AWS Just Walk Out Technology
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com
With self-checkout, you don't need an account which is crucial for travelers. Self-checkout also supports cash for the unbanked.
I've tried SC in multiple countries, just hit the button for English, scan, scan, scan, weight, scan, scan, scan, checkout, touch my credit card, go.
Late night in Stockholm train station, I bought one bottle of fizzy water and checkout added 30 seconds or so.
Obviously, from place to place you sometimes get "rough edges" with mis-scans etc but JWO has its own problems.
I'm not even sure how much floor space JWO saves vs self-checkout.
At non-Amazon branded JWO locations you insert a credit card in the machine when you walk in, no account needed. I recently encountered one like this at an airport.
While I enjoy that I can pay everything by card at home, and mostly stopped going to the handful of places that don't accept cards, I do appreciate the fact that cash is usually available as a backup.
Most banks typically authorize the card to make ~$150 of payments or so offline. Anything bigger, or for risky customers or those with a low balance, it needs to be an online transaction.
The benefit of offline transactions is they can be done in under half a second, compared to the 5-10 seconds online transactions take. For things like opening the barrier in a car park, 10 seconds is too long.
That said, I'll grant that it's also creepy AF. The bigger issue for me, though, is that Amazon is so fucking awful at physical retail inventory management (both the selection of items that should be there and the selection of items actually available for purchase) that the Go Grocery in Seattle went from being "this is how I buy groceries" to "there is zero chance they'll have most, let alone all, of the items on my incredibly boring grocery list."
Amazon still wins, though... I end up walking the other direction and going to Whole Foods...
source: I owned a chain of specialty food retailers as well as a warehouse, and this issue even stymied humans at times!
This seems like a situation that would be improved for all concerned parties if there was a vending machine in the station.
The Co-op grocery store in Stockholm Centralstation also has self-checkouts but it's self-checkout is a lot slower when you have 20-30 items in your cart, and you have to catch a train.
You bought one bottle of water. You're not benefiting from the store. The store owner isn't benefiting from you using his store instead of his vending machine. Store customers aren't benefiting from you using the store instead of the vending machine.
If it works in the Shanghai subway (daily ridership roughly ten times the population of Stockholm), it'll work in the Stockholm stations too.
Also, people usually buy stuff like a drink, magazine, chewing gum, books, maybe other snacks from a store. Not sure how a single vending machine would be able to vend all that. And even if you could — I’ve seen Japanese vending machines — you’d only be able to carry a very small selection.
Not sure JWO is about saving floor space. It's more about saving the customer time. A grocery line on a Saturday afternoon is frustrating. Imagine Costco having this.
JWO works with products sold by weight (like produce -- it uses sensor fusion with weight sensors), large items and identical-looking items too. I tried it last week at Amazon Fresh. It works.
Remember that the Amazon weighing shelves have to deal with someone putting produce across two shelves (ie. A an apple balanced so it is partially weighed by one shelf and partially by another).
Since the shelves are large (ie. 10 foot tall), they also have to deal with the buffeting air from air conditioners in the shop, while still detecting someone taking a 5 gram SIM card pack...
In another store you need to place your groceries onto a weighing shelf, and somehow I couldn't figure out what to do to make the machine happy.
For produce and pastries that don't have a bar code you have to navigate through a stupid hierarchical menu and I just couldn't find some of the items...
At some point these machines hopefully will improve (just like automatic ticket machines have improved), but for now I still prefer waiting in a normal checkout line.
Kroger's self-checkout is absolutely obnoxious, they've hooked it into some machine-vision stuff to try and stop you from stealing, but it literally stops you about every third item no matter what you do.
"Pointless jobs" for whom? It definitely puts food on the table for said persons' families, that is definitely not "pointless". Or do you think a lady in her 50s will just hop into any job at her discretion? (no, "community stuff" will just not cut it, you need at least a university diploma for that).
And this comes after those discussions on the tens of thousands of pointless jobs inside FAANG companies, a discussion that we had a few days ago. Jobs which are paid very handsomely, btw.
Give people welfare without giving them jobs that are drags on progress.
Give me a break. The world functioned fine before any and every random job required a university diploma and would be better off if people stopped asking for them. You would think on a site worshipping the famed hacker-without-a-degree this opinion would be absent.
> Or do you think a lady in her 50s will just hop into any job at her discretion?
Come on, this is an obvious strawman
Many people who work such jobs are mothers who wish they could spend more time with their children, adults who wish they could care for an aging parent, students who should have more time studying and socializing, etc.
If the job is extra/not needed, some consumers will rationally prefer to self-serve (for whatever connotation if that you prefer).
I don’t see why I should stand in line when I could exert myself for 90 seconds and be out of the store 5-10 minutes quicker.
Maybe in select stores?
I personally experience more headache than great UX using self checkout in most stores.
Who needs store cards when they can just see in realtime what you're picking up and putting back, along with your demographic data.
Having these competing non-standards is a pita for customers as well as for adoption. I would think that it would be the same for jwo.
When the EV charger industry gets cutthroat competitive on the service itself, the requirements to use an app will probably vanish because they don't want you to pass on their charger just because of the friction of signing up.
Not just that - also track your eyes to see what else you've anticipated.
Retailers hate Amazon up to the point to avoid AWS - there are exceptions - to any of their cloud infrastructure.
The local Kroger instances here have these handheld things you can use to scan items as you put them in your cart rather than at a checkout station.
I don't exactly see a large number of people using them. Like, I think I might have seen one, once?
There is an easy fix: hire people to ensure that wait time is minimal by opening as much checkout isles as possible. But in the economists wet dream the automated, humanless solution wins by being cheaper.
> The report also revealed that 80 percent of retail executive respondents believe that smart checkout is one of the most important solutions to invest in over the next five years.
Absolutely, because you have no need to pay additional squishy meat sacks when people/shoppers can do the work themselves with self checkout. Externalise the cost onto the customer.
Because the consumers will, usually, choose to go to the cheaper store.
> Absolutely, because you have no need to pay additional squishy meat sacks when people/shoppers can do the work themselves with self checkout. Externalise the cost onto the customer.
As opposed to the "squishy meat"'s salary, which is paid by... whom?
Also, I'd say that the actual scanning is not the most "labor-intensive" / annoying part of the checkout process, but moving the products out of the basket, onto the cash register, back in the bag. And even with regular checkout, the customer does that. With self-checkout, you can actually do the scanning while moving the product from the basket to your bag, which means handling it only once.
It's the wrong UX. I'm not sure I would scan my cart items -- that's making me do extra work.
Some of them also let you use your own smartphone to do the scanning.
It became more popular in the pandemic, as only interacting with your own device reduces the amount of contact you have with other people and things they have been touching.
I do think the palm reading thing will be a potential vulnerability in two regards. First, maybe as a "hack". Is there a way to fake the palm scan? Something you could put on your palm to assume someone else's palm print? If I use this service will I have to be concerned with thieves scanning my palm print? Second, I think it will also invoke a "creepiness" concern among the general population when Amazon starts wanting your palm prints.
I am also confused as to why this falls under the AWS umbrella. It seems very unlike other AWS offerings. This requires adding hardware to your store.
On the other hand, they may already use AWS which feels like “a company owned by Amazon” rather than Amazon itself.
It's also very strange to think that team members should be responsible for speaking for their race. Imagine if your team had a black engineer and your team expected him to explain to everyone "the black perspective" or "how will black people think about this". An individual doesn't represent anyone beyond themselves and, ironically, it is racist to think otherwise. A black engineer is there to do the job of an engineer, not tell you what his racial group will think. If you want to know what a demographic will think of something you use surveys, focus groups, and market research - DEI is not relevant.
You cannot do focus groups for issues you don’t even know about. Race isn’t the only factor here — someone who grew up on a farm is going to have different things to say than someone that grew up in the city.
This is sometimes true, but quite often it is ownership-class propaganda to depress wages and prevent worker solidarity. For example:
>Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers' compensation claims, according to [Whole Foods'] documents.
The way to find out what different groups will think about your product is to survey representative samples - not to hope that the person of background X on your team could speak for all X.
You can use focus groups for issues you don't know about - absolutely. That's one of the main benefits. Get a group to use the Go store. Ask about what they thought. Ask the people who used it a lot and those who used it a little - why did you use it so much/little. You find that some people are made uncomfortable because it feels like stealing. There - if you didn't realize that was an issue before, now you do.
This as DEI working as designed. The latent condescension in the corporate propaganda is apparent and offensive when verbalized. If you speak it aloud like the GP did, you are chastised. In a professional setting that's an effective humiliation ritual. It strongly discourages you from speaking up again in the future. Eventually you notice more flaws in the DEI sales pitch, but by then you've learned your lesson. You stay quiet. Thus the worker is controlled and the corporate propaganda is shielded from criticism.
As posted below, Amazon has been caught measuring workplace diversity and correlating it negatively with unionization and worker solidarity. To them, forced diversity is a net benefit. But the downsides of forced diversity are never to be mentioned by the workers themselves, who are irredeemable racists if they say what Amazon internally acknowledges to be true:
Yeah, no thanks.
> Consumers can enter a Just Walk Out technology-equipped store using one of three methods—method types available can vary by store: (1) Amazon One, a contactless identity service that uses your palm to pay; (2) credit or debit card; or (3) app-based entry, using retailer-branded apps.
I’m not intending to be unproductively facetious mind you, those types of specialized SaaS offerings that let workers operate and organize and educate should exist, and if AWS ever wanted to spend PR money in the right place… eh? Eh?