August 26, 2020 - 7:00am
Can anyone stand-up to Amazon? The online retail giant was going great guns before the pandemic, but now it looks unstoppable.
Yet there is hope — a challenger that might just beat BezosCorp at its own game.
Remarkably, it’s a British supermarket. Ocado doesn’t have any shops, but it does have state-of-the-art automated warehouses. One of these ‘customer fulfilment centres’ features in a report for The Economist.
The anonymous author describes how hundreds of robots whizz around, assembling customer orders. It’s a truly remarkable feat of advanced engineering.
Right now, Ocado is a David to Amazon’s Goliath; but David has better technology. In any case, Ocado’s no pipsqueak. The growing company is already bigger than big names like Marks and Spencer:
We’re not just talking retail here. Britain is full of institutions that command public affection and customer loyalty, but rely too much on their history and too little on reshaping the future. M&S is one example, others include the BBC, the civil service, the Church of England and, dare I say it, the NHS.
It’s not that they’ve gone to complete wrack-and-ruin. They still do some things very well. So well, in fact, that it’s allowed them to get away with the things they keep on doing badly. Just think of M&S food and M&S clothing — you wouldn’t eat the former if it tasted how the latter looks.
As a country, we can’t keep carrying the deadweight. Like M&S, with its store-closure programme, there’s a lot of downsizing coming our way. To save the best of the old, the worst has got to go — and thus we desperately need enterprises capable of building anew.
By this I don’t mean disrespect for tradition or novelty for its own sake. Indeed, lazy institutions can always conjure up novelty by disrespecting their own traditions. Pull down a statue, cancel Rule Britannia, job done.
Real innovation, however, is harder won. So when it happens we should celebrate it. That means making some room in hearts. Cherishing old institutions is all very well, but they too were new once.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeNaipaul was on one wing of the modern-ish study of Postcolonialism. He was a good writer and was well travelled; he had his opinions. But that does not make him right.
I have been three times to India. On arrival I have been excited but on leaving the excitement had turned into depression. The number of people in the cities is overpowering. It is bound to lead to corruption because being corrupt is the only way to survive. No politician will be able to remove the corruption.
The people in India are friendly and welcoming. As a visitor you always feel safe. But you can’t be part of it. As a visitor there is only one solution – find a way of reducing the number of people so that the problem becomes manageable. This can be done by simply not increasing the number of people but then you get into arguments about Human Rights.
Indian population can be reduced by the same way it has done in so many other countries.
Allow enterprise and prosperity to flourish.
India is already seeing benefits of this, despite the relentless demonisation of Modi. Their birthrate has reduced considerably.
To me it appears that overpopulation is incorrectly only ascribed to an increase in births? However the reduction of deaths seems to be the main cause. In India, those who survived births, life’s diseases and finally old age ailments and died at a ripe age, families had celebrations at their funeral. Now there is an expectation- to live up to and beyond 90, even in India. It’s not the births causing the problems , its deaths that have been outlawed.
Fear of Covid in the last 2 years is the case and point. Such western health protectionism has permeated to the developing nations. Like the virus itself, this western idea has infected the whole world. With grand plans of certain elites to vaccinate the whole world, no wonder the idea that death is unbearable whatever the ailment and is causing population to spiral.
It started a long ago with the advent and availability of modern medicine. It’s inevitable influence & unintended consequence is population boom beyond control.
When I listen to human rights , it makes me cringe . The most bizarre cases, I have heard of are mentally and or physically handicapped have the right to bear children without birth control with government aid. If these are the lessons for the rest of the world, what hope is there of controlling population ?
India followed disastrous socialist economic policies for decades, resulting in the oft derided ‘Hindu rate of growth’.
India needs freer markets, ‘radical reform’ in the realm of property rights. The slums in particular are indeed an outrage, provide legal title and proper public services, water and sanitation. That should not be beyond the capacity of a talented nation.
By the time I reached the Indonesian section of Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, Naipaul’s fixation on, to him, the ignorance, backwardness and uncivilised behaviour of the Muslims he met, including accounts of one man wiping snot on his own clothes, had me concerned about his true motives. These inclusions felt petty and vindictive.
His later apparent flirtation with Hindu nationalism seemed to confirm this impression. His thesis was persuasively expressed, his sincerity was less apparent.
And this is the point, sincerity is an irrelevance, as are motives, as is every aspect of personality. The only thing that matters is the work, does the work, the writing in this case, speak to you such that you find difficulty answering back? This applies even more starkly to the hard sciences than the humanities.
If you are one of those people who cannot separate the person from their creations, you are effectively creating a heaven, hell, and limbo for all discovery and all creation: the works of those you approve of to heaven, of those you don’t to hell, and all those where you know nothing of the creator, like that two-millennia old sculpture you saw in Rome the other day, why, they of course all go into limbo, judgement reserved.
Thank you. You use one of my favourite arguments – about separating the person from their work. As I say, the thesis was persuasive. But, for me, it was the words used, part of the creation itself, that lessened its appeal.
I suppose the Muslims are generally poorer and more ‘backward’ in those societies, notably India.
Without a man of letters like VS Naipaul, a beacon of freedom, of freedom of expression, would be a lot less powerful.
I’ve read The Writer And His World. And I still have the book.