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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are these people shopping at Amazon boutiques?
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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 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?
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?
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.
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.
Can you elaborate? What does this mean exactly?
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
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.
I'm sure they can make an app for that.
For one, there's usually a delay before you get your receipt.
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.
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.
I’m sure they have a ‘you charged me incorrectly’ resolution service as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.