The last few weeks have been very hectic, so I missed this (boldface mine):

Upon discovering that an item they want to buy is in a locked case, less than one in three shoppers (32%) get a store employee to unlock the case, according to a reader survey from Consumer World, a consumer advocacy website. For 55% of respondents, it’s a lost sale, because when a product is locked up, they try to buy it elsewhere. The remaining 13% try to find an alternative product in the same store that is not locked up…

Dworsky acknowledged that the results might be skewing high because it was an opt-in survey that readers took rather than a random one, and said his audience tends to be “interested in consumer matters,” which may mean they have a lower threshold for consumer inconvenience….

“It’s become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable product galleries armored in plexiglass,” Amanda Mull wrote about locked cases in Bloomberg in August. “The whole thing has a whiff of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops.”

…“If stores lock up too much stuff, they cease to be stores—they become giant vending machines with no place to insert your money,” Mull wrote. “For a lot of shoppers, those locked shelves become another reason to avoid in-person shopping and hand their business over to Amazon.”

I avoid stores, whenever I can, that lock up things I want*, and I know I’m not alone. It’s especially annoying when you have to get multiple items in different parts of the store: either you have to summon people multiple times or drag the poor worker around the store. And there’s no reason to think things are any different from pre-pandemic times in terms of theft.

What convinced me of the uselessness of locking things up is there are three CVS stores near me, each about six minutes apart on foot, and they all lock up different things. My hunch is upper management wanted to limit ‘shrinkage’ so they could wring out every last cent, and thought they could get away with this. I’m sure they’re all still getting good paychecks though.

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It's at its best when it interrupts a speech every twelve syllables.

Everything Pizza

A chef in Dubai used OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT to come up with a pizza recipe — and as it turns out, it started selling like hotcakes.

Spartak Arutyunyan, head of menu development for the international pizza chain Dodo Pizza, told the BBC that the resulting recipe "was actually a huge hit, and it's still on the menu."

In a bid to reflect Dubai's culinary traditions, ChatGPT went all out, suggesting a wild mix of ingredients. The recipe includes "Arab shawarma chicken, Indian grilled paneer cheese, Middle Eastern Za'atar herbs, and tahini sauce," according to the report.

In simple terms, the chatbot decided to create a cross-cultural hodge podge of flavors to be thrown together on a pizza rather than anything particular original. Regardless, it seems to have struck a nerve.

"As a chef, I wouldn't mix these ingredients ever on a pizza, but still, the mix of flavors was surprisingly good," Arutyunyan told the BBC.

The Menu's Rejects

Arutyunyan revealed that other ChatGPT recipes didn't make the cut, including a pizza topped with strawberries and pasta, or a pie featuring blueberries and breakfast cereal.

We've already come across several lazy attempts to cash in on the AI hype in the culinary world. Last year, for instance, a dubious "bespoke smoothie shop" called BetterBlends in San Francisco closed down after its hyper-personalized smoothie recipe business failed to catch on.

A taco shop in Dallas also dabbled with generative AI — with equally mixed results.

Velvet Taco culinary director Venecia Willis told the BBC that ChatGPT spat out some "funky combinations."

"I think AI is a great tool to use when you're in a bit of a creative slump, to get the brain going again — ‘that combination might actually work, let's try it,'" she said. "The AI can suggest something maybe I wouldn't have thought of."

Other experts were far more skeptical of the use of AI chatbots in the kitchen.

"If you can get ChatGPT to spit out something that looks like a recipe, then it's because there are recipes on the internet," outspoken AI critic and University of Washington linguistics professor Emily Bender told the BBC.

More on ChatGPT: Did AI Already Peak and Now It’s Getting Dumber?

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