Amazon Fresh Digital Shopping Cart & Checkout
Where Are the Producers?
What the Amazon Fresh stores have accomplished is nothing short of phenomenal.
First, I scan into a digitally integrated shopping cart with my Amazon app. Then, the cart automatically scans my products and summarizes my purchases on the cart monitor. To complete my shopping journey, I receive an automatic checkout, and a nice employee greets me and verifies that everything went smoothly.
Just like touch phones and live interactive gaming, what not too long ago seemed like a far-out concept is here. It’s going to be a game changer for the industry. My recent experience walking into a “regular” supermarket felt like going back to the 1980s.
However, with all this amazing technology, where is the insight into the producers of my products?
Where is the traceability and validation of marketing and certification claims?
How do I know how farmers, communities and ecosystems are impacted by my purchases?
Amazon Fresh: Full of Technology, Lacking Traceability
If we have the technology to design this type of shopping experience, surely Amazon can make the effort to know where its products come from. Surely they can give that information to consumers.
Amazon prides itself on customer service and user experience. They’ve certainly set the bar for global commerce. But at what point do impact metrics become a factor in their business strategy? They don’t consider it to be good for business yet, or they would already be investing in it.
Integrating traceability technology and validation doesn’t require Elon Musk to make a rocketship to fly to Mars. It does require a sincere commitment to supporting transparency of supply chain partners, simple data capture, and digital traceability solutions.
I don’t imagine it will happen overnight, but even so, you’d think that at least one, or perhaps two of the thousands of products sold at Amazon Fresh would give you some basic transparency and traceability.
Here we are, living in a state of greater abundance than the wealthiest emperor of Rome. We can get coconut products from Thailand, organic apples from the Pacific Northwest, and brown rice from India. We can taste chocolate from the Ivory Coast, fresh seafood from Scandinavia, and kombucha from down the road. And still, we don’t have access to information about when those products were harvested, who harvested them, and how it all impacted our crumbling environment.
At what point does the bread and circus end? When will we finally demand that they feed us the truth?
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