The only country whose opinion should matter here is Taiwan. If and when they decide they want to be recognised officially, they should be. Not before, and not after.

use QR codes on each product

^{Pssst… products all already have scannable codes on them.}

But yeah, Woolies rolled this out in a few of their stores last year. No need for dedicated hardware, the Woolies app does it. It took me a while to realise that actually it’s not yet available in very many stores. Just 16 in Qld, 20 in Vic, 32 in NSW, and 13 in the rest of the country combined. It just so happens that the two nearest to me are both on that list, so I got the impression that it was more common than it actually is.

But yeah, the tech does already exist as a whitelabel service. If I had to guess, I’d say Woolies rolled their own rather than using one of these, but other companies could do it without needing to do all the work themselves.

It might be a bit more difficult for them than for Woolies and Coles, sure. But Australia is unique in how strong Colesworths are, and yet in other countries, as demonstrated in the video linked above, stores are able to have scan & go tech.

Granted, there are a whole bunch of other factors in the Australian market that make it way worse than it needs to be, like our restrictive zoning practices that promote driving to big supermarkets rather than stopping off at your local small store on the ride home or walk back from the train/tram/bus stop. But the bottom line in terms of their inability to provide customer conveniences is that if stores in a country that is both less centralised and lower population can do it, there’s really no excuse here. Pubs and clubs have gotten on board with it via the prevalence of QR codes to order food, despite menus being unique to every place. Maccas manages to have a pretty damn good app experience despite prices and menus varying somewhat between stores and being largely franchise-owned.

They don’t need to spend millions developing this for themselves. A quick search turns up numerous different while-label services that can do this for you. I don’t know exactly how much they cost or how hard they are to integrate, but I know I would be way more likely to go to somewhere other than Colesworth if the experience didn’t suck arse. Last time I went to my local local store (there’s also an IGA pretty nearby that I do visit from time-to-time, but this was a fully independent local grocer) they refused to check me out at all because I didn’t have cash, and they only accepted cash for small purchases.

Your last paragraph is a good point, and is yet another reason that the government should structure its laws and enforcement to help promote these smaller businesses rather than CostlesWorthdi. But I think it’s unlikely to sway very many shoppers.

I get the joke, but actually…yes. A co-op doesn’t mean the people actually doing the work don’t get paid. It actually doesn’t even mean not-for-profit, just that the people profiting aren’t shareholders, but people who actually have a direct stake in the business. That can be a customer-owned co-op, supplier-owned, worker-owned, or some combination of those. Those groups would be the ones making any profit, in a for-profit co-op. And in a not-for-profit worker- or supplier-owned co-op, the workers (including the CEO) and suppliers still get paid—they’re just able to be paid more while selling goods for the same price, or paid the same while achieving a lower price, than a non-co-op business would.

A few problems with this. That requires a world experienced in 2D, with one axis being towards or away from the centre, and the other being clockwise or anticlockwise. Works great when discussing intragalactic travel, but OP specified intergalactic travel. Where there is neither an obvious centre point nor a single plane on which things predominantly occur.

Though fwiw, language very similar to that is legitimately used in some real world languages. Some Malayo-Polynesian languages, such as Manam, talk about direction in terms of seaward, inland, clockwise, and anticlockwise.

Sorry, I thought we were having a civilised conversation about how a known problem could be solved. Not being rude arseholes slinging insults at each other and using the tired right-wing “ignore evidence from elsewhere in the world because we’re special” bullshit as justification.

I’m struggling to remember a time when I’ve wanted to look at a price for a grocery item online. I’ve never done direct to boot.

Ok, that’s fantastic for you. I love direct to boot, and I specifically avoid my local IGA because even though they do have self checkout (only installed around the last year or so), it always seems to be roped off when I go. Not sure if that’s just because I only tend to go late at night when they have the fewest people rostered on. I don’t actually care about checking the prices online because I’m financially secure enough that I’m lucky enough not to actually care but if I did care a lot about the price, I would definitely be wanting to be able to check where I’m going to get the best deal. But I do like being able to check which products they’ve got so I can plan my shop. This is especially important for smaller stores where I might need to plan to go to a bunch of different stores to get all the stuff I need.

Maybe I’m wrong and this wouldn’t actually help them. But it’s clear that people aren’t convinced by them doing what they currently do, and that they need to try something new. Maybe getting speciality lines could work, like Aldi does with their centre aisle, which clearly works very well for them. But “focusing on local products” has been the primary selling point of smaller supermarkets and independent grocers for decades, and clearly does not work.

As for it being “too expensive”, if companies in countries that have a smaller population than ours and lack the strong duopoly of Colesworths can develop or purchase scan & go tech 3 or 4 years before Woolworths started doing it here, I refuse to believe that’s actually the real problem. I suspect smaller business owners in Australia are just more likely to be technophobic and to believe that it’s sound business to ignore technology than small companies in Europe.

The smaller guys need to do a better job at providing a good service though, too. Small local grocery stores have had scan & go options for half a decade overseas, something that Woolies only started rolling out last year, and no other store in Australia has, to my knowledge. The big guys also have options like regular self-checkout, checking prices & stock online/in-app, and direct-to-boot ordering. These are all things that smaller guys could reasonably fix, to varying degrees

Much harder for the small guys to fix is the fact that Colesworth are more likely to be a one-stop-shop place. They’re huge, and with that comes a huge range of stock. Supporting your local grocer is fine, but might then mean you have to make a separate trip to a baker and butcher. Given these less-easily-surmountable drawback, it just becomes extra important that they don’t fall behind in things they can control. But they do.

I’d rather just spend a fraction of the money on a Nebula subscription.

Aren’t those two the same thing? At least in C-style arrays, which might not be how they’re handled under the hood, but is at least how most languages present it to the programmer.

You are, as it were, on the money.

Steve Cannane: Now, I’m not sure what Bill Shorten was relying on for those figures. He’s never actually told us what the evidence is that suddenly that industry would all fall apart.

lol, lmao even

Yeah for real. I really wish this weren’t only available in audio form, because he absolutely wrecked them with that one. More people need to be able to see this to call Labor to account.

It’s 15 minutes.

even now you can still host your own website / services at home without any specialized gear

Yes, as I said, that’s the only thing I’ve done myself—in particular, at times I’ve run it off of my main desktop, and at other times on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard drive attached—but that’s specifically not what I was asking about because the previous comment was specifically talking about non-developers who might have that basic HTML understanding and just want a server where they can throw up an HTML file and have it served up. A goal that’s more technically involved than a wordpress.com site, but less involved than self-hosting a LAMP stack and running the Let’s Encrypt certbot.

(Plus, of course, the growing prevalence of cgNAT making self-hosting impossible for many people necessitates the use of a hosting company or user-friendly web service.)

If you didn’t need to see your GP to get a very it’d ease up the system immensely.

Yeah I learnt static HTML and CSS circa 2007, but even then it felt like what we were being taught was very out of date.

I’ve never actually used any form of hosting for my own pages. I’ve run the LAMP stack on my own local server, and I’ve used services similar to WordPress, but never dealt with static web sites hosted by someone else. Do they not make TLS really easy for you in that circumstance?

I’m not talking about WordPress.org, but WordPress.com. The basic blogging service. It’s all WYSIWYG.

Fwiw these days balance bikes are considered better than training wheels for people learning to ride. Training wheels are ok if you actually need to go somewhere accompanied by an adult on a bike, but they’re terrible for learning. They don’t teach you how to steer or balance properly; a balance bike does. In fact, training wheels can teach bad habits that are difficult to unlearn.

Yeah but a basic Wordpress.com site could do exactly the same thing for free. Or for super cheap if you want your own domain.

I think it’s likely he would keep it, but fail to provide it enough funding to actually do anything of value. Possibly also limit its remit so it’s incapable of providing the best recommendations.