Look at the evidence. Lidl (and ALDI) are exapnding all over the world. Meanwhile Walmart decided to pull out of Germany because the competition was to tough.
ALDI and Lidl are world class at selling a limited selection of medium quality goods to a massive audience at extremely cheap prices.
It's unclear how any of the technologies you mentioned would improve that core competence. It's also unclear that any of them could threaten that core business. Maybe we will all get our groceries delivered by drones in twenty years, but it's not obvious that that is true. And it's not obvious that being a follower on this, rather than a leader is inefficient for LIDL.
I could turn it around and say that in the US there seems to be a penchant for high-tech solutions "just because" rather than thinking about whether they make sense. One example: In Germany we don't have any voting machines, never was even seriously discussed. Every ballot needs to be counted by hand. Yet final counts are available on the night (with further verification done later). Some analysis based on experiences in the Netherlands also suggests that it's cheaper to do it that way.
> In Germany we don't have any voting machines, never was even seriously discussed.
It was quite seriously discussed and some were used during the 2005 election. You don't see any discussions about it today because the constitutional court put a stop to it.
I don't think so. If you have open source voting machines that can be and are audited, that's probably more than good enough for fair and open elections.
Lowering the complexity and thus barrier to understanding just builds an extra buffer of transparency into the system. It's a very-nice-to-have.
In a technical sense, yes. But there is definitely social value in having a system that is in principle auditable by (almost) everyone. An open source voting machine would still be only auditable by the small minority of people who can read code.
You don't want to just have free and fair elections, you want to also convey the clear and unfakeable impression that your elections are free and fair.
Pen and paper gives you both a safety margin (or transparency margin). And it allows you to signal in a hard to fake way that your elections are free and fair and hard to temper with.
(Fair as far as the voting system goes. Eg first-past-the-post on paper will still be a less fair voting system than Germany's weird proportional hybrid or my favourite, range voting. Or this fascinating gem: https://rangevoting.org/PropRep.html)
ALDI and Lidl are world class at selling a limited selection of medium quality goods to a massive audience at extremely cheap prices.
It's unclear how any of the technologies you mentioned would improve that core competence. It's also unclear that any of them could threaten that core business. Maybe we will all get our groceries delivered by drones in twenty years, but it's not obvious that that is true. And it's not obvious that being a follower on this, rather than a leader is inefficient for LIDL.
I could turn it around and say that in the US there seems to be a penchant for high-tech solutions "just because" rather than thinking about whether they make sense. One example: In Germany we don't have any voting machines, never was even seriously discussed. Every ballot needs to be counted by hand. Yet final counts are available on the night (with further verification done later). Some analysis based on experiences in the Netherlands also suggests that it's cheaper to do it that way.