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Comment by thedarkginger | Hacker News Reader

I know this discusses a few strategic plays Amazon is making but shortfalls of the self-checkout project (AmazonGo) are interesting:

"In its video touting Amazon Go, the company said it was aiming to open the site to the public in “early 2017,” and it hasn’t provided an update to that timing. But the technology has been crashing in tests when the store gets too crowded and requires human quality control, people watching video images to make sure customers are charged for the right things, according to a person familiar with the plan."

Not super familiar with image recognition but do you think that's just a failure of the training data set or a much more complex technical problem?

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When the demo was released, people had a lot of questions about how the cameras would deal with occlusions and products being covered up by bodies and odd angles. Recognizing and localizing and tracking a single person picking up individual items slowly is a much easier task than tracking many people in a crowd crisscrossing and blocking the camera constantly; that it is apparently failing in exactly the scaled up realistic scenarios where you would predict increased failures points to it being a genuine difficulty and not simply too few crowded scenes in the training set.

(I bet their deep learning team is having a lot of fun trying to figure out how to make RNNs rather than CNNs scale and train well...)

I had the same question about cameras dealing with those issues, but this article says "Products are embedded with tracking devices that pair with customers’ phones to charge their accounts". It sounds like this means every product has an RFID / other tag, rather than using computer vision.

Sure, but who'd actually trust Amazon with their food? I know I wouldn't, they've screwed up 3 out of 5 orders in the past year, leading me to have little faith that they won't give me E Coli covered veggies.

They're opening a large, car centric Amazon Grocery pickup location just over in Ballard as a test, but the particular location they picked is a parking lot for 3 to 4 hours a day, and is over 3 blocks from transit (and where they will be putting the light rail in) due to Safeway & Walgreens already owning that prime real estate.

Since the article stresses repeatedly that Amazon is all-in on produce... I think this is a big question for their ML approach.

One of the annoying parts of not-really-self-checkout that is available in big grocery stores today is that you have to scroll through a screen, choose the correct brand (i.e. Dole Banana), and then weigh it before it prices your order.

Wonder what their strategy is to price variable weight products (i.e. produce) without introducing new friction into the user experience

Amazon will likely pre-weigh the items and give each a price embedded barcode, though it will be quite labor intensive even with the $100k wrap and weigh machines you can buy today.

Yeah. This is one of the reasons why I really don't care for self-checkout in grocery stores. Sure, self-checkout is mostly OK so long as you're swiping small boxes of barcoded stuff. But get to produce and it's a mess. I basically won't use self-checkout if I have any non-barcoded merchandise. (Which basically describes every time I go to a grocery store.)

Yes - no bar code? I won't self check, but also the large items that won't fit in the bag. I learned the hard way that it can take too long for them to get the self checkout lane to stop crying about how I didn't put a 10' pipe in the bag. Unless I have one or two well marked, small items, I avoid the self checkout.

The particular fascination of big box home improvement stores has seemed a bit odd given the number of items that don't fit with the model. Sure a lot of small purchases do but many don't.

They might go the way of Trader Joe's and just charge a blanket price per "piece" of produce.

FYI, the code for fresh produce is usually printed on the little sticker or on the tie.

Can you say what happens when they screw up the order? Is it your responsibility to wait around for someone to come collect the wrong parts of the order?

Depends, twice I've had to ship it back, and once Amazon told me there were no returns and refunded me (Samsung Evo+ 64GB that only did 6MB/s, rated at minimum 10MB/s). That being said, I need to throw that MicroSD card away, whenever I use it in a camera or single board computer instead of a tested Evo, it causes poor performance.

Oh I was asking about the food ordering specifically. I was curious how errors are resolved with perishable items.

Complain, receive refund.

So no different than any other Amazon order. I've noticed I have do the "complain receive refund" more and more in the last year with them.

I've ordered groceries with Prime Now a few times and never once was worried about trust. I'd probably trust their produce more as the people who have also touched it aren't random shoppers.

Sure, but that isn't the prime vector of E Coli and other illnesses spreading. E Coli literally comes from workers shitting in the fields due to the breakdown of the labor movement, as they are not allowed breaks or access to a bathroom with a place to wash afterwards. Thus how you end up with Chipotle serving up E Coli covered veggies.

Not having a store that your food comes from might make for a safer mental picture, but Amazon is going to go with the cheapest vendor every time, and they don't have the scale of Kroger or HEB to knock prices down anywhere near them, thus they must buy lower quality goods to hit the same price point.

It's a nice story, but E. Coli comes from fields fertilized by manure, or feces contaminated water.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC525133/

> Not having a store that your food comes from might make for a safer mental picture, but Amazon is going to go with the cheapest vendor every time, and they don't have the scale of Kroger or HEB to knock prices down anywhere near them, thus they must buy lower quality goods to hit the same price point.

It's a dangerous game to bet against Jeff Bezos losing because Amazon lacks scale and problems hitting price points. Amazon may not have the grocery scale of Kroger today, but it also has billions of dollars to spend, a different cost structure and no need to compete with existing grocery chains completely on price (it's a different service, Kroger won't be at my door within two hours).

I do. I order from Amazon Fresh every week. The reason is simple: after fifteen weeks of having Safeway deliver my food, not a single time did they deliver all of the items I actually ordered.

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