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1,247 pointsmangoman982 comments

I worked at a grocery store for several years, and one thing I recall is customers CONSTANTLY putting items back in a random aisle, rather than where they found it.

I wonder how this tech deals with that? Maybe they figured that out, too. But I was amused in the video when I saw the customer putting it back where it belonged, because that's not how I remember that going...

All that said, this is fantastic and exciting.

Edit: I also hope they're already thinking about EBT cards and WIC.

I guess tech like this could collect this information and then create an optimized "garbage collection" path for a single employee to put all the stuff back on the shelves once in a while.

Knowing Amazon they will charge the first few customers for the products, claim it was a glitch the do something panicky to either fix or prevent the problem.

I really wouldn't trust 'picked up off the shelf' detection, not without the whole thing looking like a giant vending machine. RFID tags on products probably works better.

I don't think the system works like that.

From my first quick take of the video, the app+turnstyle is used to identify you to the store. The video system then tracks your position as you walk around.

When you walk out, the items are recognized and tallied by a large RFID sweep. Funneling you back out through a turnstyle makes sure the vision system knows it's you. Notice that you don't need to barcode yourself on the way out, and the exit system is phone agnostic (it's not checking for an NFC or Apple Pay tag or anything).

The whole "tracking individual items as they come on and off the shelves" task is a very complex thing. But tracking bodies as they walk around a 1,500 square foot room isn't that hard.

Not as crazy as it sounds. With RAIN Rfid you can get the xyz location of a tag from ~30ft away accurate to 6" in realtime.

Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1LykdRWTfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCA8L7v-R8

Also, since the app is still on your phone there is no reason they can't be using it to gather data as well.

They did say sensor fusion. I'm not sure if they have indoor location tracking in the app but it seems reasonable.

I don't think that helps in the use case presented here.

What is really needed is a way to talk to multiple RFID tags quickly without any crosstalk. Think of a handbag with a dozen candy bars in it. How do you scan them all quickly without missing any?

The goal has always been to scan something large in one pass, say a shrink-wrapped pallet of items that could number in the hundreds or thousands. Obviously this is technology that Amazon could benefit from as well, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of technology overlap here.

> How do you scan them all quickly without missing any?

Most RAIN Rfid readers have a read rate of 800+ tags/second. Door portals are a solved solution and now phased arrays are on the market which scan all items in realtime. Take a look at the impinj marketing material for more information. For example the RS2000 chip: http://www.impinj.com/products/reader-chips/indy-rs2000/

That's a definite plus. I was just saying that the long-range position tracking might not be as important.

> When you walk out, the items are recognized and tallied by a large RFID sweep.

But the video clearly shows the items being recognized as someone takes them from a shelf (and puts them back). The items don't need to be recognized at the time you walk out, the store just needs to know that you've walked out.

You mean that floating list in the air?

I think that's just visually giving you an idea of what's happening. Like I said earlier, I'm giving a simple naive presentation of how the system might work. Or, at the least, how I would design it without dealing with finicky shelf sensors. Ask anyone that has ever worked in a hotel with in-room minibars how well those things pan out in real life.

Unless that store is just a mockup and not how it really looks and works, I see nothing on those shelves or in the sky above it that is watching you put that cupcake back on the shelf.

The real way to find out is if someone in the demo video can pull their phone out of their pocket mid-trip and see their current inventory and total price. But I didn't see that in the video.

The girl in the video at 1:26 looks at her list and total, but after she's been through the exit turnstyle.

Agree with you, would be much easier to just checkout once when you leave.

The video makes it look like it's constantly up to date, but that sounds quite complicated (despite dropping the ML, DL buzz words).

> You mean that floating list in the air? I think that's just visually giving you an idea of what's happening.

A friend at Amazon said he tried to trick it by taking two items at a time and it got it right every time, so yeah it does appear to track when you take the items.

Did the system know before checkout, or after?

I can't help but picture Indiana Jones swiping the golden idol from the pedestal with one hand, and quickly replacing it with a bag of sand using the other hand.

I think RFID tags are too expensive to put on every product. I may be wrong on this.

I have a feeling you're wrong -- I see RFID tags on almost everything these days, even tiny cheap products.

Yep, in smallish bulk (low 1000s), you can get them for about 10-20c a tag (and these are "self printed" ones you can print in-store as needed via dedicated RFID printers) (e.g. https://www.atlasrfidstore.com/rfid-label-4x2-for-the-zebra-...)

I am sure that amazon/walmart/tesco/whoever will need more than 1000 at a time and so obviously get a larger discount. Probably down to well under a penny or two - starts to make a lot of sense when you factor in the other benefits (lower staff, easier stock-tracking/taking etc)

Quick search on Alibaba shows that on volume these are just $0.01 each (and probably lower when you buy larger volumes). Of course sticking these to each product is inconvenient and I would assume the tags are not yet built in in most grocery product packaging.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-Professional-ma...

Also the cost of labor and/or machines to stick them on.

Alibaba sellers will list almost anything for $0.01 each, though, regardless of actual selling price.

RAIN Rfid tag is < 10cents.

1% is a decent average margin in a grocery store (http://smallbusiness.chron.com/industry-standard-gross-margi...).

So, it would require a $10 item to break even on a €0.10 tag.

I don't think you can make that conclusion. Presumably this store will be saving money on cashiers by instead using RFIDs.

The article I quoted claims 1% is the _gross_ margin, in which case my argument is valid. I now think that is incorrect, as other high-ranking Google results claim it is the _net_ margin.

But if using RFID saves them more than the cost of the technology its a win.

Basically if Savings from reducing sales persons > Cost of New Technology, you'll add the new tech.

It doesn't have to be strictly cheaper, as it also adds convenience. Not having to wait at the checkout will be worth something to customers, possibly quite a lot in the case of a shop targeting richer customers.

Also never underestimate Jeff Bezos' willingness to lose money in the short term.

Most libraries RFID all their books now so you can just drop them on a scanner that detects all the books you have, swipe your library card and go.

I don't think that's actually what Amazon Go is doing though.

RFID has some privacy concerns, since the tags continue work when you are outside the store and somebody can scan what you are carrying.

Using these as EAN barcode replacement also has the problem that the system can't tell if you bought the product from Amazon GO or if you just happen to be carrying it with you when you enter the store.

Bring a Faraday's cage, or rather Faraday's bag. Use it once you've paid to store your goods.

Someone can already walk around a grocery store and see what's in my cart or they can just watch me checkout. Buying groceries isn't exactly a private experience unless you buy your stuff online. Securing tags in things like a passport or credit card is important since identity theft is real and hardware to read the tags is cheap. Knowing what things I buy in the grocery store might help some marketers know what sells but I can't really think of any nefarious use of that kind of data.

Maybe you could use it to make some guesses about a person. An older guy buying frozen dinners, beer, and not much else is probably single or divorced. A woman buying prenatal vitamins is probably pregnant. Someone buying both Special K and Fruit Loops might have a family. But someone can already make these determinations from using their eyes. RFIDs might make it a bit easier but don't really add any new infosec facet to this grocery store experience.

> Someone can already walk around a grocery store and see what's in my cart or they can just watch me checkout.

The problem with electronic surveillance is never the surveillance part. It's the part where we can surveil billions of people at once without the need for billions of spies.

Of course it's trivial to tell. When individual items are tracked, it's exceptionally clear if the item is from the store or not.

RFID probably works better if you control the packaging, for instance, for deli counter products. But for packaging that you don't control, you either have to slap an RFID tag on when the items get to the store, negotiate with suppliers to start to include RFID tags in their packaging for items shipped to your store, or arbitrarily limit yourself in terms of which products your store may sell. Not to mention that, if your store slaps on RFID tags itself, it raises the OpEx of running the store as well as needing to come up with tamper-resistant tags, because somebody would be able to steal a product by discreetly removing a tag and then walking out of the store.

In essence, RFID tag technology already exists, and there's a reason why it hasn't taken off in grocery stores.

> because somebody would be able to steal a product by discreetly removing a tag and then walking out of the store.

That's already handled in grocery -- people can mess with regular barcodes if they want. it's a known cost of business

And if they know who you are because of your phone, and they are doing inventory on a really regular basis (every 6 hours, maybe even less), they might actually be able to track down who it was.

Given the turnstiles that the users entered/exited from I'd have guessed there is RFID in play too.

I would assume RFID would be more accurate to begin with. Seems like there's a lot of room for errors with their proposed technology.

BUT what if their goal isn't to make razor thin margins at grocery stores, but to test out their tech on human tracking. You've got to believe that they have a more long term plan than making a better self-checkout.

They can now tie in your Amazon Go app with you as a person. Most likely all the sensors and cameras in the store will be both tracking you via your app with Bluetooth, but also perhaps body heat sensors and the like that track you based on your unique body pattern.

Then they can tie this in with your Amazon Prime account to better improve recommended purchases to you, they can tie this in with your Prime Now account and your home address and more immediate delivery needs. Drones, Kindle, Echo as well.

The goal is deeper analytics and tracking on individual humans. That's how Facebook makes their money, and Amazon can perhaps have deeper data on individuals than any other company tracking browser cookies.

Avoiding getting charged is an incentive to put it back in the right place that doesn't exist currently. Maybe not even where you picked up just a discard area

Yeah, or it's an incentive to not shop there at all. You can't just use "incentive" as a reason why you expect to succeed with a UX that punishes your users for small mistakes.

incentives can be positive or negative

Honestly, that's an "incentive" that should be illegal. You should only get charged for something if you actually take it home or use it. Anything else is a cop out to push the costs of a deficient system onto the user/customer.

It's the store's fault when you selfishly and silently put perishable goods in non-refrigerated areas so they can spoil? IMO the store would have the right to charge you with destruction of property, if not the cost of the goods they're now out entirely due to your actions.

The number of people that never learned "put stuff back where you got it" from their parents is astounding.

> It's the store's fault when you selfishly and silently put perishable goods in non-refrigerated areas so they can spoil?

I find it really annoying when people put words into somebody's mouth.

Misplaced perishable goods are certainly a problem, but not the one they're discussing right now.

We are talking about people misplacing goods in a store, are we not?

Perishable goods are a subclass of goods in a store, are they not?

It sounds like the careless actions of the general public really bother you. Let me tell you something: grocery stores are low margin retailers who make their money by volume of sale, not enforcing conformity. The moment you open your doors to the public, you are going to get all kinds of mentally ill, aloof, high/drunk, distracted, disabled, elderly/senile, and (literally) retarded people in your store. It's futile to judge their actions using your idealist looking glasses.

The moment you start kicking people out over subjective "rule-violations", you are eating into your own profits, pissing off people, and projecting your own morality onto strangers. Aunt Minny may have set down that roast because it hurts her hip to walk across the store, and she realizes she already bought a roast yesterday. But over the last 10 years she's spent $25,000 shopping there. Some guy with Crohn's disease may literally shit on your floor if he doesn't drop his perishable item and run home/to the rest room. If both of those people are regular shoppers, sure the lost perishable item eats into your bottom line, but in the long run you are making a profit off them.

Waging an unnecessary morality war can only impede your ability to run a profitable business.

Edit: why not just give employees handheld IR thermometers, and if the temperature of the product is < $MEAT_MAX or $VEGGIE_MAX degrees then allow them to restock it.

It sounds like the careless actions of the general public really bother you.

That's accurate. Ask me how many times I wish I could find the guy that carelessly tossed a cart out in the parking lot (given easily accessible corrals) which subsequently bashed into the side of my car. Or found a packet of hamburger (with accompanying drippy juices) in with the toys. Or...

The moment you start kicking people out over subjective "rule-violations", you are eating into your own profits, pissing off people, and projecting your own morality onto strangers.

Leaving aside the misuse of the word subjective, this is why we avoid the "kicking out" part altogether and use financial incentives instead. It's no different than, say, ALDI charging you a quarter to get a cart (that you get back if, and only if, you put the cart away). Put stuff back where you found it like a civilized person, and there's never a problem.

The number of people who think that people had parents growing up is astounding! -_-

> It's the store's fault when you selfishly and silently put perishable goods in non-refrigerated areas so they can spoil?

It's incorrect and misleading to talk like that malicious use case is the only one at play here.

Malicious is probably not the right word, more like thoughtless and lazy. The same mentality that leads people to abandon carts willy nilly in the parking lot.

Why? If it's understood that the way the system works is that it's in your 'virtual cart' as soon as you take it off the shelf, why isn't it the customer's job to put it back if they don't want it anymore? There are other checkoutless systems that use the customer scanning a barcode as they pick up each item; same deal there.

Why is it the customer's responsibility to figure out and comply with the rules of your (nonstandard) system to avoid getting charged for something they don't intend to buy and didn't in fact use or take out of the store?

There are all kinds of reasons why that is unreasonable:

* different stores might have systems with different rules and policies, causing confusion;

* people may not remember where to return the item;

* the magic machine-learning system might glitch and not recognize the item was replaced, and you probably won't notice since there's little feedback from the "virtual cart" since you're not interacting with it directly;

* another glitch could put another customer's item in your "virtual cart", so you have nothing to return;

* etc.

Systems like this should fail in customer-friendly ways, and "item returned to the wrong place" is a kind of failure.

> Why is it the customer's responsibility to figure out and comply with the rules of your (nonstandard) system to avoid getting charged for something they don't intend to buy and didn't in fact use or take out of the store?

Because that's the store's policy. If you don't like it, nobody is forcing you to shop there.

Interesting considering the case of hotel mini-bars. In some cases, you get charged regardless of use it. If it senses that you removed the item, you will be charged.

if the costs of the products are reduced along with the operating and spoilage costs then its a net + to the customer, which aligns with Amazon's basic value propisition

If that happens the customer would just complain and in time we'd lose the trust in the store. So, no, the incentive is most definitely on Amazon to get it right. If they don't, they won't last long. Just imagine news stories with people that later noticed that they "purchased" items that they didn't leave the store with. It would be a huge mess.

It's actually an incentive to not take the product of the shelf (i.e. not buying it).

I imagine having people put items in their original position when they change their mind won't be an issue. I know that if it were me I wouldn't risk being accidentally charged for something simply because I couldn’t be bothered to put it back in the right spot.

How does this handle produce? The assumption seems to be that everything is packaged.

It seems like everything is already prepackaged in the store according to what they have for sale. I know my local grocery store has certain things prepackaged into bundles instead of allowing people to bag them.

At a lot of grocery stores in Europe, you weigh and tag your own produce. Basically you put your bananas in a plastic bag, set them on the scale in the produce section, and push the number for bananas or select them on the touch screen. It prints out a barcode and price, you stick it on the bag, and the cashier scans it.

Perhaps this could be similar, but instead of printing the barcode, it automatically adds the item to your Amazon cart.

It's an 1,800 square foot store, I doubt it has a produce section other than for individual fruits and the like.

If all merchandise in the Amazon Go store have been RFID tagged, this is a non-issue for checkout, as the turnstile tag scanner should be able to sense the items you take out of the store. As far as randomly put back at a different place of the items, the staff can use the tag scanner to detect that and fix it up even easier as oppose to physically locate the item by human vision which is arguably harder and less efficiently.

We don't know the details yet but RFID may solve this issue completely.

Faraday cage bags are already a thing.. I can see them being a lot more popular..

RFID along cannot solve it - it's Computer vision + RFID. Don't forget cams are everywhere in the store that will capture the moment you pick something up...

If the system detects tags disappearing while inside the store, it can trigger an alarm and tell approximately where they were (to be combined with surveillance footage).

Ehh, there'd probably just be a "don't buy" bin that you out the items you don't want in.

> I worked at a grocery store for several years, and one thing I recall is customers CONSTANTLY putting items back in a random aisle, rather than where they found it.

If the incentive is reducing the chances of being charged by the system for an item they didn't buy, you bet people will put stuff back where they found it.

True. And maybe they also figured out a technical solution, too. If not, I'm sure they will eventually.

But I'd also have been more impressed with the video if they showed stressed-out parents with crying kids and their hands full as they've got their cell phones tucked between their heads and shoulders, rather than young people quietly grabbing a single item and leaving.

This can actually HELP with those problems because a lot of those problems happen while in a line. Maybe they expect their customers to be like the ones in this video, but certainly my store was a little more chaotic. They should design for that chaos -- and maybe they did, but the video doesn't show it, is all. Presumably because they wanted to stress how easy it was, but to me that comes off as alien to the real world, based on my experience.

> But I'd also have been more impressed with the video if they showed stressed-out parents with crying kids and their hands full as they've got their cell phones tucked between their heads and shoulders, rather than young people quietly grabbing a single item and leaving.

It's an 1,800 square foot convenience store in a yuppie area stocked with what appears Whole Foods like take and go food, not a Wal Mart Supercenter. It will be quite a bit different if they open a large store out in the suburbs.

That's fair. Although yuppies have kids, too!

It's not the kids that cause trouble--it's the carts with 250 items, the arguments over price, and the paying by check.

I can tell you've never worked in QA :)

you must assume you're users will do whacky things and they will have no idea how the system works.

If that risk exists it will turn into a disincentive for people to even pick up items and look at them closely. If this gets in the way of people making impulse purchases it could significantly reduce the store's sales volume - after all few people stick to their shopping lists and retailers know this. I'm looking forward to seeing the results!

This. That 80$ champagne bottle over there? Better get my hands off it!

Dont take the kids to that store :)

If they were trained on normal shopper, how long does it take for the first exploits to appear, like some ML-equivalent of tag switching.

Like I heard from HEB Central Market employee, that they had a hard time with their bulk self-portion coffee beans, where the price range is quite large yet the beans look pretty identical.

Like most bigger shops, I think amazon will just tolerate the loss without enforcing it too much, if it stays manageable and under enforcement costs, which includes a too negative impact on the general shopping experience.

Like self checkouts, these technologies will not work well in high crime areas. By requiring customers to have a cell phone and an amazon account they can avoid a lot of the higher risk customers at least.

I'm curious, what about self checkouts does not work in high crime areas? Usually stores with self checkouts still have employees and cashiers in the store monitoring for theft.

What about the presence of self checkouts makes theft more likely?

Would it be feasible solution to have drop-off basket at the counter for items that you do not want to buy? Also there could be refrigerated and non-frigerated baskets, along with a nice sign saying that it's ok to not change your mind.

In the video they said they use deep learning algorithms. Perhaps each product has a unique number and even if it is not put in the right place the algorithm saves its new position.

The big store chains nowadays doesn't even have someone to put products in their place. Their product provider personal that put the product in the correct place. Now they will have a way to make their own customers to work for them. This is a store owner dream.

Way back when I worked retail we had a cohort of particularly ignorant customers who would get fresh meats from the deli counter, wander about the shop then decide they didn't want said meats and stash it behind random products in whichever aisle they happened to be in at the time.

Meh, cheap rfid, or funny barcode positionning to ensure their sensors can always track stuff.

I'm not that thrilled, somehow I'm not in love with todays tech and progress (that's on me). Moreover I wonder what people living on cashier jobs (it's an easy target for unqualified and hurried people) will feel.

Goodbye profession.

All the supermarkets I use already push you to self check-out stations....

True, but these often require one or two hosts to unlock issues.

I was for the test but I find the self checkout annoying. It's less efficient than the usual kind. You have less space to unload you stuff; less space to rebag them, and the cashier is lighting fast at scanning and grabbing the money because of 7h/day of doing so. I'm not pro human cashier, I don't think lots of cashier really like it either. But self checkout is not as good as I thought.

Yes. My main supermarket (a former Safeway in the UK) has one person looking after 20 self-checkout stations. I guess most of us have learned the system by now.....

Self-checkout works well for half a dozen items in a hand basket. If you have a trolley full of a week's shopping, you're going to use a cashier. In fact, in this supermarket, you can't even get a trolley into the self-checkout area.

My local M&S store has three different checkout areas. (1) traditional, for people with trolleys. (2) Self-checkout area for people with baskets. (3) Really fast (but very narrow) lane for people just holding a few items in their hands. You almost never see people using the "wrong" area.

What's interesting is that I usually pick the one with the longest queue, ie line 3. The cashiers are really fast so you don't have to wait long.

One other factor is that a lot of us in line 3 are using contactless (Wave & Pay) cards, so the payment process doesn't slow things down. People who don't usually use the waiting time to get their cash ready.

In our local stores in the USA, its one person looking after 4 or 6 stations, 2 or 3 of which are perpetually out of service.

Same. It seems that this is just a temporary and fragile step toward something else. Amazon Go or else.

Maybe an early adopter problem, unless they've upgraded the checkout stations to current technologies? The UK ones are mostly quite recent seem to work fine (though I have no experience outside London).

One interesting benefit of the “detect removal from shelf” concept is that there might finally be a time stamp associated with the removal of the item.

Right now, if you see a random perishable item sitting on a shelf, you HAVE to throw it away because it could have been there for a long time. On the other hand, if you can see that some Frozen Peas were only taken off the shelf 2 minutes ago, you can just put them back and they’ll be fine.

Although, what I’d really want is not only the time stamp but the customer. I’m sorry but if you cost the store $25 by leaving a damned ROAST in the cereal aisle, I would be perfectly happy to never let you in the store again.

UPC codes are not uniquely identifiable to the unit, only to the product. You could narrow it down to all of the people who took that item off the shelf, but you'd probably be into surveillance reviews after that.

An option is to label all the items with a unique identifier, but that is typically seen as too costly, which is also the reason Amazon hasn't fully fixed the FBA counterfeit problem.

Amazon is boasting it involves "computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning" so there is definitely quite a bit more going on than the UPC code. It also doesn't appear any UPCs are actually being scanned in the first place.

It's certainly buzzword compliant...

I think it might be purely rfid based. All major rfid vendors have theft prevention devices which can detect in real-time products crossing a given line.

Decathlon, the world largest sport goods retailer already use that technology.

They still have checkout lines but technically speaking they would be able to charge you when you leave the store.

Last time I spoke with them they were using Embisphere hardware, but any vendor, Checkpoint for instance, could be used to similar effects.

If all products are rfid tagged (which is entirely possible given the current price of metallic ink) then this store is at most state of the art.

If they actually use vision techniques then it is actually quite a feat. Current vision techniques used in retail are either too crude (when based on the store cctv cameras) or too costly (another French company, IVS, has demonstrated a self service buffet style automated checkout but AFAIK it is still prototype).

Disclaimer: I have links with investors in both Embisphere and IVS.

The last time I checked, the price of a printable RFID tag was around 10 cents. That's far too expensive for a 15oz can of beans.

What sort of prices are you seeing?

The ballpark of 10 cents per printed RFID is right.

I have reasons to believe several ink manufacturers/printers are working on an order of magnitude less per tag.

But are you so sure that 10 cents is too much?

What do you think the gross margin on that can is ? ;-) What do you think the net margin on that can, once the checkout lines (and their personnel) are removed, would be?

If a stitched RFID chip on a 2€ thsirt is currently cost-effective for Decathlon, I see no reason why printed RFID tags would not be cost effective in the very near future, if it is not yet the case (and once again, I have reasons to believe it is almost already the case).

I share your optimism - the future of retail belongs to self-service with the checkout process integrated into the shopping cart. Grab and Go.

However, I don't think that end game is the first use case for an RFID solution - inventory monitoring/LP/loyalty can demonstrate ROI long before the checkout lines are removed. For those use cases, the unit price needs to be much cheaper, but an order of magnitude improvement might be right.

You are absolutely correct. Inventory monitoring and LP are where money is to be made (or rather "not lost" :-) ).

I have skin in the game on the loyalty part so I will abstain from speaking on that.

Coming back on your thoughts about inventory, the birth of Embisphere, the RFID company I spoke about earlier (and the reason why Decathlon started to use them), was solely the invention of a "racket" for fast instore inventory

http://www.embisphere.com/en/rfid-products/embiventory-power

Other uses (checkout, LP) were almost an afterthought. The sole gain on speed and accuracy of in-store inventory was enough to decide Decathlon to add RFID chips on all its inventory and Decathlon inventory is massive ! They are in the range of 30-70k active SKUs, with sometimes hundreds of thousands units of stock. Sell that in hundreds of stores worldwide, add the warehouses in every country and the manufacturing facilities in China, and you end up with millions of euros of investment just for that damn inventory ;-)

Nice! It looks like Nuukik is well positioned to take advantage of that new infrastructure!

It would be lovely if you developed an in-store navigation capability. It's so frustrating to run into a store to pickup something, and not be able to immediately find it.

The results of periodic scans should provide a decent point cloud that could be used to determine shelf/aisle geometry without a blueprint. Foursquare uses this sort of approach for its interior mapping process, but they can't tell me where to find the bean dip. There are multiple obvious ways to monetize that dataset including simply selling it to Foursquare.

We may or may not already have developed proofs of concept of in-store navigation systems for european retailers ;-)

In-store location of products is deeply linked with very complicated discussions between retailers and product manufacturers.

Moreover, facing is a very strategic part of retail and I doubt retailers would be happy to release their facing strategies to outsiders or competitors.

Even inside a retailer's organization, several opposing views exist, between maximizing breadth of product range, giving prime exposure to the private label, etc....the equation they have to solve is very complicated and I don't think there's an ideal solution to this. A retailer facing strategy is linked to its core values. It has a direct impact on its bottom line and an indirect one: the consumer's unconscious perception of facing "strategies" is probably very significant.

> I'm sorry but if you cost the store $25 by leaving a damned ROAST in the cereal aisle, I would be perfectly happy to never let you in the store again.

Wouldn't a better solution be to charge the customer for the roast and if they complain, you explain: "sorry, you didn't put it on the proper shelf, the technology considers that as a purchase", and possibly eat the cost in the form of some incentive to come back to try to keep them. The ones that don't complain either didn't notice, or they don't care enough to stop shopping, or they won't come back like you suggest.

The ones that complain get it taken care of, the ones that don't don't cost you anything. Win-win-break even?

IMO, any messaging in the format "sorry, $thingYouDid, the technology considers that as $notWhatYouDid" is a recipe for customer loss.

Not at all in this case. The benefits of this technology and the disincentives for bad behavior are strong enough that this would work.

I agree with your point, but at the same time, you should be charged the price of the food if you grab perishable food and place it in an area that renders it unsafe. I worked in retail and at theme parks, and I'm personally of the opinion that it's better for everyone in the long run if you fire entitled customers.

, you should be charged the price of the food if you grab perishable food and place it in an area that renders it unsafe

That'd constitute a massive retooling of consumer behavior and logic and would require quite a bit of conditioning over many years, no?

That sounds like exactly what Amazon are trying!

Not really. Customers already pay more if they don't have the company card, aren't "loyal" etc... Instead of it being framed as a fine or punishment or way to "fire customers" it is simply referred to as a discount and a way to get coupons.

> retooling of customer behavior

One or more hits to the wallet would be strong negative reinforcement.

> if you fire entitled customers.

That would be fine in the ages before social media. Now everyone "takes to twitter" and tries to organize a social pitchfork campaign. The victimhood mentality is real. People get off on the celebrity from being wronged by a big bad corporation. It wouldn't be long before some jerk posts a video of himself leaving a roast on the cereal aisle and being '86'ed from the store, then post it straight to Youtube for all the delicious karma points. Corporate image is a big deal.

Sounds like that place would have lower prices since the costs of customers like that isn't spread around to considerate people, I think I would like to shop there.

Unless you make it "your thing." Take for example the Alamo Drafthouse, a chain of movies theaters that are aggressive in removing patrons that disrupt other viewers' experience. In the few times that people have tried to complain, the company has generally come out of it for the better.

I will admit this strategy won't work for everyone. Most corporations are not willing to respond to a complaint by using social media to (accurately) call the complainer an obnoxious asshole.

who's got more profit: Alamo Drafthouse or Regal Cinemas ? Or rather, if you own X-thousand shares of XYZ corp, do you want them to "aggressively wage morality war" at the cost of $1.00/share, or maximize profits ?

From what I've read Alamo Drafthouse has over double the per-screen revenue of Cinemark. Their strict, pro-viewer policies really engender customer loyalty.

The real problem, though, is that one time when the company is in the wrong over a bug in the AI. Then you basically have a faulty AI, and by extension, the store, falsely accusing the customer of vandalism or some such thing. Not a good way to go.

Maybe this is different, but my experience with recent tech innovations in brick-and-mortar payment systems haven't been positive overall. More trouble than they're worth.

This could very well be different, but the minute the store starts valuing the AI over the customer, I think the store is in for some trouble public relations-wise.

Agreed. On a related note, I wonder with the extra efficiency gained from no checkout lines, how much it would offset lost revenue. In other words, if, say, you are able to serve 20% more customers, even if there's 4% more loss from tech bugs (not considering shoplifting), the fact that you're moving more people through the store might make up for it.

If someone buys 45 items, but 3 dont ring up, as long as the 3 were relatively cheap items like a can of beans, as opposed to a $15 jar of spices, does it really matter ? Over time, the system will learn which items "go missing" most often and focus on them specifically for better inventory mgmt.

Getting rid of bad customers is exactly what is being suggested.

Aside from putting up the odd sign to discourage certain behavior, no, I do not think that stores have any good reason to bend over backwards to keep individual customers.

Retail is far too accommodating already. Some people figure that being a “valued customer” means they can be an unending source of sunken costs in time, effort and stress, among other things. And those costs can be multiplied across the other customers waiting in line, too.

If a “customer” is destroying your inventory, annoying other customers, or commanding far more of your time than warranted, there is no reason to put up with them. Protect the larger investment, which is: all your other customers, your store, and your employees.

Stores bake that into the cost of doing business, it's like dropping something and breaking it, in the vast vast majority of cases you won't be charged for it, just be clean up on aisle 3...

Heck I've dropped jars or similar things during bagging after paying for them several times and every time I was offered a replacement.

Mistakes happen, it's often considerably more expensive to deal with customer complaints especially in the age of social media than it is to replace an item.

It's also important to note that this is baked into the cost of doing business all along the supply chain, if items are not sold they will be often returned by the store to the distributor which would chuck them as a loss, or more often than not sell them for other uses other than human consumption.

Some perishables are thrown away others are then sold to other industries e.g. the roast that was left over might end up as dog food...

For a dog food company it's cheaper to buy discarded meat produce the dog food take samples and while it's being shipped do the cultures to ensure that there are no contaminants or bacteria and if something fishy is found just do a recall upstream for specific batch than it is to buy "fresh" meat and ingredients which are fit for human consumption.

Supply chains are huge and complex and all these little annoyances don't really count for much, it only really bothered very small stores that have to buy everything almost up front and they aren't leasing effectively shelf space for distributors.

It'd be nice, for the stores, if they didn't have to bake so much "attrition" into their accounting.

The attrition is going to be high anyhow, tons of stuff gets damaged during shipping, handling and stocking, tons more is never sold.

Most large stores take out nearly everything off the shelves at night even if it's still within it's "use before" date which on it's own is utterly nonsensical to begin with as most items don't expire for days, if not weeks, months and even years from the "use/best before" date.

People drop stuff, people mishandle goods, how many people squeeze a vegetable or a fruit to check if it's ripe damaging it? how many apples get a mushy spot because they banged around in the crate?

You are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel of inventory attrition when you are talking about perishable misplaced items, compared to everything else they are a rounding error.

There is a lot of loss baked into every supply chain, unless you are going to change it in it's entirety really don't bother with the end, the loss at the point of sale is minimal compared to everything else.

I get that there's a lot of attrition, but less attrition would be nice.

In Australia if you break something in store, they typically wont charge you, but if they do, they have to charge at cost. I wonder if this another reason many stores dont charge. As any store with a larger markup would have to let you know that $55 vase they were trying to sell you cost them $6.

I've never heard this "rule" before, do you have a source? "Cost" is a pretty flimsy concept.

I thought "cost" was one of the simpler concepts - the price at which the store bought the item from the supplier.

Even that fluctuates frequently. When I worked at a grocery store, when you ordered something it would show you what the item would "cost" the store.

This could change from day to day (e.g. fruits, veggies), vary based on quantity ordered, etc.

Then you get into private label (store brand) products, where the "cost" was usually either $0 or some ridiculously low number.

This was a national chain. At the store level at least, we wouldn't have been able to find the value of an item "at cost" with any confidence.

I may be wrong... I read this previously that was very clear about the customer was due to pay the supplier cost. But I did a google now to find the article and the best I could find is this is a civil case and not "not covered by the Australian Consumer Law" and it seems to be at discretion of the court for value lost and how at fault you were.

https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/shopping/refunds-and-returns...

I think the rule is that, when a business charges a consumer a penalty fee of any kind, the fee must relate to actual costs that the customer's actions imposed on the business. A business could estimate the cost of bananas, but they couldn't use the sale price if that was usually ten times the cost. This applies to things like bank overdraft fees and hotel cleaning charges as well. The idea is that consumer contracts can recover costs, but aren't allowed to punish people.

I don't have a source for that.

Wait til they apply music piracy concepts!

"sir, you ate 4 grapes in store. Our grapes average 2seeds/grape, so we've calculated lost sales in the range of $800.

You see, those seeds could each grow into a vine that will produce an estimated $100 worth of grapes over the lifetime of the plant. You're basically stealing that money from us!"

> > Some people figure that being a “valued customer” means they can be an unending source of sunken costs in time, effort and stress, among other things.

> Stores bake that into the cost of doing business

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37711091

> "I return half of what I buy," says 30-year-old Alex Demetri, who spends £500 to £700 on clothes each month.

> She also admits to wearing some of her clothes first before returning them.

> It is customers like Ms Demetri who are causing problems for shops, which are "struggling to cope" with the number of items returned, new research suggests.

> So-called "serial returners" are bringing back items which have been used, are marked or have parts missing, making a quarter of it unfit to resell.

Occasional mistakes happen, but some people deliberately do this kind of stuff.

Perhaps my example was a bit too extreme. But someone else replied to me with a better example of notifications on an app, or warnings that items are still in their cart but did not pass the store threshold, etc.

Seems like the maximized value could be somewhere in the middle, maybe without trying to sneak in replacement costs for items left on other shelves..

I agree, especially you see those videos on youtube where the kids are intentionally 'slipping' and throwing multiple jugs of milk onto the floor.

The store will have video footage of everything... maybe their sensor AI will eventually distinguish between intentional and accidental spoilage.

> I do not think that stores have any good reason to bend over backwards to keep individual customers.

Funny; want to know how Amazon CS became so popular with people? They gave complainers what they wanted, and only shut down repeat abusers. You want to exchange or return this TV for no reason at all? Go ahead. You bought this a year ago and want to return it now? Get a rep on the phone and it's done.

It was fascinating to watch from the inside. CS reps became easier to hire (no need for independent thought when 95% of the calls can be answered with binary flags determined by a "follow the prompts" wizard), Amazon's CS approval rating skyrocketed, and they're still making money to this day.

So, yeah, they have proven that there is a really good reason to keep all but the most abusive individual customers.

According to the cupcake example in the video, this is all in real-time, right? A much better experience would be warning the user as they go - the ham remains in their "cart" and is clearly flagged as abandoned (maybe with a push notification if they don't have the phone out, though I imagine most customers will be double-checking).

Why not just take it out of the cart then if it is clearly flagged as abandoned ?

>Wouldn't a better solution be to charge the customer for the roast and if they complain, you explain: "sorry, you didn't put it on the proper shelf, the technology considers that as a purchase",

It might be legal federally, and in red states, but this sounds like a class action lawsuit in a liberal state with strong consumer protection laws just waiting for hungry lawyers.

> Wouldn't a better solution be to charge the customer for the roast and if they complain, you explain: "sorry, you didn't put it on the proper shelf, the technology considers that as a purchase", and possibly eat the cost in the form of some incentive to come back to try to keep them. The ones that don't complain either didn't notice, or they don't care enough to stop shopping, or they won't come back like you suggest.

One could simply retrain the customer by literally charging them the moment they take it off the shelf, refunding them if they put it back. It would look crazy on your bank/credit bill but i think a legion of micropayments maybe the future anyways. There might be an opportunity there to turn a stream of 100s of micropayments into meaningful data for the end user.

There are many potential reasons that an item could be put back in the improper spot on a shelf that does not induce a loss for the store nor is malicious by the shopper. Things very often get put back into the same shelf but a different position.

But what about this: What is to stop someone from pulling items out of other people carts?

There are no carts, just bags. This doesn't appear to be a replacement for traditional grocery stores but rather corner stores or bodegas, so there isn't a need for them.

Good luck with that. The customer is always right.

You start doing stuff like that it will bite you back 10x.

> The customer is always right.

This adage only works when marginal value of a customer is high, and monetary preferences aren't utterly dominating customer's thought process. Business dealing with necessities, or ones where demand outweights supply, aren't like that - that's why in a grocery store, customer is trash. There's plenty more where he/she came from.

Have you ever worked in grocery?

The customers tend to be brand loyal, and the lifetime value of a customer is very high (family with 2.4 kids and a dog is minimum $10k/year in gross sales), so when you start banishing customers for doing things that they may not even realize that they did, they will loudly tell everyone they know what a bunch of assholes you are! The $25 roast will cost you $500.

If I stop shopping at a local grocery that uses a loyalty card for two weeks, they will immediately begin sending coupons worth 10-20% of my average transaction value to get me back. The ROI of giving away $20 at a pretty low margin implies a high value.

Only briefly, helping with inventory. But my SO did, and well... I eat food, and so does my family. And so I learned that with grocery, the one consideration that literally trumps all others is... price. Other significant factors are geography - people tend to shop closest to home or their commute path, and assortment - the more you can buy in one place, the better. There's very little a grocery store can do to chase away customers living in the area except having prices higher than the shop next door.

Now my experience is of course limited to shops in urban Europe, servicing low- and middle-income populations. Maybe high-income people can afford to vote with their wallets, but with all the people I know, the ability to save $100+ / month by just going to the cheaper store of the few nearby is enough to make them not mind grumpy cashiers.

> they will loudly tell everyone they know what a bunch of assholes you are!

I have never in my entire life seen this behaviour impact a single company. Even though I'm first to badmouth asshole businesses and praise the nice ones. Even in tech, I'm yet to see a single company seriously impacted by people's reaction to bad behaviour. I mean, how is Uber still around? Or how is Lenovo still selling laptops?

The customer is always right just means that if the customer wants a bright pink top with bring pink shorts, they are right.

It doesn't mean every stupid thing the customer does is right.

This is a tangent, but I think that's better stated as "the customer is never wrong". That frames it as a customer support challenge rather than a surrealist exploration of what your customer may claim as their desire.

No plan survives first contact with the customer's kids.

It could be flagged as "must restock"... one cool thing is it could then tell you exactly where it needs to go back to, finding that was always a pain (source: I was a cashier in a large grocery store, once upon a time)

To this day (20-odd years later), I always put grocery items back where I found them (and bag my own groceries). Don't be a dick.

This made me think of a possible exploit. If these sensors are using weight sensors and cameras, it might be possible to pick up similar items and then put back the much cheaper version.

It turns out the most people aren't interested in complex strategies to steal a grocery items while under intense video surveillance with ID verification.

Or just go to literally any other store and you won't have to defeat sophisticated algorithms to shop lift.

Another thought I had was how it will handle multiple people filling the same "cart". Often I'm shopping with my girlfriend and, being the time-strapped millennials that we are, we'll split up the grocery list to divide and conquer and meet back up at the checkout aisle. How does this reconcile that? Would both of us have to scan in when we enter the store, or link our accounts in some fashion?

Exactly that. Or what if you go to shop with a child and he puts candy bar to the "cart"?

The emphasis on machine learning and computer version makes me think that they're recognizing the products based on what they look like, not just where they are.

you are forgetting by the time this becomes a reality we would have all become perfect human beings with perfect ethics and morals and social responsibility just the way silicon valley has always intended and designed every product for

If youre on EBT/WIC, what % of those folks have both a smartphone, Amazon Go installed AND an amazon account?

So Amazon Go is a defacto rich peoples store? Sadly, this will probably be a selling point for some.

You would be surprised how many EBT/WIC folks have smart phones since they are often part of educational plans and back-to-work initiatives. It was often easier to order product off Amazon than locally (gift cards, debit cards).

I wasn't meaning it as a class-based statement... just that I don't expect one of these to pop-up in either oakland or the tenderloin in the next few decades...

I'm assuming that the position on the shelf has very little to do with adding the item to the cart. I'm guessing that taking the item out of range of a scanner and into range of your phone is what does it.

I've not seen anyone so far suggest that people will still work at the store. There will still be people who help customers do what they need, but instead of mindlessly scanning groceries, they'll be there for the things people actually need help with. Returns, price problems, finding things, lifting heavy items, etc.

If that's the case, that this is a solved problem, they should have showed that off!

For what it's worth, some customers DO put unwanted items back where they found them. I'm guessing you wouldn't necessarily notice those cases so you might perceive a higher proportion of those bad actor customers than there are in reality.

I would argue the fact that you are automatically charged for an item when it is removed from shelf is incentive enough for people to ensure they put it back in its right place if they decide not to purchase it.

Are people forgetting the legal perspective?

You can't charge your customer for an item they didn't buy. Trying to make the computer "dumb" doesn't change this. You're going to get angry customers on twitter, chargebacks, and possibly sued.

In a regular store, customers are anonymous, so they can be jerks without fear of consequences.

If I understand well, in Amazon Go, every customer has an account linked to a credit card. I guess that this will work as a deterrent. I a customer does something wrong, they can get a warning. Next time, the account is canceled. Problem solved.

They will detect it and have people in the store replacing it.

I hate it when companies offer a "how this works" section that doesn't actually tell you a damned thing about how it works.

* How does my Amazon account get associated with the items I take?

* How are items detected when leaving the store? If my friend and I walk out side by side, how does it know (if it does) which items are mine and which are hers?

* What happens when someone picks up an item and leaves without first doing whatever check-in/registration/setup is necessary?

Exactly. They say, it uses Deep Learning, Computer Vision and blah blah.. (Add 2 more buzzwords). But, for christ's sake, say how!

Sensor Fusion. Duh.

So will they have weighing scales to walk over? And also register eaten candy bars and toilet visits?

> Sensor Fusion

I wonder, when did the obvious way you use sensors become a buzzword?

RFID, image recognition with cameras... what is it? Can someone go and check it out? ;)

* What happens when someone throws a product in my bag. Who pays it?

if you don't notice it and don't put it bag you pay for it, just like in a normal store. That's what I'd assume at least.

Its probably too creepy in terms of privacy to detail how it works which in turn will give themselves PR. I can only assume it uses arrays of cameras and sensors with deep learning. Glorious amounts of tracking data.

yep. full on dystopian tracking was my first thought.

It's not "dystopian" if you're on private property and have accepted their terms of service. You can avoid surveillance by, you know, choosing not to shop there.

If there is no way for me to delete my personal data after i leave the store, i find it distopyan.

If one day all the stores are like this, I guess you may argue I can still grow my own food, and everything is fine.

> If there is no way for me to delete my personal data after i leave the store, i find it distopyan.

By "personal data", if you mean the video footage of your shopping, then it will probably be deleted after a few days/weeks. It will just be used to train (reinforce) the machine learning model, and will be discarded eventually. But your shopping history will always be there, as it is now in online shopping sites...

Nope, get back on narrative! If it involves tracking me it's dystopian and literally 1984, especially if I've voluntarily signed myself up to be tracked

My current best guess is, basically what you've suggested. The Amazon Go page says "Computer Vision" which means "Cameras, Cameras Everywhere!". It also says "Sensor Fusion," I bet that means at the very least "Wifi and Bluetooth," with which they'll use to place your location on a virtual map of the store. That location could then be compared with the computer vision object tracking location to "double check" that you really are at that location. And so on.

As a customer-facing thing, "how it works" means "what do I have to do to get stuff". Like, how does the process work on a UX level.

Which is already addressed earlier in the video. The "How it works" section of the video adds no practical details on how to use the system. It's just a slot to drop in a bunch of impressive-sounded jargon.

Oh. I have to admit I ignored the video and thought the comment was about the "How does Amazon Go work?" paragraph on the page.

These are purely assumptions based on what I saw on the video alone:

>If my friend and I walk out side by side, how does it know (if it does) which items are mine and which are hers?

Looks like the entry/exit is the same type of set-up you find at most large office buildings with the tap in/out gates (see screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/e7fDglY.jpg). I assume it only lets one person out at a time which also suggests your friend could only enter the store if they had an amazon go account and tapped in themselves.

>What happens when someone picks up an item and leaves without first doing whatever check-in/registration/setup is necessary?

Again, based on those gates, I'd assume you can't actually access the store without going through the necessary set-up first.

Personally, I'd like to know what happens if/when my phone battery dies in-store.

Or if you lose your internet connection. or if your app crashes.

It looks like you don't need to scan anything when exiting. So your phone could die once you're in the store and you'd still be able to check out.

I'm guessing the Amazon Go app generates a one-time-use QR code that gets scanned on entry and then security/tracking cameras follow you all over the store. If the cameras see you in front of an item when its RFID sensor detects it was picked up, they make an educated guess that you picked it up. Then they can re-scan all the RFIDs as you exit for extra confirmation.

i believe this is it too, mainly because of their mentions of machine learning and computer vision in the post.

They probably don't have RFID sensors on the shelving, and if they did they would only be able to detect when you walk several feet away from the shelf, and would have huge problems if two people were standing right next to each other at the shelf.

It looks like they have a row of cameras along the top of each shelf that will be used to detect when you pick up and place items back down.

The RFID tags are mostly useful at the gates to confirm the visual data and feed back into the machine learning algorithm.

I think you meant http://i.imgur.com/e7fDglY.png

How it works sections aren't designed for the technically inclined user they are designed for the layman.

They don't have to get intensely technical but they could say a little more than basically, "magic".

Except to a layman it is basically magic. Using X technology we did Y so you can do Z. I'm sure in coming months you'll get the in depth technical explanation you are looking for but this announcement isn't for you it's for the average person.

That's a rather defeatist attitude to have about explaining technology to laymen.

For example (not saying this is how it actually works): "Scanning your phone when you enter lets us know who you are. Then, our advanced vision tracking system follows you around the store and lets us see what you're choosing. Finally, scanners in our turnstiles verify your purchases as you're leaving the store."

This is an advertisement announcement not a technical breakdown. There is no need to even say that much.

I'd assume the sensors can do a couple things - sense your proximity to your goods (the closest) and sense the difference in time between when you leave and when your goods leave (the smallest). I'd also assume that they use logic along the lines of "your goods are those which have been closest to you (and not on the shelf) for the most time since you entered the store.

I'd assume trying to forcibly enter the store without registration will set off an alarm. I can't wait to show up with 15 of my friends and run amok in the store - it'll present an interesting legal experiment (unless they just get us for trespassing).

Yeah that was pretty terrible. I half expected to hear the word synergy in there somewhere.

Sensor fusion? You mean multiple sensors?

I'm more interested to know how it handles one person taking something off the shelf and handing it to another person.

Companies have been discussing "checkout-less" stores since forever, but nobody has been brave enough to do it due to the perceived threat of shoplifting.

And while shoplifting is a legitimate threat, are non-shoplifters going to be turned into shoplifters without a checkout? Are normal shoplifters stopped by checkouts? These are the core questions, and until it is tested nobody will know for sure.

Target is getting awfully close to this. With their Cartwheel app you're meant to scan all your items as you shop (so it auto-applies coupons and discounts); but they haven't taken it to the next logical step and allowed you to provide your Cartwheel output at the checkout for checking out.

I will say that the way Target has implemented smartphone barcode scanning makes me think that there might be a future in all this. It is extremely painless, they just need to stop kicking you out of the scan screen when it finds a discount (i.e. it doesn't kick you out if no discount is found, but does when a discount IS found, that's problematic for efficiency reasons).

In the UK, Tesco have been running a 'Scan as you Shop'[0] thing for a couple of years now. Customers pick up a scanner as they enter, scan their items as they go into their cart, and they have special checkouts which read your scanner.

There's a random chance that your scanner will be audited by a human against the contents of your shopping cart. Usually the first time you use it, then it backs off.

[0] http://www.tesco.com/scan-as-you-shop/

Sam's Club has been doing similar for the last year[0], as well. They already have a built-in "check your receipt at the door" flow that customers are used to, so it wasn't that hard to offer an electronic tweak to the existing system.

[0] http://www.samsclub.com/sams/pagedetails/content.jsp?pageNam...

I used this for the first time two days ago. I was pleasantly surprised, and it felt really awesome --almost to a point of guilt-- skipping the checkout lines.

However, once I reached the exit where the man was inspecting receipts, things screeched to a halt. I showed him the bar code on my phone, and he looked at it, exclaiming, "Oh no, Scan and Go. You used Scan and Go."

He then turned to find a powered-off scanning device that he couldn't get to start up, as he muttered, "I wish they'd never started that."

I replied, "As a customer, I love it."

He had to call over a manager, who used her scanner to scan my barcode, blindly scroll through my purchased items list to get to the green button, and declared me good to go.

Meanwhile, I had held up all the people trying to exit behind me. It was still faster than checking out, but hopefully they get proper training for their employees implemented.

Sounds great if it's not as unbelievably user-hostile as the self checkout machines. Those things are just total crap, every one I've ever tried.

Once I got the hang of it, I've had almost zero problems with self-checkout machines

It's usually one of two things: a purchase that must be approved (either alcohol or some medicine) or scanning the single item barcode of a multi-item

I always either get erroneously told to put item in the bag, or have to take an item out of the bag because for some reason it shouldn't be there according to the register.

The secret is to hate the environment and just use the plastic/paper that is already there.

For me: When I am doing my weekly food shopping, I just use plastic. When I am grabbing something I forgot or picking up beer or something during the week, I just leave everything in the area, pay, and then bag with my reusables after the fact.

These days I only need human interaction when I buy booze, and that consists of a cashier eyeballing me and approving it.

I think there are bigger problems, like how they implicitly assume everyone is a thief and are will to damage usability for everyone because that assumption.

That stupid scale isn't going to stop any shoplifter, but it does inconvenience me every time.

EDIt - Grammar.

Right. They're user-hostile.

It's not just to catch thieves, but to catch errors in scanning too. When I was a cashier (this was back in 2004 but these self check outs appear to be running the same UI), about 70% of the time I had override the machine, the person had thought they scanned something but didn't. And it rarely appeared to be an attempt to steal.

I even catch myself doing it. If you are smart you can notice the error, take it out of the bag and rescan and the machine will keep going.

Most people just freeze and wait for help.

That is not when the machine messes up for me. If I just got done scanning the 5th case of some beverage and it needs to be weighed what should I do. The screen provides little hint. Sometimes there is a "remove my bags" button but often its not there. If I try to move goods to my cart it complains and stops the process, I put the stuff I Just scanned directly in my cart I get an error.

If you say that the scale does find honest mistakes (which I doubt, I think you just have dumb shoplifters) and I say the scales are strictly harmful to user experience then it seems these things must have a bad UI until some advance comes along.

They screw up for me about 60% of the time. Alcohol is annoying but understandable. More problematic is the weight sensor that misreads the product after I set it down and forces me to wait for an assistant to click a button that says it's okay. I'll occasionally get the register that isn't calibrated properly and then I need assistance for every item. That's fun.

I have given up on bagging as I check out. It goes crazy every time I open a bag and set it in the bagging area. So now I just pile up my groceries and bag them when I'm done, which wastes everyone's time.

> I have given up on bagging as I check out. It goes crazy every time I open a bag and set it in the bagging area. So now I just pile up my groceries and bag them when I'm done, which wastes everyone's time.

This. Trying to do the following

a) Open one of the cellophane bags that are stuck closely together

b) Put the product I just scanned in it

c) Take my hand away so it reads the weight correctly

...are way too difficult for me to do without the machine locking up and saying "okay, assistance required, let's hold you up until the overworked 1 person for 12 checkout machines gets here". So I do the same thing you do, just throw them in the checkout area and bag later.

It wastes everyone's time, but sometimes allows me to bag more efficiently and use fewer plastic bags.

We don't have plastic bags anymore in Seattle. The act of opening a paper bag and setting it on the scale (or simply opening a reusable bag that I'd already set on the scale) is enough to make me "require assistance" 99% of the time.

The ones in supermarkets in Australia started off with a lot of weight related issues. Seems to work fine now, not sure if they have gotten smarter or just less picky with weights.

At the mall where I live, Woolworths insists on bag weighing but Coles actually has it turned off!

This is awesome, as it's incredibly time-saving. At Woolworths I generally have to look like a doofus holding my next item to scan in front of the scanner for at least 2 seconds while the machine is frozen as it slowly weight-checks the item I just bagged...

At Coles the bottleneck is the speed at which I can bag things. Usually I just cram as many things into one bag as possible (I always repack later) and checking out takes under a minute.

NB: The Coles where I live is toward the back of the mall and reasonably far away from the center's exits. I think this has had an impact on the number of items that go walkies, which is why they were able to disable it. (The Woolworths on the other hand is practically outside - leaving there is like going through airport security, they physically rummage through your bags!)

It's actually an interesting problem to solve. You would think that a particular item weighs the same no matter which store you scan it in, but in reality item weight can vary. Sometimes it is due to the manufacturer changing the packaging or adding a free sample of some other product to the item, but more interesting it could be the region. One chain I worked in had issues w/self-checkout on paper items such as toilet paper, paper towels, etc. The items were all weighed in the home office in Massachusetts and input into the master item file. This worked fine in most of the stores. The stores in Florida however always had issues because, due to the humidity in the air, the paper would absorb some of that and be just heavier enough to trip the scales. Eventually it was fixed by adding a larger weight variance allowance to the southern stores' POS registers.

Also when something's on sale but the non-sale barcode scans. I think employees are trained to cover the barcodes but it doesn't always happen.

That's surprising to hear. I love them (at normal grocers, not Sam's Club) because I find I am faster at scanning and checking myself out than at least half of the cashiers I encounter.

Almost all cashiers in my country are under orders to scan things slowly enough that the customer doesn't feel rushed to put them away. There are discount stores (Aldi and Lidl) that don't do this, and the cashiers there scan things much faster.

I wish more stores employed bag boys/girls. They speed the process up so much. It's a good first job for teenagers and the mentally disabled.

Tesco's last generation machines are particularly bad, although their newest ones have removed a huge amount of latency from the UI and weighing scales from what I've seen.

If you're shopping for a single item, scanning it and dropping it in the bagging area is sufficient to start the flow, then simply wait a second, click finish, then tap your contactless card is all required to complete a transaction, can be done in under 5 seconds

The best machines I've seen in the UK in terms of user flow are probably at Waitrose, they're just supremely faster to use than those at Tesco

You get what you pay for :-)

The Sainsbury's near me have started to go contactless as well, and it's great.

I had problems with early generations of self-checkout devices, but I have no such problems now. In fact, I will use them whenever I can.

I used to work in a grocery store many years ago though, so it's possible that I have some skills kicking around in my brain that make it easier for me to use them.

I found it depends on the 'class' of the supermarket. The higher class the supermarket, the less calibrated they are to treat you like a shoplifter.

In Waitrose you can use your own rucksack without getting flagged!

At M&S, you must wait to get approval after indicating that you're using your own bags. Awful system.

I've had nothing but trouble with the self-checkouts I've used in the UK. I'm quite slow and methodical about it, but the machines always manage to inexplicably fuck up halfway through.

I find in Tesco and the Coop (don't think I've used M&S) they let you say you're using your own bags, but they assume that's a carrier bag and complain at my rucksack. I always leave packing until the end if I can now, although they'll still complain about unexpected items even after paying..

Waitrose have had the exact same thing for many years now.

Stop & Shop in the NE US released this in ~2006

Where is that at? I am Omaha and google maps did not show a "Stop & Shop".

It's a grocer in the Northeast.

Good one :). NE = North East, not Nebraska in this instance though I can see the confusion.

I worked on that project (Shopping Buddy) and a few later iterations of it. This was before the iPad, we had these huge IBM super rugged tablets on the carriages. We used something like Zigbee to triangulate the precise location of the carriage in the aisle, so we could tell whether the cart was at the beginning, middle or end of aisle 5 or aisle 6 and target ads appropriate for where you were. There was a small scanner for you to scan your groceries as you went. It was ridiculously expensive to outfit one store w/the tech so we ended up with a simpler version using Motorola MC70 handheld scanner guns and ditched the exact triangulation and instead went to more generic stuff where we would just check which AP you were connected to so we would know which third of the store you were on (produce, frozen foods, or middle of the store). That system then got ported to iOS and Android so you could use your phone instead of the scanner. The original version despite its issues was pretty advanced for the time (mid 2000s).

They still have the mobile / MC70 version rolled out to the entire chain now, it's very successful from what I hear.

Awesome insight! This is why I love HN.

My mother makes uses of it every week and gloats that we don't have the tech available here in Boulder (a tech hub).

Tesco also has pushed self scanning tills for years now.

However, the number of employees working at the cash register is still the same because those scanners sometimes do not work and most importantly their user experience is deplorable. So, you frequently have to ask someone for help (and I'm in my mid-thirties and very tech-savvy. I can only imagine how someone twice my age would feel when using these scanners).

> However, the number of employees working at the cash register is still the same

Actually the ratio of staff:active-self-checkout machines is planned to reduce in each new deployment as customers become accustomed to the machines. Starts around 1:2 and usually sits around 1:4 with a target of 1:8 or even 1:12 at quiet times.

That's definitely a reduction in cashiers since the machines displace existing check-out lines & registers.

Source: an acquaintance is a manager in a Tesco Superstore.

Similar at supermarkets in Australia, one staff member could be watching over about 12 self checkouts. They still offer regular registers for people with a lot of stuff and people that don't like self checkout.

The machines are good enough now that I almost never get stuck, although some people are a lot more prone to needing staff assistance to complete checkout.

Terrible UX is spot-on.

I was using one of these just this morning: got all my shopping onto the scale/shelf and was getting ready to pay. The machine asks how many 5p bags I used. So I start packing the stuff into my backpack to find out whether I need a bag. The machine pipes up: "Did you remove something from the scale?" The screen has a full screen modal warning that I have to put the shopping back.

I put the things back on the scale and guess that I won't need a bag and I pay using contactless but what if my shopping won't fit in my bag?

I understand why we have to "pack" things onto a scale (it makes it much harder to take things without scanning them) but it has to trust you at some point.

Just say you brought your own bag and put the backpack on the scale. Then put things into the backpack as you scan them. Sometimes it'll request an attendant to confirm that it's empty (probably because it's heavier than most bags).

Yes, but i always think that will take ages ;-)

You're supposed to put your bag on the scale at the start when it asks if you brought bag(s). Fill it, then fill 5p bags if necessary.

You can blame that bad UX on the government, not the store. Next time you can just lie. The store doesn't care. They'd be happy to give you as many bags as you need for free if they were allowed.

Don't ever use a Chip + Signature credit card at a Tesco self-checkout, they had to reboot the thing when I accidentally used it instead of my regular UK Debit card.

Other than that I really like self-checkouts, usually much quicker and they're excellent for coin disposal (dump all your coins in it and pay the rest by card).

>> Don't ever use a Chip + Signature credit card at a Tesco self-checkout

Are UK banks giving these out? I've never come across them before.

They're standard issue from American banks these days. I believe you can request them from UK ones too if you have trouble remembering a PIN, though.

Self-checkout registers in Finland have about 1 employee per 6 machines. They work pretty well, I haven't had any issues after the first few months they were launched.

I used them in Tesco many times it's was horrible expirience too. Sometime they didn't work properly or failed to scan something.

What worse shortly after some stores in London got those there was less cashiers working at eventide. So you had to choose between unpleasant expirience or long queue.

This exists in the US, too. I saw one at Giant in Pennsylvania when I was home for the holidays.

Tesco started that back in the late 90s and Sainsburys also did it 5+ years ago, then Tesco seems to have had another go at it recently.

edit: Safeway was first, in 1997

The Camden store illustrates the progress Safeway has made in other directions too. As part of its customer friendliness, Safeway was the first of the major food multiples to introduce self-scanning, the system it calls Shop & Go.

http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/uk-safeway-follows-leader/a...

Our local store installed them to great fanfare back in the 90s, kept them for about a year, then quietly removed them. I was always very curious as to why: perhaps they didn't get used very much, or perhaps customer satisfaction with them was low.

A Waitrose I lived near had this system, and I think it must have been fairly successful because they put in a second wall of scanning devices shortly before I moved.

Offhandedly asking why next time you're at a (self-) checkout can't hurt.

Huh...I had travelled around the UK/Ireland last year and I don't think I saw any of these. Maybe I was hitting the wrong stores, or people were using them and I didn't recognize them.

It is typically found in very large stores. I only have only seen this in two Tesco stores.

They're only in big stores, and you could easily miss them if you weren't looking. Also most people don't use them.

> There's a random chance that your scanner will be audited by a human against the contents of your shopping cart. Usually the first time you use it, then it backs off.

I must be really suspicious-looking because I've been subjected to a "random audit" all 5 times I used it. Gave up because with a weekly shop it's quicker to go to an actual checkout than having someone scan all of my items again.

The idea's good, but my experience of the execution has been bad.

I'll admit, my first thoughts were "How can I exploit this system? How would I place sensors? What kind of sensors? Pressure plates? Cameras? IR trackers?" etc etc.

And I'm no shoplifter, never done that, I just tinker with stuff all the time. It's a kind of occupational psychosis. Same with lockpicks.

Yeah, but ultimately it's pretty easy to steal from a lot of regular stores too, and most people just...don't. Because they're not thieves.

My take is that a foil-lined bag will bypass the whole system.

I think that could easily be detected if they wanted to. It sounds like they may be tracking your store movements and what items you pick up, so it would be odd if a shopper carrying items walked out of the store without registering any of the bought items.

If the cost of sensors + additional theft is less than the cost of the removed salespersons. Then the system makes business sense.

I thought it might be vulnerable to a human DOS-attack, where a flash mob of shoppers wearing similar cloths and/or masks all walk in at the same time, grab items, pass them around, and then all try to leave at once.

> perceived threat of shoplifting

If that's the problem, couldn't these companies just test it? I mean, even if all the items in the single pilot store were stolen, would it really be such a big cost for Wallmart R&D department to have exact empiric knowledge as opposed to "perceived threat"?

I actually read this completely differently with regards to shoplifting. How can you shoplift when you have multitudes of cameras watching your every movement and automatically assigning to you any products you take off the shelf? This is the dream anti-shoplifting system; it's automated loss prevention personnel.

So, you're saying your non-member friends have to wait outside if you decide to pop into Go for a few items.

It will flag clients for "suspicious" behavior, compare your face with known shoplifters in the last 10 years, and check if you are on the FBI most wanted list.

You'll be arrested before having picked up a single item.

When it is installed and working it could be part a "The Culture" like utopia. But even if it has an error rate as low as 0.01% and ruins the lives and careers of people because of technical mishaps it can make their lives a dystopic nightmare.

> Target is getting awfully close to this. With their Cartwheel app you're meant to scan all your items as you shop (so it auto-applies coupons and discounts); but they haven't taken it to the next logical step and allowed you to provide your Cartwheel output at the checkout for checking out.

Tesco in the UK is already doing that. You just finish your shopping by scanning an "end of shopping" barcode, you pay and then you go with your trolley. You sometimes need someone to remove the security tags or check that you're 18+ for alcohol but that's it.

However, home delivery is even better in my opinion, it's very common in the UK nowadays. You see those vans everywhere, from nearly all big supermarkets.

Amazon has the money to run the studies to prove whether it increases revenue. I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to both detect shoplifting and differentiate it from legitimate purposes using a modern high-end multisensor fusion machine learning system.

Better make sure to carefully balance the samples in your training set to avoid confounding variables though, or else your AI is going to get quite racist and sexist very quickly.

Even if they gain more shrink/ loss by having customers scan their own items, the reduction in employee labor is almost certainly worth it.

> are non-shoplifters going to be turned into shoplifters without a checkout?

One could respond that you can never truly shop lift if you follow the rules.

First, you have to check in when you enter. Second, they tell you to grab and go.

As long as you don't try to be malicious about it, then it's on Amazon to figure out what to charge you for. If they fail to see something, that's on them.

Presumably there will be some terms and conditions that require you to examine the receipt for the visit and make good any omissions. I don't suppose it would be impossible for Amazon to protect themselves from this kind of loss.

It seems to be that as long as you're malicious (I.e. deliberately hiding items), then that's on them. At least that's what the implied contract is to me. Otherwise it's just a "self checkout" app.

Apple does it. You can use the Apple Store app to scan and pay and walk out.

real (part of the Metro group of retailers) and IKEA do it in Germany (and have been out of the evaluation phase for some years).

This reminds me of the story about unmanned stores in Sweden https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/sweden-ope... where you just walk in with a smartphone with a app, buy and checkout all by yourself

Here in Chicago the Jewel/Osco chain of grocery stores tried handheld scanners mated with the self-checkout systems about 10 years ago. I lived near one of the test stores.

It worked pretty well, but from what I heard the shoplifting rate was a lot higher than the comfort level of the store's executives. There really is no way to check that you've scanned every single thing in a large cart full of goods. They experimented with things like random checks from cashiers, but that just added to the labor and confusion. The project was scrapped a year or two later.

RFID could fix that if we're really close to being able to scan a whole cart full of goods in one sweep (which the Amazon project seems to imply). But then you have an issue where every single vendor to your store needs to be inserting compatible tags into the packaging. That adds cost and logistics.

> RFID could fix that if we're really close to being able to scan a whole cart full of goods in one sweep (which the Amazon project seems to imply). But then you have an issue where every single vendor to your store needs to be inserting compatible tags into the packaging. That adds cost and logistics.

I remember seeing this working when I was in university [0]. They just couldn't focus on supermarkets because the tags were too expensive (10-15 cents per tag).

[0] http://www.vilant.com/

I own a house in Bentonville, Arkanasas. I now live in Denver, but owning a property in Walmart's company town means I always pay careful attention to retail developments that threaten Walmart.

I know a lot about the various retail companies and how effective they are with technology. Anyone that thinks Target is going to do anything effective in this space doesn't understand how god-awful their entire logistics/supply chain is. It's legendarily bad.

Amazon is another story. And this particular technology is something that can destroy Walmart, eventually. I'll be watching this very closely, because if I see enough headway being made I'll be selling my house before the disaster hits the market there.

Honestly though, groceries and CPG are HARD. I suspect that Amazon has simply thought about cost-savings from having minimal staffing in a store and used it to justify the insane capital costs of an RFID tag on every item and the scanners/camera/compute needed to operate the Go store.

What's always so funny to me is how the millennial generation in general has a hugely negative view of Walmart for paying poorly and destroying small businesses, while having a positive view of Amazon. In this case, Amazon will continue to do what it's been doing (destroying businesses) while paying nothing, because it's automating away a huge segment of work. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it's definitely going to happen, and like self-driving vehicles, this is going to disrupt society big time.

> What's always so funny to me is how the millennial generation in general has a hugely negative view of Walmart for paying poorly and destroying small businesses, while having a positive view of Amazon.

The difference is that while both may offer low prices while destroying small businesses, the customer experience on Amazon is great while the customer experience at Walmart sucks.

>>Amazon is another story. And this particular technology is something that can destroy Walmart, eventually.

It's a nice innovation, but it does almost nothing with regards to competing on price with Walmart. And with the self checkouts, checking out isn't even that big of a deal. So i don't see how it's going to affect Walmart.

In Apple stores, you can buy anything off a shelf using an app on your smartphone and walk out with it without even needing to talk to an employee.

Of course, all the really pricey stuff like watches, phones, and computers is kept in a back room.

I'm surprised people read Amazon Go as shoplifting friendly.

My first thought was: wow, and they made it much harder to shoplift. In a regular store you can just tuck an item in your jacket. With this tech, they know when the item left the shelf, that you were standing there, and that it left the store with you.

Sure, it's hackable. Everything is hackable. But this actually seems like an anti-shoplifting measure to me.

Heck, I could imagine them installing this system in a normally staffed store just to detect shoplifting!

Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad.

I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement)..

I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables.

I know all the people who work in these supermarkets. The cashier in the supermarket downstairs always sings a quiet song while she scans my products, she knows my daughter and she's always nice and friendly.

The cashier in the other store talks to the customers. She stops scanning and starts talking while the line waits. Some customers might join the conversation. I know she has an old cat that eats an unlimited amount of food if allowed to do so...

There are similar stories about other shops in the neighbourhood - they come to work, they serve the people in the neighbourhood, they go home. They do this until they retire.

These people like their jobs because we respect them for what they do, so they feel useful and they work hard.

I don't mind waiting in line for 3 minutes. Or 5. It's never longer than that, even if the cashier discusses the latest news with the old lady.

The humanity of it has value for us here and that value is greater than the time we'd save by removing the people from the shops.

I would love to live in your bubble.

Checkouts in my area are either super slow self checkout machines or done by a super slow unmotivated clerk. I could do without either.

Like it or not, those jobs are on the way out.

Every supermarket around here has self service checkouts already, it's just a matter of time before something like this comes in.

I don't like it, for the reasons you outline. I think we'll lose something. I'm especially thinking of old people who might be living alone and see their shopping trip as an opportunity for social interaction. Unfortunately that's the way things are going though.

This is neither useless nor bad. This is a convenience and there are literally no downsides to it. If you think the extra human interaction is worth it, do as you please, but i guarentee you are setting yourself apart from at least 80% of the general population.

I'll never understand the view that superior technologies mandate removal of the "old" ways of doing things. No one is forcing you to change, but dont be surprised when most people dont share the nostalgia you have.

You're looking at it from the wrong perspective. What you, as a customer, value doesn't really matter. The store owners don't introduce cashless checkout in order for the customers to save time, they do it so they can save money.

Human cashiers will probably exist in the future too, and if you value it you'll be able to pay extra for it.

Thats absolutely not true. Its a competitive advantage to save your consumers time. They do it for both reasons, which makes it seem like, as an outsider, an incredibly compelling technology.

What you, as a customer, value doesn't really matter.

If this were true, the shopping experience would be very different for all of us! Stores would look like Soviet-era warehouses, with everything done at the least possible cost.

In reality, customer experience matters a great deal. That's why you see companies like Amazon creating these sorts of innovations.

For me, this is useless because Instacart delivers everything I need with no markup, save tips, for $80/year. Perhaps this is wildly unprofitable for them, but for now it's far better than going to the store parking, shopping and driving back. I save many hours a week for hardly any money. If self driving cars get perfected, they won't even need drivers! Amazon Go might as well be a robot that automatically steers and buggy whips my horse drawn carriage.

Couldn't agree more. My wife and I did the math and Instacart saves us money. I have no idea how long they'll stick around or if they'll continue being so cheap, but it blows my mind how convenient it is. The biggest benefit imo is having them shop at Costco. Every quarter we do a fairly large oder for house hold restocking and Instacart makes this something I don't even have to think about. Before it would have essentially consumed my entire Saturday.

If that's true, then you have nothing to fear. People will pay extra to shop at stores with human cashiers, and the machine-driven stores will not be able to compete.

However, I suspect that when presented with the choice, people will take the machine store in exchange for lower prices. And I suspect that you suspect the same thing, otherwise you wouldn't be concerned.

Yep, this is a case of a minority view being concerned that its the minority view.

Taking an authoritarian approach is really a shameful way to handle it.

Yes, I think you're right and that's why I think this is bad.

Economically it makes more sense to buy cheaper and faster. But this eats into the fabric of society and offers nothing in exchange.

And what are all these people supposed to do then ? Sleep all day ? They will fight back with their votes at first, which they are already doing in the US and Europe..

Then there's the centralisation, control and privacy part - amazon gets to decide what products your area will be supplied with, it gets to know your eating habits, your walking habits, etc. Will pretty much own you and the neighbourhood.

But then again, I don't really see an alternative - it seems that we're being 'innovated' by force into the future and there's nothing we can do to stop it.

How about those people go teach their local kids about science? Or volunteer to take care of the homeless or the elderly? That seems like it would benefit society much more than talking to a few bored people in a checkout line.

Except they won't, because nobody will pay for that. It's easy to find an alternative occupation - it's much more difficult to propose one that's reachable when you consider the starting point and economic reality (living costs money; retraining costs money; people low on the ladder usually don't have cash to burn).

Well, right now the U.S. has spent about $4 TRILLION on bombing countries in the Middle East... Maybe we could use some of that money for a better purpose.

The world has enough money to do these things, it's just a question of priorities and replacing greed with compassion.

Right. The money is there. But the economy is structured around money being spent only when you absolutely have to - so it doesn't reach those nice things while there are more directly profitable things like bombing the shit out of Middle East...

I think you're incorrectly separating the 'fabric of society' from the economy. The economy describes all things that are valuable to us as a society and that includes interactions with the staff at our local grocery shops. When you say "Economically it makes more sense to buy cheaper and faster" that is obviously not true for you and probably many others who are prepared to pay for the social interactions that local shops provide.

There will still remain room for shops with cashiers in the market just as there is still room for restaurants with waiters, tables and chairs despite the innovation of drive throughs and fast food.

As long as you are part of a large enough group who is willing to pay for traditional style shops then they will continue to exist.

No, I think GP is totally correct. Economy does not describe "all things that are valuable to us", nor does it describe relative value between things when considering the whole picture of one's life. Economy is a system of powerful feedback loops; it amplifies momentary relative value differentials. People like the human contact, but due to financial situation prefer cheaper groceries? If shops can save on cutting nice clerks out of the loop (or working them down into zombiefication), they'll outcompete ones that try to stick to "old model", but guess what - another part of the economy is right there to take away the marginal savings you as a customer just "made", and thus you're no better than before in terms of spending money, but you've just lost another nice aspect of the society.

The economy often gives us good solutions, but it also often gives us bad ones. The economy doesn't care either way.

C.f. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

Maybe I am incorrectly conflating Economics with the Economy. I understand your point about economic forces producing an outcome that is less optimal due to our failure to consider present and future effects of our decisions.

My point is that if you look at this from an economic point of view, you should be able to figure out whether or not it is good or bad (or at least know what information you need to figure out if it's good or bad). See my other comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108119

We could, as you say, analyze and figure out whether or not any given market "innovation" is good or bad, but the big problem is - we can't meaningfully act on such information. Coordination is superhard[0], and in the meantime we all make individual choices based on momentary value differentials - choices which the market will happily aggregate and amplify, whether we like it or not.

You're spot-on in splitting the problem into two in your other comment.

[0] - especially if you frown at one of its most powerful form in a large society - government regulations.

    Economically it makes more sense to buy cheaper and faster. But this eats into the fabric of society and offers nothing in exchange.

The same could be said of many previous innovations going back to the industrial revolution. We've always found new jobs for people and generally raised the quality of living.

    Then there's the centralisation, control and privacy part - amazon gets to decide what products your area will be supplied with, it gets to know your eating habits, your walking habits, etc. Will pretty much own you and the neighbourhood.

This is true of many grocery chains though already. They can track that information based off rewards cards and purchase history. I'm pretty sure Amazon won't be the only company to do this technology will either be replicated by other companies or turned into a service for other companies to leverage.

I don't actually think it'll be a difference in monetary value. I suspect machine run markets will feel cold and lifeless, while human run ones will feel warm and welcoming.

I've been to restaurants where you order from a terminal and your only human contact is someone who delivers your food without a word. There were a bunch of them at one point and they all closed down, and I don't remember thinking they were cheaper or more expensive at the time. I just remember feeling like the experience of going out with friends to a restaurant felt diminished.

Also at one point, Home Depot and Lowes switched to a majority of self checkout lines, but all that did was move everyone over to the "old fashioned" lines that ended up taking 3x as long to check out, but people continue to do this.

The self-checkout lines are popular in most of the stores I've been in. (I personally like having both options available.)

I would also argue that any store I've been to with a self checkout line tends to have a majority of the use. I find them faster. My wife was hesitant the first few times she used them, now she prefers them as well. I would argue that odds are you & the people in front of you, who often are in a hurry, will be faster than the person who checks out people all day & is suffering from fatigue & boredom. I would also argue that most people in a checkout line want to get out of the checkout line as soon as possible & with no errors.

In my experience, it's hard to judge the popularity these days as there tend to be more self-checkout kiosks than traditional checkout lines that are actually manned.

Your logic doesn't hold.

The unstated assumption is that the people using the stores have sufficient capital to value interaction with people over lower prices.

You can imagine that if the shoppers also worked in jobs where their humanity was valued, they might have this capital, but that's not the case for most of us because we work in systems that trade humanity for efficiency and the value extracted is captured by a tiny elite.

If you look at what that elite spends money on, it is exactly more personalized human interaction.

The problem is an artifact of people making choices in a system that concentrates wealth in the hands of a tiny few, and nothing to do with what people in general prefer.

Well, they have sufficient capital to use those stores now. Are you proposing that the problem with improved efficiency is that it gives the elite more room to take from the population, so you end up worse off than before? I can see where you're coming from if so, just want to make sure I understand what you're saying.

Improved efficiency is a subjective term.

If your goal is to create a society where relaxed human interaction is prioritized, then it would be deeply inefficient to accrue the majority of surplus resources to a tiny few.

If on the other hand, you are a member of elite whose interest is in competing with other members over resources, you would define efficiency in a way that minimizes the value captured lower down the hierarchy.

So yes, I am essentially saying that, but I don't want us to fall into the trap of using a single definition of 'efficiency' based on the assumptions of a particular system, but recognize that it depends on what is being optimized for.

I don't think that relaxed human interactions work against the elite's goals per-se - they just don't contribute directly to their goal and so are optimized away wherever possible.

What is cheapest in the short term is often not the best in the long run. Economics assumes that the long-term consequences are priced into all decisions, but those consequences may not be clear and people with limited means have to make some very hard trade-offs. The costs may also be put on society as a whole and not borne by the individual. It can be helpful to limit those options as a society.

My best guess at the risks is that we may lose something valuable as a society or damage mental health if we push people away from social interaction. Many people will remain healthy, but those who are in difficult circumstances may find themselves on a downward spiral as they are further isolated from their communities. What if your community doesn't have a large supermarket? We talk about food deserts in the US right now, what if we have social deserts?

A simple example of short-term v long-term, look at soda and sugar-sweetened carbonated beverages. They're extremely cheap. Often less expensive than bottles of water in the US. This encourages many people to buy them as they are a cheap source of calories and sweetness. However, it's only many decades later that we've discovered the damage they can do when consumed for long periods of time. Many people consuming them don't have better food options. A few cities are starting to tax them to make the costs more evident.

Gasoline is another good example. The US is addicted to cheap gasoline and doesn't know how to stop even though we are now aware of the potentially catastrophic consequences.

That's a good point. It seemed to me that they were making the case that people consciously valued the experience, but maybe it's a hidden value.

It seems to me that there must be better ways to give people social interaction besides making some people sit at a cash register for eight hours a day and making a bunch of other people wait in lines to be served. But that's a tougher argument to make.

Well, there's always church.

Religious institutions provide avenues for nominally non-commercial social interactions. Mutiple variants are available to account for taste (e.g. Christianity, some forms of yoga).

There are two points being made here by you and the original commenter:

1. Social interactions at commercial centres are valuable and Amazon and others who follow will be unable to offer such value.

2. Social interactions at commercial centres are more valuable than the beneficiaries are conscious of.

#1 I think we all agree on. #2 is the critical point and the degree of which is arguable and would swing Amazon's innovations between good and bad.

Let's imagine that on average, whenever someone goes into a shop and interacts with another human they are gaining 50% of their social wellbeing (i.e. a lot). Let's also imagine that on average whenever someone goes into a shop and interacts with a human they leave believing they have gained only 1% of their social wellbeing (i.e. not much). Such a person is likely to stop shopping at a shop with tills and cashiers in favour of a humanless shop such as Amazon Go. However that would likely be a mistake because they would lose half of their social wellbeing without even realising. This in my opinion would put automated shops into the category of a socially 'bad' thing.

Now imagine the actual social benefit of traditional shops is 5% (not huge but not insignificant) and the perceived social benefit is also 5% (i.e. we're fully aware of this benefit). In that case, people should be able to make the choice of which kind of shop is best for them based on a complete set of information. This in my opinion would put automated shops into the category of a socially 'good' thing. They offer more choice coupled with the relevant information to make that choice.

The discrepancy of perceived vs actual benefits can explain why we make the wrong choices with regards to a lot of market decisions from driving a gasoline car to eating at a restaurant. The best way to determine whether a market option is socially good or bad is to try to measure this discrepancy, see if it exists and if so, is it significantly large?

Walmartification continues, except with Amazon. Amazonification I guess

Yeah, all cashiers love working long hours for peanuts. We should keep them there so we can make small talk while they bag our food. Without checkout lines how will we meet other people?

EDIT: Sorry for the snark, I feel bad. This is a real dogpile. You don't deserve this much shit.

Well, I can see lots of issues here. Maybe you are being isolated from what is going on here.

These guys might have been ordered by management to smile for customers. That doesn't make them happy. Just a bit more miserable, but you don't see any of it.

I can't see why anybody will like to finish their life counting stuff and money for other people. I can hardly see them happy even if they smile to me.

And here is another guess: They are probably getting a salary that barely covers their basic needs and won't cover urgent ones.

How about: Machines do this for us while we work on more interesting thing. Maybe if the bright of us are failing to get married and raise kids, we let these guys handle the task for us. I can see women being much more happier raising kids than processing mail for the post office.

As a man I'd be happier raising kids than processing mail for the post office. Or scanning groceries all day.

I put women because they seem to care more about kids. But men are fine too. That's not my point. My point is some very successful people have trouble creating families which is not sustainable for the human race as it is.

(What follows are generalizations that of course have exceptions.) For the record, this is likely less true in Barcelona than in most parts of the US. While a supermarket cashier isn't seen as a good job in Spain, people also care much, much less about having a "good" job, and much more about their quality of life outside of work. Also contributing to this is the fact that the difference in social respect and overall quality of life between, say, a supermarket cashier and an engineer is vastly smaller in Spain than in San Francisco.

Anecdote: my wife is from Barcelona, and is currently finishing her PhD in a technical field. We're in the US at the moment and she could likely get a well-compensated job after graduation if she wanted, but is considering applying to be a barista at Starbucks or similar instead. It's not that she particularly dislikes what she studied -- just that she doesn't particularly care about work life one way or the other at all. I've observed this attitude a lot with Spanish friends.

I'm not talking about salary or social status. I'm talking about doing the actual job. There is nothing full-filing in a routine, very basic job (scanning items back and forth). A plumber is more interesting in this regard.

Another useless job: A door-man.

> I can see women being much more happier raising kids than processing mail for the post office.

Men too

Trying to save jobs that are no longer the most efficient way of solving a problem is not the way to promote the value of humanity, in my opinion. People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible. They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay extra for something that only the minority get value out of is not a competitive strategy.

If humanity were to take your opinion, we'd never evolve as a society, lest we remove a need in society and with it, someones job.

I am unsure we are evolving. We have evolved in many areas that solve real problems, like healthcare and such, but I'm not sure today's society is any better for all the technology that allows us to save a couple of minutes in a queue.

To improve the efficiency of a particular group, we create problems elsewhere. The result may not be net positive. In fact, I think it isn't, since those saved "couple of minutes" will probably be spent browsing Facebook.

It's not just time checking out that is saved. This is de facto a cashless store. Having cash on site is a liability.

The point isn't that we save 2 minutes, it's that there's now 10 less job we need. And that may seem as a negative at first, but the idea is that as more and more job get automated, prices should go down until the point where people will not have to work full weeks anymore, or rather, focus on learning and reaching higher education, rather than doing dummy work all day (aka just scanning items non stop for 8 hours).

It might be worthwhile to re-frame it. Rather than say "10 fewer jobs," say "10 people are no longer forced to spend eight hours a day sitting in front of a cash register."

That assumes we can find something better for them to do, of course. But man, we have to try! Forcing people to do things a machine can do is inhumane.

I'm a bit worried that most of us here on HN are feverishly working on ways to automate away jobs, and there is quite a strong economic incentive for us to do so, but there is hardly any effort and no incentive for policy makers to catch those affected. Who is building and planning for this new social utopia once people no longer have to bag groceries? Right now it looks like a lot of misery and poverty on the horizon before things get better.

I totally agree. Getting rid of wasteful jobs is a good thing if you can somehow handle the people who lose those jobs, whether redirecting them to something more productive or pensioning them off or whatever. And that side of things really doesn't seem to get much attention. There's a lot of hand-wavy talk about basic income, some lip service paid to continuing education and retraining, but not a whole lot really being done to prepare.

I have a notion that one of the major ways people will be spending the time they otherwise would be working is by consuming entertainment.

If that notion is correct, moving towards an educational model focused around creating the components needed for general entertainment (video/AR/VR/Music etc) might alleviate the problems we'll face.

> I have a notion that one of the major ways people will be spending the time they otherwise would be working is by consuming entertainment.

Where are these people getting the money to spend on entertainment if they aren't working? I don't think this will happen.

What I do see happening, however, is that people have less free time between juggling more than 1 job and a side gig with Uber/their ilk.

Getting rid of wasteful jobs is a good thing regardless of whether you can handle the people who lose those jobs in the short term.

The job-saving technology will live forever, long after the people who are temporarily displaced die. You're doing an immense amount of good for the untold number of people who aren't even born yet.

Technology is also global, but the political problems associated with eliminating jobs are problems on a state-by-state basis. Is it immoral to develop a technology just because some political systems are incapable of handling the gains in productivity, while other states are?

I would never say it's immoral to develop the technology. The tough question is how to deploy it.

This is the right question to ask. The laborers in question could all be productively employed as artists, homemakers, social workers -- whatever. To the extent that we get lots of new workers in those categories, and still get to have groceries too, that's a net gain for society. But it's up to society to get us there, and right now society doesn't seem even remotely up to the challenge.

> Who is building and planning for this new social utopia once people no longer have to bag groceries?

I grew up in a country (Finland) where people bag their own groceries. The table behind the cashier just has a bit more room and some dividers, so even 3 customers have room to bag their own groceries simultaneously.

So an utopia without the "grocery-bagging class" is certainly possible.

Same in Germany. When I visited the US for the first time. It was really strange for me to have people bag my groceries. Also. I usually shop groceries with a back pack. How does that work in the US? Will they put the stuff in there for me?

I've never seen someone with a backpack, but it's not uncommon for people to bring their own reusable bags and have the bagger use them. I think a backpack would work the same way. Hand it over, then get it back full of food.

I normally pack my own backpack. That way I can be sure the squishy stuff is on top, the glass bottle goes in the glass bottle holder, etc. As a nice bonus, the bagger can take a couple minutes rest.

I was being a bit facetious with the grocery bagging example. My core point is "Who is building and planning for this new social utopia once 5, 50, 95% of jobs are automated away?"

> Right now it looks like a lot of misery and poverty on the horizon before things get better.

So what is new? We have been automating jobs out of existence for a long time. Every era has had a lot of people that are redundant, every era has had useless governments get to grips with it.

Recently I automated three jobs out of existence, making the computer do the data entry work with the customer filling in forms. This is great for the customer as they now get what they want done instantly instead of having to wait a week for the human to do what the computer can do. It is great for the company as 3 people don't have to be managed, provided office space and paid. But as for my colleagues?

I obviously have had thoughts about automating my friends on the next desk out of existence, how I see it is that there are actually plenty of vacancies in the company, there are plenty of vacancies outside the company and the writing has been on the wall for the last year regarding the changes we put through. 2 of my 3 former colleagues are now working elsewhere, having moved on fine, but there is the one that did not step up and go for other interviews within the company or look elsewhere. Now I am sure that government handouts are available, however, if someone does not look out for their own job and assumes it will always be there for them, what can you do? Is it always the government's fault in this situation?

My above sentiment is a tad Thatcherite, it was Norman Tebbit who said 'on your bike', i.e. if there isn't a job for you in your home town then you have got to move, the government isn't going to magically create a job for you. The 'on your bike' remark didn't go down too well in the 1980's, but 'on your bike' it has been since then.

Thats a highly individualistic point of view. One where as long as you're willing to put in the effort and be flexible you'll be able to thrive. I see it a lot on HN because most of us work in growing fields with many opportunities. Maybe you had to uproot your life and move to San Francisco but hey, now you work for Google and clear six figures.

There comes a point where flexibility and gumption don't get you far enough. When the pool of good quality jobs shrinks so much that the ecosystem cannot support the species.

I'm not calling for a halt to progress. If you hadn't automated away those jobs someone else would have. There are very strong economic incentives to do so. I just wish governments would see the writing on the wall and start planning for the future where the status quo leaves most people out in the cold.

Look at what happened in the us. Unemployed people are looking towards the government to make sure that there are jobs for them to do.

But how can we be sure that enough meaningful jobs will exist for all people who want to work? It would be kind of surprising if there was a meaningful full job for everyone.

This feels like former communist countries where everyone was employed, although many jobs were pointless.

XBox and OxyContin seems to be the current trend.

>That assumes we can find something better for them to do, of course. //

In practice what [is and] is going to happen is that the jobs of the poor are removed, because they are more easily automated and the capitalists will retain much of the revenue that would formerly have been spent on wages.

Nothing is going to be done politically until there is either civil unrest or until there is so much impact to those with lowest wealth in society that the capitalists start getting poorer returns because too few people can afford to purchase the goods produced. In either case the situation is going to be very dire IMO before we get there.

This on top of the apparent existing inequalities and the increasing pay gap that the gig economy is creating (the efficiencies don't appear to be improving pay for the workers nor reducing costs as much as they could), and things like zero-hours contracts are pushing [in the UK] makes for a bleak outlook for those who are not already rich IMO.

"Nothing is going to be done politically until there is either civil unrest or until there is so much impact to those with lowest wealth in society that the capitalists start getting poorer returns because too few people can afford to purchase the goods produced."

The problem is the civil unrest seems to be moving in the direction of ethnic nationalism and isolationism, which may not turn out to be the best long term solution to this problem.

Keep half of them to unstuck the automatic cash registry, watch buyers and restock the shop.

That certainly seems to be the solution so far.

This would be great if they got to keep the same salary.

Now they're just plain out of work. Hooray?

"Forcing people to do things a machine can do is inhumane."

It's not clear there's anything a person can do that a machine can never do, in principle.

So then what's the point of having people?

Unless you believe in souls or some other form of dualism, then clearly machines will eventually be able to do anything we can do.

But we're far from that point now. Anything machines can currently do is, pretty much by definition, drudgery. I'd be happy to reevaluate that statement if and when this changes.

I have no idea what the ultimate answer to that question would be. Lots of SF authors have tried to address it, coming up with answers varying from humans always having something they can do better, to humans existing to have fun, to humans having no point at all and therefore get wiped out by the machines.

Generally in sci-fi, one of:

A): None (catastrophic). People die out, or are wiped out, as advanced machines outcompete them for all resources.

B): The boundary (hopeful). AI capable of creating new ideas is either impossible or just too difficult to invent (hard to prove which way it goes), so people keep pushing it farther.

C): None (utopic). Machines do anything people would have done for society, including the creation of new things to have and/or do. However, machines don't reach the level of autonomy required for them to actively eliminate people, or decide against it because there's plenty of resources for everyone, so people have 100% leisure time (which may happen to resemble what used to be work, if the people in question enjoy the process, but is no longer necessary to society).

D): The boundary (dystopic). Machines end up being more complex than people - to the degree that people are valued less than sufficiently advanced machines, and are put to work rather than manufacturing robots to do the jobs.

A note on D: Generally relatively soft sci-fi that does this, because the stories generally put humanity's role as hard labor, which doesn't make sense. However, I could see a story in "The Thinking Machine of the Future has become so Incredibly Advanced that the Absolute Pinnacle of Human Thought is to them what Plowing Fields is to Us." Humanity as the intellectual equivalent of the plow ox (or the tractor), doing the jobs that the machines (with their much higher potential for more complex thought) find to be beneath them and refuse to subject each other to. Possibly with the assistance of basic nonintelligent machines, the way we wouldn't try to make an ox plow a field without first affixing a plow to it.

The Earth's population isn't getting any lower, those 10 jobs lost mean 10 people that will need support from the rest of society, just to survive.

It's utopian to think job losses mean everybody gets their workload reduced, as this has never happened before. Automation has never reduced anybody's workloads. In fact, every reduction has happened to either eliminate de-facto slaves (industrial revolution) or because excessive workloads actually reduce productivity.

those 10 jobs lost mean 10 people that will need support from the rest of society, just to survive.

If we have the technology to replace those people and we don't do it, then we as a society are already supporting them just to survive. You're talking about artificially maintaining inefficiency. If we're going to go down that road, we might as well start paying people to dig holes and fill them back up again.

They already need the support of the rest of society. No one survives on their own anymore. Automating a job like this gives more time and money back to people who buy groceries, which is almost everyone. Some of that can be used to support the lost jobs while they find something else to do.

>Some of that can be used to support the lost jobs //

It can, that's clear, the problem is convincing the people who didn't lose their jobs that they should take a take hike to support the others; that's not an easy sell in Western Capitalism at least.

> Automating a job like this gives more [...] money back to people who buy groceries

Honestly, I think this is never going to actually be the case. Why would a grocery store lower prices just because their costs went down a bit? Neither the demand nor the supply has changed, nor has the price people are willing to pay for their groceries.

If nothing has changed but your costs, why lower the prices when you can simply report increased revenue to your shareholders? If competition comes along, a quick "we're premium, they are cheap" marketing campaign (or buying them out) would probably cost less than lowering the prices to match.

Just look at Walmart. They're dirt cheap because their costs and their margins are the lowest and consumers flock to their stores.

Funny enough, if you find the same products at other stores, they are the same price. I think Walmart thrives by offering a diverse selection of inexpensive offerings, not by pricing identical items lower (to reflect their lower workforce costs). For example, videogames cost the same at Walmart as they do at Target. To see a different price for a specific item, you have to go to a very different type of store (Sam's Club/Costco).

I think it's fair to say that even if Walmart could half their operating costs with technology, those savings would not find their way into the pockets of consumers.

You'll have to lower the prices if you can because the next store in the neighbourhood will do it to outcompete you anyway.

Workloads have been reduced before.

The 40 hour workweek is significantly shorter than the 6 12 hour work days people used to endure.

Why not reduce the workweek again, to say, 32 hours?

Yes, and we shouldn't forget why workloads have been reduced before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

It's not a 'natural' evolution, but organized fight from labour.

The same with the general conditions of work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_and_Collieries_Act_1842

So, in my opinion, reducing the workweek or, an alternative that I think is more practical, stop working younger it's against powerful interests and can't be done without a fight.

And that's a fight that will be prompted by high unemployment after automation replaces many jobs.

The transition will be difficult (they usually are) but the end result (more free time for everyone) sounds good to me.

I hope so. But history tell us that the first reaction to high unemployment and bad economic conditions is the dark side of politics.

This would work if means of production were distributed more equally. The global productivity is already at a point where many of us don't need to work, but we still do because we are denied the benefits of the automation that you mention.

Except prices for living necessities won't get lower, since demand is elastic, people will just get trapped as debt slaves while corporate stockholders become the new monarchy.

> prices should go down

unlikely - can think of a bunch of reasons why this wouldn't happen.

> people will not have to work full weeks anymore, or rather, focus on learning and reaching higher education

too idealistic - why aren't the people who "aren't working full weeks" today focusing on learning and reaching higher education? The logic doesn't work for the people already in this target group, today.

At the end of the day, that CEO has to make bigger profits to justify the technology investment.

> too idealistic - why aren't the people who "aren't working full weeks" today focusing on learning and reaching higher education? The logic doesn't work for the people already in this target group, today.

There are many reasons. "Not working full weeks" doesn't always mean "not busy". Some of the reasons are:

- they're taking care of children / sick parents

- they're themselves sick or disabled (including various psychological conditions that can make you unable to perform effectively as a worker in this economy)

- they don't have a way to find a job that would let them earn more than they get from benefits (going to work in such circumstances is stupidity from economic POV)

- higher education they need costs money they can't get due to reasons listed above

The claim that increased automation will enable people not to work is often cited as a defense of putting people out of work in favor of automation. This relies heavily on a number of assumptions that I think are empirically completely untested:

- that automating all jobs will cause all prices to go down. (It seems just as plausible that if everything were automated, then the relatively small class of people who work building and maintaining the machines wield monopoly-like power and charge accordingly, concentrating wealth even more than it's concentrated today.)

- that with lower prices, people will want less money. (It seems just as plausible that people will expect to be able to keep working and buy more to raise their standard of living.)

- that the intermediate state, where many jobs are automated, but people still need to work for a living, is tenable for society

- that there are no significant social problems resulting from a society where nobody has to work

I don't know whether these are true or not, but if they're not, the result will greatly impact the lives of millions (billions?) of people. Obviously, banning automation isn't a solution either, but it seems flippant to bet the lives of so many people on what we think might happen in a system as complex as the global economy.

[edited formatting]

Funny how I just finish my Thesis on automation and its effects on globalization and the workforce the day before this comes out...

Well, are you gonna share that with us? :-)

As soon as I publish it I will ;)

Is it any good?

I imagine this scenario has played out a thousand times when it comes to the socioeconomic effects of technology given the rapid pace of ostensible innovation. I think it actually is part of the problem, while not a specific critique of Amazon Go, to the degree that technology advances at a rate faster than we can make sense of their effects, we face the possibility of endangering the lives of millions of people. Theses and dissertations aren't the only means of understanding, but they are invaluable mechanisms for grounding the discursive space in a digestible format.

It does enable people not to work in an agnostic view of wealth distribution. Automation means both less labor and more production, which means a net increase in total wealth.

The problem is assuming that total wealth means anything for anyone but the capitalist class that owns said wealth.

I used to believe that, but yeah, that hasn't happened and is not likely to, because the real world does not operate anywhere close to an efficient market.

Instead, those with the means of production have hoarded the benefits. Despite all of our technological progress after the American industrial revolution, we are working more hours and earning less as a whole. Despite record profits, companies are not increasing wages and prices are not decreasing for anything except cheap, low-quality, mass-market consumer goods.

See: trickle down economics.

> those with the means of production have hoarded the benefits

And, behold, we see someone rediscovering the central tenet of Marxist economic theory.

(Entirely serious; not an insult. HN readers could really do with a more balanced economic diet – reading more Marxist theory and less Chicago School...)

I think anyone who uses the phrase "means of production" was probably already familiar with Marxism.

Many people know the phrase - maybe they even remember it from history lessons. But understanding what it means is often absent (as with many concepts one doesn't use) until one for some reason starts thinking about it more.

I upvoted you, but I want to also vocally agree with you because I think it's important. Even if you don't come away agreeing with the conclusions of Marxist economists, etc., understanding it is worth the time it takes. Considering theories that are not automatically in agreement with those that currently run the show is valuable.

(This is why I've read a solid chunk of the Austrians. I generally laugh at them. But I've read their stuff and I can think in it once I get into the mindset.)

I agree. Also, Marxism didn't appear out of thin air - it was a response to real and perceived problems of the people living at some point in the past. So even if solutions don't ultimately make sense, the problems they've observed are worth thinking about.

An argument for learning about history, too? Are we allowed to have this thread on Hacker News? ;)

Oh. I didn't see the HN Experiment announcement until just now.

I'm promptly shutting up about anything for which the valid answer isn't "Lisp does it better". ;).

Haskell's type system is clearly political dialectic.

> Even if you don't come away agreeing with the conclusions of Marxist economists, etc., understanding it is worth the time it takes

Yes! It's a useful lens – just as Hayek is. No-one has a monopoly on absolute truth in the social sciences, so understanding (and empathizing with) all the framing narratives, most all of which have some kind of a point, is crucial to being able to navigate these kinds of discussion.)

Understanding Marxist (and Hayekian) thought has been very helpful to me in framing my own politics – which, ironically enough, wind up being moderate market/social liberalism in the European tradition.

Sounds similar to my own path. I started off in the libertarian bucket (unsurprisingly, being an affluent white kid) and ended up evolving towards a position roughly summed up as "markets are fine so long as you put the fear of the state in them for antisocial behavior" the more time I spent outside of my CS classes and in my political science and economics classes.

To this day I'm so thankful that I got a B.A. that let me actually leave the CS cage during college instead of just taking more math.

"those with the means of production have hoarded the benefits"... totally agree, for example, Elon Musk's Tesla should be Nationalized ASAP. </sarcasm>

> "the idea is that as more and more job get automated, prices should go down until the point where people will not have to work full weeks anymore"

Fallacy; apart from a short break thanks to syndicalist wins, we're just working more and more since the industrial revolution.

Reading suggestions: "A People's History Of The United States" by Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky.

Losing 10 jobs to automation would be far less concerning if the businesses and individuals that cut the jobs would reinvest a greater percentage of their newfound profits into social programs to retrain the 10 people who are now without jobs. Or into a fund for the much-vaunted basic income, even.

Reminder that unions have negotiated and continue to negotiate compensation plans from employers that automate away or move jobs overseas to workers that are replaced.

Unions... in the U.S.???

Is there any evidence that reducing the number of jobs correlates to lower prices?

The last 300 years during which capitalism and tech have done more for the common man than any other ststem in the last 30,000.

Uh... I'm not a luddite, nor comparing the modern world w/ pre-electricity society.

I'm specifically asking about the assumption that "if we remove cashiers, supermarkets will obviously bring the prices down" (as a counter-example, I remember reading somewhere that Seattle's minimum wage didn't affect inflation in any meaningful way)

Think about how many bodegas, convenience stores, and small grocery stores are in large cities across the world. Now if all of those stores only had to be restocked for a few hours a day, instead of watching the till 12+ hours a day, the storekeepers would have more time to spend with their families.

This is naïve. In reality, the larger companies will be the ones that can afford the technological advancement, and they will eventually drive the bodegas, convenience stores, and small groceries out of business. The benefits that would otherwise accrue to the shop owners will accrue to the leadership of major corporations instead.

I'd suggest we are evolving, but you are both mis-using "evolve." Evolution does not mean better, it just means change to fit the current environment. Humanity and intelligence is not the logical outcome of evolution.

This feels like a natural evolution. It's a outcome product of the environment.

Also, you are conflating social return vs. private return. Yes, me being able to go on facebook has very little social returns but it has some private returns. Private returns mean a lot to people - just look at all the people working on wall st.

So who decides where you spend those couple of minutes? I feel like I should decide if I want to go spend time on Facebook or interact with someone on the corner who is singing. Effectively forcing me to spend the time with the person on the corner singing may in fact be the best thing for me, but I think the choice is still more important.

Browsing Facebook sounds like passive social interactions with friends that you've deliberately chosen, rather than passive social interactions with whoever your local grocery store employees happen to be. It doesn't really sound that much worse to me.

That sounds like an echo chamber to me. Hardly healthy for a society, let alone an individual. Such alienation from your neighbors!

Good point of view, and indeed procrastination is the opposite of evolving.

However "I am unsure we are evolving" sounds like paradox. Isn't a version 2 of anything always "evolving" by definition? Otherwise, what's "better"?

"all change is not progress as all movement is not forward"

Evolve as a society, yet remove the social experience of shopping.

Interesting. I don't believe I want us to evolve in that direction.

Couldn't we just have more "greeters" and fewer cashiers?

welcome to costco, i love you

Social experience at a grocery store feels contrived and not everyone may want it. Maybe you enjoy talking to your cashier but not everyone does, so why should everyone be forced to just because some do? It makes much more sense to keep groceries for grocery shopping, and social places such as bars for socializing.

There are these other people at grocery stores besides the employees, I believe they are called "patrons" to whom you may also converse with...

This is a typical sales-y way of trying to fake an interaction people actually seek. People paid to "talk" with you are not the same as honest, casual conversation with hard-working clerks.

Paid to talk to you? What kind of dystopian grocery store do you go to?

That's how I understand your comment.

Shops in the place I live in are fine, but I've heard about "greeters" in America, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if there also were paid people to talk to...

haha no I've never encountered such folks. I was being sarcastic when I put "patrons" in quotes, because the GP seemed to imply the only people to socialize with at a grocery were the cashiers.

"Social experience at <x> feels contrived and not everyone may want it."

This pretty much sums up _everything_. So, why do we even try to have societies?

Edit: You use an example of going to a bar. You realize "... not everyone may want ..." to socialize at a bar? Some just go to drink.

I would hypothesize that wanting shopping to be focused on convenience over the social aspect is a much more common opinion (see: online shopping) than wanting to go to a loud, crowdy, noisy environment where you can pay a premium to drink alcohol and not be social.

I don't think that is a fair comparison at all. Somethings are inherently social, like going to a bar, where as others are much more of a grey area. I would argue that many of these have historically been social experiences out of necessity (no automated machines, no online shopping, etc.), not out of the need for social interaction.

My stepfather owned a bar for some decades. It's not quite as social as you would imagine. A great many people go there to drown "around" people, but not necessarily to drown "socially".

Doesn't that even more show the value of just being around other people? It's definitely a lot cheaper to drink your own booze at home.

And that's what people do when e.g. they care more about economic considerations than social stigma of drinking alone.

This is an excellent point. For thousands of years, the default was every interaction was social. The idea that you should be able to walk into a standardized store and converse with a clerk like they were an automated sales droid is only a fairly recent phenomenon. These faceless, purely functional transactions - they are exception, not the norm.

The point of a bar is to socialize, or at least have company. Otherwise why not buy a bottle and stay home?

Some people don't want to socialize, but just be "around" people. There seems to be a difference.

May be the stigma of drinking alone, where one is sometimes considered a drunk if one drinks alone.

This makes sense from a suburban, car-based perspective. From a walking, city-based lens, neighborhoods and social interactions make a lot of sense. It's why coffee shops haven't been made obsolete by vending machines - at least here in New York. Point is, it depends on your perspective.

I think it makes sense whatever way you get around. If people value something, by and large, they'll pay for it.

Most people want to get their shopping done quickly and efficiently.

However, I could easily see niches keeping people around. The first thing that comes to mind is a higher end sort of place where customers want some knowledgeable help in selecting what they're buying. Spend some money on a few people who know their products well and give good advice, and maybe have time for some chit chat.

It also depends on the state and stage of one's life. For instance, as a student, I loved chatting up clerks in grocery stores. I actually met my SO this way. Being older and working full time now, I would vastly prefer to never visit any store ever, and buy everything on-line. It's not cheap enough yet though, so that's why today after work I'm visiting the cheapest store around to restock my fridge...

Yeah, I could easily see things kind of sorting out along some lines like that, just like we have everything from 'convenience stores' to small local markets to supermarket chains to Costco.

    > This makes sense from a suburban, car-based perspective.
    > From a walking, city-based lens, ...

Funny, I'd have said if there was a distinction between driven-to and walked-to locations, it would be the opposite: if I've already taken the time to drive there I'm likely not in that much of a hurry.

Someone else points out the security benefit of a cashless store, which again I'd have thought is more of an advantage to the high street shop than the suburban warehouse-like supermarket.

> It's why coffee shops haven't been made obsolete by vending machines

I really don't think that's why. Vending machines can't compete with humans still for freshly produced goods. There have been a few shots across the bow, but producing food that requires adjustment is still beyond the range of our sensors.

I can't imagine a robot "dialing in" an espresso machine based on taste like a barista would, at least for another decade.

But I go to coffee shops for the productive atmosphere. I think baristas (and bartenders and sommeliers) will always have a place even in a post-work world.

How does a barista offer that, versus simply visiting an interface (app, browser), clicking a button, and having it delivered to your table by a robot within five minutes?

I don't think the "productive atmosphere" concept is fully realized yet. Imagine how happy starbucks would be if they could reclaim all of that bar area for more seating (and more customers ordering more drinks!) or less area and less rent.

Ah, you got me! Yes, it's the overall atmosphere, not just the productivity. The romance is admittedly a part of it. I'm not opposed to robots making coffee, but I also suspect that in a post-work world, I'd be a part-time barista for the social-cool factor and mechanical-aromatic satisfaction.

(I can't help but think that half the attraction of Starbucks is having chipper college students hand-write a personalized drink order...)

I think there will probably be a lot of niche, human staffed places. I worry though, that as robots close the gap, our collective baseline for cost will drop so low that $3 for good espresso will seem outrageous when the robot will churn it out for a $1, perfect every time.

Also, the chipperness is a lot less likable when you're friends with some of them and all they can talk about is how much they hate customers :( The unspoken secret of retail is that it's soul crushing to work in.

I think if someone made a vending machine that actually makes coffee the way a barista would, instead of pouring hot water into dried powder of random chemicals, I'd never ever visit a coffee shop again. But as it is now, vending machine coffee tastes so bad it's almost a separate category of awfulness (and don't get me started on vending machine tea...).

It's not quite a vending machine, but Nespresso has replaced going to the coffee shop for my morning espresso. I think it does a better job than Starbuck, personally.

Well, at Starbucks they appear to literally press a single button to pull a shot. So, not much art to that.

Those machines cost $10-$30k, and require cleaning every few hours (minimum wage, only significant skill is the diligence to do it) and maintenance every few days or weeks by a steam plumber. The operator/button pusher is a little bit like a flight attendant: most days here to get you your drinks—but every once in a while, here to notice steam coming from the wrong place and take the machine out of service.

> They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction

Not true for my grandmother and many other elderly people. Maybe it's loneliness. But maybe it's a generation thing, not sure. We need to question if it's best to not interact with people who sell us stuff.

If there's a large enough market for it, then someone will continue to build it.

People said the same thing about DVD stores -- yet the numbers didn't back it up. People stopped going.

<They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction

Not true. The giant store I work at has so many regulars that it's family. Often the store is one of only a few places customer's pasts are unknown or forgiven.

It's not all about increased producivity.

    > People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible.
    > They don't go to the grocery store for social
    > interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay
    > extra for something that only the minority get value out 
    > of is not a competitive strategy.

Spoken like a true New Yorker.

(... or some other big American city, but it's more impressive if that's right.)

The parent commenter describes something I immediately recognise as "very European"; there's room for both of you.

What are you in such a hurry to do? Get home and post on HN?

How much of our lives do we want tech to live for us? Part of what makes life awesome is meeting random people standing in lines.

> What are you in such a hurry to do?

> Part of what makes life awesome is meeting random people standing in lines.

By all means go search for lines to meet random people. But spare me because for me that time is wasted, and I rather recover all of it to spend it with my friends, or doing sport, or even watching TV with my wife. This thing won't make lines disappear altogether, so you'll be fine: you'll be able to find them in the post office for example.

Indeed, separate from the question of livelihoods (which could be supplemented via ideas like basic income), and less some meaningless greetings, the engagement I would up having would be far more meaningful if employment was a matter of satisfaction rather than utility.

Looking purely at local transaction costs neglects externalities and can lead to very bad outcomes.

I don't see a huge difference between valuing interactions vs. having workplace safety standards or requiring that employers provide health insurance. Both of them raise transaction costs and eliminate at least some economic models because we as a society have decided we don't like the outcome. The sticking point is usually how to do it fairly.

Edit: clarification of point

"People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible."

What evidence do you have for this claim? A study of some sort?

It is also obvious from reading the news that some people do not want this.

"They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay extra for something that only the minority get value out of is not a competitive strategy."

Again, this sounds like hearsay or a personal opinion.

> What evidence do you have for this claim? A study of some sort?

The fact that people go to supermarkets, to get their groceries faster and cheaper, instead of going to half a dozen small stores where the potential for fulfilling social interaction is much bigger.

I, too, enjoy many of my social interactions while shopping.

I think that, per the grandparent, current initiatives are not grasping nor addressing the entire scope of the existing... "paradigm" -- sigh, to try to find a word for it.

To reduce it severely but pertinently, in the news recently, "studies show" that people who feel valued and that they have a roll in society, family -- in life -- they live longer.

And what happens when we stop interacting with each other? When that daily communication between work domains and social classes ends? Again, reduction to the almost absurd -- but we're living it -- we get President Trump.

Trump may end up doing ok -- we'll see. But the shock on many maybe liberal, Amazon Prime shopping upper middle class faces? Try actually talking to, with, and not at, the people around you, serving you.

When people stop to think about it, I think most find value in the people around them, much more than the things.

Not all value is encompassed in the fastest delivery for the cheapest price. (Which Amazon seems to be increasingly falling down on, anyway, per my recent experiences.)

> They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction

Yes, they do. It's a human need. Many people satisfy it that way.

Have you considered that life isn't all about efficiency? People shop because of the experience. This is why book stores are coming "back," eBooks just aren't cutting it for people. This is why "smart lights" won't ever truly take off, people don't want to log onto an app to turn their lights off.

If people really shop "because of the experience", then this technology is nothing to worry about as it will fail in the market.

> This is why "smart lights" won't ever truly take off, people don't want to log onto an app to turn their lights off.

They will, one day, when companies stop with the vendor lock-in bullshit. An app - a siloed, sandboxed program that cannot meaningfully interact or seamlessly share information with any other program on the device - is a very crappy interface for doing anything. But we're stuck with it, because it's easier for companies to make money off apps, and cooperation is hard.

I have to disagree with this one. I have Hue lights and I rarely ever use the app to turn them on or off. When I come home and it is after sunset the lights come on automatically based on geolocation. When I leave they turn off.

Also, I can walk downstairs and say "Alexa, turn on the living room lights" and my Amazon Echo turns them on. Same thing to turn them off again. That's extremely convenient...way, way more convenient than walking around and turning 4-5 lamps on and off.

They have come way down in price to the point to where you can either pay $20 for a smart bulb versus $10-12 for a standard LED.

Will be interesting to see what happens though...I do agree that life isn't just all about efficiency. But people certainly do enjoy convenience.

Hopefully people also don't like the idea of their lights participating in a DDoS.

This doesn't take into account the value of forced social interaction. Seeing a human at the grocery, exercising patience if the line is a little longer than I would perhaps like, being forced to engage in conversation with my neighbor...There is a value to these social behaviors and value to how they shape psychological development. I worry about the world where everything is catered to Me and I, and I can go about my life without interacting with the people I'm forced to share space with.

Your government may enforce these interactions if it so chooses. I'd prefer my government did not, and leaves the choice of where I get my social interactions up to me.

At no point did I say this should be outlawed. But as a society, we should look at these types of "innovations" and question whether it's actually providing benefit to the longterm, wellbeing of our people and our ability to function together collectively.

If a person's only social interaction that is providing meaningful wellbeing is talking with the clerk at the grocery store, then I'd say the person in question is in need of serious help that the clerk cannot provide. They need to find social groups. Personally, I hate standing in line and avoid many businesses because of the slow line-ups. I'd rather be on my way so I can go to my family and friends where the bottle of wine I just picked up is to be consumed. Convenience is not the anathema of society. Not making time for each other may be. Forcing it on each other is a weak "solution".

You're both right, of course. Also, there are apps for that...

This comment makes me suspect you may have never been to a farmer's market, or a market hall (of which Barcelona has some of the world's most glorious examples).

While it's possible that some people "want groceries as cheap and fast as possible," I don't think either of those is true of the hundreds of people I join at my local market every week.

I go there mainly because I like buying directly from the producers. I want there to be independent farmers in the future too, for reasons of taste, culture, ecology, and food safety.

But I also enjoy my interactions with some of the sellers. Some people probably go mainly for that reason. The market is full, despite a big ugly multinational supermarket 100m away that has cheaper (and worse) versions of just about everything on offer. That supermarket is also full, though I think the reasons why are not as simple as market efficiency.

A lot of us will continue to share the parent poster's opinion, and hopefully in sufficient numbers to keep all the little bodegas going. Because we care about food, and we care about living among humans.

Farmer's markets will be unaffected by this, obviously. The possibility to buy your groceries in this manner would still exist, as that's a different "use case", and I absolutely support and enjoy it. In contrast, I don't believe there is anything worth saving regarding the human interaction in supermarkets - in fact, I think that working an 8 hour shift which consists solely of scanning items and saying a couple pre-defined sentences is a very dismal, and in fact much more inhuman experience than what Amazon is proposing.

Depends on the supermarket I suppose. A few times a year I go to a rural-ish supermarket in the US (town of maybe 5K people) and it's very old-school, the check-out people are very nice and gregarious, the baggers bag with great skill, etc.

I certainly hope the poor folks who toil at Aldi or Safeway might find a better thing to do with their lives, and if those stores are displaced I won't be too sad.

Does automation really remove jobs or just displace them? Honest question. I mean, in this instance, I see perhaps jobs of 10 cashiers in a store replaced with 1-2 monitoring the store and rest done by automation. But, then this gives rise to a whole set of new jobs and industries too, the engineers that design these systems, the ones that build these machines, industries supplying manufacturing of hardware for these system, software developers, maintaining hardware, maintaining software, customer support, servicing. So, if this is deployed in all stores in a city then will employment numbers add up to become a zero sum? Is it just displacing employment from one category(or location) of manual tasks to different tasks?

Besides, if most people lose their jobs to automation in the near future, there won't be enough people who can afford to buy stuff at these stores anyway, so won't it become uneconomical to run these stores?

It feels good to think automation doesn't eliminate jobs, but one thing is for certain, if it merely displaced them into higher salary jobs, no one would ever automate because it would eliminate profits.

At the profit levels usually seen in retail supermarkets, you can't stop paying all those people minimum wage and suddenly start paying them software dev salaries without an enormous hit to the income statement.

"won't it become uneconomical to run these stores?"

Essentially these stores are already smart vending machines stocked by humans occasionally at night. In the long run that might be where fresh food comes from. "Go to the vending machine and pick up a head of lettuce".

It's definitely not going to be one to one job replacement, not even close.

Software can be write once, run everywhere. You could replace thousands of cashiers with software written by a team of 10 software engineers.

Maintenance of hardware/software could be taken care of by a few people running to multiple stores throughout the day. Example would be Starbucks in San Francisco. There is a Starbucks nearly every block in the inner-city. You could just have two guys walk from store to store to perform checks/maintenance.

So yes, I see big possibility of thousands of service workers being out a of a job due to automation. Which is why a lot of people are saying we need to seriously consider something like universal basic income for the near future ..

That big decrease in cost allows the company to capture more market with a lower price, increasing profit. The profit goes to repay the investors that up-fronted the money to develop this. But the savings in everybody else's pockets eventually boost the economy, creating jobs.

TIL politicians are the most efficient ways to solve political problems..

"They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction..."

False. Sometime I go to the grocery store for social interaction. You know, to get out. I generally go to a particular wine shop cause I like chatting with the guy at the counter. The idea that we do all this "stuff" ("processes") to get "stuff" done, and then separately we go somewhere for the express and sole purpose of socializing, is just clearly wrong. It's all mixed in. We're social creatures. We socialize while at the barber shop. We socialize at the grocery store. We socialize at work. At church. At football or soccer games. If we attempt to "refactor" out the "process" to make it more efficient, fine. But, don't pretend like whatever we replace that effort with we're not going to be socializing while we do that new thing.

It's frankly really sad that we have all these people that used to be persons we knew and visited with at the checkout counter, now they're in some warehouse being super efficient having no time to visit with coworkers while they work, meanwhile, we pretend that stuff magically shows up at grocery stores and we can walk in and walk out and magic and future wow.

You're going to back up your claim with anecdotal evidence? The overwhelming majority of people do not go to the grocery store as a social exercise. People view it as a chore. They want to get in and out as soon as possible.

i have to agree. i hate any level of socializing at the supermarket - i'm there to get what i need and be gone. i don't mind running into friends i like, but i really get annoyed running into casual acquaintances due to the social niceties.

His personal feeling and experience of going to stores is "anecdotal evidence"?

Where is your three-year, peer-reviewed study into the emotional motives of shoppers? After all, you flatly stated that "The overwhelming majority of people do not go to the grocery store as a social exercise."

Since you seem to be a very serious, data-minded person: CITATION PLEASE.

"You're going to back up your claim with anecdotal evidence?The overwhelming majority of people do not go to the grocery store as a social exercise."

Wait, where's your evidence for this claim? I live in a small town in Croatia and, no, the overwhelming majority of the people in my neighborhood are not in a hurry to get their shopping over with. The speed at which groceries are acquired is just one metric out of many influencing their experience.

This is not to say that progress is necessarily bad or that checkout lines are great, merely that reducing every transaction down to its economic value risks overlooking other, less quantifiable aspects of the transaction.

You're biased by your experience, because you live in a world that's starkly segmented between work and play. I lived there, too, so I understand your perspective. But your values -- and Silicon Valley values in general -- are not necessarily universal.

To be fair, there's no evidence presented to support your claim either.

Well maybe you too should take your turn to back your claim with evidence!

I shop fast too. I get in and out as fast as I can, because - after all - the attendants in the store where I go to would not know a leaf of spinach from a leaf of kale...

The same applies to my electronics shopping...

...at least I can justify the guys there not knowing kale!

Jokes aside: not all stores are like that, and not all people shop like that.

I can think of many elderly people using shopping as a main daily source of social interaction.

Diversity means choice and choice is generally good.

I think the interesting point here is that when you remove social interaction and product advice from physical stores, then really you might as well only buy online... and Amazon is the king of online.

So this looks like a fantastic move by Amazon.

Since you're posting anecdotal evidence, let me post my own:

> We socialize at the grocery store.

I never go to the grocery store for socializing. When I was still in England, I constantly ordered online. Now it's a chore and I miss england.

> We socialize while at the barber shop.

I shave my head to avoid having to go to the barber shop.

> We socialize at work.

I work remotely to avoid having to deal with that.

> At church.

Not religious. Probably because I'd have to go to church if I were.

> At football or soccer games.

I play tennis just so I don't have to deal with a team.

I can't wait for this technology to make its way here. The grocery lines on saturdays are insane. Also maybe that means the shops will be open longer hours and I can go in the middle of the night so I can avoid meeting people even more.

But you come to HN and read the comments because... I mean, the comments are the social portion. Not pure facts. They're other peoples views. So, I mean, you kinda socialize when get your news here and post pleasant comments interacting with other readers. So, I take it, you totally get what I'm saying.

What in your mind is 'the value of humanity'? If the ideal of humanity is to solve all problems, reach maximum efficiency, and eliminate all competition then we're probably going to design ourselves out of the system eventually.

People are inefficient sacks of meat with finite potential. When we have designed a black box that solves all problems, answers all answerable questions, maximizing all efficiencies for us, and protects us from any possible threat, what do we do next? What is left?

The value of humanity isn't a universal purpose, that's just how we fool ourselves into believing that there is a point to our lives. That's how we reason about pain, suffering, and hardship.

Human existence, our experience is existentially pointless. It is down to the individual to create a purpose. Perhaps you view the purpose as being something tangible and 'out there' to be had. Others see the purpose as simply just being, enjoying the small things, finding pleasure in the pointlessness.

No one can say what the value for another is. There is ultimately no value except that in which you find in yourself.

So let's not kid ourselves that we as a race are working toward some kind of ultimate design because that design is in our minds only and as such can't be 'ultimate' or significant to the 'other' in any way. Indeed it is likely to be a folly of our mind, a foolish solution to the non-problem of being.

I mostly agree. Take the parent's argument and replace grocery store clerk with gas station pump attendant.

"I know all the people who work in these gas stations. The attendant at the pump always whistles a quiet song while he pumps my gas. He knows my son and is always nice and friendly."

Yet, besides the completely weird laws in New Jersey and Oregon, society has moved on and people now pump their own gas.

I understand the parent's post point to some degree. I don't want a cold a sterile society where no one never interacts with anyone any longer. However, I also get stuck in grocery store lines all the time. It would be a net win for me to skip these lines all together even if the places I shop at become a little more impersonal.

At least in the United States, places have continued to staff less and less cashiers and have relied more and more on self-checkout. So, for many of these stores, it isn't like I'm missing out on any real connection. This just seems like a way less stressful self-checkout.

Apple lets you check yourself out using their app at the Apple Store but I rarely do this because I feel like I'm shoplifting or that people are watching me suspiciously. I'm curious if I would have that same reaction to these stores or not. I'm guessing not, because it is the only way to pay.

" People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible. They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay extra for something that only the minority get value out of is not a competitive strategy."

crazypyro, you may want to do as Brian Regan said (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8kThoZpF_U ) and pick up some Montana brochures. If you don't have 3-5 minutes in the day to talk to your neighbors, you either need new neighbors or a career change. Life is a lot of things, but it ain't all GSD all the time either.

Because societal evolution can be directly measured by how quickly you can buy your pizza pockets, and also how few other members of society you have to interact with while doing so?

Capitalism says if the majority of people agree with you they will spend their money at the supermarkets w/ the friendly clerks.

Not necessarily majority - it's an interesting ability of capitalism over many other systems - multiple solutions to a problem can co-exist. As long as enough people still demand it to make it economically viable.

With "just walk out" the friction is extremely low. It might see less pushback than other technological approaches. However I have to think security will be a major issue. If I can rob the store by just leaving my phone in my car or leaving a cheap phone in the store while I walk away with the products. Tap-in/out gates are probably the best bet, but can still be tailgated, so you'll need to have pretty tight security and monitoring ready to beat anyone down who doesn't pass the checks or looks fishy at the gate or in store attempting to fool the system into believing they're another person. Or write those off as losses, I suppose most retailers today already do a lot of that.

A lot of security concerns are resolved by just hiring a person or two to monitor the entry. Still far cheaper than cashiers and so on

No, not at all. It's more subtle than that.

Suppose the minimal cost solution has a cost of c.

Suppose there is an extra "human touch" factor that costs x extra. So the total cost is c+x.

Suppose there are n customers, of which m prefer the human touch.

In a world with humans everywhere, it costs everyone c+x/n to deliver a product that satisfies everyone.

In a world where two solutions are competing, one with humans and one without, it costs c+x/m to deliver a product that satisfies m, and c to satisfy everyone else.

The subset m that prefers the human touch has to pay more. But notice there's no magical majority cutoff here; that's not how it maps out. It's a curve that gradually increases the cost the lower the m:n ratio is, until it becomes a very expensive boutique service that only very wealthy people can afford. And the increasing slope makes it hard to fight.

It is in fact people with the least sensitivity to price and preference for the human touch that will help maintain the status quo. And those people are usually in the minority.

I get where you are coming from, and I stand with what you say, but this is a losing battle.

It's cheaper to only have 1 person watching to make sure everyone scans into the the store. Really there is no need to elaborate beyond that point alone. Also it cuts theft because you must scan to get in.

I don't think every store is going to change to this model overnight. It will be gradual over years and years. But it will happen.

I live in silicon valley. And I have a good friend from Spain who ever told me about the culture difference between his home town and the U.S. One example he mentioned to me was what you said. He said they have grocery stores they routinely go. it's like a family tradition to always shop at a specific place. They know the cashier well. One day they went to a different store, the store owner became mad.

he said, here in the U.S., business is business. nobody gets attached to a store.

This resembles more of farmer markets here. You build up more of a one on one relationship/bond. My sister even has a cheese and oils guy in one of San Diego's farmer markets. She got an ingredient taken out of her product cause of allergies, they call her when it's ready. This doesn't happen at big box stores unless there's an issue with a product in general.

I agree with @delegate that human interaction is valuable; sometimes I choose a cashier lane instead of self-checkout because I prefer it. But even then, half of the interaction has been delegated to the screen on the pin pad.

And, I'm all for people having careers that are meaningful and fulfilling. But, is supermarket cashier the most valuable thing these people can be doing?

Imagine we had all the money we wanted and could pay people to do anything and buy robots to do anything. What would we choose to buy robots to do and what would we choose to pay humans to do?

The moment you start trying to keep things the same instead of being open to change is the moment you become the old generation always complaining about how back in your day blah blah blah. The world will change all the same.

Heh, I live in Seattle, and I've got two grocery stores 1 km from my house (and a small seafood / poultry place at about 1.1 km). My first thought was why would I drive down to Belltown, when I can just walk to the store.

Edit: To be fair, looking at the video, it's mostly prepared food, so I'm probably not even in the target audience for this store. (I tend to buy raw ingredients, like produce and meat.)

I don't disagree with you. But many people don't experience this humanity, currently.

I can't agree with this. Give people basic income and let technology do what it does.

Your situation in Barcelona sounds nice and all, but it is does not describe the typical American's grocery experience at all, and therefore does not really apply to what Amazon is doing in downtown Seattle.

The typical grocery store here (i.e. what Go is actually going after) is basically a warehouse, with checkout lanes staffed by apathetic teenagers. The process is already almost entirely devoid of meaningful human contact. It might as well be more convenient.

Hopefully, whatever has protected your local stores from the economic forces that have produced the experience I describe will also protect your local stores from this incremental improvement on automated checkout.

The parent is putting Barcelona in an unfairly positive light here. Its supermarkets are fantastic, but Spain has a dismal unemployment rate, which is one reason for why you get such good service at their supermarkets.

It really drives wages down, so they're overstaffed compared to other countries, and instead of it being an entry-level job for teenagers the norm is to have them staffed by 30-60 year olds with lots of experience, but likely few other options when it comes to employment.

So does putting people who work at grocery stores ultimately help things? I'd like to think so, technology advancement is our only hope of getting rid of most menial jobs. Those who rail against it rarely do so with any sensitivity to all the menial jobs we've gotten rid of already, for the good of all.

If Amazon Go can save me from participating in the scripted conversations the cashier must initiate to keep her job, it's already paid for itself.

Amazon can puch those through the app instead. Hey, you don't even have to be at the store!

It can be even worse, at the NYC Union Square Trader Joe's, the line wraps the entire inner perimeter of the store and you shop as you wait.

I think what's probably going to happen is those sorts of shops will continue to exist as is. They provide an experience (a bit like local cafes etc...) They may even be able to charge a premium for this. The big bucks stores will end up converting to more automated systems. Stocking shelves probably one of the next things to go. So you get to choose, local more human experience or efficient highly automated experience.

Similar reason why Amazon hasn't caused small bookstores to close down.

The places I feel where I know the cashiers and employees are not large supermarkets though, but small time specialty shops (the Polish butcher shop near my house, the florist, etc). To me large scale supermarkets (wal mart, target, whole foods, etc) tend to have young or post retirement, disinterested staff that are simply there to make a little extra cash and go home. Besides, there are often 10-15 cashiers on a schedule with ridiculous turnover. I don't see this competing with the specialty shops and thus not erasing that social connection involved in some shopping. Rather, it will reduce the drudgery and annoyance of going to huge grocery stores with no personal connection and a disinterested staff.

IMO non-specialty grocery stores with a few staff closely knit in the community have already been mostly eliminated by the larger corporations.

Sorry I can upvote your comment only once!

I don't mean to be rude, but you are the example of someone who thinks "this tech is useless/bad for me, therefore it must be useless/bad for everyone else".

But in reality, many other shoppers in the world don't have your experience. I live in a large American city and my shopping experience is the exact opposite of yours: I have to drive 10-20 minutes to my supermarket; it is gigantic warehouse-sized; I don't know the cashiers on a personal level (I don't even recognize any of them as they always seem to be different); I usually wait a long time in line (10 minutes). So yeah I would gladly prefer shopping at a supermarket powered by Amazon Go technology.

A supermarket is a pretty dismal place for social interaction, don't you think? It's like saying that white collar bullshit jobs are necessary because if it wasn't for water cooler talk people wouldn't get any social interaction at all.

Social interaction besides the usual benefits also makes otherwise dull or tedious jobs more tolerable. If those people didn't have to work as cashiers anymore (how that could work is an entirely different matter but something like a basic income would be a start) they wouldn't simply disappear but be able to make better use of their time, for example by serving the people in their neighbourhood in more expedient ways.

Keeping jobs for the sake of it just leads to stagnation. People working on a job until they retire (or drop dead, whichever happens first ...) because they either have to or don't know otherwise is not something virtuous but actually quite sad in my opinion. It's often required to make a living and support yourself and your family but we shouldn't accept it as the natural state of affairs.

Agreed. We shouldn't accept this dehumanizing assumption that our social interactions are or should be a component of a larger commercial interaction.

That the majority of comments in this thread seem to imply or at least tolerate this assumption is quite saddening.

I get what you are saying, and I agree emotionally to some degree. But I think there is a fallacy lying in this sort of thinking. This sentiment appeals to the idea that certain life experiences are the natural order of things and are timeless and shouldn't tampered with. In this case though, shopping at a supermarket and checking out in a line is hardly an ancient tradition that has been the same since time immemorial.

That being said, there is value in daily ritual and routine, and we need to find a way to replace our current ones with new ones that are just as meaningful if we wish to automate all jobs away.

> These people like their jobs because we respect them for what they do, so they feel useful and they work hard.

> The humanity of it has value for us here and that value is greater than the time we'd save by removing the people from the shops.

I wish this sentiment existed in other realms and for the countless un/underemployed millennials out there. I wonder how many marketing assistant and assistant media planner jobs have been killed by the use of one janky "online marketing suite" after another.

This is awesome.....for a city as awesome and patient as Barcelona. In any major metro in the U.S., if the cashier stops scanning and talks to people there will be rage and quite possibly someone telling the cashier to STFU.

Yes, and all of the people weaving wool in their house were real people, most decent people, who were negatively affected by mechanized looms. But the Industrial Revolution proceeded apace, and now everyone is much, much wealthier as a result.

There is short term pain in automating jobs that no longer need to be performed by humans, but no sane person would look at the long term result of that automation and say it was a bad thing.

> Where is Amazon Go located? Our store is located at 2131 7th Ave, Seattle, WA, on the corner of 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street. 10px-spacer

> When can I visit Amazon Go? Amazon Go is currently open to Amazon employees in our Beta program, and will open to the public in early 2017

I think all the discussion here are very pre-mature. It looks like a controlled beta-test at best.

I get where you're coming from, but I whole-heartedly disagree. People have bound themselves to employment for too long. The entire idea that you need to contribute to someone else getting wealthy to have any value to society is stupid. People need to remember that they have meaning and purpose and value without having a job. And that's where we're heading.

Technology like this will make a lot of jobs obsolete. And, in the short-term, there will be a lot of problems with unemployment or underemployment. But, ultimately, a system of universal basic income (or something like it) will be implemented, allowing people to disassociate their identities with their jobs. It will free up their time to do other things, like help out in their communities, create art, or pursue their other passions. They can still work if they want to, but they won't need to. And they'll be able to choose jobs that they're passionate about instead of the jobs they have to do to pay rent and provide food.

Stores like this won't remove the interactions you have with your neighbors - those interactions will just change locations. Instead of seeing the cashier at the supermarket, maybe she'll be giving your daughter singing lessons because she was allowed to focus on something she loved doing instead of something that paid the bills.

The problem is that, everyone responds by saying "people don't HAVE to work now", but whenever you talk about people not being able to earn incomes, there isn't much thought put into how they will live. All of the effort is going into things that will eliminate earning opportunities for people, and little or none going into how to support the people who can no longer find work.

I'm not going to argue that we should hold back innovation to preserve jobs, or that we should have people working 40+ hours per week as our goal. The simple fact is, however, that attitudes and government policies are really far away from supporting a 'post-work' society, and are actually getting further and further away.

People who control capital in western societies - and are the primary beneficiaries of automation and other techniques that are causing many jobs to disappear - already feel like they pay too many taxes, and are generally good at finding ways to make sure they pay less. Even a level of basic income that would provide a poverty-level standard of living for people feels politically impossible right now.

I don't fully disagree with you, but I find a lot of these "post-work" responses to be really hand-wavy.

That's true. The details of how the system will work have yet to be nailed down. And, in the short term, things are going to suck HARD. It's basically going to be us riding the edge of societal breakdown. People are going to lose their jobs without a safety net that protects them. There will be a lot of people out of work, the income gap will increase, and government programs are going to be stressed to the point of breaking. But, perhaps this is the idealist in me, I believe that we will figure it out before our economy, country, and society collapse.

A store that you appreciate is build around the products and knowledge that the owners and staff provide, but removing the checkout line isn't going to change that. There's no reason this tech can't proliferate and become as cheap as barcode scanners. Having people less focused on scanning the products and more focused on communicating with customers and helping them find the exact product they want makes a whole lot of sense to me.

You could make the same argument about any job that nobody would really want to do if they had the choice and that machines have taken over.

Do you want to bring back elevator operators?

I currently live in Spain and completely understand your point of view. But, I am from the UK and the difference is of many orders of magnitude.

Supermarkets are not great places to shop or to work. Most employees are working far less hours then they want to on an income that is dependent on welfare top ups in one form or another.

Since there is no chance of UK supermarkets adopting a Spanish philosophy I think these people would be happier, and no worse off, if they were put out of a job tommorow.

For evidence just look at how many people opt to queue in the self service aisle, even when there is no queue at the human alternative.

'For evidence just look at how many people opt to queue in the self service aisle, even when there is no queue at the human alternative.'

I'd noticed that too here in London. TBH I feel I get better and more 'human' interactions from the people that police the self-service checkouts than behind the counters, because generally they're trying to help me when I need it.

Since there is no chance of UK supermarkets adopting a Spanish philosophy I think these people would be happier, and no worse off, if they were put out of a job tommorow.

Well it sort of depends on where you want to shop. Staff at my local M&S and Waitrose are always up for a chat if you want it (certainly the older generation seem to like this, and it probably keeps them coming back). But the guys at the Tesco Express are clearly only interested in keeping the lines moving as fast as possible.

In all cases they also have the option of self checkout if you want to save time and avoid the chit-chat!

Thank you for this valuable counterpoint. It is all too-easy to boil down a system to a single purpose and ignore all the little side effects and externalities. Their influences may be subtle and slight in the short term but in aggregate over time make a large difference.

You may be accused of being overly sentimental. And yes, grocery shopping is not always fun. But just by being out in the world and interacting with humans is worth something. Take that away, and at some point, these little brushes with humanity have to be replaced or we starve as social creatures. It is the increasing lack of social contact in many areas of modern life that drives many of us to social media platforms that promise to fulfill these needs.

We talk all the time about filter bubbles. What about physical interaction bubbles? Soon you won't have to see or talk to anyone outside your friends and coworkers if you don't want to. What does that do to empathy?

As someone who has worked behind a checkout till it is not a job I think anyone is dying to do.

For you, as the customer, maybe it seems cute and fine as a job but from my time in the job it's basically hours of mindless labour that teaches you little and offers no room for growth.

Your opinion on this is actually kind of despicable. You want people to perform robotic menial jobs because you feel like it adds humanity to your shopping experience but you seem content to ignore the fact that the job in question is a boring, tedious slog.

I worked a few different jobs in grocery stores, and I agree.

It wasn't a job that had a future for me, and at some point during the last job there, I realized that I needed to find something else or I was doomed to a life of barely having enough money to get by each week.

Luckily, it wasn't that I didn't have skills, just that I wasn't using them for profit. But I'll never forget my time there and how soul-sucking it can be to do the same things over and over with no real interactions with the people I was helping.

Could I have been quirky like the cashiers in the story above? Sure, but that isn't me. And I know a lot of customers would have complained about it, because so many customers love to complain, rather than just enjoy things that are happening around them for what they are.

I hope all of the bleeding-heart armchair economists in this thread see your post. They've clearly never worked these jobs they claim to value so much.

And textile workers were put out of work in the 19th century because new machines rendered their jobs obsolete. But would you really argue that we should roll back back 200 years of progress in the textile industry just to employ more people? What about the fact that textiles would be vastly more expensive and of limited quantity? Do you choose to have all of your clothes hand-woven or do you let technology take those jobs?

The only real difference here is that it's a technology you didn't grow up with that is putting people out of work, so it's seen as unusual to you. We make this choice of technology over manual labour in virtually every industry every single day. But it's normal because we grew up with it. And the kids that grow up with this technology today will see this as normal too. Eliminating cashier jobs in supermarkets isn't fundamentally any different to eliminating textile worker jobs in the 18th century.

When supermarkets came into existence a century ago, people were used to neighborhood grocers. You'd walk in, tell the grocer what items you wanted, the grocer would go back, get your bread, eggs, whatever, bring it up, and then ring you up. These people had worked hard, were well known in their towns, and were generally respected.

There was therefore a lot of resistance to self-supermarkets. Where people had to go and select their own items off of the shelves. The concerns expressed were the same as yours.

We don't miss the neighborhood grocers. People have come to expect and demand a variety and quality of goods that the old grocers could not hope to match, at prices that the grocers again could not match. The descendants of those grocers have new kinds of jobs, and on average a level of wealth that again grocers could not hope to match.

It has been the same story with every kind of automation. From the Luddites opposing weaving machines that brought cheap clothing to the loss of telephone operators to the development of self-service kiosks today.

I also live walking distance from supermarkets. I also joke with cashiers. But at busy times of day, waiting in line can take me longer than it takes to go to/from the store and select items. You don't mind the wait. I do. Amazon Go seems like a great idea to me.

And yet we are willing to pay 2x for food from farmers markets, artisans etc. That food was made with processes that go against technological progress. Why not apply the same thinking to selling the food in stores? The cashiers can provide added value (socializing, helping with selection, etc) that we are willing to pay for.

Who is "we"?

SOME of us are willing to pay 2x. Some aren't. We all get to choose what it is that we want.

Choice is good. :-)

My point exactly.

Please, please don't ever forget this: the people who work at your grocery store are nice because they would be fired if they were rude to you. You may think they are your friends but they really aren't. They would not be there if they weren't getting paid for it.

"They would not be there if they weren't getting paid for it."

That's not true. There are nice people in the world.

I know what volunteering is: I do it myself. Every week I spend several hours helping kids with their homework at a local school. This is not at all the same thing as spending 8 hours a day working a cash register, dealing with rude customers without being rude in return, being expected to cover coworkers' shifts when they're sick, working during holiday hours instead of spending time with family, etc. etc. etc.

Your response seems irrelevant to mine.

Being nice is not a behavior that is only exibited when paid to do so, as you seem to believe.

as you seem to believe.

I didn't say that. I said they would be fired if they were rude. It's a selection process that favours nice people, it does not make people nice (whatever that means).

I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables.

I know all the people who work in these supermarkets.

The significant bit is that the walk-ability indicated in the 1st sentence enables the community indicated in the last sentence. I know there was one neighborhood in Cincinnati in the early 2000's, where you could walk to the grocery store, walk to the hair stylist, walk to the library, walk to the bank branch, and have a friend shout from their balcony to invite you up for dinner. Enable people to interact with their world on a village-scale, and you will have village-like interactions. However, if you turn people into paranoid-other-ignoring drones and cargo in metal capsules, then you have dystopian sci-fi city interactions. (This is a spectrum, not a binary bit, of course.)

I don't think this has anything to do with cars.

I live in Seattle. Many neighborhoods are very walkable. I can and do walk to grocery stores all the time. No, I don't know the cashiers personally. I also have to wait in long lines quite often.

When I lived in New York, one of the most walkable cities on Earth, it was even worse: long lines and anonymous, interchangeable cashiers.

I grew up in a small town where everyone drove to the grocery store, and that's the only time in my life where people knew their cashiers and genuinely cared about their lives.

I grew up in a small town where everyone drove to the grocery store, and that's the only time in my life where people knew their cashiers and genuinely cared about their lives.

Effectively, you still lived in a village. One neighborhood in Cincinnati functioned like a village for me in the early 2000's.Many neighborhoods in Barcelona function that way.

When I lived in New York, one of the most walkable cities on Earth, it was even worse: long lines and anonymous, interchangeable cashiers.

I'm not, as you imagine, touting walk-ability as a panacea. My point is that it's the societal structure that gives the humanity perceived by the Barcelonan commenter, not the checkout jobs per se.

well I think the benefit here is exposing local businesses that make common and specialty food products in a very neutral and open manner. If the products you buy can be looked up later then it might be a worthwhile partnership for some of these businesses.

The Amazon S team are about building great experiences... their tech is often more "Amazon Turk" than "AI". I trust there are many humans monitoring those cameras for this POC phase.... getting paid a similar hourly rate to a checkout person and giggling and chatting to each other but just not with the customer.

Third Spaces are important for building local communities, but why must they be supermarkets? Time being zero-sum game, the challenge/opportunity isn't how to preserve artifacts of accidental discourse, but to create new fora that enhance the tapestry of social life.

Phrased another way, inefficient services sector processes are imposed upon us, and the preferable alternative is "opt-in" (e.g. farmers markets, bars, or what have you).

You might also find interesting the pro-feminist discourse around automating "traditional" roles. Preserving long supermarket lines exacerbate social inequities you may not be so fond of.

Less work would be good if there wasn't capitalism. I already self-checkout in some supermarkets and it's alright.

If it where not for capitalism I'd rather self-checkout then have someone serve me and waste 1m of lifetime per visit to the supermarket.

This echoes the sentiments of Kurt Vonnegut in his short 2005 essay about being regarded as a Luddite:

https://muenglish111.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/vonnegut-3....

"How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different"

I respect your view and how you value human interaction, but I think you're only seeing a part of the picture.

Maybe I'll miss out on these interactions with these friendly people who sell me stuff but if it means I can get my groceries done faster so I can go meet my actual friends faster, there's a clear benefit to me.

And this is one of the many reasons why automation has always won in the long run.

This sounds lovely. I live near Boston, Massachusetts and have a distinctly different experience.

> I don't mind waiting in line for 3 minutes. Or 5. It's never longer than that, even if the cashier discusses the latest news with the old lady.

If I go to the Stop & Shop, I spend about fifteen minutes in line on average, and the cashier is consistently rude.

That being said, when I go to the more "local" stores, I have similar experiences to what you've described.

I agree with your sentiment. And I think it's true in a place where we expect growth --but in places like Japan or Italy with decreasing numbers of workers, this makes sense. So, in that world there is a place to automate these jobs away so that we don't need retirees or near retirees making sure you don't trip on a broken sidewalk or a car is reminded to wait for pedestrians as the cars cross a pedestrian way.

More of the world will enter into pop stabilization and decline and this is where this will fit in. Where it will not fit in is in places still experiencing pop growth and few prospects for rewarding jobs.

On the other hand I'm a bit Orwellian and I do see value in people doing these kids of small quotidian things which are the basis for human fabric since civ --that is, engaging in small transactions which reinforce human connectivity.

Other people don't share your values, nor should they, nor should you expect them to. I would rather have more humans working these jobs, but minimum wage laws prevent that.

There's no reason why your human interaction would suffer if you truly value it. With the money and time saved, perhaps people now go to the cafe and talk more often, or perhaps there's now a vendor outside the shop where you can get a conversation and a coffee. More than likely there will be a solution that i can't even think of.

I don't think your view is unpopular. Plenty of people here would agree with you but it's an overly romantic view of the world.

The problem isn't that Amazon is doing this and that this will drive out those mom&pop shops. The problem is that people will choose to go to Amazon and willingly destroy the mom&pop shops. The consumers are more culpable for the destruction of those mom&pop shops than Amazon. By placing the blame entirely on Amazon you are taking agency away from people which in my opinion sounds more wrong than a nice neighborhood losing its charm because of Amazon Go.

What people don't realize is that economic forces are completely within their control and it's their daily choices that add up to neighborhoods maintaining their charm or turning into Starbucks and Amazon Go automation factories. There is a sustainable way to drive innovation and it requires people to be cognizant of those daily choices. I don't think you can make people come to that realization by stopping or delaying progress.

No, economic forces are not completely in our control, not in any meaningful sense of control. The whole human agency thing is IMO mostly bullshit; faced with a modern economy, we have very little agency. Free will is a cool concept, but drop the prices in your store by 10% and everyone will come to you instead of your competitor - that's how trivial people as a group are to control. And companies are all about exploiting this.

So yeah, technically if you, and me, and everyone else agreed not to use Amazon Go and stick to our regular grocery routine, mom&pop shops would survive. But that doesn't take into account the fact that coordination is a super hard problem. One that's essentially impossible to solve for a group larger than a dozen people without creating some strong external incentive structures[0]. On the other hand, a company like Amazon is in a position to unilaterally change the incentive landscape. There's no consumer agency to talk about here, anymore than we talk about agency of sheep being herded.

[0] - that's also why every society, as it grows, invents structured forms of governance.

Advertising is amazing to behold. You slap together some low quality ad unit, dial in your target audience on Facebook, throw a couple hundred K into the coffers... and then watch the machine crank out LPVs and conversions.

The upfront effort needed to steer consumer behavior is shockingly minimal.

Except for the fact dropping your prices by 10% isn't trivial at all. Your claims are also empirically false. People routinely buy name brand products that are more expensive than alternatives.

All you're saying is "If your offer is far more attractive than anything else on the market, people will flock to your store and buy. What a bunch of fools acting like lemmings, Lol."

How are people supposed to react when faced with more interesting alternatives? NOT choose them to demonstrate their free will? That doesn't make much sense.

It is fine to be loyal. If you all will ignore Amazon Go then maybe it will not become popular. However if you are the minority, nothing will stop Amazon.

Yah, it's the benefit nobody asked for...or at least I didn't. Save me another minute off my grocery trip that's already very reasonable, and remove employment opportunities from people--"drudgery" or not--without replacing them.

Oh, that, and I get to be more self-absorbed and isolated from people in my community than I already am...not that I couldn't make a greater effort, but there is something to be said for a world where face to face interaction used to be expected and normal.

Popular or not, it is a legitimate view and worth discussing.

As I see it, there are two separable things in your view and separating them can be good for everyone.

One the one hand there are the people who facilitate your shopping experience. They help you with this task that is part of your daily life and they provide a social connection between you and your neighbors as you gather in a common space.

On the other hand they are the 'mechanism' behind moving money you've earned back toward the farms and factories that have produced the goods you use.

Both functions are important, and through history have been inextricably tied together and the basis for a rich history of the 'merchant' class. But it is important to note that the merchants are not necessarily aligned financially with you their customer. The merchant is in the position of choosing how much money to take out of the flow for themselves.

As a process, the merchant tries to get the lowest possible prices from the suppliers for goods and charge the highest possible price to the customers who are buying the goods. The cost sold must remain higher than the cost paid for the merchant to exist, and the merchant incurs costs while being a merchant (from venue maintenance to employee salaries to shoplifting and theft) and so the total cost of the goods has to remain below the price it is sold for in order for the merchant to remain solvent. The cost of goods sold must remain materially lower than the revenue they generate so that the merchant can accumulate some savings in order to offset unforseen expenses as well.

Now all of that mechanical operating of a grocery store has nothing to do with the social and service aspects of going to the store, sharing gossip with employees, and meeting and chatting with neighbors.

And now we have the set up to understand the actual problem and the cost of the actual solution.

You mention that there are 5 medium sized markets within a 5 minute walk. Why do you walk to one or not the other? I don't know for your case but in my case I will go to a market that I know is likely to have something I need, or one that has a good price on something I'm buying, or one that is near my travel route too and from the office because it is then not too far out of the way.

Historically, if one market has generally lower prices than nearby markets, people shop at it preferentially and the other markets suffer (sometimes failing completely). Using WalMart as an example, it has gone into regions and decimated the local retail outlets by offering lower overall prices in essentially unlimited quantities.

But the mechanism that allows Walmart or Target to do this is that the profits from other stores in the chain can cover the losses of individual stores. So a Walmart in a small town can still offer lower prices than the local grocers and merchants because they do not depend strictly on local profits to keep their store there open.

You could legislate that all shops had to be locally profitable rather than depending on outside of market help. However, that has the down side of specialty shops like hardware stores may become impossible to operate because they don't have enough regular customers to stay in business.

Then there is the local staff. For the merchant they are technically only necessary for collecting the money and protecting the shop from theft. But for the customers, as you mention, they are an important aspect.

We could imagine a scenario (we may not believe it to be possible but can imagine it) that through video surveillance and facial recognition that a computer can ascertain where every piece of stock that has been put into a store has been removed. Further, that surveillance would take care of charging the person acquiring the stock regardless of how surreptitiously they did so. This would be a big improvement in the shops economic model if everything they brought in was "sold" and charged for. Shops today have complained of losses from employee theft and shoplifting reaching 3.23% of sales at grocers[1] and that cuts into their profits significantly. Take that loss away and the grocer gets to keep more money from its revenue.

What to do with that extra money? The biggest job category at risk is cashier, but what if those people became roaming store customer assistance agents? For the same amount of pay they would now spend their days helping the customers find the groceries in the store, reaching high shelves for people who are short or disabled, restocking shelves from the larger stock in the storage area. Baggers would still be useful as people with many groceries would still want help going out to their car. Butchers and bakers, and counterstaff for lunch counters would still be needed.

But then here is the rub, the prices for the groceries wouldn't change at all. The cost savings of automated checkout are going into the salaries of former cashiers.

Now if at another Grocery they instead simply lower their prices. You the consumer get to decide if the former cashier has a place in the store or not. You decide by paying a price for your groceries that lets the merchant pay the former cashier to be there as service personnel.

My experience suggests that the bulk of the customers will go to the 'cheap' grocer and end up taking away the cashier's jobs because they are unwilling to pay a bit extra to support that person. People will rationalize it and blame other factors but the bottom line will be that by patronizing the less expensive store with no cashiers, they will cut off revenue to the store that had found alternate employment for their cashiers. And that shift will result in either the re-employed cashiers losing their jobs or that other store going out of business, or both.

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/06/24/shoplifting-worker-theft-cost-...

If the only reason those people have jobs is that we feel pity for them and don't want to automate their work, then what they have is not a job. It's just disguised welfare.

Why not just give them actual welfare?

But will we...give them actual welfare, training, some transition? Or are we going to bring in the automation and let nature take its course?

The parent comment men says they are in Barcelona, so maybe it won't be politically impossible to just give them welfare.

In the US, it might require some doublespeak to keep people from revolting at the "socialist" implications of paying people for not working.

I hate to see anyone's job get replaced but that sounds like my idea of Hell. I purposely wear headphones in stores because I don't want any employees talking to me. If I saw a cashier standing and talking to someone while I was waiting I would be pissed. If it was a regular occurance I would stop going to that store if at all possible.

This probably says a lot more about me than it does Amazon Go...

I think this comment fails to recognize that nearly everything any of us do results in less human labor. It might be obvious in the case of supermarket checkouts but I've personally eliminated more than a few office jobs.

I think there are plenty of ways humans can improve the world that doesn't involve jobs but it's going to be a rough transition. Where there might be fewer cashiers, I hope there will eventually be more educators, scientists, artists, and caretakers.

I work in central London. There's a supermarket below my old office (Sainsbury's opposite Holborn tube) which is around 1/3rd tills. There are around 30 in total, of which around 20 are self checkout. Nevertheless, at lunchtime and rush hour, you still have to queue.

This technology would be extremely valuable to a shop like that. More choice, more customers, better shopping experience. And employing staff for 3 short-lived peak periods must be expensive.

Something that I've learned is that technology will change everything. If we would've put excuses to all technology that is here today, we'd still be living 30 years in average. We are evolving, and so is the way of living and the definition of humanity.

Generations that are being born today won't see a supermarket as a social place at all, and those are the generations that will be accepting and shaping how humanity interacts, so you better adapt to their "normal" life.

FWIW, we have both automated and machine-based checkout at our grocery store, and I choose the machine-based when I can because its faster, and I usually have a wife and kids waiting at home.

So, sometimes the more automated option is also the option that involves more net 'humanity' for me (or at least more time for close/meaningful human relationships).

For me, this retail model would be attractive.

Separately, I agree that automation may be displacing people who need assistance as a result, but I think the best way to address that is to offer government assistance, not to avoid the valuable automation.

It seems you agree with Vonnegut:

[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

My real life experience - met Vonnegut as I was walking to work (Manhattan, NYC).

Me: "Sir, are you Mr.Vonnegut?".

KV: "Hmph". Me: "It is an honor to meet you. Fan of yours from when I was 16".

KV: "OK".

Still very fond of him and his works :)

Ideally, you will connect with your local community because everyone in your community has the financial freedom to pursue physical or creative activities and is not burdened with an 8 hour commitment to do nothing with themselves all day. I believe this is the future we should be working towards.

I agree with you, it's pleasant to go to the local market. You don't mind waiting on a line for 5 minutes, but do you mind paying more for the same product?

With automation, supermarket costs will reduce, otherwise there would be no reason to automate.

This also happens with books, buying online is not so pleasant as go to a store, but people do, for different reasons.

I feel the complete opposite. I always avoid cashiers I recognize. I hate that unnecessary relationship. I want to buy stuff without another human being involved.

I agree. I do some shopping online but by default stick to brick and mortar. I like keeping excuses to be out in the real world interacting with people, as the need to do so is vanishing.

Though appealing to Amazon, of all companies, about humanity where workers are involved is sadly, comically unfitting.

"I know all the people who work in these supermarkets."

Perhaps not. I worked at a supermarket as a starving student decades ago and the number of non-cashier employees dwarfed the number of cashiers. Most of the people in a store at any given time are stocking a department or cleaning or providing counter service or rather optimistically all three. We had more people employed at 3am stocking shelves and scrubbing floors than employed serving customers during 2nd shift...

There is an assumption in the comments, that might come from confusing urban convenience stores with supermarkets, that the only employee in a supermarket is the cashier.

You could make something like a quik-trip gas station/convenience store almost staff-less, but an actual supermarket is crawling with non-cash-handling employees.

Here is what I think you might be missing.

You point out that there are a good number of employees in your local stores who have a productive job which they enjoy and from which they get personal meaning. You fear losing all of that if we introduce fully automated stores.

Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose we already HAD fully automated stores, but we also had this same group of 60 people who (in the actual world) work in those 5 supermarkets. What would we invent for them to do which would pay them, give them something productive to do which they enjoyed and from which they could get personal meaning? Scanning groceries for 8 hours a day just wouldn't be my first pick to address this problem.

So I guess what I am trying to get at is that I agree with your sense that there IS a possible problem with eliminating the need for these jobs -- but I don't think it's a problem of "shops need to have people". I think it is a problem of "the benefits of improved automation need to be more widely shared". If all of the benefits go to a few people who happen to own Amazon stock, then what's to happen to the 60 folks in your neighborhood?

Personally, I'm in favor of some sort of universal basic income along with a change in our society to create socially acceptable niches for people to do small, simple projects -- but I certainly don't know all the answers.

Playing devil's advocate here, what if those people didn't have to work these menial jobs and instead could just do art or hang out playing games with each other all day? It's the social structure that says you need to work to survive, that while it's served us really well, will lead to a lot of hardship when the labor of people is not worth what they need to survive.

To offer a counter point. In the three cities I've lived in in the US this is not the case. The vast majority of people do not know anyone that works at their local grocery store.

From my perspective it's annoying. I need to go in to a crowded market get all my stuff. Once I've done that I either need to wait in line for an automatic check out station (because there are not enough), or wait in line for a cashier which takes forever especially if someone decides to pay with cash.

For me this potentially gets me out of the store faster so I can do things I actually want to do. I honestly wish I did know the people but that's not really how it works and so this is exciting for me

'Harmful' might be a more appropriate description than 'useless'. Losing the last of tiny interactions throws is deeper and deeper into filter bubbles and echo chambers.

But I am guilty of sacrificing them for convenience myself, e.g. I tend to avoid the cheese counter at the supermarket in favor of prepackaged stuff from self-serve shelves. Removing final checkout is just more of the same.

At least Amazon seem to be trying to the robomarket with a permanent all-seeing-AI installation instead of the not too unrecent consensus prediction of RFID on every single bar of gum and on every piece of fruit. Much better to talk about social implications than about technicalities in RFID surveillance.

I'm sure some old-timers miss chatting up the switchboard operators between phone calls as well, but we're not going back to switchboards anytime soon.

"These people like their jobs"

I doubt that sentiment would be shared by most cashiers at Walmart and other retail chains.

Here's a curve showing how the proportion of the working force employed in agriculture has dropped from 70% to around 2% over 175 years [1]. So in other words, it went from almost everyone working in agriculture, to almost no one working in agriculture. This has happ

So how is this possible? It's possible because the very reason that fewer people work in agriculture is because each human is more productive, resulting in cheaper goods on the shelves, because each salary can produce more of the same good. In other words: when an employee becomes more productive, a company can sell its product at a lower price, and earn more money. It can use this money to hire more employees, to produce more goods, rather than result in a layoff. In a free-ish market (with healthy competition), competitors will force incumbents to lower their prices, in search for profits.

This has been seen countless times, in many different areas of industry (from pantyhose to, TVs to phones, cars etc.). All of these products have become significantly cheaper (relative to median income) over the past decades, and this has resulted in more people buying them, such that layoffs have become unnecessary because the increase in productivity is offset by an increase in demand.

So, it's relatively simple. 1) If the decrease in price does not cause an increase in demand, employees will have to be laid off. 2) If it causes an increase in demand, then the company can afford to hire, perhaps dramatically more. So, for example, if shoppers buy 5% more items because prices are reduced by 5% (because of automatic checkout), then the cashiers can work at the packaging facility, or the farm, or in transportation, needed to make 5% more goods available to consumers.

[1] https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/assets/4565243/Ag_workforce.png

They will most certainly be tracking a lot more than just you picking up your item. The data they collect about shopping behavior will be interesting.

Like, how long I hesitated before I picked up something, what I had already in my "cart" at the time, what deals I looked at but passed on, etc.

Insurance companies will love it the most.

explain

So you eat lot's of unhealthy stuff?

While we are covering your high blood pressure medication?

Well, I guess we'll just increase your rates then...

That's no change. Between customer loyalty cards and the easy ability to tie purchases to credit cards, if they wanted to do that they already could.

I'm not sure it buys them anything, though. That's a very noisy signal against the loud-and-clear signal of what the measurements say when you come in to the doctor. Who cares what your shopping habits say when you come in with high blood pressure and morbid obesity, or good blood pressure and normal weight?

The change is specifically in in-store behavior. And even that's more because Amazon has the money and skillset to fund the software; the supermarkets already have the data in the sense that they have the video streams, they just don't have the money to fund people running beyond-cutting-edge vision research on it to get that level of analysis.

Of course they would have the money, but things work fine for them right now.

And they are not technology companies.

I agree with you, a lot of that data would already be available. The question is how much more willing Amazon would be to sell the data, compared to supermarket chains. Probably it's not difference.

I was just extrapolating what the OP meant.

I personally would really love shopping like that.

If I knew my loyalty card was being used for insurance, I'd have two: one for healthy stuff linked to my real name, and another for everything else (linked to a fake name).

I doubt Amazon is in the business of selling your data to insurance companies.

Only because its not profitable yet? Or do you have some other reason?

Why wouldn't they, have they demonstrated some level of ethics or concern for personal privacy?

Because it's literally line 1 of their privacy policy about sharing user data.

>Information about our customers is an important part of our business, and we are not in the business of selling it to others.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

That may be true today but in future, all they need to do is notify you that there has been a change in their privacy policy to permit them to share it with third-parties.

Maybe, but does it pass the test of "Would it make sense?". Ok sure Amazon could make a few bucks by selling the data to health insurance companies but does it make sense for Amazon to do that? Amazon customers find out, get mad and then stop buying stuff on Amazon. Health insurance companies know their customers buy junk food. There's tons of data about buying habits and population stats of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. Their premiums already incorporate all this. Knowing the buying habits of their customers on Amazon isn't going to be of much value to them.

Amazon has done several manners of shady things. Remember when kept raising prices on products people bought often to assess what individuals would pay? Or how about the way they treat their workforce?

Amazon, and many other companies, do plenty of things that don't "make sense".

Sure they don't sell it, just like Google and FB don't sell their data to advertisers. They package it in a way where they can auction a derived data set (often via advertising) or charge subscription fees to access some version of it.

They don't have to give up the core data asset to be useful to insurance companies in this case. They just have to do something like give people a health score or something similar.

They always try to get me to punch in my loyalty card when buying (only) tobacco even though you don't get points on the purchase. It's made me wonder what they're doing with that data, and selling it to insurance companies came to mind.

You don't need a loyalty number to track purchases made on the same debit/credit card numbers (though it may improve it slightly).

just use cash for tobacco.

I generally retire loyalty cards after a few months and ask for a new one next time I checkout. I also never fill in the phone number or other information.

But still I generally pay with cc/debit cards so the banks still know where, not necessarily what, but how much I spent.

What benefit is there in retiring loyalty cards? Creating noise to deflect data collection? Optimizing for returns on some financial aspect?

As far as I know supermarkets are already able to track customers paths using their smarthphones thanks to your WIFI announcement of known networks.

More interesting are the shopping patterns like purchase frequency, the time periods between them, the kinds of flavors you like and other products you've not considered. Less insidious. More along streamlining your purchase process and identifying similar behaviors and tastes. Much of which any store with a rewards program should already know.

I did some contracting for a large retailer many years ago, back then we did some experiments embedding rfid in shopping carts so we could collect data. We learned A LOT from that (don't know if we did it, but we threw around the idea of different UPC codes on candy in the front vs candy in the back during holloween). I wouldn't be surprised if this is one more tool for Amazon to dominate the data collection game.

Combo it up with augmented reality glasses to highlight nearby items that combo well with what you just purchased. Pick a recipe and it can guide you to the ingredients you need. Lots of potential for upselling =) I don't even think it's all bad.

Welcome to the Skinner Box.

If you take a slice of cake, hold it for 12 second, frown, put it back, spin clockwise three times and buy a lowfat plain yogurt, you will get a discount for sugar-free pastry on your next visit... if you did it just right.

Oh no. There are a whole group of people who will learn to get really good at this thanks to computer games...

Hopefully the next generation of shopping carts have dashcams on them?

I definitely can see that they will collect more. I imagine it would be similar to what they currently do online but now applying it to a physical store.

This strikes me as yet another over-engineered workaround for a problem with society. In Japan, I rarely wait in line at a grocery store or convenience store. If I do, it's a short wait, and my interactions with the staff often brighten my day a little bit.

Why is Japan different? For one thing, they use a checkout system that is designed to move lines quickly. Two employees can work concurrently, one ringing up a customer and the other handling money exchange with another customer. Customers do their own bagging in a seperate area. The POS system takes cash in and spits out the correct change, and also handles IC cards, credit cards, Apple Pay, etc seamlessly and usually without requiring anything more than a PIN at most. And of course, customers can prepare exact change or get their cards out and place it on the tray while the cashier is still ringing them up. And the final, most important element is the people--polite, attentive, careful, and professional. Cashiers are trained to call out every item and price, and offer extras such as ice packs for cold items, dry ice for ice cream, utensils for ready to eat items, and so on. A quick, efficient, pleasant interaction that ends with a bow and a gracious thank you goes a long way toward encouraging everyone to treat each other well. And, by the way, the money that would be sunk into Amazon's infrastructure and inevitable support services goes to keeping people in jobs.

I pay with a contactless card when I do my shopping, so the money transaction takes about a second. It's still too slow, because you have to put your stuff in the bag/backpack etc. (admittedly, this is the shop's fault - they don't have the separator so people can load stuff while the next person is being ringed up).

But in most countries, it's not that the shops can't make it faster, it's that they don't want to. They make the biggest margins on the impulse buy merchandise along the queue and people won't stop going there just because they have to wait 3 minutes.

>And of course, customers can prepare exact change or get their cards out and place it on the tray while the cashier is still ringing them up.

Good luck putting your card on the tray in poorer countries :D :D, good way to get it stolen.

>And, by the way, the money that would be sunk into Amazon's infrastructure and inevitable support services goes to keeping people in jobs.

Keeping people in jobs is of dubious value, especially since Amazon's infrastructure would create jobs too, it's not just money disappearing and things materializing out of thin air.

Keeping people in jobs is absolutely not of dubious value. And if you think Amazon Go is designed to create new jobs, I think you're in for a serious disappointment. Working at a grocery like Aeon is probably a legit full-time career for a lot of single mothers, elderly, and others who need jobs that don't require advanced degrees.

I'm going to steal something I saw in my social media feed a while ago: "I'd like people to move away from the notion that people need to be doing boring, tedious things in exchange for money".

And I can guarantee that there are zero businesses designed to create jobs. Businesses are designed to create value, jobs are a byproduct.

There are going to be fewer and fewer jobs in the future, and the sooner societies adjusts, the better. Keeping people in unsustainable jobs will only slow this transformation.

I'm biased, by the way, because I'm from a post-communist country - we've had the "jobs for everyone" thing, and it wasn't working very well.

I agree with you about jobs for the sake of keeping people busy. However, one of the great lessons I am learning in Japan is that human beings are capable of exceeding automation, as long as those human beings are participating in a healthy social environment. In the West, we often set low expectations for people because we cater to the lowest common denominator and we tolerate socially regressive behaviors. The dark side of Japanese society is a willingness to cut bait on people who aren't team players and a vulnerability when leadership isn't up to the task. On the other hand, there is a tremendous distribution of skills and the work ethic is astonishing to my American eyes. People unironically aim for perfection in even the most menial tasks--something that I think is the key to personal satisfaction and has a huge benefit to the society at large.

Technology aside, shoppers are going to feel so weird doing this at the beginning.

There's already social anxiety when people pay for things and walk past a security guard, or a security barrier. Whether it's an airport, or a clothes store, or a ticket barrier, there's always a nervousness about being called out.

It's bad enough in the Apple Store where you can pay and walk out, this will take some real getting used to.

I imagine I'd get over it pretty quickly, especially since waiting in line for the checkout is so dreadful. I really, really hate it.

think youre overestimating how "challenging" this will be for 99% of people

What they should feel weird about is the battery of security cameras that will watch your every move.

Why? You're already recorded pretty heavily in every chain store you go into for loss prevention.

Right, but it's not typically tied directly to your online account (as far as I know!)

Retailers are definitely pushing in that direction with things like Bluetooth LE beacons that talk to your phone. Plus store loyalty cards and the like, which have been around for decades. But those schemes have mostly been opt-out, apart from those weird stores that require membership cards.

I just don't really see how associating it with an online account makes it much better or worse than the normal recording that'd done in stores everyday.

Really? I may be on CCTV in every store I go into right now, but (as far as I know!) they don't look me up on Facebook etc, log which shelves I'm browsing, and track me across multiple stores.

Maybe I'm underestimating what other companies are already doing, but it seems like Amazon is pushing the envelope here.

I guess governments are increasingly doing this kind of thing too, and that's also very troubling, but the silver lining is that at least they aren't doing it so they can bombard me with targeted ads.

I think the challenging part will be when you get used to it and then start to do it like that in any other shop accidentally ;)

I'd worry a little about shitty reception on my phone meaning I'm actually shoplifting without realizing it.

Well, there is always a mens-rea argument. If Amazon wants to offer this type of store and the technology fails to pick something up you can't really be faulted for not paying for it (without noticing).

It doesn't look like the phone is actually required for anything after the check in and really the only hard reason to want a phone there is to have a convenient link and another data point to help track people through the store. They could do the same tracking with cameras to associate you and the items you've pulled off the shelf. Add in RFID in the checkout lanes and you've got a pretty easy system that accommodates dying phones.

I don't know why but I think the turn-styles that identify customers as they enter will help alleviate some of these concerns. Additionally I think if they distributed Amazon Go branded shopping bags in the store it would also help.

I've used the Apple Store feature to buy a charger and iPhone case in the past. I admit it did feel strange as I waltzed out the front door past the genius bar guys just holding an item in my hands. If I had a bag I could put the item into (I imagine I could've asked a worker for one) then I would probably just look like every customer who paid at the till.

This leads me to think that the reason I felt weird is because I was the only one walking out of the store (to my knowledge) that paid in this manner. If I know everyone is doing it, again my mind would probably be at ease.

I have heard people talk about this as becoming a race issue, and I agree. This is basically an iteration of self-checkout, and if that has issues with people being profiled at the store exit (which it does) then this will too.

Just wait for dynamic pricing!

Here's an ad from IBM circa 2006 predicting(?) this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eob532iEpqk

Crazy to think we're actually here now. And even sans-RFID.

"Sensor fusion" could very well imply that RFID could be within the picture.

Or even just a strain gauge weight detection on the shelf combined with computer vision.

Came here to post this, as I immediately thought of IBM's ad while I was reading Amazon's bumf. I think I would trust IBM's RFID tags vastly more than Amazon's visual tracking.

It's actually from the 90s [1]. So much so that I thought it was one of the AT&T "You Will" commercials [2].

[1] http://digest.dx3canada.com/2015/05/12/retrofuture-ibms-1999...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2EgfkhC1eo

Glad to know I wasn't alone in thinking it was an AT&T one...that's what I searched for first. Those were the 80s though, right?

1993. I had to look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will

And David Fincher? Wow. No idea.

I saw a fully working demo of this at IBM in 2010. It was fully RFID, plus E-Ink pricing labels on shelves so that prices/offers could be updated remotely.

I saw an article on the BBC this week, strange timing but maybe someone knew about the Amazon announcement: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38174011

I've been expecting that for years. RFID tags capable of being read without collisions were expensive back then and needed a battery. There were problems with reading many tags at once. Those problems have apparently been solved.[1]

I suspect that Amazon has RFID tags on everything in addition to the vision systems. There are existing backup vision systems for retail checkouts, such as LaneHawk. Most of the components for this already exist. Now it's here.

[1] http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/8475.pdf

Here's my speculation on the technology behind it:

Tracking. A lot of tracking.

You don't need deep learning and car sensor technology to do simple rfid tag pick up/drop offs to detect what you have in your cart.

No, this technology probably fully tracking your every movement in the store. It may use rfid tags to detect what you have, but that is not the main tech.

When you walk in and scan your phone, a camera array will scan you to create a footprint on who you are and link it to your ID. Then your every movement will be tracked by various cameras throughout the store.

You walked 3 steps, took a step back and looked at the advertising on the right? We recorded it.

You went to the cereal aisle first? Picked up a box of cereal and then put it back in favor of another one? Yup, we recorded it too.

If this is indeed the case, then the correctness of what is in your shopping cart is going to be very, very high and there will be no need for an honor system, randomized checks, or other mechanisms to prevent inaccuracies.

Shoplifters will probably get away with the first shoplifting but will probably get profiled immediately and unable to do it multiple times.

Here's my rough sketch on how this could work:

a) You track every person from multiple camera angles, it should be "relatively easy" to track the position of every customer at all times. I'm not sure if it can handle people in very close proximity (or e.g. after hugging in store) - maybe Amazon actually uses facial recognition to resolve the identities afterwards

b) Only one person can enter the gate at once, and it's easy to authenticate the person at the starting point

c) Leaving is also a one-way gate, and at that point the system can simply mark the shopping as complete and mail the receipt

d) The shelves are specially designed and can sense (maybe with RFIDs) when an item is removed from the shelf, and match that with the person closest to the item. A possible difficulty is handling people who take an item from the back of the shelf (e.g. to get a fresh item).

for d) it could be a combination of rfid, closeness, and cameras detecting who grabbed it.

Not many comments about privacy. This is how I see it: You are identified when you enter the shop and amazon knows exactly the products you buy.

If you have the choice to buy or not to buy at the shop, that's fine, it is your decision. But let's imagine that in the not so far future, all shops in your neighborhood are like this. No way to go shopping whithout given exact trace of you, your location, the stuff you buy, the time you buy, the amount of food etc.

We all know that too much data is not good for us (yes, I am looking at you, my government).

While I like the idea of not standing in a line and wait, I really wish that these shops offer a prepaid anonymous card for those who don't want to be totally tracked.

I think the privacy implications for a shopper at Amazon Go are the same as a shopper who shops at Tesco with a credit card. The company can use your credit card to track exactly what you buy already and many people seem to be happy with that (even going so far as to sign up for loyalty cards).

But it should be possible to a) use a prepaid credit card or b) pay with good old cash. That way it is still possible to buy without getting tracked (while all the others that don't care use the loyalty card).

I agree it should be possible but unfortunately the technology doesn't allow it. In this case I would give the analogy of online vs offline shopping. Ideally we would be able to buy goods on amazon.com with cash (or perhaps bitcoin) but the technology doesn't make this feasible.

don't know about tesco, but I know about Costco. You need to provide your membership card every time you buy. So Costco definitely knows your complete shopping history.

Also any online shop (Amazon included) has a complete history of everything you've ever bought.

For brick&mortar shops you would be a fool to assume they don't mine your shopping history based on your credit card (or some sort of hash that's computed from your CC#).

Think of the opportunity: someone can build a "privacy" store where you can buy anything without being traced.

I can imagine this being made illegal when mass physical shop tracking becomes the norm (more than it already is).

There are a lot of social issues that a system like this might entail, in addition to privacy:

1. Not everyone has a smartphone.

2. Not everyone has an electronic account with which to pay (or for practical reasons, they can't use it frequently).

And the people that fall into those categories aren't just fringe. Parents give dollar bills to their kids & send them to the store to fetch food. People without established credit might have to use cash for purchases, etc.

Can't people with no credit open a checking account and get a debit card? I was never askef for a credit score when opening one of those.

Probably - I don't know the procedure. I do know most people consider debit to be a less secure (for the consumer) form of payment than credit or cash though.

What happens when my phone battery runs out while shopping in the store?

What happens if I don't replace an item in the exact same place I picked it up? I'm charged for it I assume.

How do you purchase produce or vegetables, all these thing need to be packaged individually I assume. So much for concern for the environment...

Is the occasional line in a store really worth having your every movement tracked by Amazon and your image taken throughout your time at this store? Sounds like a store straight out of 1984.

Are you poor or without "a supported smartphone"? Forget about it.

Amazon is a company that tries new things and that's good, but here we have yet another example of tech nerds "solving" a problem that doesn't exist.

What if they've solved every one of these problems? Would you like this technology then?

What does it take for you to be on board? Would you ever be on board, or would you keep coming up with problems you think you have with this?

"Phones don't die"

You're probably right.

"Weight removed from vegetable bin, vegetables are $x/lb"

This already happens at... most stores.

I think Bluetooth enrollment would be good enough or they'll send you a barcode on a PVC card stock maybe even with RFID, but sure poor people can't shop at the nice grocery store, that's always been true right?

I sort of agree, but I also think there is a real market for it. Blah blah capitalism blah. "The market will show whether the problem was real." I'm pretty sure it's going to work out and be profitable for Amazon like always.

> What happens when my phone battery runs out while shopping in the store?

From the look of the video the phone isn't required for checkout. The flow looks like you scan in then camera's and other sensors track you through the store then you just walk out and the items are scanned and totaled.

> What happens if I don't replace an item in the exact same place I picked it up? I'm charged for it I assume.

Then just put stuff back where you got it. You shouldn't just leave items randomly strewn throughout the store already.

> How do you purchase produce or vegetables, all these thing need to be packaged individually I assume. So much for concern for the environment...

It's not a full grocery store, it looks like it's all packaged foods and fresh daily kind of prepared foods.

> Are your poor or without "a supported smartphone"? Forget about it.

Judging from the video, any Android or iOS device should be able to function, all it needs to do is display a QR code and a receipt no RFID or even a decent camera.

> Amazon is a company that tries new things and that's good, but here we have yet another example of tech nerds "solving" a problem that doesn't exist.

Why does everything have the address some deep underlying problem. Some things just make life a little easier or more convenient and that's ok.

> Are you poor or without "a supported smartphone"? Forget about it.

The better question is if Amazon will "trust" or be able to secure areas that are traditionally food desserts so that these poor people will be able to have better and cheaper food access.

How has nobody mentioned the worry that you'll get overcharged? I'm sure computer vision isn't perfect, however close it may be, and once you've left the store (presumably when you'd check your receipt) there's no way to prove you didn't take whatever you were charged for. I'd be pretty worried about accidentally "buying" something I didn't actually take, even if that's statistically unlikely. (Yeah, I know, it doesn't make sense to worry about a 1 in 10,000 event, but people aren't rational.)

Or, if they decide to side with the consumer and give you your money back, then that opens them up to theft - go in, buy stuff, "oh I didn't buy $expensive_item!", get money.

I would go further and say that static pricing will not be exclusive. No prices on the shelves but prices as you scan. Person 1 purchasing at 8am Tuesday will not pay same as person 2 Friday at 534pm.

I doubt it. I don't think many people would go for it if there are no marked prices. Not to mention that's probably illegal in many jurisdictions.

The whole thing is driven by camera input. If they have a reason to be suspicious, they can just rewind the tape.

They will just refund you...they do that all the time with online shopping

Thats the same problem current grocery stores today have though. As the buyer, it's currently my job to make sure I'm not overcharged

Your periodic reminder that 'retail salesperson' is the most common job in America (~4.5 million).

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-10-m...

I always thought some type of driver was more common...

It's just a starter job, people shouldn't rely on them as a career, it's their fault, bootstraps, etc. etc.

> people shouldn't rely on them as a career

Nobody thinks of that as a career, but 4.5 million people seem to rely on it for income nonetheless.

For the large percentage of Americans who don't have a degree or maybe not even a high school diploma, there is no such thing as a 'starter job'- there's just 'a job'. Heck, for a growing proportion of the population the degree doesn't even help.

We in the tech industry would be wise to remember that we live in an incredibly privileged bubble where careers are real things, where it's easy to find new opportunities.

Actually, there are starter jobs for folks without degrees or even a high school diploma. People gain experience and there are plenty of companies that don't hire via a HR checklist. Plenty of people work their way up from cashier to management.

The big danger is external factors that remove those first rungs of work that allow people to climb up.

During college, I worked for about 6 or 7 months in a local supermarket. Seventeen years later, some of my former coworkers are still there.

How do people think it matters who's fault it is?

You can call them lazy or stupid but they still exist and a lot of them won't get a new job (again, doesn't matter if they can't or just don't want to find one).

This isn't a solution. It doesn't matter who's "fault" it is. If 4.5M people lose their jobs very quickly, we're going to have a big freaking problem on our hands.

Retail, fast food, stock pickers, truck drivers, etc.. etc.. Sure you could say "don't make menial jobs your career" all you want, but this is still going to be a huge freaking issue sooner than later.

This is from just last week: https://www.ft.com/content/dec677c0-b7e6-11e6-ba85-95d1533d9...

We should go bravely into the future, and solve problems as they arise. Maybe this is the catalyst for basic income?

Exactly. All-in-the-game economics can get flipped around really quick I think. 1. Let's automate everything right now, we have the technology. 2. Millions of workers displaced. 3. Social upheaval?

I think the mistaken comparison people make, is that when farmers and such lost jobs in the industrial revolution, new opportunities that didn't require total re-education were popping up as fast as old ones disappeared...this is not the case today. The shrinking range of opportunities are to be found in increasingly exclusive, high-skill white collar positions. People are being left behind, and the fuck-you-I-got-my-STEM degree crowd, their attitude isn't making anything better.

"This won't eliminate retail clerks, it will just make their lives easier so they can focus on other tasks"

don't attempt sarcasm on this site. people take things literally.

Supplemental reminder that tech exists largely to eliminate jobs. Whoops, that was a typo- I meant to write "increase productivity".

those two things are directly related. People need to stop being blind about the fact that yes, there will be mass unemployment soon.

"If you are Amazon, you have to acknowledge that you are slowly corroding the retail sector, which employs many (~4.5 million) people in this country."

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/silicon-valley-ha...

In 1800's - "If you are a farm equipment manufacturer, you have to acknowledge that you are slowly corroding the farming sector, which employs most people in the country."

Even if they "acknowledge" it, so what? It's not their job to create extra jobs to replace the ones that they've automated out of existence. It's never been the jobs of the companies creating disruptive technology, like farm equipment or cars or computers, to do this.

It wasn't Ford's job to find new jobs for everyone who had a horse-related career; same deal here.

and income inequality has skyrocketed since then.

I agree with you that income inequality is a big problem, and it is a major cause of social discord, but to be fair, quality of life increased significantly across all percentiles since then.

e.g. which society is better to live in:

    (low inequality, less wealth)
    10th percentile average wealth: 100
    99th percentile average wealth: 1000
 
    (high inequality, more wealth)
    10th percentile average wealth: 1000
    99th percentile average wealth: 1000000

Of course this is an oversimplification, but you get the idea: income inequality is not the only important factor.

You have to consider purchasing power, not how much moneys you have in your wallet.

If the majority of people get 10x the money they used to, they're not getting 10x the purchasing power, because everyone needs a higher salary.

This is also an oversimplification. You can read more about the phenomenon here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

Agreed. I intentionally didn't use units of my wealth numbers to indicate some "absolute" measure or wealth.

10x more food, land, or whatever.

Actually income inequality was highest in agricultural times (higher than today), and hit its bottom in 60s or 70s for the US/UK, well after industrialization. Life expectancy and health inequality is near all-time lows right now. Information/education inequality is also at all-time lows, with more people in college than ever, and near universal access to the internet. Entertainment inequality is at all time lows.

Just wanted to note that we're really not doing too badly with advancing technology. And if you measure actual poverty as compared to relative poverty, which makes more sense to me, we are doing even better. Have a nice day.

> Just wanted to note that we're really not doing too badly with advancing technology

Tell that to all the people who are doing badly? Jesus, it's like people look at some statistics that say the world is ok, and then continue in their totally ignorant life. The world is literally full of people who say it's not good enough.

How are you measuring that? If we're talking about the US, then housing, healthcare, and education are the three largest areas I've seen us regress in -- areas where inequality is at all-time highs.

Technology is advancing, and we're seeing lots of benefits from that -- I think everyone would agree. But advances in technology don't inherently translate into better quality of life. A $500 4K TV screen is amazing, but doesn't make up for the fact that a basic 2-bed apartment now costs $25,000/year. A $650 iPhone super-computer-in-your-pocket is fantastic, but doesn't make up for the fact that a 4-year degree now routinely runs $60,000 or higher.

Extending debt to cover up societies inequality doesn't actually solve inequality, it just hides from view how big of a problem the inequality has become.

Oookaaayyy… but then you don't get to complain when those people vote Trump into office.

Sure I do.

1. Automation wasn't a major political issue behind Trump's success.

2. I can still think someone is wrong even if they hold the majority opinion (although in this case it was a minority opinion since Trump lost the popular vote).

3. I do think something should be done to help people who lose their jobs due to automation. I just think that's the government's domain, not that of private companies.

And this is the definition of a Straw Man argument to the implication "we need to care about the people affected by innovation".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

There are 3.5 million truckers in America. I welcome self-driving trucks, however.

You welcome them how soon? If all those workers were displaced tomorrow, is that good?

Because automation is an instantaneous occurrence that we have to talk about if an industry vanishes overnight?

Living in New York and nearly being run down by "professional" drivers daily... tomorrow sounds good. Taxis too, please.

Oooh, will that stop the incessant and generally illegal HONKHONKHONKHOOOOONK too? Yes please!

NYC is a very long way away from self driving cars. The truck drivers that will be replaced are those that drive cross country via highways.

So it seems that most people assume that this kind of shop is a replacement to major grocery stores. I dont think that this is what their initial customer base is going to be. I see this more inline with "Fresh & Easy" kind of markets where on the go customers can just stop by for a quick bite or a quick pick up of resources like a 7/11 or something similar. I can see that they may want to expand to supermarkets but I think this is more addressing the quick easy supermarket market and focusing on easy pickups rather then full fledged supermarkets for all grocery needs. I may have missed something but that would be the most logical and successful way for Amazon to introduce this technology.

What happens when you don't have enough money available to Amazon to cover all the things you grabbed? Do they give you a window to return items before banning you from the store and/or notifying police?

Wonddered the same thing. Also what if you dont want your purchases to end up in the cloud. Can you still pay with cash?

And does paying with cash matter in a store using advanced image recognition? Or do they also use the image recognition to build a profile of the purchaser?

if you don't want your purchases to end up in the cloud, probably don't shop at amazon.

Considering there are no cashiers or checkout counters, cash seems like a no-go.

I'd be interested to see if they have manual-fallback in case "the system is down"

I'm assuming your Amazon Go account is tied to a credit card. In which case, it's not Amazon's problem. They got their money - you now owe your credit card company.

But that card could be maxed out.

In some cases it is still possible to go over a card limit through the way transaction processing works. For instance, when you go to a restaurant and pay in the US they will run the card for the amount of the bill (which may not decline because you have enough $), but you might add a tip on the receipt. The tip will be added to the final charge and taken from your account, potentially making you over the limit. This is usually never stopped but might cause you fees and banking headaches. They may implement a similar procedure like gas stations usually do, by pre-authorizing a fixed dollar amount such as $50 or $100 and sending through the real value to collect after.

And if your credit card company declines the charges when Amazon attempts to bill them? Then they're out inventory and don't have any compensation. Then it becomes their problem.

Maybe they ping the card with a $1 charge every so often to ensure it's at least not cancelled. It could be maxed out in which case they'll likely just give you a negative balance and a time period to pay it. If you don't they can just sell it collections and potentially ban you from the store (it looks like you need to scan your phone to get into the store).

They could do like gas stations and charge a hold just whenever you enter the store then finalize the transaction whenever you leave. That'd solve the problem and if it was going to fail you'd just never be able to enter the store and you'd just see a warning message about your CC not being valid.

I'm thinking that the easiest/lowest-cost strategy on Amazon's part might be to allow your account to go into the red, and then blacklist you from store access until the debt is satisfied. In most cases this money can be easily recouped later, and they can probably get away with charging an "overdraft fee" of sorts. This would be coupled with clearly stated limits on dollar amount and duration of delinquency before the matter is escalated.

What happens if you trash a hotel room?

They charge the credit card you gave them when you checked in.

What happens if somebody compromises Amazon accounts by the hundreds and hires a shoplifting crew to clean out that store everyday, selling the goods for 1/2 price on the black market.

Retail organized theft is already a major problem here and this is with stores that have F/T security. There is no shortage of drug addicts willing to jack items for $0.10 per $1 retail value, the goods are then exported and sold in China for things like toothpaste, babyfood, ect.

This is a strategy you could only accomplish a single time. The losses would be on the order of $10,000 for food only currently on display. you probably wouldnt be able to sell your stock before it expired. and the whole thing would be recorded on camera.

not to mention you'd be arrested for hacking

I assume they will sell non perishable items at some point when this becomes public. I bet there will be security at the doors verifying purchases after the first couple of weeks:

http://www.inews880.com/syn/112/172511/mom-and-pop-bust-reco...

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/11/17/bc-man-arrest...

There's a couple things to prevent this, some really simple and effective. If you've visited the store before they'll have a lot of pictures of your face to compare anyone checking in with your account with. An additional security check when a new phone is added to Amazon Go. Also when an amazon account is used with Go it'll also include a lot of information about the phone it's being used with so our hypothetical group would have to be able to get a large number of anonymous phones or any half decent fraud detection setup would recognize those phones since most other phones will be associated with a single account ever.

What do you do with your children? What about your non-Amazon co workers who came out with you to get lunch? Do they stand on the sidewalk while you shop? Do you swipe them in? Do they get swiped in as guests (who then shoplift cupcakes?)

Don't get me wrong -- this is exciting and impressive -- but needing to swipe in to enter a store is, I think, a very significant change to how we think of stores as public places.

> but needing to swipe in to enter a store is, I think, a very significant change to how we think of stores as public places.

CostCo rule #6: Your membership card must be shown on entering the warehouse and at the tills.

I don't think it's really that much of a change, this is already par for the course when it comes to bulk-purchase stores.

Another one of CostCo's rules:

> Parents are responsible for their children. They must be kept with them at all times.

And one last one:

> Members will be required to purchase any packages opened or damaged by them or their guests.

These are all pretty ubiquitous rules for this kind of store and I can't imagine people will really notice the difference. You'll use your card to swipe in you and your guests, when you leave as a group, your card will be charged.

If you come with someone who also wants to buy things, you jut enter one after the other instead of as a group.

it's unclear how the act of purchasing a product works -- it might require the buyers phone to be near the item when it leaves the shelf

It's not spelled out but it doesn't seem like it'll be a requirement. The only additional thing they could get from the phone without really limiting the number of supported devices is a rough location and that information can be replaced with tracking customers through security cameras.

That's a good point -- but in general, CostCo or any similar discount club I've been to doesn't really prevent physical access -- there's no turnstile. (Though my experience is limited - I'm not a member - so I typically am with friends or family.)

The only difference is CostCo employs a "turnstile", whereas Amazon will build one.

One person in a group must have a CostCo card. The turnstile in the video suggests that all people in a group must have the Amazon Go app running.

I'm not installing Amazon Go on devices for each my children, so does Amazon Go let them in, or not?

When I started reading the description, I thought: "someone finally delivered on that RFID pitch of just walking out of the store". Was surprised that it's actually computer vision.

Same. I remember predictions of RFID-based shopping becoming the norm 10 years ago, but it never happened. Does anyone know why the tech didn't pan out that way?

RFID tags are still to expensive in the supermarket context. The margins are usually razor thin (at least in Germany) and the products are quite cheap. Even when buying RFID tags in bulk they are too expensive.

Disclaimer: I am more or less pulling this numbers out of thin air.

Assume that having a single cashier costs $15 per hour. Assume that an RFID tag costs $0.05. Assume that in average a cashier handles 1 item for only 5 seconds (including payment).

That means that a cashier can handle 720 items per hour, and that costs the supermarket $15. Having RFID tags for 720 items would cost $36. That's still a ~$20 dollar difference, which still amounts to ~$0.028 per item.

I would be willing to pay that if that means i can forgo the checkout lines.

That sounds about right. Depending on the store, though, the cashier will handle a lot more articles. E.g. at Aldi, a cashier is expected to process at least 3k articles per hour.

The big problem is: Most people are not willing to pay for that :) Depending on the product, 1-2 cents might be your whole margin.

That makes sense. I had assumed that RFID tags were at the sub-penny level of cost by now. Looks like they're well above 5 cents even in bulk.

I know the standard already exists (It's called EPC), and it is actually used a bit. I recall last time I bought socks at Walmart, there was actually an RFID tag inside the label. I believe they're used a bit more in the supply chain, but AFAIK no retailer actually uses them at the point of sale yet.

One reason I think the retailers took a step back from EPC was the general fear mongering and misinformation. In addition to the crazies calling them out as "the mark of the beast", there were numerous reports in the media about how walmart was going to start "putting computer tracking chips in all the pants they sold so they could track you wherever you went." I'm pretty sure they were also supposed to give you cancer and kill baby seals, too!

The problem is RFID, while cheap... is not cheap enough. It's still most economical to keep RFID on the case level.

It's also really easy to take the RFID tag out of a product. Machine vision is likely the cheaper/more secure approach.

This doesn't seem like the kind of store concept where 10c/product would be too expensive.

So technically they built something to automatically detect shoplifting (but charge to customer in the process).

If this worked in generic stores they could make a killing with theft detection services.

Amazon makes a bigger killing by having a competitive advantage of not having to worry about theft. Just like Kiva gave Amazon an edge in warehousing, this gives them an edge in meat space stores.

NPR's Planet Money podcast did a story two months ago with the inventor of the self checkout machine, Howard Schneider.

At the end of the end of the episode he was asked what his "dream" supermarket would be, and he said one where people don't have to check items out. They walk in, grab something, walk out, and are automatically charged.

This seems to be exactly what Amazon has done. Pretty amazing to see the realization of his dream be announced only two months after his interview.

So what happens when someone asks a good samaritan to help them get some expensive item off of a high shelf? How does this deal with things like a couple shopping together, one with an Amazon account and one without where both of them are getting items off of the shelves?

Even if all of the video was monitored by a human I can still envision several pitfalls to this where it's hard to know who to bill for what without interacting with the customer.

People shopping with children would also be a big issue, it seems. Somehow it seems they will need to deal with the multiple-shopper case (no idea how to solve the "Have someone else get the item off the shelf for you" case).

See my theory above. There's no real inventory of your items until you walk out. What the vision system is doing is matching up your account (scanned upon entry) to the lane you choose when exiting (where the items are scanned).

So the food tags have disposable rfid/bluetooth enabled? Or the computer vision is to be able to scan the bar codes even when they're not visible? Any issue with the amount of radiation in that store?

That's my guess. RFID in the labels or packaging somewhere.

RFID radiation is no different than the radiation coming in and out of the phone in your pocket.

"Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning."

Very interesting choice of comparison ha... I suppose this is Amazon trying to attract the tech crowd? It almost sounds satirical.

Not to downplay the tech -- this looks incredible.

From the rest of the text and the video, I have absolutely zero idea how they are using deep learning here. And let me not even mention that they've used the AI word in the video.

So, I highly doubt that attracting the tech crowd will work if they don't explain the damn thing about how they are using it.

Most people here are assuming there are RFID tags on every product.

But I think they are watching the shelves and visually identifying when a product leaves, what it was and who took it. And if they put it back on a different shelf, a different camera sees that and it is removed from the person's "shopping cart".

They are using their internal employees to train the AI or AI's (maybe one per section of shelf).

Imagine a Kellogg's employee assigned to watch each of their cereal boxes and make a list when someone takes one.

That's how I think they are using AI here. Hundreds of them in the store.

Is the basic idea that there are cameras everywhere and they watch and record everything you touch?

Now I can't stop thinking about the behavioral analytics. Can they get rough pupil dilation data? I'm sure they can get facial expressions and maybe gaze tracking.

Next step is using kiva bots to rearrange/restock the isles when no one is looking.

My guess is that its a mixture of indoor position tracking of your phone and infrared/computer vision for the products that detect a product being taken.

Ha, that's a great idea. Partition purchases by hour, figure out which products are bought disproportionately often in particular hours, and for the top three of those products, Kiva their shelves either to the front of the store (if you want to optimize for greatest throughput) or the back of the store (to optimize for longest time-in-store to increase impulse buys) ;)

Oh god, "Now where did the bread aisle move itself to today?"

This has been in the eye of retailers for a long time (such as the bar code scanner guns some stores let shoppers use) in part because it makes it very easy for shoppers to (over)spend. Retailers are always looking to eliminate barriers to customers purchasing things. Amazon has a few convenient innovations that make shopping faster: one click purchases, subscription services, the dash button, and possibly one day a grab-n-go grocery. This post doesn't intend to demonize Amazon, these are all innovations that make shopping easier, but I think it's good financially for customers to be cognizant of how this convenience impacts behavior.

What happens when parents walk in with kids? Does little Bobby need his own account for everything he's going to touch and pickup?

What if I walk in with a friend on our way to somewhere else and they don't have an account and I'm just getting something quick, do they not get in and wait outside? Everybody in the video was just one person or all had an account/phone.

Overall, I hope this works and expands. Checkout lines can be a hassle at times.

The queues at stores have always been the worst part of the experience. You put stuff in a bag, which is effectively a queue, then you wait in a line - a human queue, then you de-queue your cart on a belt, which is another queue, it gets scanned item by item and then placed right back into a similar bag to where it started. Good job Amazon for finally working to eliminate the queues.

It's amazing how this combines just about every cutting-edge trend and hot topic in technology, both good and bad:

- Elimination of low-level jobs

- Elimination of cash

- Deep surveillance (cameras everywhere, online tracking)

- Assuming it works, it will seem pretty magical!

(edit: formatting)

This is amazing, I admire Amazon for their boldness. It seems very practical for users. I assume that you can dispute charges with the app and that they store the footage of you to resolve disputes. I'm sure they'll need some times to tune the algorithms. But disputing a charge via an app is better than to wait in line. Kudos to Amazon for innovating.

It's definitely an interesting technology and a bold idea, but personally I have far more issues with grocery stores than just a 2m line.

For me, the far more time consuming part are:

1. Finding where something is (yes, after months you'll slowly memorize it all, but when you're new to a grocery shop, this easily takes 3-4 minute per item you need.

2. Choosing between the dozens of options.

The other day I went in this new store just to buy a shampoo and a mouthwash. For each there were over 30 near identical products and I spent way longer than necessary deciding which to go for.

With amazon fresh, I can at least search for a specific product, and also read reviews and specifics right there on the page. Amazon Go doesn't solve any of those problems...

It feels silly to me to create a whole store just to solve a tiny little problem that is grocery lines.

Am I normally unaware of Amazon's new products, or have they been releasing an abnormally high amount of new offerings recently?

Most of the announcements were from AWS re:Invent event: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/

I believe they are having a conference, so that explains the batch of releases in the past week or so.

They had AWS re:Invent 2017 last week, so that is the reason for so many announcements :)

Amazon's had their conference, reInvent 2016, going last week

https://reinvent.awsevents.com/

I wonder how much extra revenue a typical store can expect from the “impulse buy” sections at checkout counters? Unless the entire exit to the store is littered with impulse-buy displays, they might be losing that chunk of revenue and have to make up for it somehow.

Also, it already seemed more convenient to not go to the store in the first place (ordering online), especially for the kinds of items in packages that would work well at this type of store. The missing convenience was one that store employees could give you: let you pick out the fresh things you want (like produce and baked goods) and have someone box those up for you and even ship them to your house.

Amazon didn't build this to generate extra revenue on 'impulse buys', they built it to collect a fuckton of data. And while they own the retail space, delivering fresh food isn't easy with their infrastructure. I'm guessing they'll Beta the Amazon Go system for a few years, then offer it as a service to existing Grocery chains. THEN fresh food delivery will be a snooze, since Amazon will have access to the Whole Foods down the road.

> delivering fresh food isn't easy with their infrastructure

Don't they already have pretty widespread grocery deliveries?

A bunch of grocery stores here on the West Coast are replacing their self checkout lines and going back to checkers. They're saying that it's to "improve the customer experience" but people in the industry know (due to tests done by other retailers who bypassed the technology once they tested it, like Costco), its because of product loss/shoplifting. I know it's not apples and oranges but I do think that the loss margin is going to be so high on this that only Amazon will be able to eat this -- and I think they know this.

Haha yes, hackers are going to have a field day with this!! I'm sure it's good enough for users which don't actively try to game the system through technical means, but I suspect it won't stand a chance against someone who's taken the time to understand and undermine the system.

On another more on-topic note, what an awesome time to be alive! :) When I was younger concepts like this were usually paired with flying cars and space travel in cartoons, but now it's real.

Ah yes, I'm sure there'll be legions of hackers stealing groceries in meatspace for kicks while being watched by multitudes of cameras.

Heh your definition of the word hacker is way too narrow if you think all we're doing to sitting around behind screens all day spouting 31337 sp34k on the interwebz.

No, you're wrong. If it can be done it will be done. It's just too much reward versus the risk. Stealing this way scales too well. In a normal shop the risk of detection is variable, and therefore higher on average. Sometimes people will be alert, sometimes not, sometimes there will be guards sometimes not. Now this is different, it's all down to following the correct number of steps to get the desired results.

If you replace these two stickers, now scan this then switch this...

It'll be down to a few bits in some chip somewhere that decides how much you need to be billed. I'm sure it won't hurt adoption or even lead to a significant increase in lost merchandise, but I'm equally sure it will happen.

Sure a few will do it for fun. Most won't though, because it's still stealing things and there'll be a non-trivial chance of getting caught.

The assumption is hackers will steal for their own use. The reality is they'll change store inventories of zucchini such that they appear as dragon dildos on the receipt, put 65536 rolls of TP into random victims carts, zero out other people's shopping sessions for the pure hell of it, DOS the vision systems using IR blasters during rush times, frame any customers in uniform (cops, for example) as shoplifters, add negative 2,147,483,648 cans of pepsi to random carts, sign up as username "little bobby; drop table *;" or equivalent, stick RFID tags for embarrassing products to people's shoes so they're billed over and over every time they visit, take things out of and add things to other people's carts when they're not looking, all kinds of fun.

As for plain old physical theft:

Oh here is an interesting exploit. Buy or steal a $20 "VISA gift card" register an account with that as the payment option, walk into the store, grab $500 worth of steaks/liquor, walk out.

I worked at a food store as a starving student and we had interesting problems with people loading up carts and shoving them out the fire safety doors into a waiting pickup truck and driving off. If you allow people with false ID into the building, you will get ripped off. I can assure you police are completely uninterested in video footage of shoplifters, probably due to the near infinite volume. If you can physically get away, unless you achieve felony levels of theft value, you're simply free. This might have interesting long term implications for whats for sale as fewer and fewer people have higher and higher paying jobs and everyone else is perma-poor, such as this tech might scale for 80 pound bags of rice and flour even when almost everyone is poor, but not jars of caviar and $300 bottles of liquor and rare wines and jewelry stores. Salt and pepper, sure, saffron threads probably not.

It is an awesome time to be alive, but I do wish we'd start doing more interesting stuff with our technology than simply streamlining the ability to buy stuff. Convenience is wonderful, and I make use of lots of modern technological improvements in that regard, but I'm skeptical as to whether any of it has really made a measurable improvement on my standard of living.

https://medium.com/the-mission/silicon-valley-has-a-problem-... is largely what I mean. I don't blame the tech industry, necessarily. It's society as a whole that seems to have developed such a warped set of values, and I have no idea what to do about it.

Wow. So groceries without checkout.

I thought that at some point RFID would replace barcodes providing similar experience. However, this system claim to be based on cameras and image recognition.

If it truly is based on cameras and image recognition, that would allow them to roll out to already-existing stores pretty easily. That way they could market the infrastructure rather than build their own stores, which I imagine is less risky and more lucrative.

It could but it looks like it might require the shelves to be well organized and relatively static. It also can't really deal with fresh produce and other unpackaged goods or by weight items.

I've been wondering about RFID too. But I guess if you have too many items in one place (shopping bag) it can be tricky.

I'm absolutely shocked big chains aren't doing this already. I hate the lines at my local grocery, it's fucking annoying as hell, a terrible UX and everyone always seems upset (i try to be chill, fwiw.. for the cashier sake lol).

I sort of doubt i'll ever see these Amazon stores though, Brick and Mortar is quite hard. I suspect i'll see someone (Amazon or otherwise) add this to the big chains i already use, though.

Either way, lets get rid of lines please.

I wouldn't be shocked. Remember the now-shut-down retailer payments app CurrentC? And this seems even MORE difficult.

You are shocked big chains aren't doing this? What big chain has a robust R&D department working on image recognition? The profit margins at major grocery stores won't support anything like this.

"I'm absolutely shocked big chains aren't doing this already."

They don't have the money. It's a very competitive business and margins are not high enough to be doing that level of cutting-edge computer science research.

I've seen them try just to build software that allows you to shop from home and get it delivered either curbside or to your home. They can. But in my opinion, it's also clearly at the limit of their capability, and with all due respect to the programmers involved, also clearly just barely staffed adequately.

This seems easy to outsmart or confuse.

What if I go with someone that doesn't have an Amazon Go account grabs some stuff for me and throw it to me?

Or how about I go with someone that has an Amazon Go account too and we divide in two, he goes for the milks I go for the cereals. We meet just before the "check-out" and he gives me my milk I give him his cereal.

I'd need to know more about the technical stuff to know how it could be confused, or to know if it's even possible to.

If there's an Amazon employee who has visited the store, please tell us the experience.

I suspect during the beta they've asked their employees to try and steal things amd move things to the wrong place -- really push the software.

At least I hope they did. I assume they are going into this expecting a loss while they work out the kinks.

Based on comments in here, one would suspect they implemented this entire thing without trying to break it even once.

So much negativity and pessimism.

No company or government in the history of humanity has managed to foresee the myriad ways dishonest people will try to get away with dishonest things. Many, many, many, many, many companies have severely underestimated the high cost of fraud.

Also, employees trying to break the system are not likely to bringing young kids shopping with them.

The only question I have is who's liable when things are fuzzy: right now, the store bears the liability for things eaten within the store, destroyed while in the store, snuck out, etc. It's easy to see that this technology leads to the liability being pushed onto the shopper for all of those cases, but that will definitely lead to some serious customer-service arguments.

Customers has always been liable for these things. It's only because of customer service nightmares that they aren't. It's really not much different except now they store has slightly better data.

Guys this is not good. As much as I love the convenience of pick-and-go, this eventually will prove out to be drastic for a variety of bad socioeconomic reasons, that most of us are already aware of. Small businesses were already suffering at the hands of Amazon Prime. Now Amazon Go wants to not only kick out those businesses out of the block but it also wants to take away jobs of small retail salesperson. Unacceptable. This can perhaps work at Amazon headquarters but I hope, I really hope it does not make its way to major metro cities like NYC and if it does then Amazon should promise to create certain number of jobs and revenue that it intends to displace. Just because an average reader of HN does not do such jobs or had held such jobs for only a brief period in his/her life, this does not mean that lot of people don't rely on such small time jobs for their livelihood.

Places I can see this working are with low footprints such as cafes at hospitals etc.

Amazon Go, please Go away.

Updated: Grammar correction.

Wether we like it or not, automatization is going to eat many, many millions of jobs over the next few years. Taxi/bus/truck drivers (self driving cars), fast food staff[1] and thanks to tech like Amazon Go's, also regular store employees. Trying to stop this from happening is futile. What we need to figure out is how are we going to prevent society from exploding once most people are out of a job forever.

[1] http://newsexaminer.net/food/mcdonalds-to-open-25000-robot-r...

Like it or not, this is the future. If Amazon don't do it then someone else will. People want cheap goods and this will give them cheaper goods.

The solution to your worries is a universal basic income.

Try to become a part of the solution not part of the problem. As an engineer, this is a mesmerizing and a very appreciative tech. Kudos. As a (selfless) neighbor, I can never be happy to see unemployed neighbors. Sure we can create these autonomous technologies, but we also should be active in policy-making for our cities e.g. if 10 jobs are being displaced then collectively what are we doing to create 10 more jobs.

Profits earned from Amazon Go are not going to get reinvested in cities. A small portion of it would be divided as payrolls among engineers and people who would manage these Go stores but a large chunk would go in deep pockets of Bezos' and Amazon investors'.

Get more people (and a greater variety of people) to invest in Amazon, and other companies who displace jobs, perhaps?

Have you bothered to ask yourself where the money goes after it's put in the pockets of Bezos' and other Amazon investors? Do you think that money is just sitting in the bank doing nothing?

I am guessing other pet projects, R&D for Amazon. Clearly not in cancer research or funding of infrastructure or investments in other need base communities.

Last time I heard Amazon is struggling with net positive cash flow because it keeps on re-investing profits into various other side projects with eventual goal of dominating retail space e.g. Amazon Go.

Why would Amazon invest its profits in cancer research? Wouldn't you expect a drug or biotechnology company to invest their profits in cancer research?

Amazon is in the business of creating a marketplace that efficiently matches buyers and sellers. It provides a distribution infrastructure for sellers and provides a high level of service for buyers.

I'm not thrilled with the socio-economic impact this will have, but it's inevitable. A big hope I have is that, similar to the automation and efficiency boost of agriculture (once upon a time most humans worked in farming), this will unlock huge sums of money that can be diverted to other hard to automate services that will employ these folks.

"this will unlock huge sums of money that can be diverted". Agree. But what guarantee do we have that Amazon or similar large companies such as Apple had ever re-invested their profits back into economies? So far none. Yes Amazon can hire more people for warehouses, but is it fair for a displaced retail person to go and work at warehouses (trust me I have worked at warehouses and it is not a FUN place to work at!)?

Well those warehouse jobs won't exist either...

Then don't go there.

It's a broken idea to think that technology will not replace jobs – end of story. Trying to legislate for inefficiency is doomed to failure – instead of hand-wringing about the loss of jobs (an almost inevitable side-effect of technological progress) it seems much more sensible to start thinking about about what an economy without these jobs would look like.

It's disappointing to see people downvote this post rather than respond to it.

I'm not going to argue that this sort of technology isn't going to have a decimating effect on employment, small business etc. It will. It will very likely have a huge socioeconomic impact for one simple reason: Most of us aren't planning for the next industrial revolution.

That fact that you're freaking out now tells me you really haven't been thinking deeply about the impact that automation is going to have on our society, nor have you been considering realistic solutions to these potential problems.

Automation will decimate jobs as it allows us to create lot more with less. It might give people more leisure time, or it might widen the income gap. We could send people back to school to learn relevant skills, and we might be able to do it cheaply if we maximized MOOCs and vocational training more and relied less on expensive universities with lavish facilities and football coaches with million dollar salaries.

We could also fuck up our opportunity to move forward by focusing our energy on preserving jobs that we know are going away. It's not if, it's when.

Not moving forward is not a realistic option. Even if had all the political power to get your way in this country, other countries will simply take the lead in automation. The countries that focus on their energy on educating their people to take on the next generation of jobs will be the economic leaders of tomorrow.

It's not a small problem and it's not going to magically work itself out like some laissez faire dipshits would like to tell you. This is going to be tough and painful. Now is the time to start planning for our future.

>Most of us aren't planning for the next industrial revolution.

The value of labour will continue to decline. While your labour has value, saving up as much money as possible and putting it in index funds seems like a really good idea.

Where I live all the grocery stores already have almost no employees, with delivery service so you only interact with a website + delivery agent, or a self checkout kiosk if you show up in person.

The in person shopping primarily happens in specialty grocery stores like Italian delis and the like. They won't be going away.

Interesting that they say "Amazon Go is currently open to Amazon employees in our Beta program, and will open to the public in early 2017."

Generally "beta" implies that non-employees are using it. This is more of a dogfooding program (though maybe they wanted to avoid that term since they're selling human food this way!).

Amazon in Seattle is a large enough org that they can "beta test" something like this with 10k+ employees that don't work on anything related to it, and get basically the same feedback as opening to the public.

closed beta

Ok Amazon, why not do this?

Skip the whole stocked shelf thing entirely. Have a website setup that customers can build a shopping cart, then just show up and pickup their "pre-bagged" groceries. The benefits to this are obvious.

1) No shop lifting. 2) Car friendly (you could have multiple drive-thru pickup lines) 3) Convenience for the shopper (saved lists, common items, don't have to walk around the store) 4) The store, could just effectively be a warehouse. 5) Possible to automate almost all of the work.

And before you say "what about produce?". Well, you could have a automated "imaging" station upon goods receipt that customers could use when building their cart. Or, offer really good return policies. Either way, the convenience would far outweigh the produce problem.

They're 90% of the way there with primenow. You can order frozen chicken, deli meats, etc. No fresh fruits and veggies yet, but you can order eggs. There's no drive-thru though, they just deliver it to your house within 2 hours of ordering, 1 hour if you pay a premium.

Amazon Fresh already exists[1], but they deliver instead of you picking it up.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=Fr_Gr_Sft_Nv1_learnmore?ie=UTF8...

It already feels very weird to me to walk into an Apple store, check out on my own phone, and just walk out with product. This will take some getting used to.

I think it works for grocery, but for luxury products I do expect someone to do some basic checkout.

I think this potentially ignores the needs of disabled shoppers who rely on supermarket workers.

What if you have mobility issues and need someone to grab items for you? What if you have vision issues and need someone to read an ingredient list?

There will still be staff. Amazon were obviously careful to include a shelf stockist in the promotional video. Staff will still be needed to stock shelves and solve problems with the automation systems and most likely, to answer customer questions and help customers with their needs.

I think this could work if cart or your app confirms your selection before checkout. Otherwise people would be too stressed out / unsure about discounted items to roll the dice.

RFID alone is not enough. It must have some kind of video tracking component to it, otherwise I could easily fabricate a Faraday cage inside my bag and just leave with the goods.

Why is this a machine learning problem? Why not use some low-power tag for items, and scan all items on customer exit?

Personal opinion: Amazon is not interested in creating supermarkets/wal-marts. Instead it wants to sell an ML solution to other brick & mortar stores, and this current effort is to prove plausibility. Selling an ML solution, with cameras and software, is harder to compete with than a tagging solution (especially if based on open and accessible hardware).

You're basically describing the old idea of 'tag everything with RFID' for the checkoutless grocery store. It didn't really catch on because it's a fairly expensive way to attack the problem given the small margins on most items and would require that EVERY manufacturer implement the tags or for the stores/distribution system to add tags to non compliant items which would also be fairly expensive.

So to get around needing to tag everything you can throw computer vision and machine learning at the problem to determine where the person is grabbing an item from and combined with well organized shelves you now know what they just grabbed off the shelves.

I love this idea! I hate how stores only have like 1 or 2 registers opened.

I wonder how it would react to a family shopping, is it tracking people or the bag? Hopefully it'd bill who ever has the bag in case your kid puts in a bunch of junk food. Supporting carts for larger purchases seems like somthing is missing.

But yeah I love this. I hope we move towards the future when repetitive jobs are all automated and we have some sort of basic income. So the human race can be more innovative and everyone can unlock their true potential instead of being a corporate drones for a job they never liked and can't figure out how to get out of it.

Edit: Wanted to add real quick - as things do get more automated. I do hope there's a easy way to get ahold of human in case of things acting up or if you just need some help. I know tons of sites seem to not even provide support or make it super hard to even find a contact. Amazon itself seems to have good support from what I've heard, never really had to use it but in general companies should focus on support also, with or without automation. Just seems like somthing generally lacking to me in the tech industry.

I'm guessing it's not as simple as they make it look in the video...unless the food tags have some kind of RFID/Bluetooth to communicate with the phone in your pocket...maybe the grocery bags? Even with cashiers sometimes they don't know what the price is...also some things are sold by the pounds...where is the scale? What if you pay then walk back in again? You get double charged?

No need for them to talk to your phone or a smart bag. They just funnel you out through a lane and scan them there if they're using RFID. They can also do this theoretically without using RFID at all if they can solidly determine what product you're taking off the shelf, maybe by using good cameras to see where you're reaching and if you're placing or replacing the item that's assigned to that slot. They've been tracking you since you entered the store so they know what Amazon account each person is associated with so they just combine the 2.

As for loose weighed items it doesn't look like they're selling those. /Everything/ in the promo shot of the store is already packaged and they look like they're going for more of a convenience store food source than a traditional grocery store.

It would take many cameras working together to pull this off...what happens when you drop out of sight? Feels like a big vending machine...If they're not competing with big grocery stores, then this won't scale well...right?

If the system relies on tracking you constantly from the moment you enter they'll have as many cameras as they need to cover the whole store. For just tracking the person you really don't need too high of detail just decent coverage and if the system is using CV to determine what you're taking off the shelves instead of RFID(ish) tags (which makes sense given the cost of applying tags to every item) then they've already got way better camera coverage than they need to just track you around the store.

Really this whole thread is all just rank speculation that'll be mostly confirmed or denied once a store actually opens and people can look around and see what's going on.

Also as for scaling it's a fixed cost to cover a larger area compared with a variable cost if they're using RFID to scan when you pass through the turnstiles so really a camera based system probably scales better than a tag based system.

I only run open source software on my phone. I can't wait for the day when I can't even buy groceries without a proprietary app.

The futuristic supermarket I imagined as a kid was a warehouse-scale vending machine. Robotic carts roll down the aisles on tracks, and the shelves push the requested items out onto them. You show up after that's done and collect your cart.

Probably need some human labor for the produce section.

This is interesting but the checkout line is nothing compared to the time in the aisles.

What I do not understand is: Why do they need to know that it was me who got something off the shelf? They need to know when something has left the shelf, so they can refuel, and they need to know when something leaves the store, so they can charge.

But do they really need to know when you pull out an item and then give up buying it?

It's kind of the only way to do it without having an RFID tag on everything which would be expensive because they'd have to either special order the items from the manufacturer or apply them themselves both of which are costly. That's one of the major sticking points that has prevented this from showing up in normal grocery stores for years.

I read a bit more about, it seems that following the whole process, not just check in and check out, it becomes harder to steal an item.

"Because it works by watching actual items come off the shelves — instead of reading a tag or RFID chip, for example — you won’t be able to steal items by removing or altering tags."

What I like about this is it encourages the European style of grocery shopping. That is, visiting a grocery store daily to make dinner with fresher foods. The longer the lines, wait, and commute, the larger grocery orders will get and the further people are pushed towards Costco style grocery purchasing.

My first thought is: I don't have a supported smartphone.

The current checkout process entails the acceptance of common legal tender, but this process will require I have their app, and presumably allow it quite a bit of tracking permission.

A cool demo, sure, but I think I'll stick to shopping like the normal folks.

It's interesting that they talk abut a supported smartphone. If it was just computer vision looking at what you grab you would only need a printed card with the QR that the folk in the video uses to check-in.

So, probably there's something needed from the phone as well: NFC, low energy Bluetooth, inertial location tracking? I guess that we will see when we look at the supported devices list.

If there's two things I get uneasy about, it's (1) giving up privacy in a whole new category of being filmed/monitored/tracked and (2) being guided into behaviors that encourage me to consume more and consume more casually.

If you've ever entered a grocery store, both of those things have already happened.

It's imperfect and unable to be completely avoided, but worse to move the line further in the wrong direction.

The left-wing viewpoint on this is going to be that it's an economy that increasingly works against low-income/homeless people (who are less likely to own a smartphone or always have it charged and on them). Sure when it's a one-off, no big deal, but if it lets a store have lower prices and provide a better customer experience, then more and more stores will adopt it.

I think this technology is something our society doesn't need in this moment. Reducing jobs only because people can't wait in the line is not a big step to humanity. We need to see what are the consequences for future generations instead of trying to look "futuristic".

Get ready to be called a Luddite for thinking about the consequences of embracing the new shiny without question.

Interesting, i've read about these Store Concepts for years as Test Projects from Rewe in Germany, but they never rolled them out widely. Probably sticking RFID on everything was too expensive. This camera based solution might be better suited for a wide rollout.

I remember having a discussion with a developer doing these RFID based solutions. He said one tag was back in those days about 10-15 cents each, which is way too much for supermarkets.

Talking about Rewe and German supermarkets, it's unbelievable how horrible the whole experience of doing grocery shopping is here in Germany. You almost always need to queue a lot, there is no space to pack your groceries and the cashier don't give you any time to pack until pushing the next customer's groceries to the small space.

They try to be efficient here, but the reality is quite chaotic.

If you're talking about discount supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl, etc), then note you're not supposed to pack your groceries at the cashier, but rather put them back into your shopping cart and pack up by the packing tables behind the cashiers. This way, checkout proceeds much faster compared to almost all other countries.

Also Rewe and Real enforce this behavior. And I don't see anybody doing this. The next customer's groceries are mixed up with yours and everybody seems to be ok with that.

This is impressive. How did it know which products were inside the woman's shopping bag? As customer grabs items how does it associate the items to that customer's virtual cart instantly? Aren't customers supposed to scan the products?

So it's a surveillance scheme good enough to track every product on every shelf?

"Four years ago we asked ourselves: what if we could create a shopping experience with no lines and no checkout?"

And yet they're not first doing this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3465767/Now-s...

I like to take my time shopping. Look around read labels, check what are people are buying.

The part that kills me is checking out. I have always wondered why the cart can't scan your items and when you push it through a reader at checkout it just has everything totaled and charges you. The cashier can now bag your groceries. You could even have the cart recheck your purchase amount when the items are removed to be packed.

Someone out there hurry up and figure out the details :)

This is bad. I can't really support this because it requires a smartphone. And it literally looks like you must have the Amazon Go app to enter the store. No.

Maybe they also weight you when enter and leave the store. They can then cross check your weight with the weight of the items you have bought.

You just had a strike of genius

I can't tell if your comment is tongue in cheek or not, but I highly doubt they will make people weigh themselves when they walk in. If they aren't confident in their image recognition technology they would improve it rather than throw in an additional method of tracking.

I'm pretty sure you can weight persons when they pass the entrance and exit automatically, by adding sensors to the floor.

They could weight the contents of the shelves. Based on that you may know what you took out. I actually looked into that for a retailer.

Many systems already do this for controlled access. Would be a useful bit of data to have if easily implemented. Problems are when access is not 1 by 1. You could get useful, but not consistent suggestive data.

and if you use the restroom?

You get a receipt. (hat tip Douglas Adams)

Other interesting possible implications of this:

1) The inability to pay with cash (or debit, or check, etc..). 2) No need to carry any form of money in the store.

Taken to an extreme where every store runs this way, will people have a need for cash, credit cards, or anything else? Why not just have your bank account attached to your Amazon (and every other account) and have money taken out directly?

As a security guy, that is terrifying.

Supermarket retail has razor thin margins, last I heard. If it's going to save money in the long run, then it's the future.

If the justification for merging the produce stand, bakery, fishmonger, butcher, etc. into one is the efficiency of a shared POS and delivery system, this could provide the justification for splitting them back out, at least in upscale markets. Rather than cashiers, you would have "consultants." And you get richer data for supply chain decisions.

I know this is fairly impossible in urban areas but I find myself shopping much more frequently in what I call grocery farms. If you live in affluent suburbias I'm sure you have seen them. They are basically high end grocery stores that sells the produce they grow along with other things they buy from other local farms. Some of the produce is grown inside and seasonal things are grown outside.

Yeah some of them are just for show and an excuse to sell high end stonewall kitchen stuff but others actually grow their own stuff or sell other farms stuff.

The problem with local food (produce and meat) is that they are often not in plastic containers (which I prefer). It looks like Amazon Go requires very prepackaged stuff.

I really would love to see someway to have more farm+grocery stores (that is grow right in the store or very near by). Figuring out a way (even if it requires some GMO) to grow food right in the store would be an amazing thing for the environment, health, and food quality.

The other things is I know people are in a rush with everything but over the last few years I find grocery shopping rather cathartic and I think people used to enjoy grocery shopping (you know go to the butcher and then to the baker kind of european lifestyle). It is shame we have to make something even more "on the go" that I'm not sure needs to be.

> (even if it requires some GMO)

You say that like if it's a bad thing, you might want to better inform yourself on GMOs as there are A LOT of myths and misconceptions out there.

> You say that like if it's a bad thing, you might want to better inform yourself on GMOs as there are A LOT of myths and misconceptions out there.

And you might not want to assume what I know and don't :)

I say it because GMOs are not open source. Local farms don't get access to GMOs and it can create an unfair advantage to big farms.

As for health reasons I don't believe that GMOs are bad for you but they may have lower nutrients since you can now grow on the same plot of land over and over (and soil depletion of nutrients is a real thing) [1].

I'll assume you didn't know about soil depletion... as there are lot of people that don't and you know its better to inform yourself :)

That being said I do agree that GMOs get mostly unfair sentiment.

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...

95% of seeds are patented, GMO or not, including those used in Organic Farming, the 'open source' / patents part is not something specific to GMOs (although the Organic industry works really hard to spread that myth).

Organic farming can also use pesticides (and most do), some of these pesticides are as bad or even worse than the ones used in modern agriculture.

And in regards to nutrients https://gmoanswers.com/studies/how-do-gm-crops-impact-soil-h...

I'm exceedingly open minded that GMOs are good but you might very well be closed minded that there are some negatives particularly since I linked to a scientific article (albeit slightly pop sci journal) and you gave me link to an organization whos goal it is to spread GMOs are good.

From the SA article:

“Efforts to breed new varieties of crops that provide greater yield, pest resistance and climate adaptability have allowed crops to grow bigger and more rapidly,” reported Davis, “but their ability to manufacture or uptake nutrients has not kept pace with their rapid growth.” There have likely been declines in other nutrients, too, he said, such as magnesium, zinc and vitamins B-6 and E, but they were not studied in 1950 and more research is needed to find out how much less we are getting of these key vitamins and minerals.

That doesn't mean GMOs are bad but it might mean people will abuse the fact they will grow easily on just about anything (I'm exaggerating for emphasis).

As for the unfair advantage it is in large part because of ignorance of the consumers. I admit it is a weak argument but sadly the local farmers often have to grow non-gmo because that is what sells and they will get lower crop yield if there are other nearby GMOs (bugs and cross pollination). It is not enough to be locally grown... you have to be GMO free. I met a farmer in Hawaii Kauai that shared this issue with me and the seemed fairly passionate about it.

How do they know you're you? Do you scan your phone on the way in / out and get tracked via RFID or do they do facial recognition?

If it's the latter there's no way I'd use something like this. I love Amazon (as a retail customer) and AWS, but no way I'm self registering my face with them.

This is really exciting. I've always wanted to see this.

It makes me wonder someday if money will be completely invisible.

Seriously, this will basically make lots of low skill workers redundant. Yes it fabulous innovation, but surely automation along these lines is dangerous for the fabric of society. When I say this, I mean, whats the plan for dealing with all the lay offs caused by tech automation ?

Looks cool but one major question:

Who can go in to the store? If only people that have phone + app then technically I can't go in with my wife, allow her to pick and choose her yogurt while I'm looking for a coffee, put our groceries in to one bag and pay for it from my account.

Nice and all but I don't want a store to get my personal info just so I can shop at their place.

Amazon "All Store Jobs" Go! Not sure how new administration going to respond to this.

If I bring the whole family shopping with me, does everyone need a phone app and stuff?

I got excited when I thought this would be about Go usage on AWS, but this is way cooler.

I would have liked to be in the scrum meeting, and proposed the David Blaine use-case.

This is what people expected when RFID technology came up. They somehow thought its going to be this panacea but quickly realized its not. Amazon might have the solution but I can't say unless I see the implementation.

What happens if someone sneaks into the store without an amazon account and walks right the hell out with whatever they want? Not a criticism, just curious what we speculate the theft prevention systems used here might be.

> What happens if someone sneaks into the store without an amazon account and walks right the hell out with whatever they want?

This is also a perennial concern at any tradition grocery store as well. Presumably, in a system that operates primary off of computer vision, you would:

A) Be able to quickly detect an unrecognized person in the store and alert security, and

B) Have very good video evidence of the person committing the shop-lifting to provide to police.

It sounds like they actually end up in a better position relative to a tradition grocery store from a security perspective.

This requires "Amazon Man Trap", too.

Person can blip in and blip out with one of those baguettes unheeded otherwise.

"On the charges of shoplifting from Amazon Go, you have been found guilty. You are hereby sentenced to 3 years of Amazon Prime membership."

Oh lame I was expecting this to be an announcement of Go support on AWS Lambda.

It's really weird that the prices are printed on paper labels. Why aren't they digital?

I guess it's not that big of an issue though, since this is a single store and not a chain. The employees need stuff to do.

There was/is an old scam where the store puts up a tag with a false low price and the UPC barcode scanner reports a different (higher of course) price and much like long distance cramming hope the customer doesn't notice.

If the store is falsely accused its simple to hold the receipt up against the paper label.

There are digital price labels but they're unidirectional protocol so every time a product comes off sale the store risks substantial trouble if the digital update protocol is merely 99.9% successful.

You'd need a successful bidirectional verifiable digital price tag system. It could be as simple as sweeping a very high resolution camera up and down the aisles.

Amazon app currently already has barcode scanning. My guess is that they are replacing POS with app. If you think about it no one needs those arcane point of sell machines because smartphones can do scanning as well as payment processing. The only thing left is detecting unscanned items which is fairly well solved problem using RFIDs. May be later can be combined as well with measuring weight of person identified when entering.

This is brilliant as-in how no one else thought about it. Lot of small shops have limit on their open schedule because of staffing issues. I am assuming Amazon will set up few experimental shops and then sell technology to other stores. This can certainly revolutionize retail if they persist on executing right.

So...

What if I have a large shopping run, like for Thanksgiving? I have a ~$400 cart worth of loot. Where will I sort and bag my goods?

They should make Amazon Go like a 7-11 rather than a Whole Foods.

Are the item prices any less?

That dreadful music... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11286858

I embrace and trust all that Amazon does. As Jeff Bezos is proud of saying (not direct quote): you're not failing you're not trying enough difficult things.

If I enter the store with a product I purchased elsewhere or even earlier in the same store (say some bottled water), will I be charged for it when I leave?

The future is now! This advert 10 years ago: https://youtu.be/pmAr23yZP9Y

I can see this being useful by freeing up staff to provide value added services instead of being stuck at the register. I can see stores having category experts.

im not sure this is a problem that needed to be solved. The issue of ordering groceries has been solved by existing supermarkets, in my case i can order everything I need on a weekly basis from Tesco for a small delivery fee. The last thing i want to do is go back to shopping in store, there are smaller local shops for little items but i cant see me using Amazon go in lieu of my existing grocery store that delivers.

"Alert, alert you are too poor to be in here."

"No lines" I'm just imagining a huge group of people standing by the door waiting to download the app so they can buy eggs.

The packaging or company that creates products conducive to "go" (cashierless) will be required for chains like walmart.

This is cool. Interested to know how customers can return their product once they come out of the store. Just place it back ?

This is the future of the world. Great innovation that we're excited to see. Whats not to love about this?

Now the question is: would Bezos keep this tech for himself or give access to it to other big retailers?

Will be useful in Amazon package centers for pickers

amazon go skydive - just hop on the plane!

amazon go swim - just dive right in!

amazon go kennels - just drop and drive!

amazon go restoration hardware - good luck!

amazon go lite - just grab and checkout and go!

amazon go guns - just grab and go!

i assume they will eventually open this up to other retailers / service providers?

What happens if my smartphone is switched off after I enter the retail warehouse?

Does it use a phone app & GPS/NFC for knowing when to charge the customer?

I wonder how they plan to deal with fraud... some kind of check-in process instead?

> With our Just Walk Out Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go! No lines, no checkout. (No, seriously.)

Yes, seems like you check-in with an app.

I saw that, but it sounds vague enough that there a few different scenarios I can think of to attack this service. Like what are they going to do if multiple people are sharing an account, but they only have photos of one?

edit: I just realized how they can deal with that -- take a picture when the person walks in and tie it to the account they scanned. There still seem to be a bunch of fraud issues, but this is certainly interesting.

Just don't share the account. That may already be part of their ToS.

They don't need to remember photos at all. Just track the person beginning at the point of scan.

It should be easy to MITM victims of powned phones unless they pay extremely close care to ping times or RTT in general.

All I have to do is pown someone's phone and use an app on my phone to make my phone look like its their phone, regardless of where they actually are. I can't imagine the facial recognition would be that good.

Its a simple extension of physically stealing phones or cloning like people did in the 80s/90s on analog AMPS. cloning is interesting to think about, steal their amazon auth info, remotely brick their phone for good luck, walk in with a burner phone claiming to be their new phone, its all good.

I was thinking that, but then realized that the concept of fraud doesn't really apply in the way we're used to. I mean you're allowed to walk into the store, take anything you want, and then walk out.

How would you even define fraud in that context? Presumably there are things you could do to confuse or mislead the technology, but it seems to me that as presented the onus is on Amazon to just charge you the correct amount based on what you leave the store with.

Presumably they'll want to deactivate the accounts for people who don't settle their bills, and they'll want to keep out folks who don't have accounts. This seems attackable to me, probably because they haven't released enough details about how it works.

Yes those two things are trivial though. Presumably the technological advance here is the ability to tell what a person has chosen and charge them for it without barcode scanning or checkout.

In the video, the customers check in with a barcode displayed on the app.

Probably there will be a guard at the entrance: the barrier will beep when someone enters without signing in, and the guard will stop them.

What's more interesting is that there can be absolutely no dead angles for this to work.

They might have cameras inside each shelve, mounted on top, to correlate products taken with the person standing in front.

But what if two persons stand close together, one leans over and takes something...

Or what if you go into the store with a friend or your kids. And you all pick up items which are supposed to go on your tab.

It's definitely a challenging problem.

How does this scale. Would camera be able to follow 100 people at the same time?

So how long before someone starts claiming this is the mark of the beast?

If the merchandise is as bad as the books they ship (faded pages, water damage, ..), no thanks.

I don't need Deep Learning[tm] when I go to a supermarket. Also, they should really have integrated The Blockchain[tm] in the buzzwords.

Nevertheless, this is good for Bitcoin.

A lot safer than the "Just Run Out" low-tech approach.

This encourages consumerism. It will be hard to take a count of what you're spending. While I wait in the line I always rethink about what I'm buying, sometimes I realize I'm buying something I don't need.

Amazon hates consumerism.

Software is eating the world and Amazon is eating software.

Why announce this 3 months ahead of the scheduled opening?

Someone cares to explain the technology behind this?

1. Scan your personal barcode with your phone when you walk in. Camera associates your physical self with your code.

2. Cameras track every item you pick up.

3. Cameras note when you leave the store and charge you.

Do you know this for sure or is it a guess? I was wondering if it might be your phone proximity to the items for a period of time but I guess that would be easy to tamper with.

I'm going to be depressed. Stamped Sheeps.

why is "deep learning" and "computer vision" required here? Surely a RFID tag on each item would suffice?

Presumably it works if your phone runs out of battery while in the store

When you exit it needs to match the items scanned (with RFID) to your account (using phone proximity/computer vision)

RFID tags are way to expensive to scale. The margin for one of the products might be just a few cents, so with RFID tags they might have to sell at a loss or rise prices. This would eliminate the cashier, but at least in germany the wage/item scanned is way cheaper then RFID tags.

1 million Merits.

Selfycart's valuation just skyrocketed.

How does Amazon Go handle alcohol sales?

I like the video. But I wonder where they put all the middle aged and elderly customers. Probably in the food.

There are zero children in the video, as well.

I don't think there are many children (or elderly for that matter) among Amazon employees.

Yes. Not any more.

this is great! since the election my one purpose in life has been to automate every job of the "white working class" because of what they've decided to do to us. With this and Otto and Uber it won't be long.

What Would Glenda Do?

communism is on the way and everyone is happy :)

unconditional basic income is the next step

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7reIMSpBNA

Sweet, can't wait to be put in a forced labor camp. Wonder how many millions will die this time.

or Kuomintang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_camp

Can I wear a Jeff Bezos mask into the store to get free groceries?

About time.

As someone who regularly takes kids to the grocery store, this would be a nightmare. You'd get charged for every random thing your kid decided to pull off a shelf and stuff somewhere else. Unless their AI ignores kids or something.

So, you drive around trying to catch Amazons on your phone?

                       1984 anyone?

What a grim and desolate idea.

Shut up and take my money.

Please just exit the store, we don't take cash here.

You joke, but when I was in Beijing a couple of months ago, the juice vendor wouldn't take cash from me. She only accepted AliPay and WeChat.

Yup, mobile payment is so seamless in China

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