Comment by jandrewrogers
5 hours ago
People underestimate just how much effort goes into minimizing food waste and shortages in these types of industrial systems. The entire supply chain coordinates using these embedded sensors and control systems to make sure you always have safe food available at the lowest possible cost.
Connectivity in these environments is often challenging, it isn't like connecting a consumer fridge to wifi. Sometimes you are bridging weird networks that multiple parties need access to. It should be secure but that isn't as straightforward as one might assume. Many of these systems have very long lives, so there are many limitations that reflect the technology that existed when they were built.
All of this is invisible to the average person but it is what makes the world work.
It looks more like they set a target level for shortages and then try to minimize waste without exceeding that level. Almost every time I go to Safeway, they have run out of some items I intended to buy. Trader Joe's is more reliable, probably because they have fewer items in stock.
And yet, supermarkets existed in the year 2000, selling products at comparable or lower inflation-adjusted prices, without any of this connectivity.
Yes, a lot of it exists to squeeze a bit more of a margin out of the business, but come on. The alternative isn't going back to the Middle Ages, it's shaving 0.1% off the profit margin. It's OK to wonder if the risk is worth it.
Grocery stores infamously have some of the lowest margins in all of retail and typically hover in the 1-3% range. As a sector they have about zero room for inefficiency and have to be this aggressive about chasing operating cost reductions.
The increased profits that have occurred in recent decades have landed with the big food companies, not with the retail chains selling their products at very little margin.
Wonder the margins on those $9 boxes of Cheerios at major California grocers.
They did promise to increase the cost of breakfast a couple years ago.
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Yeah, I worked at one during that time. The amount of food we threw away on a regular basis was incredible.
Except that in this case, the possibility of something like this probably is worth it, because system vulnerabilities are solvable problems, while ignoring the ability to improve system efficiency is a static stance. A lot of things have driven up the price of groceries since that time. You mention "comparable or lower inflation adjusted prices", but this hides the fact that the inflation adjusted basket of groceries in the US is near inflation (105% vs a baseline of 94%), while the input costs to that supply chain (like labor, and diesel) have gone up faster. The efficiency isn't doing nothing, grocery prices would almost definitely be higher without it.
> because system vulnerabilities are solvable problems
If only…
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> system vulnerabilities are solvable problems
Which apparently why after >2000yrs of effort from both sides we now, finally!, have locks that no lockpicker can compromise.
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> the inflation adjusted basket of groceries in the US is near inflation
You must not mean what you have said here. If so, you are double-dipping.
I think it's an interesting question.
I would be interested to know what the damage caused by this attack is compared to savings over a system where thermostats need to be adjusted on-site.
That's the work that goes into hiding the "other half" of the inflation (i.e. the 2x diff between reported inflation and what you can actually see in your life).
How would you stay in business if your competitor was offering 20% off your prices because they had better logistics and tracking? Ask consumers to eat the cost due to their latent demand for, uh, inefficient delivery and food spoilage?
Are you saying that stores in the 2000s were throwing away 20% more of their total revenue than they are today? That sounds crazy, especially given that the prices - again - seem pretty much the same or higher if you correct for inflation.
But more to the point, there's plenty of grocery stores that ask 20% more than their competitors and are doing just fine; in fact, constant price changes and promotions make it impossible for consumers to really compare if Safeway is cheaper than Whole Foods, so people usually go to the place that's physically closer, has better selection, or better vibes. I can't even know if a 12-pack of Coca-Cola is going to be $6.99 or $9.99 today.
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There are numbers between 0.1% and 20%
This is already the case in the grocery market. There are various leaner and more efficient operators offering the same goods for lower prices, sometimes a lot lower than just 20%. However most people don't think to shop at the various Grocery Outlet's or Food4Less's. Working class is wise to it but not really further up the class ladder. They don't think much at all and reflexively go to their ralphs, which plays the opposite game where they have higher prices such that they might occasionally mark them lower and make you think you are getting a deal. Some people are even going to erewhon.
No, this “user story” does not mean the customer actually wants or uses the feature. You do not need remote command and control to tell if your truck chiller is working.
You don't need remote command and control to tell you if your single truck chiller is working, you can just go look at the thermostat. But a company needs it to confirm that the chillers are working and at a safe temperature across all 1,000 trucks in their fleet.
That's remote monitoring, though, not remote operation. Very different threat vector.
What am I missing? Of course the user cares if their food has been stored at the proper temperature from production to transit to the shelf. They don't care that this specific implementation clearly had a security vulnerability, they just want to check out and get back to their lives (and not get sick), but there's no way this whole setup was completely unnecessary to produce that desired outcome, flawed or not.
Maybe we throw it all away and go to 1990s-style grocery chain management, hire a bunch of people, and costs go up while reliability and monitoring shifts to humans. But that doesn't mesh with consumer expectations on price, which is probably how the whole system originated.
But you’re going to adopt a platform that meets the needs across your enterprise, so the capability is often there even if one situation may only call for monitoring.
Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, “just call someone to turn it up/down/off” doesn’t scale.
Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, “just call someone to turn it up/down/off” doesn’t scale.
And yet, somehow it did scale just fine for a hundred years before we hooked everything up to the internet.
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And you know what the customer needs? Or is this just a personal feeling. There’s multiple people from the industry chiming in on these threads as to why this is needed.