New Florence. New Renaissance.

Sweetgreen Infinite Kitchen

The $450,000 to $500,000 per-unit incremental cost of the Infinite Kitchen system is equivalent to the yearly starting wage of approximately 14 full-time kitchen workers at one Washington, D.C. Sweetgreen, based on current job posting listing the hourly rate for back-of-house workers as $16.63. That cost is also equivalent to about 23 employees working the average weekly hours for a restaurant production worker based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 

Neman said the robotic makeline has the capacity to make 500 bowls an hour, and that it hasn’t reached that level of demand in the current test markets. But Neman believes “some of the places that we’re going to be testing this year are going to be those heavy urban environments where it does have that [level of demand]. So we do expect a sales lift in those restaurants.”

Restaurant Dive

 

The day in the life of a Costco store

You may only be able to shop at your local Costco for 10 hours a day, or pump gas a few hours longer but the store is a beehive of activity 24x7

From Costco Connection

“Keeping the warehouse stocked for members is a complicated, never-ending game of Tetris. At the same time, the Food Court, Bakery, Service Deli and Meat Department prepare and stock items daily. And it all must be managed with incredible attention to detail, and with regard for safety, cleanliness and timeliness. There’s a rhythm to this constantly changing flow of activity: Mornings (4 a.m. to 11 a.m.); days (11 a.m. to 3 p.m.) and nights (3 p.m. to 11 p.m.). The warehouse employees who work these shifts depend on one another to maintain the immaculate shopping experience members have come to expect from Costco.”

The article details activities in many parts of a typical store

The cult of Costco

There is method to the madness here. Warehouses (a.k.a. stores) that seem haphazard and chaotic are in fact run with military precision, and virtually every detail of merchandise selection, store layout, and pricing is designed to turn wary first-timers into loyalists. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s late lieutenant and a longtime Costco board member, famously said that he wished everything in the U.S. ran as well as Costco. Indeed, the company has nailed the science, and art, of retail like virtually no competitor.

Costco’s eclectic sales assortment—Shrimp cocktail! Khakis! Coffins!—has helped embed it firmly in pop culture. Costco obsessives throng dedicated groups on Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and X to trade information on a great find, or discuss which celebrity was spotted in which of its 600 U.S. stores, or just to bemoan leaving a store after spending $300 more than they’d intended

Fortune

An interview with the former CEO, Jim Sinegal which explains more of the corporate philosophy

Startups target the military sector

Allen persuaded Simoni to leave DoorDash earlier this year and work with him at his new company, Allen Control Systems, to build a gun turret that uses computer vision to blast drones out of the sky. The goal was to create something affordable that could stop the HESA Shahed-136 drones Russia was sending to attack Ukraine’s infrastructure. “Right now, cheap drones like that are a weapon without a countermeasure,” Allen says.

The former restaurant-tech entrepreneurs are among a new breed of founders bringing the startup playbook to the staid defense industry. With wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, the need—and opportunity—for innovation are on display every day as drones, AI, and other commercially available technologies reshape reality on the battlefield.

Fortune

Dedrone, featured below, is another startup which sells to the military and to law enforcement agencies

As the NRF Big Show kicks off

As the annual show kicks off in New York, the focus is about how technology is reshaping the retail experience but I found as interesting the latest Monthly Economic Review from the NRF’s Chief Economist, Jack Kleinhenz, especially the economic data he summarizes. Inflation, supply chains and COVID continue to muddy the waters but as he summarizes  

"Consumer spending propelled growth in 2021 and will continue to be a bright spot as 2022 unrolls. The current recession recovery cycle is very different from previous ones. Consumers have never been as wealthy as they are today. In fact, consumer wealth grew an additional 18.1 percent year-over-year in the third quarter, keeping well ahead of inflation. If there is one lesson we have learned it is not to underestimate the resilience of the consumer and, therefore, the U.S. economy. With stimulus programs in the rearview mirror, consumer income and spending will instead be fueled by job growth paired with wage gains going forward. That said, the omicron variant could cause households to crunch down. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell recently said “people are learning to live with it” but households have already changed their behavior. Theater performances and concerts are being canceled and universities are returning to remote teaching. Fortunately, we have a lot of tailwind in terms of job growth, spending and production as we turn the calendar to 2022."

Tech to combat shop lifting

The Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail, a trade association, which Mr. Dugan heads, estimates that organized retail theft accounts for around $45 billion in annual losses for retailers these days, up from $30 billion a decade ago. At CVS, reported thefts have ballooned 30% since the pandemic began.

Mr. Dugan’s team, working with law enforcement, expects to close 73 e-commerce cases this year involving $104 million of goods stolen from multiple retailers and sold on Amazon. That compares with 27 cases in 2020, involving half the total. CVS has doubled its crime team to 17 over the past two years and purchased its own surveillance van with 360-degree cameras and a high-powered telescope.

The corporate investigators charged with tackling the problem are often former police. They tail thieves, compile investigative reports, stalk storefronts for stolen goods and comb through trash outside suspects’ houses. They pore over videos from stores that have been robbed and scour profiles on online marketplaces.

Earlier this year, an e-commerce analyst on Mr. Dugan’s team who looks for sellers hawking high-risk products such as allergy medicine or razor blades identified an Amazon account with over $1 million in suspicious listings. It was linked to a video store in Leominster, Mass. Local law enforcement, working together with CVS and other retailers, arrested the owner of the video store in May.

WSJ (sub required)

Tech in Amazon department stores?

Amazon.com Inc.’s planned department stores will aim to boost its apparel sales by offering shoppers a chance to try on clothes from its own private-label brands in technology-fueled dressing rooms, according to people familiar with the matter.

One idea that has been tested is for customers to scan QR codes of items they want to try on by using a smartphone app and for associates in the store to gather the items and place them in fitting rooms.

Once there, customers could ask for more items using a touch screen, which might be capable of recommending additional clothing based on the pieces shoppers liked. The rooms could use sliding doors for associates to bring more clothes without seeing shoppers, the people said. Robots or other forms of automation could eventually be deployed in the stores, one of the people said.

WSJ (subscription required)

 

SAP Industries - "Shark Month"

Over the last month, on the Deal Architect blog I have run 8 Analyst Cam episodes of SAP Industry leads presenting trends in their sectors and how SAP and startup partners are delivering to those trends

• Direct to Consumer with Paul Smith
• Circular Economy trends with Natasha Pergl
• Automotive/Mobility trends with Hagen Heubach
• Servitization/XaaS with Torsten Welte
• Utilities with Markus Bechmann
• Retail in 2 parts with Achim Schneider
• Life Sciences with Mandar Paralkar

More to come in December, where Rainer Zinow will profile "micro-verticals" that SAP covers with partners for the SMB segment

Competency-based education

So, after months of discussion, the district switched to competency-based education, a form of personalized learning that emphasizes mastery of skills over time spent in class. At Northern Cass, that means that grade point averages no longer exist. In two years, neither will grade levels. Instead, K-12 students get rated on a four-point scale for each skill, receiving about two new ratings per week. In seventh-grade English, that may mean the ability to hold collaborative conversation. Those who are prepared with questions and open to other viewpoints might receive a three. Leading the conversation and keeping it from stalling out would garner a four.

“We kept coming back to the idea that you couldn’t get world class because the system itself wasn’t designed for that. The system itself was designed to sort kids, to rank kids,” says Dr. Steiner.

WSJ (sub required)

A celebration of trade jobs

Mike Rowe talks about his new show "How America Works"

"This is us taking a single topic like logging and saying, "Okay, maybe you've heard some things about logging. Maybe you have formed some opinions about it." Rather than telling you how to think about the industry, we just introduce you to the regular people who put bread on the table by getting us the lumber we need to build the desk you're sitting at right now and the one underneath this glass, right? We just make it as personal as we can. We do the same thing with energy. We do the same thing with electricity. We go to the Hoover Dam and we just spend a day with people who are trying to repair and maintain the turbines, which provide electricity for about a sixth of the country. We do the same thing with waste management, just by hanging out with some garbage people for the better part of a day.

And people will be surprised by the degree of sophistication that informs all of these vocations. They'll be surprised by the passion that these workers feel for their jobs.

People are very confused about energy in general. And look, this is headline news, right? And the show doesn't try to be political or polemic, but you can't help but make the point: When it comes to energy, a lot of people think about electricity as being fundamentally clean, whereas maybe coal or oil they might think of as fundamentally dirty. What most people don't really understand though, is that their Tesla or their Prius that they plug in and feel great about plugging in, uses electricity and that electricity doesn't come from the electricity tree. It comes from a turbine and that turbine is spinning, and in the vast majority of cases, the energy that's being used to spin that turbine is being provided by natural gas or oil. And so what I hope we learn from the series is the way that we all are truly interconnected. You can't just arbitrage the part of the workforce that makes you uncomfortable in the equation."

Here is an excerpt from his episode on loggers