Would you order from the Amazon Dash push-button service?

This service is yet another bit of technology which effectively keeps people locked into their homes. We’re forgetting what its like to go out into the neighbourhood to get the stuff we need when we need it. Once you are used to getting shopping delivered, food delivered, and now instant purchase of items – we will lose not only our ability to interact with the world around us, but electroncially someone out there can collect our data – so its an erosion of privacy too. We face a future where we are slowly losing our everyday living skills. Driverless cars, prepared food, disposable clothing (we can make our own!), labour saving gadgets (our grandparents made very good meals using knives, spoons and whisks), handwriting, ..the list can be longer. Technology is good, but we can get to a stage when we are so reliant on it that when it fails (and it does), we are physically and mentally helpless. And stressed!!

I’ve seen the button advertised, but never really looked into it. The topic header has been revealing, so thanks.

This is a growing trend, and Amazon wants to be in the vanguard of the creeping internetisation of the home. Personally, having read the header, I think it’s a step too far and a bit ‘clunky’ at this stage. The idea of little buttons everywhere is a bit daft, I suspect, but I can see a natural progression.

The self-service checkouts we all use, albeit perhaps guiltily, owe their ubiquity to the electronic scale based on strain gauge technology, which is extremely accurate. How long will it be before kitchen cupboards are fitted with strain gauge shelving that, once loaded with all your items, can accurately determine what has been used and ask you if you want to re-order an item or two? It’s already feasible and cost-effective, so I suspect it might start appearing shortly.

But the real problem is whether you want the world to know you’ve run out of Mr Muscle for the bathroom, or – heaven forbid – the coleslaw (but not in the bathroom, of course…) 🙂 More seriously, however, homes are inexorably moving towards total internetisation and the one aspect of that which is of real concern is that the security of the systems will never be bullet-proof. Happy times ahead.

You might look at this as a disaster of such size that people apparently cannot see it. An Emporor’s New Clothes mass hallucination.

I am not talking about the loss of personal contact, the loss of local shops, the marginalisation of those who cannot interact successfully with modern life. the loss of privacy, and the further divorce of money from the buying process.

The obvious one for me is the amount of physical traffic generated to deliver insignificant goods all over the country. Has anyone quantified the costs for the deliveries? The extra road traffic etc. Home delivery works currently as many misguided and desperate people are delivering items cheaply. If HMRC were not providing the tax interpretation they are then these people would have a living wage and the cost benefit of giant warehouses competing with local shops would be narrowed.

The UK Government amazingly is looking favourably on drone deliveries which will remove the delivery workers anyway. More underemployed or jobless people is not a blessing at the best of times. But particularly daft if the profits made from this service disappear to the USA. Basic economics says that if all profit is abstracted from a country then it hurts your economy.

What I find surprising is that the terrorist potential for drone deliveries seems to have passed unnoticed. But then money talks louder than people.
arstechnica.co.uk/business/2016/07/amazon-drone-delivery-trial-uk-government-caa/

I would no more use the service than I would buy shares in King Solomon’s Mines from a Nigerian Prince. Amazon has developed it’s markets at the expense of it’s competitors by spending years hardly paying tax in many areas in which it has traded. If the firm is allowed to become totally dominant in the marketplace what do you think will happen to British owned companies who have had to pay proper taxes over the years and of course have been unable to compete on the same terms. Less income for the Exchequer means less money to spend on public services in the future. It may not matter to you this year but don’t cry when your pension payments are increased and all public services suffer in the future. I am not against International trade but you must see that the big multi-nations companies will do all they can to avoid contributing. Look at the attitude of Apple at this very moment!! Support your own now or suffer later. By the way, its a stupid gadget anyway, Amazon are the only beneficiaries.

REALLY? An Amazon ‘Cash Button’, what next! Not only do they expect you to fork out £4.99 a time for one of these gimmicky little things, but they hope you will fall into the trap and buy one for each and every Branded Product ‘they’ hope to steer you into buying. No Thank You.

One flaw I see is each Button would need a second Button for when the battery inside the first one runs flat? And it will as having something like this stuck around the average household will result in little fingers pressing it endlessly for the sheer hell of in and cries of ‘mummy what does this do … it doesn’t work’???

From a more basic level I personally think some companies are trying to be too cleaver for their own good, after all this is the UK not America/Germany. We’ve less numbers over here with high disposable income to throw away and with the economy as it is the 40 odd High End Brands these ‘Buttons’ cover would perhaps be better suited to Aldi and Lidl’s own brans 🙂

But what would I know … I’m just a working mother living the dream in the real world.