Amazon Dash

We live in exciting times, truly. A few days ago I discovered the invention of the Amazon Dash. It looks like even our grocery shopping is entering the future! It’s about time though, grocery shopping the old fashioned way is such a pain.

How great will it be when I can just say the name of the food I want, and it will materialize right before my very unbelieving eyes? What many hours will we save, not having to trudge to the supermarket on the weekends? What countless minutes will we gain with our family, friends, and video games? Amazon has answered the prayers we didn’t even know we prayed and has given us the future of–wait. I’m being told that the Amazon Dash does not in fact make food materialize right before your eyes. Okay. That’s a bummer.

So what does it actually do? Well, it does make your grocery shopping easier, in the sense that it almost ensures you’ll never have one of those days where you come home from the store, all gung-ho about making your grandma’s famous fudge-maple-avocado-bacon brownies only to realize that you’ve forgotten the bacon.

(Of course, no one would ever actually forget bacon, but you see my point)

The Amazon Dash is actually a little microphone on a type of spoon handle. You say names of items, or scan them, and the information is recorded in an app. With this, you can order all you groceries via Amazon Fresh. Oh yeah, for this thing to be of any use to you, you have to have Amazonfresh, a service that is currently only available in California an costs $300 per year. Once you place your order, Amazonfresh will deliver your food to your door within a day. That’s pretty nifty. But who knows when this will be made available to the masses. If you would like to try a delivery service like this though, other grocery stores, like Safeway and Schwan’s, do have similar services. I don’t think they use a little microphone-wand-thing with theirs, but I’m sure a mobile app would work just as well for most people. Peapod is a website that offers a grocery delivery service, and I hope that too becomes more widely available.

I’m excited to see if this idea in general becomes more widespread. Not necessarily the wand, but a grocery delivery service for everyone. How would this change the way we eat? What we buy? How we spend our time? Wand or no, I think the implementation of a grocery delivery service might be beneficial. Maybe it’ll make people more cognizant and mindful of what they’re eating. Maybe we will take more charge of our health. Maybe we’ll take the time we save grocery shopping to exercise or read books. Or maybe we’ll just order more Ho-Hos.

As I’ve said before, technology is really about the way you use it. But new tools usually make life better.

As always,
Be amazing,

Phaera

PS. Next week, we look at baking robots and see what E3 reveals about the Xbox One