- " 'The robots are coming! The robots are coming!' seems like a familiar sentiment as robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning become more ubiquitous in workplace settings."
- "Late night shoppers looking with a need to buy books will have their very specific conditions met in Beijing as 20 new staffless bookstores that will operate 24 hours a day are expected to open throughout the city this year.... Like other staffless stores, the 'Xinhua Lifestyle Store' requires all customers to register their real names using their WeChat accounts and have their faces scanned before entering. And because the store has access to all their users' purchasing information, it can offer 'precise and humanized' book suggestions to all of its customers."
- "The 10,000 square foot store on M Street Northwest, which opened March 13, is a bookstore the way Walgreens is a pharmacy: Sure, you can get drugs there, but the real draw is everything else. At Amazon Books, that everything else could be a juicer, an espresso machine, a Vitamix or one of a slew of voice-controlled Echo gadgets. Retail consultants might call the merchandise mix unfocused. Mariana Garavaglia, Amazon's head of store management and operations, calls it 'holistic.' "
- "[W]e shouldn't only be asking ourselves, 'Can we build it?' But we should also be asking ourselves, 'What idea of the human do we want to have reflected back to us?' "
- "The opening comes amid a resurgence of independent bookstores in the Washington area. Politics and Prose, a longtime fixture in Chevy Chase, is opening two new locations in the Wharf and Union Market. A number of other neighborhood bookstores have also recently opened, including Solid State Books in the H Street corridor, East City Bookshop on Capitol Hill and Walls of Books in Parkview."
- "Boston will win Amazon's second headquarters, according to an artificial intelligence system developed by Wells Fargo Securities. The bank's stock-picking robot, called Aiera, thinks the city is the likely choice to host HQ2."
- "Americans think automation will likely disrupt a number of professions--but relatively few think their own jobs are at risk."
- "Amazon plans to open its first Missouri fulfillment center, in St. Peters, near St. Louis; the center will employ more than 1,500 people who will have 'opportunities to engage with Amazon Robotics in a highly technological workplace,' the company said."
- "Imagine robots working for a few years as bookstore clerks until they finish their novels and become robot authors."
- In 1977, the American Booksellers Association show in San Francisco featured "a five-foot-tall robot selling The Encyclopedia of How It Works... The robot's electric voice asked, 'Would you like to know how I work?' And gave back the answer: 'Get mommy to buy my book.' "
- "The answer to that likely doesn't lie in Amazon Go clones, but the ability for retailers to fight convenience with convenience with the smartphone at center of it all."
- "Fabio, the Pepper robot, who was deployed as a retail assistant at the upmarket store Margiotta in Edinburgh, Scotland, was let go after only a week at the job after it was found that the robot was confusing the patrons, who preferred assistance from its human colleagues."
- "The key to integrating these technologies successfully is to break down each role's workflow and look for automation opportunities. Jobs that have elements of retrieving information, scheduling, and calculating numbers lend themselves to being enhanced by automation. By taking those tasks out of the workday, employees can spend more time on activities that are harder to automate, such as interacting with people..."
- "In retail and, specifically, the supply chain, we're seeing a lot of automation, and I can envisage some of the job titles will have 'hologram' in them. Head of hologram services, or anything to do with robotics."
- "Their exquisite sensors will comprehend our very dust/ And re-create the best and the worst of us, as though in art."
- "But perhaps it would be fitting to end with an inspiring quote from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, via Botnik: 'Innovation happens by gently lifting a grandfather and asking him for six different ideas.' "
- "The bookshop of the future, therefore, needs to be an experiential hub for all things literary. It needs to be a place where writers can talk with and meet their readers. It needs to be a physically engaging place in which readers can drink tea or eat while browsing.... Curation is key.... Trust, an increasingly scarce resource in today's world, is essential. Trust trumps price. It's the essential commodity for the book retailer of the future."
- "[T]he problem of automation isn't automation, but as ever, it's us."
--Robert Gray, contributing editor (Column archives at Fresh Eyes Now)