Spurred by Amazon, Supermarkets Try Swapping Cashiers for Cameras
wsj.com
wsj.com
This is the sort of relationship I do not want to get into for ordinary purchases. It demands too much trust, which is hard to build and unnecessary for most things.
A store that is arranging things so that there are no checks is a store that is going to profit from its own mistakes. Impersonal forces will drive it to do so regardless of particular human intentions.
Of course they are "priced" in the sense of the vendor assigning a price to deduct, but transparency to the purchaser is legally required.
The issue I have is that once you add the friction in, it prevents errors from being corrected, and that reduces the incentive to prevent them. It's not about whether I can get a problem fixed when I notice it. It's that the number of problems will be higher because on average fewer will be noticed and fixed. Furthermore, whenever the rate of problems seems a little too high, the easy "fix" is to add a little more friction.
Passing items between friends that used the same phone to get in is also seamless (I’ve never tried passing an item between two amazon accounts).
I believe there are weight sensors to counteract stuff like taking out half a sandwich and putting the rest back, but I’m not sure about this one.
There are definitely ways to cheat the system. But the tech is at a point where it is similar hassle/consequences to other petty shoplifting that happens across the world (the cameras can always be checked by a human in a post-mortem).
The reality is convenience store shopping is at a point where it is almost always better for the company and the customer with Amazon Go tech.
The bigger problems with the Amazon Go tech is, how do you scale it to a supermarket size, how do you get around or change regulations that a human needs to validate ID for alcohol, how do you auto-stock the place, how do you get away from needing a human for security guard / first aid reasons? Also I imagine it costs a lot to set up. How do you make this cheap enough to be financially worth the ROI?
I agree with you - the stores will save more money by switching to this tech and it will be better for the customers.
I really hate having to queue for 10 minutes in a busy supermarket to buy groceries - it's probably the worst UX I experience on a regular basis.
Why do people do this? Why can’t you put it back where you got it if you don’t want it any more?
Some people are just terrible.
I was in a supermarket sometime last year and saw a woman put a package of meat in the toilet paper aisle and walk away. She saw me staring at her and began shouting at me.
The world is full of awful people.
I mean it's kind of symbolic: meat is basically absolute, complete and utter shit, anyway.
People aren't likely to repeatedly steal from an honours system cafe if there are regular customers witnessing them.
I'd say, in a cafe, besides cash you could have a touchscreen to key in your order and tap your phone to pay. The walk in walk out Amazon model is not an honours system, it's a technological policing model.
I've seen trust-based mate shops at hackerspaces around the world, and I've been told that the ones that have a credit system (even one that's not limited, checked, and that's not even authenticated) end up actually not having any significant losses. Like, anything from a piece of paper with people noting down unpaid mate purchases to things like android tablets with a webapp letting you note that you put in a bill of N euros and taken out a bottle of mate.
Friction from being able to pay right away seems to lead to "I'll pay extra later" thinking, which makes people either forget or miscalculate how much they actually owe.
Also, when your balance is negative, after every purchase there is a big red notification reminding you of that.
I've spoken with grocery store clerks in SF (at major chains like Walgreens) who were concerned that their stores might be closed because of truly excessive losses due to constant shoplifting. Of course the shrinkage is factored into the price, but you can only raise prices so much before it starts eating into your sales.
BTW, when I visited the Amazon Go in SF it actually seemed to have more staff present than a regular grocery store of comparable size.
It's just walk in, pick up a drink and a snack, walk to the self check kiosk and scan both barcodes, tap a few times rapidly (you can just hammer a button in the same place a few times) and wave my card. If I had to guess I'd say the entire checkout process takes ~10s, most of which is getting my card out of my wallet.
This differs from a US self checkout in a few ways:
- I nearly always had to queue in the US. I nearly never have to queue in Switzerland, at least at this store. This may be because:
- Swiss self checkout kiosks don't weigh the bagging area like US ones do. In the US there's always a small delay between scanning items while you bag the item and wait for the checkout to detect it. In Switzerland you just scan it and the kiosk doesn't care what you do with it afterwards.
- Payment is extremely fast, like sub-second end-to-end fast. You literally just wave your card at the terminal.
- There are usually 15-20 self checkout terminals in the larger supermarkets you find in the city so unless you're there at a really busy time, they usually have more than enough throughput to deal with traffic. In the US I'm used to seeing <10 self checkout terminals.
A weird moral compass that had you not using technology that replaced menial labor would be actually impossible in any (even ancient) society.
A tech worker who claims to value a cashier's job over their own convenience is basically gorging on two large deluxe pizzas while criticizing others for eating an olive.
Just look around you. Pick just about anything. A wall. A refrigerator. Your shoes. A spice jar. They all have stories to tell about automation and job loss.
It was stupid scapegoating in the past and it is even stupider now. Notice specifically that scapegoating is specifically at who is weak and at hand - not actual sources of problems.
Also, they have a kitchen attached to them, and prepare food in it, so they have kitchen staff for that and all the delivery surrounding it.
They also now need to hire engineers to work on the system, maintain and repair it, and service workers to setup and maintain the infrastructure needed in the store.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure the whole things turns out way more expansive for them than hiring a few cashiers. I think the idea is that the extra convenience given to the customers mean that customers will prefer to shop at Amazon Go instead of elsewhere, and that might be worth the extra cost to grow the marketshare.
No you won't. Our standard of living is built on automation in a million ways, big and small.
You're only actually opposed to recent, more visible examples. Why?
I know the same argument can be made for buying stuff online - but in the physical world you cannot really change your appearance without ridiculous costs/time involved.
Many supermarkets already have a large amount of CCTV inside of them. Some of these are already mining the data for the concerns you describe (often without the audio aspect).
What makes this worse than that?
In any case, we desperately need regulations to govern government/corporate use of individuals' biometrics.
we need strong privacy laws so that the penalties for collecting/abusing biometric data is a strong deterrent for whoever does this kind kf thing.
The point I (poorly) tried to raise wasn't: "well, grocery stores could do this too, so it's not a problem". Rather, it was more: "shouldn't this be even more alarming, given that it can already happen at most stores across the country".
I dont think you intended that, but your comment seems to imply that having higher friction is an inherent experience of a grocery store, and that there is no reason to go there otherwise.
Personally, my family is going in a different direction. Commodity products at Aldi, different stuff at Trader Joe’s and speciality products at specialty retail.
It’s cheaper, better quality and less time than navigating a 150k sqft store.
There is no need to catch these people, they're customers, not thieves.
Apple has done the same thing forever with mobile checkout. They make it work by crazy margins, plus a customer base and voluntary compliance.
Retail employees have limited ability to do anything about shrink other than increase friction anyway. I worked at a big electronics retailer in the 90s that would get robbed blind, and there was very little you could do. The only exception was when a gang of fake Asian tourists raided the place, and we “helped” by being interrogated by the police, because they suspected than an employee tipped the gang off about inventory.
The danger is that these new outlets keep peeling off more of the mass-affluent and working class customers that keep the other stores profitable. Just as Sears and Macy's anchored the 250 other stores in a mall, the supermarket anchors alot of other business. So we went from 80% of goods sold by tens of thousands of retailers in 1970 to dozens/hundreds in 2000 to potentially 3-5 in 2030.
There is also (at least at the original one) plenty of staff, just they are helping people through the gates and restocking shelves.
You could still shoplift with a fake Amazon account, but this would be way above the effort level most shoplifters go to, especially to steal a sandwich.
There is another Carrefour branch, which does not have the above option, but allows you to give your trolley to the checkout counter, and just go home. In 30 minutes or so, you get the products delivered to your door, with the credit card reader, so you can pay.
What would be really awesome, would be a merger of there two features, as follows:
I walk around the supermarket scanning the items I need (without adding to trolley, and lugging the trolley around). Then pay and walk out, and in 30 minutes the items are delivered to my house.
That would be cool, and the tech and systems are in place for that.
I think nearly half of people do some grocery shopping online these days, I wonder if that's putting more pressure on supermarkets to reduce overheads like cashiers. The lower end supermarkets seem to mostly go the other way - with Aldi and Lidl not having self scan checkouts even other than trials.
Although what most people use is actually the reverse, you order the items online and go fetch them with your car, an employee puts the bags in your trunk and you're on your way. You can either pay online or on site.
Implementing RFID would be cost effective as compared to implementing Amazon Go based approach. Where you need to install sensors and camera installed!
RFID tags are the major cost, which can be solved with bulk purchases.
Decathlon has already deployed RFID based self checkout system!
UHF based RFID readers are better since they have more than 1 meter of read range.
Even places like Whole Food and 7-11 still require PIN + cashback + yes/no prompts on NFC payments which IMO defeats the purpose.
Even better than Apple Pay IMO is NFC-enabled cards. Love that US issuers like Chase and Amex have finally started rolling those out.
Meanwhile at my local ACE hardware store they manage to have everything I need in a MUCH smaller building, but they always have someone on hand if any help is needed.
So I’d rather the shop cut costs in other ways, like use smaller buildings and narrower aisles to save on rent. I like people.
Our grocery store (Wegmans) has labelmaker scales in the produce department, and the four or five digit code right next to the produce items. You bag it, weigh it, and label it yourself.
Speeds up the human checkouts, too.
There are definitely still issues if you need assistance. The ratio of self checkout lines to attendants is 8/1 when the store is busy.
There's a knack to using them, and unless you have a generous number of them (I know of only two local stores that do), you end up getting stuck while the single staff member assigned to the self-checkouts assists customers having issues.
Plus it's not unusual for a significant number of them to be out of order, not accepting credit cards, only accepting credit cards, or just being generally temperamental.
I don't know about that - self checkouts are both more space-dense and require far less staff to support so each individual store could support way more customers.
Replacing human workers with robots should be considered a good thing, it's a problem with our system of economics, not with the companies increasing their level of automation.
Then elevators got smarter and people now directly interface with the system.
With checkouts, it looks the same. I have a few pieces of hardware I want to buy. I can either stand in line and wait until someone scans them for me and tells me the total, or I can just scan them myself and pay.
It usually much faster to go through the self-checkout (especially with Home Depot's new set up. Just a handheld scanner and a huge touchscreen). For those times that it isn't (either a line of people, or unusual items that need special handling), then I'll go with the regular checkout.
To me, the extra work is in waiting for someone else to do what I can do faster and easier. This is similar to how gas pumping works in Oregon and New Jersey. No thanks, I'll pump my own gas please.
That being said, I do agree that direct interface is a lot faster in most scenarios (like elevators, self-checkout). I think the most important factor is, does it reduce inconvenience or does it add "nice-to-haves". The former will always guarantee a fast adoption
During the gradual demise of full service gas stations in the other states, there was a period when one or two of the pumps were designated full service and if you pulled up in front of them the attendant would pump your gas, in exchange for a premium of around $0.20/gallon to cover the extra wages and benefits and insurance risk etc.
The reason they discontinued it wasn't that the gas stations minded selling the service, it was that approximately nobody opted to pay extra when given the choice. Which is why they only really survive today where it's required by law -- there is no law in the other states prohibiting it, there just aren't enough people who actually want it to justify having it.
I'm not so self-important to think that I can't stand in line at a checkout for three minutes.
Those two Ace Hardware stores are amazing! They have so much stuff in such a small place, and always have helpful people.