Jetsons Episode 5,437: the Kroger vending machine
Jeffrey Tucker at Whiskey and Gunpowder - How free enterprise is building a Jetson's world, while government continues to try to keep us in Flintstone hell. The featured book, It's a Jetson's World - Private Miracles and Public Crimes, is available in free PDF and eBook formats at http://mises.org/document/6528 . Mises' dead tree version is also a couple bucks cheaper than Laissez Faire Books.
Here’s the thing. Saving is supposed to work. It’s supposed to pay off. The general price levels are supposed to have come down, for food, education, housing and medical care like it has for the technological wonders whose markets are largely untouched by government’s benevolent fist.
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You have heard of unmanned flight. Much more impressive to me is the unmanned grocery store that could be coming to a street corner by you. It’s being pushed by Kroger. It is a large-scale machine stocked with 200 items from the grocery store.
Crackers, cheese, milk, bread, chips and dip, maybe even some fruit and cold cuts — most of the common items found in the grocery store — are all in this brilliant vending machine now being tested at select places around the United States.
The prices are more comparable to the grocery store but it has more convenience than the convenience store. The savings to the company includes no 24-hour staff, no high insurance for security risks, no sky-high real estate, no maintenance of building, and the foregoing of the endless headaches of wacky customers, untrusthworthy employees, bathroom catastrophes, theft, and more.
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