“Just walk out” technology by Amazon
justwalkout.com
justwalkout.com
And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this?
In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world.
Amazon were slightly profitable or break-even since 2003. There's a convenient chart of their profits since day one here:
https://qz.com/1196256/it-took-amazon-amzn-14-years-to-make-...
Starting in 1997 they bled money with mounting losses until about 1999, when they began to turn things around. The dotcom pop is clearly visible but they recovered almost immediately and their losses continued to shrink until about 2001-2002 when they became break even. From 2002-2011 they either made small profits or nothing, but that was obviously because they were growing at a rapid pace and putting all the money back into the business. Once AWS launches in 2006 (so about 10 years after day 1 in retail) profits start growing but then are back into the red around the time of the GFC+recession, and again in the 2012-2013 European recession. After that it's stratospheric profits.
How much investor money is "infinite money"? Somewhere between $8-$9 million before they floated on the stock market.
https://www.quora.com/Who-were-the-original-investors-in-Ama...
Obviously, investors who put money into their IPO have done extremely well and cannot claim they were shovelling money into a furnace, far from it.
The inflation in investment round sizes over the past 20 years has been staggering. I see nothing that suggests Amazon was unusual in raising so little money (comparatively speaking) before they went public.
Finally, Amazon's marketplace is just not navigable. Their search is pathetically bad, and this is nothing new, it's been a common complaint for years. Some fairly massive amount of their traffic is inbound from Google searches like "some product amazon" just because of how pathetically bad it is. The only other reasonable way to navigate their site is if their similar product suggestions or "commonly bought together" happens to nail the item you were looking for.
I've had searches where adding an additional keyword that is in the product title will actually cause the product to disappear from the search. What in the actual fuck.
That's what I thought until I was scammed by a Chinese on eBay... after countless emails, calls, even police reports, eBay did not return the 800 dollars I lost... not sure if it's an isolated case but it was pretty frustrating.
Their recommendation engine for related prducts used to be nice but that's been replaced by sponsored products which lowers the quality.
Now, the only way I use Amazon's search is when I have a SKU or part number and type it in directly. But I also do that in Google and often find the same thing elsewhere at similar or less cost (including shipping, though to be fair it may take a day or 2 longer).
eBay's search is still one of the best for me, in that it respects the keywords I put in and allows for extended query syntax to really hunt something down (which then can be turned into a saved search).
One of the most creative things I found on eBay was tool rental. I needed a tool to replace the bearings on my washing machine, and a seller was selling one explicitely as a rental: tool was charged about $120, with $35 shipping. When done, sent it back for a refund. The "shipping" included the rental fee and shipping both ways.
The one that they're missing that I really wish they would include is "multi item BIN" formats. People will list a $1 item so that they're the first result that comes up, and then the item you're looking for is high priced. The prices are in fact so high that I go out of my way to try and exclude these items using "not" keywords, setting a minimum price, and filtering to US only, which collectively get most of them.
I have a lot of saved searches for "rare" items that only get listed infrequently, or for items that I'm waiting to come down in price.
The contrast between the way those two sites handle their search is stark.
After shipping with Amazon for our non-Amazon orders for six months, we've moved about 80% of our shipments to them because they save us that much time, hassle, and money. FedEx picks up almost all the rest, with a handful of packages going out UPS and Postal due to address requirements, or customer preference on phone orders (all online orders are Amazon/eBay/website where we limit shipping choices; we are about 60% Amazon, 30% eBay, 8% website, and 2% phone orders on a typical day).
I hope that there's always a USPS option. My apartment complex has package lockers that can only be used by the USPS, so that's the only safe way to get packages delivered when I'm not home.
If they released this at Whole Foods, I'd guess they'd fire all the cashiers there. That would make this rollout a lot less exciting for a lot of people.
I hope Amazon comes up with an awesome way to help the cashiers this technology replaces. Then if self-driving cars end up working out, that industry can learn from what Amazon did.
[0] https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/rudy-takala/top-2-us-jo...
Since Whole Foods sells alcohol, I doubt that. There are things that lots of governments won't let you have customers “just walk out” with.
As I wrote that I realized they could even employ cashiers to do that instead.
They check ID entering the liquor section (and it is a human that checks), but otherwise it is bag it and just walk out.
They can be retrained to work in fulfillment centers. Amazon will provide the piss bottles.
I would think the majority would be employed at little restaurants, small shops, etc.
> Will people still be working in stores with Just Walk Out technology?
> Yes. Retailers will still employ store associates to greet and answer shoppers' questions, stock the shelves, check IDs for the purchasing of certain goods, and more - their roles have simply shifted to focus on more valuable activities.
The benefit is a much better customer experience, not labor savings.
The primary benefit is access to a lot better data about shoppers, not a better customer experience.
It's a massive competitive advantage far beyond whatever data they get by watching me roam the store.
Retailers that compete on "experience" like Target etc will reinvest into a better customer experience.
Retailers that compete on price like Aldis will focus solely on driving cost down.
I'm not sure why this should be on Amazon. It's on all of us to better train people to have the jobs of the future. Our education system hasn't really changed in 100+ years. It needs to.
And if these companies profit, they do so as a reward for spending the capital (dollars and manhours) in creating new technologies that improve productivity. Specifically total factor productivity in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobb%E2%80%93Douglas_product...
It's on all of us because it really isn't on anyone in particular, surely not on Amazon.
I can take your statement and flip it around just as easily: why should Amazon bear the costs of paying for many R&D ideas that may or may not pay off? We should all share that cost if we're all going to benefit from those innovations
Are you seriously trying to suggest everyone benefits from Amazon’s innovations?
I'm not saying it's a great thing, just that the jobs Just Walk Out will be replacing are already being replaced by self checkout.
Recently came back to the East Bay (SF) and the Whole Foods I'm staying near, more than the others, seems like a staging store for Buy Online & 1) Get Delivered, 2) Pick Up In Store.
There are often more WF employees shopping for pick-up orders than customers walking around the store. Navigating aisles that are full of these WF shoppers gives the store a pretty signficantly different feel than the other stores that I'm a regular at. Plus, the staging/storage area at the front for ready-orders is much bigger than at other stores.
Not as true at SF city WFs, or the ones in Reno, LA, Park City and Phoenix/Scottsdale that I'm familiar with.
I'm guessing this dynamic, plus "Just walk out" is where they're headed, at least in certain densities. And that's where some of the cashiers may be transitioned.
It's not just about "AWS"-ing the thing. It's about gaining access to all of the transaction data and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you. A retailer like Walmart would NEVER use this tech, they know their data is one of the most valuable things they have (in fact they don't share their data with anyone, while all the other FDM retailers do), but boutique retailers like J Crew or whoever would happily.
Amazon is always putting up ads for me based on my purchase history, but they're never what I wind up buying. I have no explanation for what is wrong with their algorithm.
Just call me The Hammock Man!
This was about the same time they stopped shipping things in cardboard boxes and went with bubble packs, and most recently, paper wrap with no padding whatsoever.
Basically, you choose why you're returning. In some cases if you say something other than "the item was defective", it'll only have options that cost money.
It's super rare, but I've seen it before.
Other things however come just as you would expect (paper wrapping or bubble wrapped). So it all depends on the amazon worker doing his or her job..
It's pretty obvious that people don't go around shopping for screen protectors and then buy phones to match.
But I wonder why they don't just flip the prediction? If you bought X, then advertise anything but X.
Like if you bought a toilet seat, they might advertise toilet paper instead (which would be good, because all the stores around here just ran out...)
Or maybe showing a wild selection of weird products results in people "brainstorm" other shopping needs, as a kind of anchoring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring#Anchoring_in_negotia...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
I wonder if their creepy surveillance tech knows I said it. I was going there to pick up my brother's medicine from the pharmacy. It's a real shame. I used to LOVE shopping at Target. But the dang store has gotten greedier and super obnoxious over the years.
I was positive they used to use their tracking data to design store layouts with minimal clashing, such that they distribute the shoppers across the store. It seemed to really work, too.
In their newer layouts, I dunno what it is, but everything seems crammed together all in the same spot. They replaced the popcorn, icees, and hot dogs, with food I don't like that costs too much. They got rid of the handbasket things that were handy and all over the store, and got rid of the benches too. Then they sold their pharmacy to CVS.. which immediately threw out the kickass containers Target used to use and added a super obnoxious phone system.
Just overall, I hate shopping at Target now.
Turns out people who have just purchased something are far more likely to purchase that thing again than a random person.
This makes them the perfect person to advertise to.
Even if the percentage is quite low this can be better than advertising to the general population. Say the numbers were 1 in 10 000 impressions leads to a toilet seat sale, but 1 in 1000 people who have just bought a toilet seat buy another one soon after (first one was broken/distributor/toilet seat collector/remodelling whole home/etc).
If those were the numbers it would be silly to not advertise to recent buyers.
Essentially, the self selection of 'I just bought <x>' very often puts you in a category that is far more likely to buy <x> again than almost anyone else.
Very helpful for identifying what’s hot and releasing your own version. Figuring out seasonal trends. Or getting competitive price information to match/beet. Walmart brags about their ability to presciently stock stores, which keeps turnover & capital efficiency high.
Well, who knows how much interest will truly materialize, particularly given the data leaked to amazon, but the post claims/implies that retailers reached out to Amazon and were interested in licensing the technology.
This is an industry with a lot of inertia, and customers are not going to be driving this change like a lot of optimists at amazon might expect. They will struggle when the tech isn't working right and prefer the old ways, as they do now.
Plus there is the rampant theft that will occur, unless you hire someone to stand there and man the door. And at that point you've spent millions on this fancy tech that your shareholders salivated over to have the same exact payroll overhead as you did when you had someone sitting there scanning items.
If this makes amazon and the dime a dozen clone startups some money, good for them, but I don't see this changing the world.
So far Amazon has also not shown their technology deployed in an existing store, rather than an Amazon Go. We're actively working on being the first to demonstrate this. Stay tuned over the next couple of months.
But, sincerely, good luck. New technology should shake up the existing players, not be an occasion for oligopolies to become even more powerful.
Can you give us a sense of how many transactions standard is doing every day with it's tech that's further along / more deployed than Amazon? At least the SF location I visited had steady traffic so Amazon is collecting some real data (selection a bit limited so go grocery interesting to me)
Isn't the better question, "where is the product"? Is it a gimmick?
This looks awesome, but until I see it in action, working flawlessly, outside of the Seattle/Silicon Valley nexus, I'm not sure there will be (or needs to be) any competition.
I’ve seen a lot of very intolerable lines in the suburbs. It’s not unusual for me to wait 15 minutes to checkout at Target or Costco and last December I remember a 25 minute line.
I think this is a product. There’s about six different grocery store within a fifteen minute drive from my house. I’ll switch to the first one to implement this system.
This really doens't sound like a problem that needs amazon and "technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning"
It looked basically the same, except that there were these huge, bright blue Amazon Prime ads everywhere. It felt vaguely dystopian—a store of my youth invaded by the giant tech monolith.
If Amazon is trying to not noticeably change Whole Foods, they're doing a pretty lousy job.
WF has already served Amazon well by being a test bed for grocery delivery optimization, no need to screw up a profitable existing business with any additional radical changes. That's what Amazon Go stores are for, and now they can sell that tech to other stores. Once the tech is mass-adopted, they can smoothly switch all WF stores to "just walk out" tech with very little complaints, as that's the experience people would be already used to at all the other stores
Not only that, Amazon would be literally paid by others to take over Amazon's own risk. This is such a nice play all around, they just need to manage not screwing it up somehow. But execution never was a weakness for Amazon imo, so I bet it will mostly go smoothly.
If I was a major business, I wouldn't pay Amazon to be a guinea pig, especially when I see them unwilling to do it at their own major retail chain.
If you've got a Whole Foods and a less-upmarket grocery store equally far from you, you're gonna get your staple foods from the less-upmarket store, and just go to the Whole Foods for the things only they carry.
But if you're making an online order with a fixed-overhead delivery fee from Whole Foods, you're not going to make a separate online order with a fixed-overhead delivery fee from the less-upmarket store; so you're going to end up ordering the staple foods from Whole Foods, too.
If I were doing this, I would be far more likely to make a separate order online than physically. It takes no effort to do it online, but to shop at more than one physical store is additional inconvenience.
I'm guessing they're slowly scaling up.
Or, just over charge by a large enough margin to make up for it.
For example, I made two apple pies the other day. The recipe calls for 2 lbs of apples each, so I bought 5 lbs of apples (to account for the weight loss from coring and peeling).
Based on the video below, it would seem there are a few bugs to work out. For example, never pick up a whisk at an an Amazon Go Grocery store unless you intend to buy it. You will always be charged. [1]
> How does it handle fruits by weight
Fruit aren't priced by weight. This is also covered in the same video.
(I believe M&S has something similar?)
One of the big tech companies in the 80's demonstrated this. I think it was either IBM or AT&T/Bellcore. Essentially, it was just a scanner at the door that read RFID tags in each item, and your credit card.
This was back when RFID was still oh-holy-shit technology.
The reason I think AT&T might have been involved is that the video demonstration was very similar to AT&T "You will" series of commercials that aired around the same time.
Yes, you'll have to recharge your shopping carts/baskets. Just design them to ensure they pass through charge (like a string of Christmas lights) when stacked together, so you only have to plug in (or have a cradle for) the bottom one (for baskets) or frontmost one (for carts.)
It's still a worse idea than using computer vision, if you've got that, but it's not something we couldn't have pulled off a decade or more ago.
The amazon thing is obviously based on computer vision which in the hindsight makes sense. And makes more sense than our ideas that includes CV as one of the source into sensor fusion magic...
Um, Walmart and most major grocery stores already have self checkout areas. So “wait in line to get served” isn’t quite the comparison. Most companies will give zero fucks about adopting this unless it becomes the expected norm.
Edit: The "scan your own cart" model is a more compelling counter-argument than the self checkout machines currently at Wal-Mart, as this can accommodate a much higher throughput.
There are competitive options, if you’re in retail you do not have to give Amazon all your “retail data” or use their tech.
Conclusion : ideas are worthless, Execution is key
This was also often the conclusion found during the Dark Ages. ;D
Do you mean to say that doing something well is way better than imagining doing something well?
Ie. Good ideas are valuable
To me, that's part of the reason why thought pieces are valuable to me. Also, unconventional tracks at academic conferences, like provocations at DIS 2020 [1] (which I cite here since it's on my mind because I'm personally applying to it right now).
Execution can bring profit. Ideas might not.
History is full of examples of visionaries coming up with ideas that have inspired and fueled others--in some cases whole industries have been founded on these ideas. For instance, Doug Engelbart gave the "Mother of All Demos" in 1968 [1]. It was a proof of concept, but the ideas he talked about were implemented by other companies--who profited from it.
It is unfortunate that we live in a world where ideas hold such little monetary value, but they're most certainly not worthless.
But let's say you have very good ideas but you're a mediocre executioner.
1. Could you find a very lucrative job/partnership mostly because of your ideas, and get quality help with the execution ? It's possible.
2. Ideas are easy to steal. Do you have a decent strategy to prevent that from happening ? Those sometimes exist.
3. Not every business sucseeds. Can you try repeatedly ? Maybe, depending on context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will
I was always confused as to why they'd spend money on vaporware advertising, since I don't think they were responsible for doing any of the things.
I get why they spent money on vaporware advertising.
But I don't get why there's no modern equivalent. No one seems to be making equivalent statements about technology that's 20-30 years away from today.
There are vague hints that AI and QC will somehow be awesome, but they're very light on specifics.
It's interesting how we got from the forward-looking 90s to the backward-looking 20s.
There are some fully automated stores the size of shipping containers in Beijing, but they're mostly demos, too.
I don't think anybody really has this working well enough to deploy. It has that machine learning "we got to 95%" look. This is something that's easy to almost do, and the last 5% is really tough.
I do love how the very first banner video standard.ai shows is how one person passes an item to another. I'm curious to see all the edge cases Amazon Go ran into over the year or two they ran. I can see a lot of messy cases like that coming up.
Standard.ai apparently has a demo store in SF, although it's been closed due to the coronavirus epidemic.
Grabango - one installation in test at a Giant Eagle store.
Getzippin - one installation in test at a Lojas Americanas store. Their site gives the impression that it's really about getting people to install their phone app, so they can be spied upon.
v7labs - we're AI, we don't need installations.
It's always been a question of when the supporting technology was going to be good enough to make it work. The idea has been around long enough for most of the early patents to expire.
Yep, I meant more along the lines of how you put it i.e. packaged up and ready to start selling it as a boxed-up/drop-in solution.
All the way down in Australia.
At PIXEVIA we develop the technology and run a fully working convenience store in Europe.
Although not yet doing automatic checkout, but most of the technology needed for it is there.
What if I grab two items with one hand, and then put one back? Will the system correctly track this?
Is this still a thing? In Poland most shops allows you to scan and pay for products in matter of seconds without any help. No lines, no hassle. :)
I'd be really impressed if any large supermarket chain (outside of the US) would be ok to be so tightly coupled to amazon for virtually no benefits compared to self checkout. It's like a lot of what SV is pumping out, half assed solution to non existing problems.
In my part of the US this is common as well, but there's almost always a line to use the scanners that is about the same as the line for the a human checkout clerk. So I almost always opt for the human.
Technically Walmart did this in their Rogers, AR flagship store in the late 90s, but consumers found it awkward/error prone and didn’t use it much. I have a feeling Walmart shockingly enough was just to far ahead of the curve technology and culture wise (if memory serves, self checkout wasn’t even a common thing back then or if so, was just becoming one).
Twenty years ago this web site would 100% have looked like an April Fool's joke.
Don't know what to make of that. Maybe it's that although retail feels almost exactly the same as it always has, under the hood lots of parts have really been moving, and I just haven't noticed?
The parallel observation is that when Gmail was announced it totally did seem like a prank. You're offering how much storage for free? for everyone? How?.
Then just play the trends: how much space the median user actually uses, user adoption trends, planned storage capacity, storage cost. Possibly the whole GMail never used more than 1% of of Google's total storage capacity.
The 24/7 global corporate surveillance network has it's roots in Sun and its "The Network is the Computer", as early as 1984. Hard to believe Google just stumbled into a trillion dollar business model two decades later.
But at the same time, Google (as well as the rest of the marketing industry) is working on replacing the functionality of third party cookies without having to use them -- thus negating the entire reason to restrict third party cookies.
Also: imagine you could write what you want on a ground up dead tree, drop it in a special box and a few weeks later, the item shows up. That's a catalog, and Sears was making them in the late 1800s. I bet there are older examples.
And then, later, we could also order by phone and credit card, just giving our card number over the phone (since we didn't expect to be dealing with or be surrounded by assholes, like nowadays on the IoA) and getting the items after a few days (since the standard Post was better organised than the pitiful mess it has become now).
And suddenly I'm reminded of If all stories were written like science fiction stories
https://web.archive.org/web/20040929041451/http://www.shrove...
FYI 20 years ago the total yearly e-commerce trade sales accounted for $27B in the US alone [1].
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/185283/total-and-e-comme...
Except for the fact that you could actually do this 20 years ago.
Also, that name, OMG, there are going to be so many protest signs that use this.
See also this
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-model-google-n...
EDIT:
JustWalkout.com was registered anonymously at GoDaddy 7 years ago: https://www.whois.com/whois/justwalkout.com
Amazon.com has public DNS contact info: https://www.whois.com/whois/amazon.com
There's no TM or R marks around the term "Just Walk Out" on the page and no Favicon.
Are we sure this is real?
But i don't see any link to this justwalkout.com from anywhere on amazon.com, justwalkout doesn't pull in any content hosted on amazon.com, the reuters article doesn't reference it, and all the other tech blogs talking about this seem to just be referencing the reuters article.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-store-technolo...
Twenty years ago, "Just walk out" technology in grocery stores looked more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrwjiO1MCVs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA
14 years later, it's still vaporware. There are a lot of fairly tough problems that need to be solved to make it work. Today, Amazon is probably better positioned to sucker/bully retailers into adopting their solution than IBM is. It remains to be seen if they can actually pull off the tech side of things though. IBM is not a company that's easy to laugh at.
She's trying to ring up the most customers per minute possible and using a second register helps her increase her checkout rate.
It's not unusual that I spend more time waiting to check out than I do actually shopping. I'd love solutions like "just walk out" since my experience lately seems to be something along the lines of "grab what I need and stand in line unnecessarily".
I don't know about your part of the US but it's now pretty common everywhere in Europe to have nearly unmanned retail stores. All the checkouts are self service. You can grab a portable scanner at the front, scan items as you walk around grabbing them and then tap your card at a checkout kiosk.
Amazon's implementation sounds even easier (no scanning required), but in terms of raw throughput it's probably only a bit better.
Imo there is nothing in terms of convenience and speed that can beat "just walking out".
One cool thing about Amazon Go is that it actually sends you an email afterwards telling you how much time you spent at the store. Without failure, my overall times range between 30 seconds and 2.5 minutes. While for a regular grocery store, I would estimate it to be at the very least 10 mins for an equivalent amount of items purchased. Maybe it is my own quirk, but it deeply annoys me to spend time doing things in an inefficient manner, whereas I know I can do them much more efficiently AND with less effort.
Judging from visits to London, our grocery culture is different mainly in that we usually buy weeks of food at once. Some people still use checkers to help them efficiently get through a giant cart of food. And our grocery stores are often gigantic, maybe dozens of lanes of checkout side by side, where in Europe I often see maybe... two?
I've waited in lines in UK and European stores, (Fortnam during the holidays?), but rarely waited in grocery stores over there, even in places without self check. There's just much less foot traffic in any individual grocery because they're so much smaller.
But maybe I'm just comparing US suburbs with UK cities, not sure.
There seem to be a lot of cashiers on weekends, but fewer overall. So many unused lanes, most of the year.
the first gen kiosks were pretty bad (slow, overly sensitive, no way to go back if you click the wrong thing, etc) but the current ones are solving those issues and have all but eliminated lines in my experience
- no item weight confirmation - no steps in-between trying to sell me things - no annoying voice overs - decent UX (navigation) for the 99% case
Here is how I pay in those stores: - scan my item(s) placing them directly in my bag: taking ~1s per item - navigate through 3 screens by hammering the [Next] button that is in the same spot on all these screens: takes less than 1s - pay contactless with my creditcard: takes less than 1s
The US screwed up each of those 3 steps.
I've been to Amazon Go a few times, the small one in NYC, and the selection is underwhelming but the walk out experience is amazing. And since then I've fantasized about just walking out pretty much every time I'm in a grocery store. The technology really feels special, like a sudden vast improvement in something I never really even thought could be improved.
If there are two grocery stores to choose between, I would go further and/or pay a bit more for the one I can "just walk out" of.
Not only that stores could cut staff pretty much right away. Amazon could charge some fraction of the payroll reduction + processing fees and it would be a no brainer for stores to implement, especially as the number of competing stores increases.
People are talking in this thread about how there is some competition "in the works", but amazon has multiple live deployments already. People are talking about the obvious dystopian angle here (spying on your data). Personally I'd give any company all by buying habits if it means I can skip lines after buying the stuff.
Personally I think this is going to be huge, and I will be betting big on Amazon.
But these stores exist today and make traditional cashiers obsolete in no uncertain terms, potentially across the entire brick and mortar retail industry, and the response is "eh, there's already self checkout lanes".
It really feel to me like one of those moments where people shrug off the iphone when it first launches.
I could be wrong but the phrasing of the FAQ on on the information page seems to suggest 3rd party stores using this tech could start popping up in a few months.
To me the Waymo announcement would be as momentous if they said:
> How long will it take to install [self driving] technology in a [car]?
> The installation of the technology can take as little as a few weeks from the time we have access to your [car].
I suppose the page doesn't directly explain when they will start the installations. But from the phrasing, I wouldn't be surprised if we hear an announcement of some sort of launch plans with a partner store in the next Month. It seems relatively imminent. Of course, I think there were other Amazon Go related announcements that didn't pan so who knows.
I've used plenty of self checkout lanes too and it's roughly the same satisfaction as going in a cashier lane. It's still X + Y steps where X is the number of items you have an Y is payment related steps.
(It's possible that I just hate lines (and self checkout?) way more than other people)
Not at all. It seems like a tiny, infinitesimal even, improvement over self checkout. Waiting in line is annoying, spending a minute or two scanning groceries is not. At least in my area, self checkout moves fast enough that I rarely have to wait for one to be available.
No, not really. It's more convenient and faster, sure, but it's not an incredibly significant sort of thing. And the cost/benefit ratio of it (considering the privacy implications) is nowhere near favorable enough for this to seem attractive to me.
There are random spot checks of course, but I don't think this would work elsewhere, not with the high level of citizen trust that there is here. I'm sure they lose some money to people enticed by easier stealing, but the flow of people is so much faster that it's probably worth it many times over.
In the future, I'll expect more and more stuff to come to me, rather than having to go and fetch them myself.
Luckily for Amazon, they'll also be in charge of that.
I wouldn't feel comfortable just walking out without knowing how much I'm going to be charged, so this tech is essentially useless to me.
My receipt was in the app shortly after (I walked about two blocks and checked). I think it took longer for an email to show up, but can't recall exactly
My main problem with this is how invasively creepy it all is.
I agree that this is another increase in the invasion of privacy that will probably end in a bad place. We need laws to prevent these systems, not just a few people holding on to scraps of privacy with desperate measures, like not buying a new car.
However, I don't think this technology will be used extensively by people who purchase a large quantity of products at a time. Instead, this will be catered to the times when someone needs to pick up 5 or less things at a store. In this instance, these customers are not typically price-sensitive about what they need.
We added a sugar tax, so the sticker price for beverages like original Coke went up, but similar zero sugar products (Coke Zero, Pepsi Max) did not. Of course some stores just raised the before-tax price to capture the difference as profit, and others just eliminated sugary drinks. So... a mixed result.
The EU's focus is that consumers always pay what the sticker price says. So, no "plus tax", no "shipping fees not included" on items that unavoidably have to be shipped to you, no "service fees" no "card fees" nothing like that. I think even if you don't actively like this, you can see the point of this approach.
Would it be easier to get consumers angry about taxes if the tax wasn't "baked in" ? Maybe. But it's not as though it has proved impossible to campaign against, for example, tax on tampons or even toilet paper.
Also, you seem to be putting more thought into this than our government has.
What if the item is marked as on sale but the database hasn't been updated so I don't get the sale price?
What if the price on the item is correct but someone fat fingered the price in the database?
What if a different customer moved an item from one shelf to another so the price on the shelf is for a different product?
What if I want to know the total with tax?
What if a camera sees me pick up a $500 item to look at but doesn't see me put it back on the shelf?
I don't want to go home, wait an hour+, see I've been mischarged, and then have to spend a week waiting for a refund to process.
Many of them happen when you're checking out in person too. You can simply go to the receipt kiosk every time if you're worried about being charged incorrectly.
Plus, when credit cards were introduced, you were still given the opportunity to agree upon the total on which you'd be charged, before you were charged. That's all I'm asking for with this.
Another potential alternative for the anxious (and I definitely include myself) is an app showing up-to-the-second billing state on the smartphone screen. At a glance, usability issues seem hard but doable.
This is still extra steps compared to "Just walk out" but it's close. There is no interaction with store employees (which suits some friends who struggle to do human interaction on "bad" days) for example, this store would seem to work just fine without any employees although of course it's a huge grocery store so it has dozens doing various things and couldn't in fact function without some.
The really nice optimisation of course is to get rid of the money. If you stop caring about trying to make the numbers add up and just rely on people going "Huh, I only need two cabbages, why would I take sixty cabbages? What am I going to do with sixty cabbages?" then this is all much simpler. But I think even Amazon doesn't expect to deploy this to a culture where that's realistic.
It also made it super easy to bag groceries.
Try shopping with a little kid and using one hand on your phone and being randomly checked when there are 20 people waiting before you. This is not working in the current version of the technology.
I'm sure they can make an app for that.
For one, there's usually a delay before you get your receipt.
With Prime Now, you get your groceries delivered and pay for them in advance. Once in a while, you don't get an item, get the wrong item, a rotten piece of fruit, or an expired bottle of milk. When this happens, you simply go to the app where every item is listed, and follow the quick prompts to get a refund. You can optionally give a reason for asking, but in my experience they don't actually seem to care; in fact, whenever I've left a comment that, for example, one of the ten oranges I ordered was bad, they've always refunded me for _all_ the oranges on my order. I assume this is because the number of refunds is low enough relative to the number of purchases that they can afford to just always refund, keeping the customer happy enough.
If this is how it ends up working, then I'd gladly trade standing in long lines at the store for just walking out and reviewing my purchases later. The tracking part is still a bit creepy, though.
Do you memorize all the time whether you grabbed two or three bags of chips or exactly how many cans of beer etc?
How do you prove you didn't buy something? Or will they just accept your word? If anyone can just say whatever, then people will just ask for refunds of stuff. Will they check the footage in each case? But maybe it can work in the US. It sure as hell won't work in many other countries, where people look for loopholes all the time.
I'd imagine it's similar to the heuristic Amazon uses today with their A-Z Customer Guarantee.
If you request a lot of refunds for a single trip, or have a history of requesting refunds, your individual risk score goes up, and the hoops you jump through to get a refund increase.
Also for retail grocery stores now, loss prevention is already an issue.
Right now, a person can take an item off the shelve and hide it, leaving only security cameras and human personnel to watch for theft.
Adding in amazon's technology would be additional layers of defense.
With amazon tech, in addition to manually monitored cameras, you add AI monitored cameras, and sensors on shelves to detect an item has been taken.
Without Amazon's tech stores rely on staff members witnessing the item being hidden.
With Amazon's tech, the item is taken and marked for payment as soon as it's removed.
Honestly, yes. What I worry more about is how well the names of items on the receipt actually match up to the products. From the summer I worked as a grocery cashier, I can tell you that people often end up confused at items on the receipt that they actually bought.
Combine that with mistaken items on the receipt and some number of more trusting people will just assume it's just a weird labeling of something they did buy and move on.
Are the prices not listed on the individual items?
Purchasers make decisions on a product by product basis, not based on the total.
How often are you at the checkout and say "Wait, HOW MUCH is my bill? never mind then, going to go put some things back."
Sure, it happens, but it's a 0.0001% use case.
edit: OK, fair play to everyone who responded and said this is a common use case if you're poor. Not sure how relevant the food stamps argument is here, since this is an automatic pay and checkout system.
But, remember - this requires a credit card and an app. As you put things in your basket, your app shopping cart is also updated, and you can track your running tally.
Would it?
>easily reversed based on video data
That suggests a level of effort from multiple parties well in excess of the typical "look at item; look at receipt"
There's a link to dispute the receipt should something happen, right on the receipt itself. Now this is specifically Amazon Go app, but I would expect it to be same for other retailers.
Edit: I see that this is a little bit different than Go stores. It's far less convenient, but you can still get the receipt in your email by visiting a kiosk it seems.
Not often, because I can look at the prices of things as I buy them. Unlike here.
In response to your comment in particular, yes, I have done that. Not often, but it has happened often enough, and only a few dollars each time. Do you think people whip out Excel and keep a running tally of every item in their carts?
Are these people shopping at Amazon boutiques?
Put a can of soup in your basket. Oops! The alert I set up for items that aren't covered by Food Stamps just fired. Let me see what the issue is. Oh! I just got an alert because I went over my budget, let me review my items and figure it right away.
And even if you don't have a smartphone/app, the process of going to a kiosk to review your order will be much faster than at a register. Walk up to the kiosk and it instantly shows what's in your basket, with a total and flags for non-Food Stamp items. Now you can go swap things out or put things back and the whole interaction only took a second and was must less of a commitment than going through a checkout lane.
That's a pretty common occurence for poor people. If you only have $70 and your bill comes to $72 because you did the mental math wrong you're gonna have to put something back.
I know a lot of HN is full of people who don't pay attention to prices (for whatever reason - probably the inordinate amount of obscenely high incomes) - but it's really common outside of this crowd.
When I was poor - I thoroughly examined prices and only bought things that were on sale. If it rang up and wasn't the price that it said it was - I put it back. An example in my mind would be something like a block of cheese being $12 instead of $10. It's only $2 but it's also $2 that I was not willing to pay. Sometimes the staff at the store were not removing the old sale tags - thus it looked like it was on sale but it wasn't.
This is not aimed at deanCommie, but I just want to comment on the massive cognitive dissonance in effect when the issue of listing tax-included prices on individual items in America is raised.
Do none of those arguments hold anymore? Why? Because it isn't European tourists asking the question?
The US system discriminates against those people, no denying it. That said, I'm sure our European friends are absolutely drooling at the thought of a 7% VAT...
Like I do sometimes, but then I consider VAT policy somewhat interesting, in that it specifies the "essentials" (VAT is not charged on these) of what a tax authority thinks one should have.
But most Europeans tend not to think about it on a daily basis, because it's baked into the price.
VAT is just a tax on Value Added like it says, and the exclusions targeting items you see as essential aren't focused on somebody's idea of what's essential but are the result of various lobbying. That is, it was not the goal of the tax system to encourage petite women to buy clothes intended for children nor to punish the largest children (or their parents) with more expensive clothes that's just the consequence of a lobbied-for exemption for kid sizes.
So "But it's an essential" is a useful emotional tactic but has no legal implications for VAT.
If they willfully forget/ignore something as basic at that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The mental effort is not in the calculation but in figuring out what the tax rate is where you are. There really is no excuse for retailers not listing "tax-included" prices.
I can't prove it, but I suspect this is directly related to the fact that in the US system, we see the tax on every purchase.
I admit it's annoying to not have a single number to work with, having to juggle sticker price and real price sucks (the same argument applies to tipping).
But sales taxes are regressive and I don't want them to creep upwards indefinitely. A compromise would be to always display both prices, and make the price-at-register larger.
Can you elaborate? What does this mean exactly?
Apparently I can guess an awful lot about how you grow up based on your estimate of how infrequently that happens.
I'm betting you can guess something about how I grow up that I know you're off by quite a few orders of magnitude.
Not sure why you feel the need to say that anyone who is conscious of their grocery budget is irrelevant to an automatic system? You don't say this, but that basically implies that anyone who does so is 'beneath' this tech/convenience.
I don't want an app for my grocery store.
I do my shopping spread between 4 different grocery stores depending where in the area I'm closest to, what specifically I need, etc.. and I don't want an app for any of them. I already get pestered about loyalty cards, now I'm going to get pestered about installing my local Rite-Aid's mobile app?
A good example for people familiar with electric car charing is the ChargePoint integration. I have the app, but I never open it, and I don't even really need it (as I only use it for rare circumstances where I am in an unknown area and need to find a charging spot asap). Whenever I want to charge my car at a ChargePoint station, I just open up the ChargePoint card in Apple Wallet, NFC scan it, and that's it. It already knows that the ChargePoint card is associated with my account, so I can later open the app and see how charged my car is, what's the charging rate at the moment, my billing history, etc. If I don't have the app, I can check it on the web just as well.
Identity
find accounts on the device
add or remove accounts
Contacts
find accounts on the device
Location
approximate location (network-based)
precise location (GPS and network-based)
Wi-Fi connection information
view Wi-Fi connections
Other
receive data from Internet
view network connections
create accounts and set passwords
full network access
run at startup
use accounts on the device
control vibration
prevent device from sleeping
Everything I know about about the mobile ecosystem tells me that if an app/card/integration is required for an unrelated service, it's going to go downhill over time. Everything I know about Amazon means that they are definitely going to eventually be advertising to me and pushing notifications and 'reminders' and whatever -- because they already do with the online store.
Even the charging example getting brought up as proof of this working: I can't imagine signing up for a special credit card that was required to fill up my car at a gas station. That's not innovative. The current system is I can use any credit card, or cash, or (increasingly) mobile pay at any gas station without any account with no decrease in quality of service. And with the current system, someone else can borrow my car without also needing to borrow my credit card or phone.
I'll stick my neck out and predict that over the next 3-5 years, ChargePoint's app and web interface are going to get progressively worse, and progressively more invasive. This is based purely on the knowledge that they require an online account and special credit card just to refill a car. I don't think there's any reason to have that business model other than a plan to eventually leverage the card/account in invasive ways.
Regardless, even linking my own cards, this is still kind of a crazy concept, isn't it? It's still strictly worse on nearly every single axis than a normal charge/gas station, where I can still just as easily pay with platforms like Apple/Google Wallet, but also with a spare twenty if I've left my phone at home or if I'm loaning my car to someone else.
It's very difficult to come up with a business model that says, "you must only pay us or interact with us in a special, tracker-friendly way" that isn't going to eventually become profitable by selling a lot of data or targeting you with ads. There are some exceptions to this rule, but they are very few and far between, and Amazon (and I suspect ChargePoint as well) are not among them.
In fact, you can already look at ChargePoint's privacy policy[1] and see that they're carving out terms that allow them to share your personal/location/purchase data with affiliates and partners, as well as to use your information to deliver tailored ads.
To me, the biggest thing that has kept me from trying it is that I need to open my app and scan a QR code. Looks like they’re addressing this by left you swipe your card.
I’m sure they have a ‘you charged me incorrectly’ resolution service as well.
Credit cards purpose is that it hides from you how much money you have left. If you were paying in cash and see how much money you have left in your wallet, you're more likely end up not purchasing a given item.
This is one step further, since you now don't know how much you're paying (unless you calculating the cost in your head, which most people don't do) and typically you'll know once you get a CC statement.
Note that the kiosk doesn't print the receipt, it e-mails it, which makes it even harder to instantly see what you've paid.
You only need to use the kiosk once per credit card (to enter your e-mail address). From the page:
> If shoppers need a receipt, they can visit a kiosk in the store and enter their email address. A receipt will be emailed to them for this trip. If they use the same credit card to enter this or any other Just Walk Out-enabled store in the future, a receipt will be emailed to them automatically.
Also, not sure if genuine mistake or sneaky "clickbait": The video has its `video_poster` image that's eerily similar to a YouTube screenshot, though the video itself is hosted on Amazon's servers, not YouTube.
Even if they recently bought this domain and it was pushed to one of their GoDaddy accounts, you think they would immediately initiate a transfer to MarkMonitor to put it in their portfolio of managed domains.
In July of 2019, the domain had a coming soon page on it, that was in German:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190709115714/http://justwalkou...
But you may as well. By giving them a CC# you're allowing Amazon to spy on you anyway -- and that's not even mentioning the copious surveillance in such stores in the form of cameras and behavior detection.
> If shoppers need a receipt, they can visit a kiosk in the store and enter their email address.
Oh, and if you want a receipt, you'll have to give Amazon your email address, too, which allows them to more easily tie your real-world identity and activity to the profile they already have on you.
This sort of thing is a privacy disaster. I wouldn't set foot inside a store that does this.
If they make it accessible enough, all stores may. Even if they don't, I imagine all stores will have something similar in some timeframe. So.. what will you do then?
I think that's unlikely. There is likely to be a large enough percentage of shoppers who avoid this sort of thing to support at least a couple of stores who make it a selling point that they don't do this.
But, if there is no option then I'll have to figure out what my response will be. It would likely have to be a compromise position between buying as much as I can without involving a store at all (buy produce directly from farmers, do a lot more bartering with neighbors, etc.) and employing single-use credit cards when I can't avoid the store.
That would be OK, actually -- there are still plenty of stores that don't use loyalty cards.
The difference between the two things, though, are that you can shop at a store that has loyalty cards without having to use them yourself. You couldn't shop at a store that uses this program without using the program yourself.
this already exists in nearly every retail store already. full of cameras and for advertising purposes they have been building profiles on people for decades
AFAIK many retailers (Target, for example) use an identifier derived from your CC number and don't even need your email or phone number to build a profile on you.
I totally agree with being concerned about your privacy, but I don't understand the increased harshness on this service specifically as opposed to the already-pervasive services that already collect your data on a daily basis. Is it just because this one is Amazon and it's fun to hate on them?
But this is real-life shopping, not online. Online shopping is 100% optional. Real-life shopping is not.
> Is it just because this one is Amazon and it's fun to hate on them?
No, my criticisms and concerns about this would be no different regardless of what company was doing it.
What? Is someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to go shopping? I don't understand this statement. "Real-life shopping" is just as optional as online shopping is. Hell, "real-life shopping" is more optional in this regard because you can always pay with cash and escape the aforementioned privacy concerns. You can't do that online.
Really? And how do you get your food if you don't go shopping? Most people can't run a self-sufficient farm.
And using cash isn’t opting out of real-life shopping, it’s just opting out of one payment method.
There are probably laws requiring it in some places round the world, there are probably customers who want it, it speeds up the process by not requiring an email address to be typed in, and the total cost of a receipt printer is tiny.
That's not a complete deterrent, but it's something.
How does the system deter shoplifting? You can just do it.
... approximately once. ;)
If you want to talk about privacy, it's always a valid concern in this day and age, but your comment feels like you're building a strawman.
I was pointing those out because of their obvious privacy implications, not because I thought that the article was presenting them as privacy-related.
> your comment feels like you're building a strawman.
How so? I was merely pointing out two of the several things the article said that got my spidey-senses tingling. I don't see how what I said is anything remotely like a strawman argument.
Exactly, and that's the definition of a strawman.
Again, I do agree with your larger points about privacy, but the presentation of your argument rubbed me the wrong way.
Reading between the lines of marketing (or any text, really) is an important element of critical thinking. There's no rule that says I have to only talk about what your commercial wants me to talk about.
Are you really suggesting we should just uncritically nod along with whatever facile ideas are fed to us by an advert? <-- (Psst...this is actually a strawman)
Saying "but you may as well" gives the impression that you refuted the point the quote was making, but in reality you were refuting a point that, by your own admission, the quote was not making. That is a strawman.
Reading between the lines of a commercial is fine, and encouraged. Dismissing the point of the commercial entirely because of a semi-related tangent is not.
If you meant it differently (perhaps not to dismiss the quote's "argument" but instead to just bring up the privacy implications separately) that's great and I'll take your word for it (and even agree with it), I just found your original quote to be saying something different.
edit: I see that you are not the original poster of the comment. This comment was meant for that person, not you. Apologies.
No, it's not. A strawman is when you are asserting that someone is making an argument they aren't making, so that you can knock down that argument rather than what they are really postulating.
I am not doing that. I haven't asserted that Amazon was making any sort of privacy argument here. I am the one making the privacy argument.
I can't come back at you and say, "but I wasn't talking about mortality rates, I was just talking about hand-eye coordination. Your objection is irrelevant to my point."
Similarly, when Amazon makes a statement that using credit cards linked to email is a good way to get around making an Amazon account, and JohnFen correctly asserts that this does nothing for privacy whatsoever, and that Amazon will still make ghost tracking accounts for every shopper, that's not a strawman. They're just pointing out that Amazon's solution doesn't solve the problem.
The reason we don't want accounts isn't because making them is too hard or because we don't own smartphones -- it's explicitly because of the tracking. It's not a convenience problem; using a credit card and a smartphone are both equally convenient for most people.
Amazon is saying, "tell the people who are worried about making accounts that they don't need to, so it's fine." JohnFen is replying, "that doesn't address the reason people like me are worried about making an account."
That rule applies in general. Even 7-11 has security cameras capturing faces of people entering and leaving the store.
Easy to say, hard to do. It's pretty hard to live without having to enter a retail establishment. Particularly one that sells you your food.
Privacy is a sliding scale and different people set the slider at different sensitivity levels.
And even if one's sensitivity level is high enough to cause personal problems, they're solvable. People that deeply concerned about their privacy have had proxy shoppers buy things on their behalf.
If anything it's full disclosure high level surveillance. I imagine big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart already have sophisticated surveillance systems that attach your card info to visual surveillance systems for Loss Prevention. I've heard of people who were repeat shoplifters at Wal-Mart that eventually got caught; and when they did, Wal-Mart had essentially a running tab of all the things they had ever shoplifted and slammed them with a grand theft charge despite the fact the time they got caught they were only attempting to shoplift a $5 bottle of shampoo or something.
I'm not denying the privacy disaster you're worried about, but honestly I think we're already too far gone down this road to be able to do anything about it.
True, I was being a touch aggressive in calling it "spying". However, if this sort of thing becomes so ubiquitous that its impossible to avoid, then it is 100% spying even if fully disclosed.
The difference between data collection being "spying" or not is one of voluntary, informed consent. If every store uses something like this, voluntary consent is no longer possible, and this would absolutely qualify as spying.
Very few people going into retail stores understand the extent of the tracking going on. So yes, to the average person, this seems like creepy stalking and/or spying.
Ha! They already have a decade of my purchase history from being a Prime customer and I shop using an Amazon Credit Card. They've got everything they need and I don't mind.
Few people would be bothered by something like this. If they would be bothered, we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases.
I, for one, won’t ever go in an Amazon Go store. If other stores implement this tech without an opt-out, I will either start shopping in a ski mask or go without.
Just FYI, the local area code and Jenny's number (867-5309) is a default that exists for most loyalty programs. So if you don't want to be tracked you can use that. I've heard that this was implemented for military folks who tend to be a lot more transient than regular locals.
Or just not use anything at all. Or do what I do, and prefer shopping at stores that don't have a loyalty program. In my area, stores that have loyalty programs also have higher prices so that the "discount" from the loyalty card makes the price roughly the same as at similar stores that don't have a loyalty program.
So I go to the stores that don't have one. That's not only better for privacy, but is more frictionless and comes with no price penalty.
That's a fair argument, but I think Amazon has enough about me that what you're suggesting is a minor concern relative to what they already have.
I'm much more concerned about my Amazon search history getting leaked as a .txt file than I am about Amazon using imagery of me to train their ML models.
In my area, anyway, a huge outcry happened when these programs began to be adopted. Even now, eyeballing people checking out at the local shops, I'd say that only half of people (at most) are using loyalty cards. And many people I personally know who use loyalty cards do so in a manner to subvert the data collection (usually by having one loyalty card that is used by many people).
So it seems to me a substantial percentage of people really are bothered by them.
This is without any prompting on my end, I never ask a cashier to do this for me.
So apparently it's common enough that some cashiers on-instinct just stick a store card in whenever someone says "no". It's common enough that none of them look at me surprised when I refuse.
You'd be surprised how few people actually ever think about the motivations behind such loyalty programs. If you asked, they'd probably say it's good for the shop as it keeps us going to the place where we get discounts though these cards instead of the competitors (hence, "loyalty"). Most of them most definitely don't know how valuable that data is and how it can be used and for what purposes.
What it gets me is a few less entries in the databases of the store, credit card companies, and the marketers who buy credit card information. Every little bit helps!
Labor is a major cost for retail; anything that massively reduces labor costs is going to be hugely game changing. Combined with amazon promises that it takes only a few weeks to integrate (seriously??) if this works at all, this is going to be a super fast growth group at Amazon.
For reference think back to how many stories you’ve read about say managers short changing employees a few minutes at the end of work shifts.
This really could change retail permanently; the only question is if it works.
One of the outcomes of this is that parts of the country have been 'left behind' economically. This isn't only in England, but happening in other countries too (e.g. the USA). The surge in 'nostalgic'[0] voting (Brexit and MAGA spring to mind, respectively) is one of the outcomes of that occurring.
I'm hoping I'm wrong, and I'm hoping there's something around the corner that changes the situation specific to the information revolution, rather than an outside force (like say, a virus causing a massive shift in demographics), but the way things look right now, that's not a given.
[0] I'm deliberately ignoring the more controversial and/or negative aspects to those voting choices, as that would derail the conversation
That's the whole point of the comment you're replying to. This isn't new or unique to recent technological advancements. This is always the case when new technology displaces existing structures.
The fact that I can't imagine it is no proof that it won't happen, of course. But I feel that we've gotten lucky in the past, and I hate depending on my luck.
B followed A once before, therefore B always follows A.
Perhaps, but if history is any guide, that "long term" will span over multiple generations. That is of no help to those being hurt now.
This view of history as immutable, with the ends always meeting the means is the sort of thinking that I believe is holding us back as a society. Researchers are still studying the impact that the industrial revolution had on not just the environment, but also the mental health of the descendants of the working class in Europe: https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-the-industrial-revolution-l....
We can and should do better.
Of course farmers get sick, but they don't get the diseases created by industry. There are a great many respiratory conditions and cancers that don't occur naturally.
Not being Nicolas Cage, I was not. However, there are many, many countries today who are similar to 19th century UK/US. Would you like to go to rural China and compare the peasant subsistence farming still happening there with urban China and its sweatshops?
> suffering is suffering.
Sure. People suffered. They suffered horribly as peasant farmers living on less than $2/day, or they suffered as laborers making possibly a bit more. Work was universally hard.
It's possible (likely) that future people will see what we went through - disease, hunger, unemployment, bad management, personal suffering/alienation and a host of other problems - and say literally the same thing about us. But although I think all of us can think of a few tweaks at the margins, we'd all utterly fail fully to replace the status quo most people accept, many try to change, a few succeed at changing and a precious few improve.
We should give the past the same courtesy we expect from future generations. And we should be willing to make some of the sacrifices today to ensure that future generations will endure. (And this includes things like ensuring the effects of climate change or nuclear weapons don't wipe us out.) The past is and forever shall be a foreign country.
the life expectancy in Liverpool and some other parts of England during the peak of industrialisation fell to 25 years, the average height fell by almost 10cm, so actually it was pretty bad and it took decades for the situation to improve. I would have very much preferred to be a self-sufficient farmer during that time. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens goes through a pretty big amount of data that shows that traditional communities and even hunter-gatherers lived much better and longer lifes than people that had to endure the human meatgrinder that was industrialisation.
https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin...
Yes, and that's why the labor movement is important (I'd like it to be much stronger than it is still today). Is your view that neither the Industrial Revolution nor the labor movement should have happened?
Something similar plays out with "sweatshop labor" these days. People talk about the abuses, but there's often the same flow of people from the countryside lining up for the openings.
That's not to say that stopping stupid abuses and unsafe conditions isn't important, it's just important to keep in mind how bad things often were. Simply having a job with a salary that guaranteed you wouldn't starve was a huge improvement for some people.
As far as I can see many of the jobs we do these days don't provide any real value. In this case cashier doesn't provide real value so good riddance. But I'm not confident we'll find ourselves in a better place in the future.
Also, somehow we undervalue manual labor with some skill and unions don't seem to work as well for non-factory/hospital/plant jobs.
I think the one difference is that despite the 1850s UK having (some) protectionism and (loads of) imperialism, they didn't have massive bureaucracies forbidding everyone from doing everything without permission.
This is not actually a problem of technology but of governance. And we should keep in mind that this kind of improvement would make retail workers much more productive as well as the industry more sustainable.
To compare this to the Industrial Revolution is just wrong. Period. Just as comparing today to the Gilded Age is wrong. Those were period of massive productivity growth (and also wage growth) despite being periods of high inequality.
On the contrary, we are in an age of tiny productivity growth and almost no wage growth. We have been through a decade with basically zero interest rates (or negative interest rates in parts of the world). To say, we've been through this before and we are all going to be better off for it, is just not true.
Cut your labor and you strangle your customer base. Now we're seeing a tendency of businesses focusing on more wealthy clients, luxury goods, etc. Some modern mall strategies are gearing at primarily targeting luxury stores vs appealing to the masses because the mass labor force purses are growing ever tighter (mainly because they're emptying).
Seems like a natural progression as the "wealth trickle" progresses more and more to a drought and pools up at the top in guarded reservoirs away from the majority: the labor force.
It's one thing to automate away tasks people don't want to do and replace those tasks with tasks people do want to do (and get paid for). It's an entirely different story when you eliminate work and provide no alternatives, displacing large segments of the population, then simply accumulate the labor cost savings for your business and chief investors while stagnating growth.
Most counter arguments to this trend point at historic technological shifts where new industry popped up to supply alternative means of living for the labor force. This makes an assumption that the change is the same and ignores the trends, hand waving it away in ambiguous complexity and proposing we play the experiment out. Most wanting to play the experiment out have little to lose and much to gain. The other side have a lot to lose and relatively little to gain.
We're seeing a lot more of businesses pooling cash and asset reserves and not reinvesting them back into society and people are starting to get a bit cranky about it.
It could potentially be even more axiomatic than that and an unavoidable result of core/firmly held beliefs with trade systems that there will always be those to exploit the weaker (in an economic system) to the point where the system becomes unsustainable.
It often reminds me of agent based models of predator/prey systems where ultimately, the incorrect balance of predators, their efficiencies and successes result in a systematic collapse where the predators starve themselves to death by not allowing the prey to procreate and gather resources necessary that predators ultimately survive on.
In this case, if the wealthy (predators) don't allow the labor force (prey) to collect resources, create value, etc. before snatching added value up ('eating' if you'll humor the idea), they ultimately end up with no future value added from labor force (prey) because the labor doesn't have resources anymore to add value.
From your example following the same basic model, if some of the predators allow themselves to refrain from eating too much and allow the prey to better maintain stable set resources through self control, nothing stops their competitors (other prey) from focusing on their short term gains with no control (yum, more dinner). Ultimately, those predators looking at maintaining a long term stable system will starve if his/her competitors don't share the same views and are allowed to follow the more basic rules. It seems to me, you have to introduce artificial rules into the system to maintain the system (e.g., government regulation or new fundamental underlying rules to the dynamics).
Obviously, the real relationship is far more complex than this view and this model has many shortcomings, but it seems to provide at least some potentially valuable insight to the situation, IMHO.
When I was in my late teens, I worked tech support at a given location... A new call center for another company opened up paying about 25% more. This had a lot of people switching jobs and pay overall for the area for that type of work went up. Other companies relaxed or offered other benefits (subsidized vending machines and food trucks, for example).
If 1% of the market for employees moves, that can have sweeping impacts overall. Take WinCo vs Walmart as another example. The shear impact of the appearance of a better workplace will often drive foot traffic, especially combined with competitive pricing. Brand image is a thing, and how a company treats it's labor is part of a brand's image.
I saw this at the bakery I worked at before. The manager I worked under talked about how he wanted to target wealthier clients or at least people willing to pay a lot more for their products, which means eventually pricing out the current customer base that makes up the low income community that this business serves that were a lot more tight with their money. It's so sad and shortsighted. They are more than happy to sell out the customers they currently have in pursuit of the customers who don't/won't come in the first place. I think businesses like that deserve to die. It's a tragedy when good food becomes gated and the poor are left with options like McDonalds or other fast food chains.
My own perspective is that it is basic reality that a large number of low-skill jobs will be automated over the next 10 to 20 years. Rather than complain, I prefer to think about what society can and should do about it.
In my case, I don't believe that we should create makework low skills jobs to 'solve' this 'problem' of humans no longer being needed to run cash registers though; I have a hard time imagining most people preferring to run a cash register as their ideal day job.
a) Practically, this imposes a big problem to future society if low-skill jobs are gone. b) I'm definitely privileged to have a "high-skill" job so my fear factor here is irrelevant.
That said - if this were really a concern people were serious about, I don't see why we don't just ban cars/trains/airplanes/etc. and have caravans to do all trading once again. It would create tons of jobs all in the name of regress.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/14/21137580/apple-store-reta...
If all the store sold was usb charging cables, there wouldn't be any searches.
Unless the grocery store is selling tins of caviar, the problem is simply not at the same magnitude.
Any other concerns about cheating the system for thefts are as ludicrous as people worrying about people shooting drones out of skies with shotguns or hijacking self-driving trucks.
Other regular delays seem to come from staff being perplexed by the complexity of the checkout system.
Also, mostly middle aged women being taken by complete surprise they are being asked to pay for stuff which leads to much fumbling around looking for purses and wallets and then they'll insist on counting out the exact change.
Then the constant 'Do you need a bag?', 'Do you want a receipt?' 'Do you have a stupid loyalty card?' routine.
Bring on automation please and make the world a much more happier place!
Restocking is already a cost stores have to do. Restocking is also something which isn't too time sensitive - you can do more restocking at night if needed. It's also possible to design the shop to require less restocking, by for example having deeper shelving units where products slide towards the front.
Helping people use the app won't be needed as soon as it becomes universal.
The only remaining cost becomes store security, but if everyone has an attached account which has been verified by a passport, even security might no longer be needed. Just bill people for the items they take, ban them if they don't pay the bill, and call the police and ban anyone who is violent.
I agree, the question of, can this technology be integrated into existing retail spaces and still work well enough to be economically viable is important. But considering that there hasn't been any other retailer who's come up with a competing product over the last two years, tells me that Amazon could be way ahead of the competition on "Just Walk Out", and possibly dominate this space of retail automation for a while.
I believe it. Their new grocery was really quick to fill in (I walk by it every day, and was able to see progress while it was being built)
At least it used to be true that self checkout systems are not primarily sold with the promise of reducing labor costs, but primarily that they take up so much less space. If I remember correctly, six self checkouts take up as much floor space as one manual given the longer queues of the latter. That's why they first were sold in the cities where space is at a premium.
You still need some employees around the check out area anyway, and even if one employee can serve several you also suddently have many more of them. The manned check out was never the most labour intensive part of running a store anyway so it wasn't the best selling point anyway.
This walk-out concept has to compete with the various self scanning schemes that already exist, not with the manned check outs of old. It will be interesting to see if they can offer a cheaper and more reliable experience to shoppers.
Curious what you're talking about here. I've never heard of that, and in all the time sheets I've ever done 15 minutes is the smallest unit of time - not possible to bill 55 minutes, only 45 or 60.
I use these frequently at Walmart and Sams without any problems. Rarely have to deal with an actual checkout person unless I have to get a gift card.
IMO you can get very far simply addressing annoying latency and UX issues with self checkout counters.
Edit: There is also the advantage of seeing what you're exactly being billed for
I can't wait until full supermarkets have this.
Self-checkout is a bottleneck since there are a limited number of available machines. I can see efficiency gains by removing that bottleneck.
In fact, just follow the logic down that road. Consider highly-volatile demand purchase scenarios. A company might over-spend on self-checkout stations to cover high-demand scenarios that go unused on more typical days. A more efficient approach is to avoid requiring additional stations to cover changes in demand. Just create a single system (walk out purchasing) that handles all scenarios and be done with it.
Although I agree just-walk-out scales well with demand.
There's almost always a line at them when I walk by in the stores in my area. Usually, the line there is about as long as the lines at the manned checkouts.
I've noticed that the line for self-checkout is usually roughly the same length as the lines for individual cash registers, regardless of how many machines there are.
I'm not sure if people just don't like self-checkout or if they have failed to notice that the "go to the shortest line" heuristic doesn't work anymore when one of the lines moves much faster than the others.
1. A customer born before 1968 or so shows up
2. The scale's state machine gets corrupted ("UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA")
Both of which end up needing more retail labor than a traditional checkout line.
The first time I brought a full cart through self checkout, that's when I understood road rage, so to speak. I was never so annoyed and angry and wanted to just walk out and leave it behind so much. "Please place item in the bag... please remove item from the bag... please place..." It may well be better, or getting better, but I'm out of the experiment.
-- edit:
Since then, there have been two times, I did walk out and leave my cart behind... one of those times about half a dozen others did the same. It was a Walmart, and the Friday before a holiday (Christmas was Sunday that year iirc). It was 6pm, and they had literally closed half their registers with an average of 11 carts in each line left. I had a full cart including a lot of refrigerated and frozen items. The other time was similar but less extreme at another store (not walmart).
In the end, some of us will pay a little more for actual people doing actual customer service and interaction. I tried the scan and go a couple times, and frankly it wasn't really any better. It seems that Millenials and Z are so averse to interaction, I just don't get it.
In short: to hell with this.
Edit: yoke
Yoke
When you decide to make it really difficult for the world to engage with you, the world will make sure to make it just as difficult for you to engage with the world as well.
This was mostly referring to the "no cellphone in 2020" scenario, and I hope it is pretty obvious how much more difficult it is to engage with someone who doesn't have a cellphone.
As for how that would apply to the grocery store scenario. When 99% of the stores are automated using similar tech, he would be making it difficult for retailers by (indirectly) demanding them to use cashiers and such, thus making it more expensive and inefficient for the stores. And the stores will strike back by simply not making such stores, thus making it extremely difficult for the parent poster to shop without having to drive far out in hopes of finding one of the few remaining non-automated stores.
But you know what? I’m fine, and I feel a lot better without inviting the behavior manipulation and stress of keeping up with these social platforms.
You don’t have to be an RMS style purist to set boundaries. It’s just a matter of privacy/liberty vs convenience tradeoffs and what you’re comfortable with.
Great. Now they know not just what I bought, but also what I browsed as I was walking through the store.
How long is this footage going to be stored for, and who is it going to be sold to? If there's a crime of happenstance around the store, will everyone who purchased (or looked at purchasing) the item used in the commission of the crime be rounded up and made to prove their innocence?
If there is a crime, would they know exactly who took the item and didn't pay, without you having to get "rounded up"? If not, can they really say their tech works?
Related to this post: I wonder if retails aren't already applying algorithms to browsing habits / security footage. Understanding whether large displays or end caps are working could be valuable.
If there was a crime committed with an item available in the store, will everyone who handled, bought or looked at that item now be considered a suspect?
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...
From talking to a couple supply chain people, the best explanation I have heard for why RFIDs aren't ubiquitous, even though they now cost less than a penny (EDIT: I'm wrong, more like 7-15 cents), is that barcodes are too entrenched; RFIDs aren't nearly as useful until everything has one (since if you have to barcode scan half your products, and they are intermixed with with the RFID'd products, you might as well scan them all), and even retailers like Walmart weren't able to pressure all their suppliers to switch at once.
I wonder if this could have been fixed years ago with a collective-action solution like a stronger industry standards body or government regulation.
EDIT: Huh, could have sworn the cheap passive RFIDs cost less than a penny now, but apparently they are still 7-15 cents. That would explain a lot. Presumably the price would fall quite a bit if every product in America had an RFID on it, but we're not there yet.
Even decades old protocols support interacting with a plurality of tags simultaneously.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singulation
(Edit: added wiki article discussing anti-collision, which specifically references grocery examples)
Just from these two technologies the "machine" can see that I picked one bag of crisps, one soda (oops wrong flavour I put it back and got the other flavour)(machine saw this and made the change).
RFID would only validate at the exit.
As for the cost 7-15 cents per RFID tag: -cash management costs. A lot. If you only do e-payments then you save from that -10 cashiers cost a lot (mistakes, skimming also costs)
Just from these two cost-cuts a super market can cover the cost to RFID everything in the store. Also the fact that a retailer (I am thinking Carrefour of Sainsbury's that move millions of items per day can get far better prices on tags).
I have read an article about race timing chips runners have in their badges during a marathon and they can apparently handle large number of runners, about 50 per second:
http://www.righto.com/2016/06/inside-tiny-rfid-chip-that-run...
It's often not consumer facing, or simply invisible (there's a very good chance your shoes have a chip embedded in their sole...) but there are wide scale, functional examples in retail of exactly what you describe today.
Decathlon, for example, a very large EU sporting goods store has this technology: RFID tags are baked into every product. You fetch your products, throw them all into a basket at checkout, and it instantly "scans" them all.
The collision problem is discussed by other commenters.
It's also very wasteful and time consuming. You'd need to chip every item in the store, which is a LOT of human labor (expensive), plus those chips are essentially throwaway which adds ongoing marginal cost - adds up over time.
Amazon's solution is more expensive to spin up, but its a fixed cost. Vastly more efficient long term and vastly more scalable than RFID.
Does anyone here know for sure whether "just walk out" uses RFID?
Like, obviously customers are blocking RFIDs en masse then the tech is a non-starter. I've never heard anyone say this was a serious threat; do you have a reference?
If you're just going based on some youtube video proof-of-concept: it's not at all clear that this hypothetical attacks are more realistic than hypothetical attacks I could dream up for Amazon's system.
> You'd need to chip every item in the store, which is a LOT of human labor (expensive),
I am not suggesting RFIDs as an alternative for Amazon's business contracting with storeowners. I am taking a society-wide view and wondering why suppliers didn't switch from barcodes to RFIDs.
Some companies have managed this, Decathlon is a good example, but normally manage it by owning almost their entire supply chain. Which means they benefit from extreme integration.
Basically anything that means universally modify packaging is usually a no-go for most retailers, it’s amazing we’ve even managed to standardise on barcodes.
And as you point out, any time Amazon strikes up a "partnership" with outside parties, its ultimate goal is to conquer or cannibalize them.
Businesses should approach partnerships with Amazon with the same level of skepticism/trepidation as Native Americans signing a treaty with the U.S. government 150-200 years ago.
Retailers already rely on the trust of dozens if not hundreds of vendors for operations. Trust is established through contractual obligations, pilot programs, etc.
Shrinkage in the US is about 1.38% on average currently. Any competent retailer would run a pilot and evaluate its effect on shrinkage rates.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wal-mart-to-vendors-get-off-ama...
Yeah, I wonder how retailers are going to feel about amazon having a direct pipeline of purchase data at all their competitors fed directly to a division of the company that I'm sure they'll claim is sealed off from the rest of operations. Even if amazon is playing totally fairly here, I don't see why it makes sense for people to trust them with so much at risk
They're already very close getting to "Just Walk Out" from Amazon situation but I'm not sure how expensive putting an RFID chip in every product is.. ?
Thats still to much for groceries where items are typically only ~$2.50, and the staff time to scan a barcode is ~$0.01
A reassuring 'beep' from the system would have helped me know it had scanned and was happy rather than waiting for it to show up on a screen.
Overall I find self-checkouts with barcodes quicker and easier. A scan and beep is a quick action. Putting something in a basket and waiting an unspecified amount of time was weird but no doubt would be something I'd get used to if it was a regular thing.
I see this service taking over, at the very least, a large percentage of the 7/11 bodega type of stores. I see a future where the corner store will return. Over the last few years, companies have gone large so they can take advantage of the economy of scale. This service will reduce labor costs and have costs fall relative to similar stores previously.
Pundits were talking about Amazon opening stores with this tech. Why bother when you can get someone else to do it while expanding your core business. Imagine this, a one-man store where I order my inventory from Amazon and have it delivered daily or close to that. They brought their multivendor Amazon model where anyone can sell online using their online tech to the real world. This is a case of most retailers playing checkers while Amazon is playing chess. Yikes.
I expect to see similar legislature to roll out elsewhere; these are interesting times.
That's my experience at my local Walmart. There are maybe 2-4 lanes with human cashiers (2 when it's slow, 4 when it's busier, but I've never been there at peak) and 10-15 stations for self-checkout.
Is there a difference between a security guard watching you and a person walking around writing down every move you make, every facial expression,posture,gesture,mood,interaction and instantly applying sophisticated correlation in conjunction with thousands of historical data points about you? Come on! There is a difference between a firecracker and thermonuclear bomb.
Grocery stores across the country could do (or may be already doing) all the creepy things you're describing without implementing "Just walk out", with the security cameras they already universally have installed. Or, they could implement "Just walk out" without doing any of those creepy things.
They're irrelevant to each other.
I don't see why you have a problem with "Just walk out", it seems to me like your problem is with the prevalence of security cameras. That's a valid criticism of, say, Ring, because it's pushing to increase the prevalence of home security cameras, but "Just walk out" isn't going to increase the prevalence of retail store security cameras, they're already ubiquitous.
I like that idea better, honestly. It's more accurate and doesn't require video monitoring and all sorts of AI/ML/DL algorithms. Though, I don't know the practicality of attaching RFIDs to everything, nor the cost. And I assume some people would try to just rip them off, which I imagine would be the biggest concern, in addition to having the staff attach them to everything.
If this is in fact their revenue play they could even sell this at a loss just to build up the ecosystem, get a unmovable majority monopoly on the tech -> and data.
Maybe even add on top something like Good RX where retailers pay amazon on top to drive traffic to their stores. And even combine with Brands who want to offer discounts. Double dip.
(They’ll never say no if you ask to put on the store card though...)
I probably missed out on hundreds of dollars just blindly trusting the receipt my whole life. It’s nothing nefarious. Systems have bugs.
Takeaway for me is that I can’t use a technology that doesn’t let me verify the price.
I hope that stores like these will one day be hubs where we can refill all our bulk products and actually save on shipping and packaging. I fear that stores like these will just sell me individually wrapped apples because it's not worth the effort.
It's well established that hand washing, or lack thereof, in an airport setting can supercharge the global spread of disease. The spread of coronavirus could be reduced by up to 60% by consistent handwashing[1] by air travelers.
This tech could flag people who walk out of the bathroom without stopping to wash their hands. The easiest way to enforce compliance would maybe to be have a loud, embarrassing alarm go off when the perpetrator leaves the bathroom. Social conformity and peer pressure would drastically increase hand washing compliance.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/12/study-washing-hands-in-airpo...
Also, I don't understand how this proposal is authoritarian in the slightest. As written it involves zero coercion. The only enforcement mechanism is social pressure, a force that already molds everybody's behavior umpteen times a day to begin with.
This is basically the definition of a slippery slope.
What data does Just Walk Out technology collect from my shoppers?
We only collect the data needed to provide shoppers with an accurate receipt. Shoppers can think of this as similar to typical security camera footage.
A rather (wide) open door for Amazon to collect valuable data on customers. And is this really comparable to "a typical security camera footage"?
edit: formatting
their roles have simply shifted to focus on more valuable activities>Yes. Retailers will still employ store associates to greet and answer shoppers' questions, stock the shelves, check IDs for the purchasing of certain goods, and more - their roles have simply shifted to focus on more valuable activities.
I think this raises questions about ethics in technology. Not to mention the creepy cameras watching your every move, retail is a large source of employment for non-academics and we're slowly phasing out the need for people to operate stores. Here we've seen the self-serve checkouts which has one staff-member supervise 8~12 self-serve checkouts. The amount of manned checkouts has reduced so drastically that there's only one or two or in some cases no manned checkouts open.
Does it? I have yet to see an instance where any amount of luddism makes any sense. Stifling progress "for the jobs" is always bad for humanity in the long run.
https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011
"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. "
Basically, a computer will record everything I do in those store, analyze it, and store it.
I find that terrifying personally.
Especially because the feature is so amazing, like google map amazing, in term of how it can change the rhythm of your day.
So it will be like the smartphone revolution: at first we will fight having everything spied on, then it's so convenient we will give in.
I don't see how we will get out of the hole we are digging for ourselves, since the trap is that we are so eager to be in there.
Is this someone's pet project to state that our landing page captured XX,000 hits in 24 hours?
Is there any other information on what format this receipt is? Is it just an image or something that's actually useful if I want to parse it and track my own purchases?
I want some sort of machine readable receipt format to exist so I can analyze my own spending. Unfortunately there is zero incentive to provide this. Instead the stores we visit get to know more about our spending habits than we do. And now you want to me to deliberately give all of this data not just to the individual stores but also to Amazon?
Yeah right. I'm not giving Amazon access to all of this data. Are you serious?
People don't just go to retail to get stuff; if that were all, they would all have gone delivery long ago. If the vibe at a store is wrong, they won't go in, for reasons that have more to do with subconscious than conscious reasoning.
I am skeptical.
It can have other benefits like stealing alerts or whatever, but those I think minor. One problem I see is that Amazon is a retailer so many of the potential customers for this would be reluctant to do business with a major competitor. I'm still waiting for this to be implemented in WF.
For food or coffee, constantly. For general retail I'm not sure I've ever done this.
Isn't that a huge security problem?
This is like how the Amazon Go stores require you to scan a QR code from your phone to get in the store.
It would be awesome if there were some sort of universal social credit score you could combine with that so that I won't have to share my store with thieves and all that.
"Hey lets allow this company that basically competes with us via Whole Foods to also get data on who our customers are and what they buy and when"
That is, they should be either seeing none of the transactions, or they should be considered a third party that can’t collect or resell the data.
With contactless payments I fail to see the attraction too. Seems like it’s ten years too late. Back when people stood in line to wait for slow card transactions or people paying cash this thing would have worked.
Its no longer there and I've not seen it anywhere else so I guess maybe it was a failed pilot program or something.
Edit: it's called 'Scan as You Shop' and is offered in about 500 stores.
I really want to see how they handle _that_ edge-case!
A few regions have started passing laws banning cashless establishments for being exclusionary towards people without bank accounts, or who use alternative banking sources (In NYC it's something like 11% and 22% respectively). I would expect that trend to continue.
I suspect it's still going to be slightly more involved than that. At the very least, they need to know your credit card, so there's still going to be some checkout, even if not every product has to be scanned manually.
If shops adapt this, Amazon will have your name, address (credit card), a video of you and whoever you are with, and knows all the stuff you bought. Great for advertisement and law enforcement.
(Especially once you replace the question "do I have enough money to walk out the door with this item?" with "is my government-calculated social reputation score high enough to walk out the door with this item?")
Such as: New rfid (or image) spoofing tech, etc.
-or-
Stories "Just walk out" store forgot to activate rfid tags on some product and customers walked out w/ (x) number of items for free.
This will be interesting to see how it plays out.
I have to imagine there are considerable roadblocks for theft prevention and training your shoppers.
Ambiguity turns off paying shoppers and provides an opportunity for thieves.
-Attorney defending future shoplifting case.
“Our tech - your x” is Amazon’s core underlying strategy for market dominance.
However they might create a special section in the supermarket reserved for the grocery and have everything else in a section with rfid tags, that would result in fewer jobs as cashiers.
however they might have to add people for adding rfid tags to each and every item in the store. Interesting how much every one of these options would cost them.
That aside, would retailers adopt this from Amazon, of all tech companies?
And by the way, what happened after Amazon's announcement of drone delivery?
I'd like to walk in, swipe my CC and get a QR code printout. At any point, I should be able to scan the QR code with my phone and see a receipt showing what I have in my cart and how much it will cost me as well as my status (in/out of the store). Once I leave the store, I should be able to scan the QR and get my final receipt. If there's an issue, I can turn right around and get it resolved.
I don't want to have to deal with going to a kiosk unless I need help.
Also, I don't like that this is an Amazon thing.
[0] As an option. I don't want this to be the way of the future.
What happens when someone enters the store with a $20 prepaid visa card and then walks out with 200+ dollars of stuff?
Two. They launched two years ago. They're trying way too hard to make it seem like proven technology.
I was wondering how it'd handle someone using a prepaid card or a credit card without enough credit left on it... Like some first credit cards might be as low as like 500 so if people bought other things also could see some people getting close... Does it contact you to pay up if some reason it couldn't charge you fully or is there some sort of indicator before you walk out?
May be good for the businesses but it isn’t good for the people.
The self checkouts I see here simply don't cut it.
Don't know if people are just too dumb for them or the machines are too flakey
* The technology investment isn't going to pay off unless they scale up to thousands of stores very quickly.
* Running a small convenience store is boring and not very profitable. The technology is cool though, so lets see if someone else is will to do all the boring stuff while we focus on the interesting things.
I'm extremely skeptical of email receipts because I don't want to be enrolled in someone's daily SPAM list.
IMO, I'm going to avoid shops that use this system until they're correctly regulated.
Also, how do you sell items that are locked up?
I agree that Amazon has access to a lot of data, and will have more with this system, but they’ve been remarkably good at stewarding it so far. There are much bigger fish to fry in terms of data privacy right now.
Well somehow I suspect that's a little misleading.
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/05/14/shoplifting-cal...