y CHRISTINA
COUCH
JUST EAT pilots a
Starship robot to deliver food from its restaurants. John Phillips / JUST
EAT
If you live in the
nation's capital, your next takeout order could be delivered by a small,
six-wheeled robot vaguely reminiscent of WALL-E.
Part of a pilot food
delivery program launched by Starship Technologies and Postmates, the
self-driving robots can pick up orders and travel to a customer's house up to
two miles away, using cameras and GPS tracking to dodge pedestrians and other
obstacles. Customers can follow the bot's journey through an app, or kick back
and wait for a text notification that their meal has arrived outside, and then
open the door and click a link to unlock the bot to retrieve their food.
With its
robo-deliveries, Starship aims to reduce delivery times and fuel costs. It's
just one of a broad array of tools companies are using to speed up service and
get customers what they want as quickly as possible. As Starship robots take to
the streets:
·
7-Eleven just
completed a one month aerial drone delivery test in Nevada.
·
TacoBell last year
unveiled the Tacobot — an artificial intelligence chatbot that integrates with
the Slack messaging platform to allow customers to text orders from their
desks.
·
Dominos rolled out a
"zero click" app that automatically orders your favorite hot pie
seconds after the app is opened.
These time-saving
systems, and the race to create even faster ones, are part of an emerging
instant gratification economy designed to accommodate what consumer
psychologist Kit Yarrow calls the "I want what I want when I want it"
customer, or IWWIWWIWI. Having our desires delivered in minutes is a convenient
game changer for those who have trouble making shopping trips, but the instant
gratification economy faces serious challenges — and possible unintended
psychological effects.
The Need for Speed
For Starship executive
Henry Harris-Burland, the newer, speedier economy is about more than just
getting goods faster. It's also about rethinking traditional business models.
Starship's pilot programs will initially focus on food — the company is also testing
automated delivery in partnership with DoorDash in Redwood, California — but
the plan is to eventually provide retail, grocery, and parcel delivery, sans
human drivers.
"The last couple
of miles from a hub or a store to a customer's house is incredibly
inefficient," Harris-Burland says. "Think about vans stopping and
starting 150 times outside of 150 houses in one neighborhood. It's an
incredibly large waste of time. We're looking to totally revolutionize those
traditional delivery methods."
Pedestrians pass a Starship delivery robot. Starship
Cruising at a max
speed of four miles-per-hour, Starship bots generally deliver within 15 to 30
minutes, Harris-Burland says.
Should Starship break
into the retail market, it will be competing in a space that already relies
heavily on technology to reduce shipping times. To deliver goods in one day, or one hour in select locations, Amazon uses
proprietary algorithms to determine exactly where items should be stored within
warehouses, the shortest path human "pickers" can take to retrieve
the items, and the exact amount of time it should take to fulfill each order.
The company is
constantly pushing the boundaries of speedy delivery. It has filed patents for
an "airborne fulfillment center" — a flying
warehouse where aerial drones can refill between deliveries — and an "anticipatory package shipping" system
designed to predict what you need, package it, and send it in your general
direction (but not to your house) before you place an order.
This year, UPS will
implement ORION (On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation), a 1,000-page
algorithm that determines the shortest driver routes by evaluating up to
200,000 alternatives for each trip. ORION shortens routes by an average of
seven to eight miles, the company says. When fully deployed, it will save $300
to $400 million per year in fuel and human resource costs.
Smaller businesses
lack the time and resources to build their own mega-algorithms, which is where
companies like Routific come in. Aimed at helping the little guys keep up,
Routific offers optimization software that takes a list of drivers and
destinations and finds the best routes.
The system doesn't
find the perfect route — it could take years for a computer to churn through
every possibility. But it does find a near-optimal solution in minutes, helping
clients cut drive times and fuel consumption by about 40 percent. It also
provides substantially shortened delivery times, says Routific CEO Marc Kuo.
As delivery times
quicken, a cottage industry of startups is attacking other time-wasting aspects
of retail. Shane Mac, CEO of Assist, is aiming to end telephone hold times with
his automated messaging system. Assist provides customer service for about 20
brands using messaging platforms like Facebook and Slack, as well as automated
voice platforms like Siri and Google Home. Instead of phoning a call center
only to be put on hold, users can book a hotel, buy movie tickets, make a
charitable donation, etc., all through text and voice commands. Assist also
keeps identification and payment information on file to speed things up.
"We went from
people waiting on hold 25 minutes to people being able to change a reservation
they made to our hotel in under 30 seconds," Mac says. "We're giving
everyone in the world a lot of time back."
Speed and the Psyche
Delivery in one day,
or even one hour, is still far from providing instant gratification. But as we
move closer to that point, it's worth considering how it impacts consumers.
Research shows that
the speed at which we can satisfy our desires affects both what we want and how
much we're willing to pay for it. That suggests ultrafast delivery could affect
more than just when we get our purchases — it could affect our minds and our
behavior.
One possible reason is
because "people value a reward in the present twice as much as they would
value the same reward in the future," says David Laibson, chair of Harvard
University's economics department and director of its Foundations of Human
Behavior Initiative.
When faced with
immediate rewards, we often decide based on what we want now regardless of what
consequences it may bring later. When offered choices with rewards available in
several days or months, we're more likely make decisions based on long-term
needs and goals.
Economists say this
phenomenon of "present bias" influences all sorts of buyer behaviors,
and studies show that when there's significant time between when we make a
choice and when we can access its rewards, we often act more rationally.
"Technology that
moves the consequences of our choices more and more into the present is going
to empower this preference for instant gratification and undermine our ability
to do what we consider to be in our long-run interests," Laibson says.
Jonathan Cohen,
co-director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, has concerns as well. Back in 2003, an interdisciplinary team of
researchers including Cohen and Laibson put study subjects into an fMRI brain
scanner and watched in real time as subjects decided whether they preferred to
receive a small gift certificate immediately or wait two to six weeks for a
larger one.
The researchers found
that when the choice revolved around an immediate or near-term reward, the
subject's emotional processing areas were activated. Those who chose the
delayed reward showed more reliance on brain regions associated with logic.
Those who opted for the immediate reward showed slightly more activity in
regions associated with emotion.
Cohen says this study
can't be universalized to paint all decisions, but future brain imaging
research may provide a better understanding of the logical and emotional
processes that govern decision-making — and how they're affected by instant
gratification.
The Future of Fast
Kit Yarrow doesn't
believe that instant gratification business models will pervade our entire
lives as consumers. While many companies are testing lightning-speed delivery,
those services are costly, logistically complex, and thus unrealistic for most
smaller retailers. Many of these services are currently free because they're in
test mode, she adds, but it's unclear whether consumers will pay once they come
at a price.
A drone carries a package at Amazon's research and development
labs. Amazon via AP
"Right now, I
think [some] retailers, especially Amazon, are saying, 'Well, let's try this
out. Once consumers get used to getting things in three hours, they'll
eventually be willing to pay for it,'" Yarrow says. "A lot of what's
been going on is trying to train consumers to have expectations of
immediacy."
Some have already
dropped out of the same day delivery game — eBay, for instance, shuttered its
service in 2015. But plenty of companies are jumping in. Last year, Staples
launched its "Staples Rush" program, which guarantees that orders
placed by 3 p.m. will make it to your door by 7 p.m., while Walmart partnered
with Uber and Lyft to start same-day grocery delivery.
Despite all this
innovation, immediacy might not be what consumers really want in every retail
transaction. A recent survey of more than 4,000
holiday shoppers found that 92 percent of consumers consider delivery within
two days to be "fast," and 87 percent value free shipping over fast
shipping. Consumers indicated that they were willing to pay around $5 for
same-day delivery. One in four said that they wouldn't expect to pay anything
at all for this service.
Regardless of how fast
or widespread these services become, it's worth pausing for just a moment to
make sure these are truly the choices we want.
"As we make things
more and more immediately available, it poses more and more of a risk that
people will take advantage of that opportunity without considering whether
immediate gratification is the best course," Cohen says, adding that
immediate reward can be detrimental to consumers. "The more it becomes
available, the more we have to think about whether or not this is a good
idea."
