Comment by CurrentB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CurrentB | Hacker News Reader

It it just me or are people massively underestimating this? I feel like the impact of this will be close to the self driving car in terms of a vast rollout of massive new automation.

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.

I don't want to criticize or undermine this initiative in any way but someone like me who frequently uses Safeway's self-checkout machines at my local grocery store, to me this just feels like overengineering. I never had any problems with self-checkout and am always able to quickly scan-and-pay within a couple of minutes when I visit the store once a week.

So if you close your eyes and visualize a grocery store experience where you put stuff directly into your tote bags or your backpack and walk right out, with 0 time spent on anything after you have everything you need, this doesn't seem like something completely beyond self-checkout to you?

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)

It sounds great until something goes wrong.

Everything sounds great until something goes wrong.

>So if you close your eyes and visualize a grocery store experience where you put stuff directly into your tote bags or your backpack and walk right out, with 0 time spent on anything after you have everything you need, this doesn't seem like something completely beyond self-checkout to you?

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.

Now imagine you are shopping for a family of six for an entire month and you have two carts bursting with groceries. Still think it's only a tiny improvement?

No, I think it's a nightmare, because these stores are ridiculously small and don't have multiple carts and a parking lot. They're concept stores in urban areas that they can't monetize effectively

What is stopping you from doing this and just not paying at all?

"In Just Walk Out-enabled stores, shoppers enter the store using a credit card."

> this doesn't seem like something completely beyond self-checkout to you?

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.

In the Netherlands, the two leading supermarket chains have handheld barcode scanners. You can walk around the store, scan whatever you put in your bag as you do it, and then the cashier just reads your scanner and charges you.

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.

I have never had a pain free experience with any grocery store's self check out. I suppose I am not proficient at scanning and placing items on the scale/bagging area one at a time. Or at following the prompts to swipe my credit card at the right moment. Self check out frustrates me to the point where I avoid it whenever possible.

Walmarts is amazing. It doesn't tell when you don't bag something, you don't have to touch the screen at all. You just scan and pay.

indeed when i think back to how the self driving car revolutionized.. oh wait what year is it?

What I mean is that people are looking at self-driving as the next huge thing in automation that is "around the corner" for some definition of that time frame.

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.

SDCs exist today in limited scale as well. This announcement isn't more momentous than Waymo's recent one, it's just less baked into our thinking that retail jobs are on the chopping block like driving jobs.

But a much much more limited scale and years away from widespread usage. It's one ideal city hard coded into the technology vs tens of real stores using the real technology that could be installed in a 3rd party store today.

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.

It's huge for stuff you'll still bother to go and fetch yourself in a physical shop.

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.

there are very few cases (big cities) where long queues are a thing. most of the world has no need for this

Reply on news.ycombinator.com