There is a couple here in Atlanta who launched a novelty concept store and went on a PR blitz and used their racial identity as the marketing byline. This article is going to explain why this is not Black Excellence, but some Black bullshit. It makes no logical sense in 2022 to be screaming “first Black” or “only African-American” in a global economy unless you engaged in a pissing contest against your own brothas and sistas.

We live in a global, complex economy with a diverse landscape of competition and colleagues – we do not live in an Ebony/Black Enterprise magazine narrative in the 21st century. The reality is this story, these Black entrepreneurs had nothing but a novelty to offer so they hide behind this “first African-American in the world” or “first Black” stuff to get some attention. Meanwhile, some brotha or sista starts up a WIC store with no fanfare in the hood and have the Black community line up to support them without screaming “first Black” or “first African-American” because they are just adding value for a consumer to patronize and purchase.

This whole coverage is garbage and Black folks in the media like Brandonlyn Hellams should have known better to push this story with this intra-racist angle. The problem is the media is bigoted where they will give this couple coverage and write up someone claiming to be the first Black without any research but will not provide accurate “first Black” coverage to another Black person out of selective bias. So, we don’t know who is who, we just read what we are being told.

Could Have Just Said They Launched an Autonomous Store. I’m mean look at the cover photo of the article. First, they were the first Black in the world, now they are the first African-American in the United States, then there are caveats to what they actually did – the whole article is messy because they said they were the “first Black” and mess their own launch up. There was no need to even mention “first Black”, all they could have said was they created an autonomous store and that would have been good enough headlines, we all know you are Black, damn. So all this couple did was take away from their hard work of setting up the business and switch the focus to their racial identity – do not do this kind of dumb shit with your business, Black folks and Black community didn’t fix the food for the table, you did that on your own – credit yourself for the plates you make to eat on.

The Self-Checkout Business Model Has Been Proven Unsustainable. This Black person already did research on this concept over 5 years ago. I spoke directly to engineers and firms around the world who implemented this concept and received the findings. The findings are this business model is unfeasible because you are selling low-volume, low-margin tangible products, and the technology cost is too high to maintain those types of products. Look at the store, they got e-ink price tags – those are expensive to maintain, even Bluetooth low-energy or BLE case studies cite the same issue. It was easier and cheaper to just do label printouts and hire a 2-member staff than this autonomous model. 7-11 hires a small staff to handle everything from supply chain delivery to stocking to cashier to cleaning, stick with what works.

Better Solutions Already Implemented. The self-checkout marketplace model is over 10 years and dated. It has been replaced by other technology paradigms. The most obvious is online grocery shopping – that’s autonomous right there. Order off your phone, drive to the store to pick up or they deliver to your house. Do you want to know the real first Black-owned autonomous retailing model? It was when brothas and sistas created a food pantry at a Black high school that allowed students to go and grab food to bring dinner home because they didn’t have food at home – that is actually the first autonomous retailing experience for Black folks.

In summary, you see how messy it becomes when someone starts claiming to be the “first Black” in 2022? It’s becoming a distraction from that person's core business and now we got to argue. Stick to the fundamentals of your business and the value you hope to offer customers.  There was no reason, zero reasons to even blurt out or make the statement about being the first African-American in the world to do something – yeah, they said in the world because that African-African over in Papua New Guinea was so close to beating them at being the first Black, lol.

This is the stupidest shit going on right now with Black entrepreneurship. We got Asian, African, Latin American entrepreneurs building big industry-level stuff, and we got novelty-class African-Americans trying to impress other Black folks by saying they the “first Black” doing lightweight novelty stuff. You do know the funny part that I’m saving for last?

Our Toshikiso SDK already has the components to create a self-checkout market or a hybrid version of what these two folks were doing. It’s already there and I showcased the APIs in a previous article that proved exactly what I said. The platform is called The Merchant and the Flow and we have everything to create merchants, manage the supply chain, manage inventory and pricing, facilitate the basket and checkout, and metrics/data to help optimize the business. We even have touchpoints for video kiosks, touch screen checkout, and display posters. Now a ghetto ass brotha from the West Side of Chicago did all of this but the last thing I thought about when readying this product for market is talking about being the “first Black” because I was focused on making it multi-lingual to hit markets around the world.

I blame Black media and people like Morgan DeBaun and that lame Blavity for getting these Black entrepreneurial idiots to keep talking about “first Black” in a Fourth Industrial Revolution digital global economy – it’s stupid as hell to be this narrow-minded, this crab in a barrel mindset, for real. You being “first Black” doesn’t mean a damn thing if they already doing artificial intelligence-driven stuff in Shenzhen, China.  For real, stick to fundamentals and focus on the business operations and growth and development – stop it with the “first African-American” bullshit that is nothing but self-distraction from the hustle.