameters, inventory management, supply chain improvement, etc.) by looking at the process in appropriate detail.
It gets tricky to include risks to the supply chain, etc., since low-probability events (such as an inconvenient war) can have a huge effect on the process.
Some misuse of JIT was merely to shift all of the risk and process control to subcontractors (such as auto parts manufacturers located next to the automobile assembly plant), who then had to deal with the problems.

Toyota is often cited as a good example of JIT:  here is an interesting study (from Harvard Business Review) of what they actually did successfully during the disruptions caused by the pandemic.
https://hbr.org/2022/11/what-really-makes-toyotas-production-system-resilient

Excerpt from that article:
"Toyota takes a strategic approach to inventory planning. Operationally this stands on three legs: strategically sized inventories in the right locations to act as a buffer to meet changing demands, safety stock that factors in the risk of disruption, and a nuanced view of lead times. It has been pointed out that the company learned a great deal from the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011, after which it identified parts vulnerable to disruption and, as a result, were candidates to be stockpiled. How Toyota factors lead times into its inventory planning is the key."

[Rick Law]

Decade ago, I read a case study about how a major cell phone manufacturer got out of making phones after it lost most of it's customers  because "just in time inventory management" failed for a duration (few months) due to a supply issue further down the chain.  It was great until snag hits_[1].

If their supply problems persisted for months do you really think it was JIT that killed them? People with a negative attitude to JIT tend to treat it like its equivalent to penny pinching. Its quite the opposite. It means taking a really realistic attitude to the supply chain, and tuning for its potential strengths and weaknesses.

JIT was part of its failure, but certainly not all of it.  The other significant problem was purchase consolidation, consolidation is a "desirable" for JIT but not a requirement.  Consolidating to one supplier certainly make you a bigger customer and thus more negotiation power, but when the lone supplier choke, you choke also.

I think all of us here know, finding new supplier is not always an easy task, so I don't need to get into that issue.

JIT (in ideal form) gave the system no slack - the parts arrive when they are needed on the line.  Literally, the parts come off the truck on the dock and go directly to the production line.  Great, you don't need a warehouse; but problem will start immediately when thing(s) doesn't arrive at the moment it is needed.  The hero who pushed that will have a duration to brag about zero inventory carrying cost -- until production line stopped for lack of parts.

Besides the risk of non-arrival, to use JIT, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) likely is the most needed companion.  While ERP software is a great tool when it works, one problem with ERP is that it casts your processes into concrete.  Minor change in the process could be huge headaches.  For example: We can't get this single piece in the box packaging, let's switch to three bags in the box.  Such change could result in major rework of different parts of the ERP system (not software code change but configuration change, new forms, new supplier records to add, etc., etc.).   We all know that software modifications could be done over lunch and then it could take weeks to flush out one tiny piece alone.

So one can see the web of problems...  No, JIT alone didn't cause it, it just made the issues more immediate and made the issues worst.


... (joke of the moment)...
As he lay on the gurney being rolled into the operation theater,  he heard the doctor saying to the nurse "don't worry about us having no liquid stitch, the truck with the liquid stitch resupply is scheduled to arrive at the hospital dock 10 minutes before we have to close his chest up"...

[Halcyon]

many places here will not accept cash

is it legal at all?

Also legal in Australia with more and more stores going cashless. I can see why though. The vast majority of the population here no longer use cash for either small or large payments and the negatives of handling cash outweigh the positives.

By 2022, the use of cash for payments was 13%. If you look at the total value of cash payments, it amounted to 8%. These figures will likely to continue to fall substantially every year.

I honestly can't remember the last time I used an ATM... at a guess, it's probably going on 10-15 years ago.

https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2023/jun/cash-use-and-attitudes-in-australia.html

[coppice]

many places here will not accept cash

is it legal at all?

Also legal in Australia with more and more stores going cashless. I can see why though. The vast majority of the population here no longer use cash for either small or large payments and the negatives of handling cash outweigh the positives.

By 2022, the use of cash for payments was 13%. If you look at the total value of cash payments, it amounted to 8%. These figures will likely to continue to fall substantially every year.

I honestly can't remember the last time I used an ATM... at a guess, it's probably going on 10-15 years ago.

https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2023/jun/cash-use-and-attitudes-in-australia.html

Be careful about that 13% seeming small. In most things I've seen quoting small numbers they are actually talking about value and not quantity. In terms of actual transaction volume it may be much higher, since nobody executes big transactions in cash any more. Even if its the actual percentage of transactions, a substantial chunk of them are the small but important transactions that just won't go away.

In the UK we are still unable to use cards for payment everywhere. In the last year I have been forced to use cash multiple times in car parks with either no electronic payment option, or one which was down. At least 2 of those were run by the local council, so not some fly by night parking spots. Its not just tax dodgers who force us to use cash. Go deep in the countryside and there are cellular black spots all over the place, where you can only pay by cash. I bought ice creams from a van on a slope towards the beach recently. The guy said cash only. I looked at my phone. No signal. Maybe he strategically parked in a spot where there was no communication, but he was in a nice spot to catch customers from the flow to and from the beach. So, he had picked a very valid spot, and it had no signal.

There are ways to squeeze out those small cash transactions in awkward places. Hong Kong has one. The HK Octopus card started out as a transport card with stored value in the 1990s. It has developed into a card used for all sorts of minor transactions, buying from its stored value. Because its stored, no communication is needed until the stored value needs recharging. We have nothing like this in the UK.

[Infraviolet]

Piers Corbyn, a well known "crank" who has his heart in the right place but some rather excessively eccentric ideas about the causes of modern socity's present maladies has a pleasing solution for checkoutless shops:

https://twitter.com/Resist_05/status/1685940313435824128

As the cash of the exact value has changed hands when he leaves, he has the products, he owes a "debt" for the products he has taken, and by putting down the cash the debt is payed. I can't guess the specific legalties, but it looks at a glance like successful use of the principle of legal tender, that anyone owed a debt must accept cash as a means of repaying it. I'd certainly be one for doing the same myself if encountering cashless shops.

The good news I hear is that the UK is seeing a resurgence of cash usage, compared to the last 5 years or so, people finally wising up to the need for cash, and the value of using it to avoid losing it. That is to say, they might not want to use cash for every transaction, but make a point to use it regularly to maintain it as an alternative to all the more crash-prone payment methods. And people recognise with cash they can take with them the maximum amount they are willing to spend, rather than get a card driven surprise that all their money has vanished after a shopping trip.

It's just so annoying that so much can only be bought online thesedays, physical shops decline in both range of goods stocked, quantity stocked of whatever you went to buy (specific size, type of item you need is alway the one first to sell out), and in many cases prices are worse than online too. In some ways the main problem for cash is that high streets are declining.

Its a shame someone couldn't find a way to develop a type of cash (value tied to the exchanged item itself (toekn based), not held as a record of accounts and transactions... anonymous and thereby non-discriminatory... not dependent on corporate infrastructure... impossible to surveill and therefore also impossible to financially censor people... stable, excepting the harms of inflation caused by government money printing, against the values of goods people want to buy...) which could be used for remote transactions the way cards and other record based payment methods can. Not sure if it is necessarily possible (can a token based system work without records when a token by virtue of having to be information not physical matter can be trivially copied?) but it would be a good idea.

[themadhippy]

we already have a token based system,its called cash.

[PlainName]

I can't guess the specific legalties, but it looks at a glance like successful use of the principle of legal tender, that anyone owed a debt must accept cash as a means of repaying it.

It is easy enough to find out, and of course he is spouting complete bollocks:

You might have heard someone in a shop say: “But it’s legal tender!”. Most people think it means the shop has to accept the payment form. But that’s not the case. 

A shop owner can choose what payment they accept. If you want to pay for a pack of gum with a £50 note, it’s perfectly legal to turn you down. Likewise for all other banknotes, it’s a matter of discretion. If your local corner shop decided to only accept payments in Pokémon cards that would be within their right too. But they’d probably lose customers.

Legal tender has a narrow technical meaning which has no use in everyday life. It means that if you offer to fully pay off a debt to someone in legal tender, they can’t sue you for failing to repay.

He has clearly latched onto the debt thing, but there is only a debt if the shop sells him the goods, and they are specifically NOT selling him anything unless he has the means to pay without cash. So he is creating a fake debt by nicking the stuff.

[Infraviolet]

"we already have a token based system,its called cash"
Yes, oops I must have forgotten to finish the paragraph.

A token based system which can be used for remote transactions in near real-time. I can't pay cash when buying something from a website, I'm saying it would be nice if a kind of "cash" could be developed which could be used like this, all the present advantages of cash, but also the ability to be used for remote transactions.

[Halcyon]

many places here will not accept cash

is it legal at all?

Also legal in Australia with more and more stores going cashless. I can see why though. The vast majority of the population here no longer use cash for either small or large payments and the negatives of handling cash outweigh the positives.

By 2022, the use of cash for payments was 13%. If you look at the total value of cash payments, it amounted to 8%. These figures will likely to continue to fall substantially every year.

I honestly can't remember the last time I used an ATM... at a guess, it's probably going on 10-15 years ago.

https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2023/jun/cash-use-and-attitudes-in-australia.html

Be careful about that 13% seeming small. In most things I've seen quoting small numbers they are actually talking about value and not quantity. In terms of actual transaction volume it may be much higher, since nobody executes big transactions in cash any more. Even if its the actual percentage of transactions, a substantial chunk of them are the small but important transactions that just won't go away.

This is why I also included the value figure. Cash represented 8% of the total value of all transactions types in 2022. Between 2019 and 2022, the value of all cash transactions dropped by about a third. Today, it's less than 50% of what it was 6-7 years ago, despite cost of living, wages and everything else going up.

[coppice]

Between 2019 and 2022, the value of all cash transactions dropped by about a third. Today, it's less than 50% of what it was 6-7 years ago, despite cost of living, wages and everything else going up.

Its dropping everywhere, but when you talk about eliminating cash you need a solution for the residual transactions that don't work but won't go away. Its not impossible. As I said, places like Hong Kong have had a working solution for nearly 30 years. The problem is nothing like this is being introduced in most countries, and it can't be fully deployed overnight. Is that incompetence, or do powerful interests not really like cash going completely away?

[PlainName]

Hong Kong might be a special case since it's basically standalone London. There is the Oyster card here, but the problem is that covers just London, and there isn't a similar card in the rest of the country. Even if there were, the UK isn't compressed enough - like Hong Kong - that everyone uses public transport, so only a small proportion of the population would have such a card. Thus there is no chance that something like the Hong Kong card could get traction, never mind feature creep into debit card territory.

[coppice]

Hong Kong might be a special case since it's basically standalone London. There is the Oyster card here, but the problem is that covers just London, and there isn't a similar card in the rest of the country. Even if there were, the UK isn't compressed enough - like Hong Kong - that everyone uses public transport, so only a small proportion of the population would have such a card. Thus there is no chance that something like the Hong Kong card could get traction, never mind feature creep into debit card territory.

I thought the London Oyster card was only for transport. The HK Octopus card started out as a transport card, but is now used for a wide variety of small purchases. A magazine. A drink. MacDonalds. Pretty much any small purchase. There is no reason a similar card could not work in the UK. It doesn't have to be used for transport at all.

[tszaboo]

This is a logical conclusion to the rampant theft that is happening in the US. I see the videos, people walk in the shop, take a dozen designer sunglasses and walk out. Police doesn't get involved, because theft is somehow now racist. And then shops close. If you need to present your loyalty card, bank card, underskin chip, birth certificate or whatever to enter. And there is a gate entry system this is prevented. Good solution, efficient, and only a bit like living in a lawless society.

[PlainName]

Hong Kong might be a special case since it's basically standalone London. There is the Oyster card here, but the problem is that covers just London, and there isn't a similar card in the rest of the country. Even if there were, the UK isn't compressed enough - like Hong Kong - that everyone uses public transport, so only a small proportion of the population would have such a card. Thus there is no chance that something like the Hong Kong card could get traction, never mind feature creep into debit card territory.

I thought the London Oyster card was only for transport. The HK Octopus card started out as a transport card, but is now used for a wide variety of small purchases. A magazine. A drink. MacDonalds. Pretty much any small purchase. There is no reason a similar card could not work in the UK. It doesn't have to be used for transport at all.

Yes, Oyster is for transport, just like Octopus was originally. Octopus does more because it slid in features gradually to a captive market, but you think that making Oyster (or non-existent equivalent) skip all that and go straight to full fat will just work. I don't think it will, if only because of chicken/egg situation.

[PlainName]

If you need to present your loyalty card, bank card, underskin chip, birth certificate or whatever to enter.

Of course, no-one will fake those, and all the shop assistants will be forgery-detecting experts. Plus, no-one minds the queues.

[coppice]

Hong Kong might be a special case since it's basically standalone London. There is the Oyster card here, but the problem is that covers just London, and there isn't a similar card in the rest of the country. Even if there were, the UK isn't compressed enough - like Hong Kong - that everyone uses public transport, so only a small proportion of the population would have such a card. Thus there is no chance that something like the Hong Kong card could get traction, never mind feature creep into debit card territory.

I thought the London Oyster card was only for transport. The HK Octopus card started out as a transport card, but is now used for a wide variety of small purchases. A magazine. A drink. MacDonalds. Pretty much any small purchase. There is no reason a similar card could not work in the UK. It doesn't have to be used for transport at all.

Yes, Oyster is for transport, just like Octopus was originally. Octopus does more because it slid in features gradually to a captive market, but you think that making Oyster (or non-existent equivalent) skip all that and go straight to full fat will just work. I don't think it will, if only because of chicken/egg situation.

That was my point. Few countries have done the groundwork to have a system in place for all those residual uses for cash that online solution can't replace, because 100% connectivity is not feasible. In HK we actually got more functionality for Octopus cards pretty much as soon as their initial use for transport stabilised. However, it took years for the culture to change such that the first thing we reached for to make a small purchase was our Octopus card. In turn that meant that a lot of places took years to get an Octopus terminal to be able to accept such payments. As things progressed options became available, like linking an Octopus car to a credit or debit card. Now, the Octopus card could recharge automatically from the credit card when communication was available, and run down the stored credit when the Octopus card was isolated. It takes time for people to begin to trust solutions like that.

[tszaboo]

If you need to present your loyalty card, bank card, underskin chip, birth certificate or whatever to enter.

Of course, no-one will fake those, and all the shop assistants will be forgery-detecting experts. Plus, no-one minds the queues.

Nobody fakes contactless payments. And now you have a queue going out of the shop.
If it wasn't clear, I'm against this 1984 level system that they are building, especially just to avoid persecuting criminals (Yes, theft is a crime).

[themadhippy]

This is a logical conclusion to the rampant theft that is happening in the US. I see the videos, people walk in the shop, take a dozen designer sunglasses and walk out. Police doesn't get involved,

sounds like the uk,although that has little to do with race,but more to do  with can't  being arsed lack of manpower.

[AlbertL]

In many US cities, we already have a version of "checkout free" - you just load up a cart and roll it out the door!

[SiliconWizard]

If it wasn't clear, I'm against this 1984 level system that they are building, especially just to avoid persecuting criminals (Yes, theft is a crime).

I am as well, but let me warn you, we're going to have to fight very hard for that not to happen. I guess you've already figured it.

There's an "interesting" point here, which is indeed entirely 1984-esque. Say a new system makes theft virtually impossible. So the new system would provide no means of handling crime, as crime wouldn't be supposed to happen (except probably the thoughtcrime.) What would be the consequence in terms of actual crime rate?

[Marco]

sounds like the uk,although that has little to do with race,but more to do  with can't  being arsed lack of manpower.

It's not about race, it's about the crumbling of ethical memes for various reasons.

There is no reason to reach for 1984, there is a real world example where morality is imposed on a forcefully integrated diverse society ... Singapore. When people can't be memed into behaving ethically with out-groups, you need the states iron fist. Man power is but a small part of that, also the willingness to be uncompromising towards all religions and races.

[Marco]

Say a new system makes theft virtually impossible.

You'd either need omni-prescent identification (at the legal level, not something the shops can do themselves) or you'd need completely walled off entrances and exits, where groups of people who feel they belong together exit through a gated sluice. No exit until you drop your unpaid items into a return slot (that's why you don't want to exit with someone you don't trust). It would take a fair amount of space, not impossible for larger supermarkets, but smaller shops can't really do this. There are limits to technological solutions.