A report issued in 2015 was even more grim: it predicted that automation would kill over 4.6 million office and administrative jobs by 2020.[1366]

So it wasn’t all that surprising when Amazon aggressively entered the grocery market by buying Whole Foods in 2017 — which made the grocery chain Kroger’s stocks tumble 8% overnight.[1443] (Notice a pattern?)

Ford invested $1 billion in the self-driving software startup Argo AI in 2017,[1342] and the year before GM bought a similar startup called Cruise Automation.[1343]

More notably, Facebook succeeded in bringing targeted ads to Instagram, a platform that originally had no monetization strategy; Instagram ads now pull in over $8 billion a year.[971]

overall. That’ll hook customers on Amazon and get them to pay more for the less-common things they’ll buy down the road.[550]

“grow first, monetize later.”[331]

There aren’t many brick-and-mortar retail stores here — Southeast Asia has 46 times less retail space per person than the US![1049] Local e-commerce startups, such as Singapore-based Lazada[1050] and Indonesia-based Tokopedia,[1051] have done well, so Western companies will probably want to emulate them.

So, why do companies like Nordstrom offer free Wi-Fi? Offering Wi-Fi gets shoppers to turn on their phones’ Wi-Fi connections, which makes them start shooting radio waves at Wi-Fi hotspots. The store can then use triangulation to track their movements. And that, as we’ve seen, means big bucks.

“if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”[287]