Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
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But nobody ever went there - no matter what time of the day I went, there would be one person doing inventory and stocking, two people standing by to help people install the Go app on their phones and explain the concept, and myself. Occasionally one other person being helped to install the app.
I think the issue was that everything there except Coca-Cola and Arizona tea cost significantly more then any of the surrounding stores, and if you hate quinoa you were SOL because it was in everything except drinks and sushi. If you are paying two thirds of your income or more on a Manhattan apartment you probably couldn’t afford to eat routinely from the Go store. Then Covid happened.
I really hate the guy who decided to put quinoa in everything. Because of that I only ever bought drinks there.
While everyone needs sustenance, there are often several adequate choices about how to get it and making those choices become a way of communicating to others. And communicating is an defining and seemingly valuable part of being human.
It’s not really weird and it’s not going anywhere.
poor people use wheat etc.
Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster has some great primary source research on the social status of eating shellfish through the years.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/us/in-maine-fishermen-str...
At the time, salmon was the cheapest, most abundant source of protein. Poor people's food.
IIRC, lobster in New England was about the same.
So, novelty and cool factor, plus appeal to those looking for healthy options; some overlap with the faddish nature of trends in healthy eating.
Amazon is only able to capture your order details if you use the app at checkout.
Anyway I looked up some data and over half the customers in my country use the self checkout now.
If they don't actually open at least hundreds of these then they've thrown away massive amounts of money on R&D they'll never get back, and the data they did accumulate isn't even particularly useful as it's in the context of a type of store they're not running at scale.
[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2023/amazon-closing-eight-amazon-go...
San Francisco might be receptive to the concept, but it would have to be close to where people live, rather than where office workers used to go.
NYC is a tough market because there is so much competition. But if you're not trying to make money yet you can learn a lot. Perhaps they learnt that New Yorkers don't have the patience to install an app. You generally don't wait that long in a bodega -- I expect to wait longer inside a gas station on the Interstate!
I'm pretty sure the goal is to have a higher profit margin than competitors by leveraging technology, not lower prices.
This should be branded on the forehead of every CEO of a company that promises full self driving capabilities for cars before 2030 and cryptocurrency mass adoption, also before 2030.
Like the eBay Pez story it makes sense and adds credibility for the narrative to be that Amazon was the first customer for AWS. But it feels like a very unamazon thing to do, given that so much of its customer base isn't running the kind of enterprise jobs that an Amazon scale company needs.
(Either way I imagine almost all of Amazon does run on AWS these days and I'm sure the transition took a long time)
As a shopper, sounds great! Not hard to understand why they’re closing, though.
I wouldn't say the concept is a huge success because... it's a convenience store, and location is far more important than anything else, so there's a pretty low ceiling on what a convenience store can achieve beyond being in a good location, but it is certainly convenient.
(As far as business goes, they seem like a cute experiment that has escaped the pointless novelty stage but hasn't reached the industry disruption stage ('cause there isn't one) and so is floating aimlessly in the middle space where they probably can just about justify keeping them around.)
7-11s will be selling cheap and nasty cables and headphones at huge markups to even justify the tiny amount of shelf space they occupy.
That feels like a problem with the concept, really. That's one more than you need for conventional automatic checkouts.
Although Whole Foods had better food for the same price tbh.
Speaking as someone technically inclined who writes code for a living, I don’t want to have to scan a QR code or use an App to go through some weird robot gate to buy a thing from the automated store. And that’s (me), not the average Joe Blow who can’t even figure out how to open the calculator app on his phone.
It was a terrible idea from the start and 10x more convenient to walk into a corner market, grab a drink and hand the cashier a few $1’s from my wallet. All this super advanced technology and it has zero real world benefit or time savings for normal human beings.
Moreover, if having an Amazon account is a requirement for entering the store then they are effectively targeting people who'd rather order stuff online. Their focus shouldn't have been on Amazon users but the rest of the world.
Are they getting rid of human labor? Who is doing stocking, as needed cleanup, opening/closing, and overseeing all that?
I'm guessing humans are doing that. And as a customer. It seems to be most of what the people who also work as cashiers are doing, outsidd of a few rush periods where those other tasks, except emergency safety-necessary cleanup, aren’t happening or are deferred.
Seems to be its more likely Amazon is adding tech (which has a cost) which mainly serves to enable less efficient use of human labor.
CVS (a drug store) by me has also gotten rid of cashiers... but for self-checkout. So have Royal Farms, a regional gas station/convenience store chain. At both places, if you really try, you can maybe get a cashier at a single human cashier counter, but it's normally unstaffed, and everyone directed to the multiple self check out stations.
(I think USA readers know what i mean by self checkout station, but it's, where you can items yourself, and place them in bags yourself, and it yells at you if it doesn't detect the right weight of items placed in bags on a platform, and the whole thing is video taped).
Amazon's stre isn't really an alternative to cashiers, it's an alternative to universal self-checkout that everyone else is moving to -- accelerated by the pandemic, but still relatively early on the adoption curve.
I assume universal self-check-out does reduce staffing needs, which is why they are all moving to it?
I suspect the Amazon cashierless stores won't really take off until all their competition is universal self-checkout. (Which may never happen in say NYC, where you have so many independent very-low-overhead bodega-type stores. But in most places, the competition is more like CVS or Royal Farms).
Although I dunno, maybe I'm unusual in prefering human contact to self-checkout, something about the choices being self-checkout with a line or walk out of the store without checking out -- starts to make the Amazon option actually look like something you would want.
I always find that self-checkout system that everyone uses to be slower and clunky. The worst is at the grocery store where I have to search and find each item of produce, weigh it and then carefully place it in the bag. If any step in that flow goes slightly wrong, the system freezes and waits for an employee to come by and check what I'm doing.
However, in the "fast casual" space, where I'm able to order food items on a touch screen system, or a mobile website, I have actually become much happier to do that. Sometimes it takes me a while to know what I want and having access to pictures or longer descriptions helps me on my journey.
I'm not too worried about systems like completely replacing human contact though. I've seen similar attempts at sit-down restaurants and bars fail, likely because people go to those places expecting to interact with another human.
Started during the pandemic, pretty sure it's never going away. (The folks who made those apps bet right).
I try to avoid them.
But in the area of CVS (USA-style drug stores) or Royal Farms (chain convenience store, often attached to a gas station) -- as well as grocery stores in general -- self-check-out is already predominant around me, and I also don't see it going away. I suspect you're right it will never totally win in the restaurant space, but in the grocery store and convenience store space, it pretty much already has over here.
* You use reusable bags. In general most systems I've used dislike when you put a bag in the area with the weighing things, so now I have to spend double the time moving items around because they can't just go directly into the bag
* with fresh produce, the cashier will most likely have the most common items memorized and punch in the code without a hitch, whereas I have to navigate a clunky UI to figure out which kind of green onions to charge
* anything involving an ID check is much faster; a human is legally required to be there to verify, and the cashier is already conveniently there, as opposed to a self-checkout register where I have to wait for somebody to come to me
My grocery store has 8 self-checkout stations overseen by one employee, and like 10 or so regular checkout lanes. Advantages of self-checkout:
* Less employees to manage it (regular checkout usually has the cashier and a bagger, so we're looking at 1 employee vs 16 for the same number of open registers).
* A single entry line, so if one customer gets stuck the rest of the customers behind them aren't just standing there waiting, so as long as you know how to use self-checkout it's going to be faster.
* The conveyor belts on regular checkout are often pretty gross (dried sticky pop for example), while at self checkout you're putting your items directly into the bag after scanning them.
Actually, I'd be curious to know what the hiring situation looked like. Good employees would only stick around if they felt valued and paid fairly, otherwise they'd turn over. So you'd be left with the worst of the bunch. Since Amazon would have to find ways to keep retention up, they would likely have to pay market rate, or slightly above to attract willing people. That extra cost is definitely passed on to the customer.
Disregarding the prices for the sake of argument, I still prefer CVS as it just feels easier to navigate. CVS accumulated a half century of tiny little details that Amazon Go just doesn't have figured out yet.
speak for yourself. I commonly wait in line at the walgreens near me for longer than I was shopping for. If I had the choice between walgreens and the exact same store with cashierless tech I'd never go to walgreens.
So far, I've never seen a queue for these, and they're quick to use.
It's often deceptively faster to go through the cashiered lines because of how quickly they can scan and bag.
It's surprising how fast they are. The duo can frequently scan and bag faster than I can pull stuff out of my cart.
Amazon, as I agree with the parent, was neither here nor there, not as well stocked as the CVS, and too weird/too hip for a 7-11.
There is a Go-style Amazon Fresh very near my house. There are 4 other grocery stores roughly the same distance away. I find myself going to Amazon Fresh more often than not because of how easy it is to walk in, grab something, and walk out. They even put your shopping time on the emailed receipt - and I've made it through in less than a minute on more than one occasion.
I can totally see this scaling quite nicely, considering stores will have to employ less personal, even if it it requires some additional store space, and I would be mildly surprised if cashiers were still a thing in 10 years. It increasingly seems like a job no one should be doing, in a combination of "bad for your health", "a waste of of human resources in a world where they are becoming rapidly scarce" and "boring" and I don't think they will, in the not so far future.
What are other experiences?
While you are doing your shopping, you scan your products. At the exit, you scan a QR code to end the shopping, you pay, and off you go.
The huge advantage, apart from no queues, is that you don't have to remove stuff from your cart, making it way, way quicker.
You can have a “random” check where everything will be scanned again by a real cashier.
I don't understand the mechanics. You need to put the physical item back and also remove it from the barcode reader, no?
[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Barcode-...
Old method: Place items in cart -> Arrive at checkout -> Take all the items out of the cart -> Scan all the items -> Put all items back cart -> Pay -> Go to car -> Take all items out of cart.
Scanner method: Scan item -> Place in cart -> Pay -> Go to car -> Take all items of out cart
You could even set up your bags in the cart so that when you pay everything's already bagged up.
Cutting out the repeated loading/unloading saves a decent amount of time and there's usually very little wait when you need to pay. Some stores in my country support using your phone as the barcode scanning device, it's very quick. I can imagine that at some point the phone could be used to handle the payment as well, at which point it'd be very close to the Amazon pick up and go model.
Signing up for a loyalty card would give them that legal basis, where as merely using your payment card wouldn't, so they theoretically shouldn't be stalking you. In practice, not giving them your name/contact details also means there's no chance of spam arriving from them. There's was never a moment I said "I wish my supermarket would contact me out of the blue for any reason" and I'd like to keep it that way.
That said, I've never heard about that as a benefit from a market in the US, just discounts on food items (or put differently, upcharges if you don't use a card).
Not that we have GDPR-level protections here either.
EDIT: also my experience with telecom companies in Italy made me distrustful of any sort of subscription program.
Same goes for Switzerland. Both Migros and Coop offer this, and both require a loyalty card (and also a payment method, obviously), but those are free too.
Walking out without even having to deal with those pesky self-service cash register, their sometimes finicky scales, and some supermarkets’ more than annoying rules, feels like a weird magic trick.
You would just walk in, pick stuff up, and walk out. That’s it.
Each time I couldn’t help but feel like I was shoplifting.
And then the invoice came in by email, always accurate.
Truly bewildering.
Me, I'm not so sure. I don't think I'd like being reminded that my every movement is being watched. At least when I go to a store, I completely forget about security because I'm, you know, not there to steal something. It doesn't even cross my mind.
Or maybe it's a good thing to remind people that they're constantly under surveillance? I dunno.
I mean, with the Go stores there really is no concept of shoplifting since you need a payment method to walk in. Shoplifting would involve fooling the sensors and I suppose Amazon takes that as a cost of training their systems. There are many videos of people trying things to fool the system but I don't know how successful that is.
On a philosophical level I don't see any difference between this and, say, an employee following you with a clipboard and marking down everything you do. You're a customer in a private business and they can make any rule they want. Short of anonymous bartering for goods and services in an outdoor setting you really don't have much of a say. If Amazon hides the surveillance is it a trap, or just a way of making you feel more comfortable making impulse purchases?
Have you never been to a store that occasionally plays an announcement saying "Security to section 3" or some such nonsense? Those are the best, because that is 100% BS. It's theater, designed to make the people who do shoplift think they're going to be caught. And a lot cheaper than actual security when you're operating a grocery store on tight margins.
Some other comments mention having trouble with it, being billed for things they shouldn’t have.
But I personally never did. Even though I enjoyed fooling around and trying to trick it by picking stuff up just to put it back. Or coming together with someone else, both using my QR code, and picking stuff up separately. Never any issue. Although, obviously, ymmv.
It’s honestly among my most memorable experiences in the past two years.
In my friend's case it was walk in, spend a half hour working out the app issues, pick stuff up, and walk out, get charged for something you didn't take, go to Amazon to ask for a refund.
But that’s because I usually don’t use Amazon US, and you need to change to the US store, in app, to get that qr code.
I feel like they could make things smoother, like Apple does when you go to an Apple Store. Or perhaps use a geofenced iOS wallet card? Unless the QR code is dynamic?
For a number of years now our local grocery/everything store has operated a cashierless option. When you enter, you grab a handheld scanner, and scan as you go. It's pretty cool.
But it seems like nobody really uses it. And the two locations closest to me seem to have dropped it altogether. People are apparently more comfortable with just using old school self-checkout. Those have continued to proliferate, and account for way more than half the available checkout options.
Man, the old ones were better than the new ones my local Kroger has.
The new ones are like they took an old checkout stand and just put a self checkout kiosk in it, so you place your items on a belt...that moves them 5 feet away after you scan them.
So the flow is scan everything, checkout, then bag everything while people stare at you figuring out how to avoid doing what you're doing (and are angry at you for "wasting their time"), only for them to do the exact same thing.
At least one major supermarket where I am has started allowing you to use their app on your phone rather than the pick up scanners. I found it to be much more responsive than the handhelds and easier to interact with. I'm hoping they enhance it further in future by allowing payment via the phone as well.
Which is just business as usual, figuring out which stores in which locations turn out to be most profitable.
These Amazon stores are just local convenience stores. They're selling candy bars. And Amazon is a much more "experimental" company than Apple -- they launch and shut down stuff all the time to iterate and learn. This isn't about penny-pinching or margins, it's about finding product-market fit.
>"The retailer also opened a number of locations last year in Southern California. As of last month, Amazon operated 31 Go stores in total."
>"With these closures, the company will have 23 Go stores, the spokesperson said."
That's a loss of 8 stores.
“We’ve decided over the last year or so that we’re not going to expand the physical Fresh doors until we have that equation with differentiation and economic value that we like, but we're optimistic that we're going to find that in 2023,” [1]
[1] https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail-financial/amazon-halt...
Sounds like they’re focusing on the suburban market instead. Related to rising crime in the cities maybe?
The woman on the turnstile wouldn't let me in even when I explained the situation. So she went off and got a scanner to take my package. She didn't offer a receipt, and when I asked for one said it wasn't possible to give me one. I checked my email, and nothing there either. So I had no evidence I'd actually returned my item and she just said something like "It's in the system and never makes a mistake" or some similar rubbish.
While I was in there I saw several people walk just inside, faff around on their phones for 5 minutes then either give up or eventually get past the turnstiles. There's literally no benefit for customers unless you're shopping at busy times.
So all in all an unmitigated disaster.
For those of us who managed to download the app and login to it, walking into the store, grabbing something off a shelf and walking out was extremely convenient in a way unmatched by any other store. Calling it an unmitigated disaster in your situation is like calling a movie a failure because you couldn't be bothered to go to a theater and see it. Just bizarre.
Reread what you wrote, but this time try to think of a UI/UX issue that this comment _does not_ cover. Indeed, if we can start blaming the user for every UX trouble, this world would be a very different place, and not a place I would rather live in.
> just apparently too lazy or unwilling for some unclear reason.
> Just bizarre.
This is a very emotionally manipulative and accusatory comment that certainly does not meet HN's guidelines, and doesn't actually address any of the problems that the GP stated.
I will likely not respond further as this will quickly become non constructive.
You can't argue that something isn't a problem when it is self-evident. Trying to do so is manipulative, regardless of whether or not you appreciate that fact.
This sounds like something I would expect to hear from an MBA, not an engineer.
It was non-constructive from the moment you made your comment with highly manipulative phrases like "Seems like a very weird way of blaming a well defined system for your unwillingness to meet its prerequisites", "You are capable of this, just apparently too lazy or unwilling for some unclear reason", "For those of us who managed to", and "Just bizarre." Your comment does not meet the HN guidelines, was not constructive, and was downvoted and flagged accordingly.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
So then why attempt to go to a store that’s entirely based on using the app?
The store concept is based around your account - and you didn’t know your account details. The app can help avoid this, but you also refused to use the app.
How is this any different than someone who refuses to use their password to sign in to Amazon.com and complains about not being able to submit a return?
Or going to a store and not having your credit card but being annoyed that you can’t use your credit card?
So then it sounds like he’s not in very a strong position to declare the stores as an unmitigated failure…
But it definitely can be read either way, so that's confusing.
Also- why even bother with Amazon and trying to return packages etc if you have no easy way of getting your password? If this is too much of a hassle just use in person stores..
I’ve had drop off at mail shops locations be unexpectedly closed which is objectively worse than having a bad but possible return experience…..and never once claimed that “mail shops are an unmitigated failure”
I personally don't like the website too much. Full of fakes, bad quality items everywhere. I only use it for cheap stuff I wouldn't return anyway. I do get that. Amazon go and whole foods are good though. Amazon go is very convenient and whole foods often have brands which I like and I don't easily find elsewhere. I also enjoy their fruit.
…but, let’s be charitable and say some has lost their phone or whatever; it’s not totally unreasonable to expect some kind of special process for it.
…turns out, there was a special process for it. Without a receipt. Oh well…
/shrug
Some people are just weird about it. Live and let live I say.
Lesson learnt I hope: next time, I hope they go somewhere else and let other people get on with their perfectly mundane shopping.
Just wait until they have facial recognition stores, and you’ll find people complaining they couldn’t get in while wearing high powered IR leds all over their heads. You just can’t win in some of these arguments.
It's a flaw with how Amazon communicated drop off locations for returns.
You would say, "I want to return this." And they would respond with, "Take it here!" no additional information about having to have an app.
If you take a return to The UPS Store, for example, you just bring the item you're returning and a little QR / UPC code they scan and you're done.
If you take a return to the Amazon store... they won't even let you get to the point where you can return without having an app on your phone. It was annoying.
Especially if you were taking someone else's package back with your own. Or... more accurately, returning something for your girlfriend since she bought 3 tops with the intent of only keeping one and had to do a return like every 3 days because of her shopping habits. And she just assumed it worked the same as returns at The UPS Store... and then when you got there to drop off the package you couldn't even sign in as her. Ha.
I feel the original posters frustration around this. For a company that has always said, "It's all about the customer experience..." it was REALLY BAD customer experience. And, because it wasn't me setting up the original returns, I got sent to the dumb little "make you log in before you can enter" store a few times by mistake.
As the commenter stated,
> So then why attempt to go to a store that’s entirely based on using the app?
If you need an app to enter that store and you need to enter the store to return an item, then it’s pretty clear you need an app to return an item at that store.
> If you need an app to enter that store and you need to enter the store to return an item, then it’s pretty clear you need an app to return an item at that store.
(I don't have a horse in this race, I just don't think you can usually apply the transitive property to the real world.)
I don’t think this makes the point you think it makes.
> If you need an app to enter that store and you need to enter the store to return an item, then it’s pretty clear you need an app to return an item at that store.
“Excuse me, you need to install the app on your phone to enter the store”, the store manager said to the paramedic responding to a call of an unconscious senior citizen on the floor of the Amazon Go store.
There are plenty of cashierless stores which work just like any other store. They aren't exactly doing anything groundbreaking when it comes to that. They could also just put a regular payment terminal at the exit - the whole magic camera stuff would work just fine with it.
The end result is that they created an artificially cumbersome store concept, which does not provide a real benefit to the user. No wonder it isn't popular.
That’s not the issue that’s being discussed though. It’s a fair criticism, but that’s still irrelevant to the topic of Amazon Go stores requiring them and that you should therefore expect to need one if you want to enter a store.
> No wonder it isn't popular.
I wouldn’t deduce popularity from the closure of the stores. In Seattle at least, the stores had already been “temporarily” closed for a while and are in a fairly high-crime area of the city. [0] At the same time, they’re actively building larger suburban stores [1] which indicates a pivot, but that the format itself is still popular.
They’ve also added it to other venues like Climate Pledge Arena and Lumen Field in Seattle in the form of “Just Walk Out” [2]. You still need an Amazon One account to use it.
[0]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon-shutters-some-c...
[1]: https://www.winsightgrocerybusiness.com/amp/topics/amazon-go...
Why don't the people in the store have some flexibility to let you in? God forbid someone besides a computer has to make a decision.
government is an organisation of humans within a geographical region that work for the benefit of all the other humans within that region. it's as simple as that. it's the exception not the rule for there to be no private competition; unless you live in Cuba, in which case you're describing communism, not government
But that would probably be a negative for the same reason that bigger companies inevitably swallow smaller companies without government intervention: in the modern day economies of scale are everything. 10 companies that make 10,000 of something will generally lose to 1 company that makes 100,000. Monopolies will inevitably flourish without a strong government controlling them. (And moreover, in a globally connected world, if you kill all your monopolies it’s very possible another state that allowed their’s to flourish will have companies that can outcompete yours)
I’m not exactly going anywhere with this, I don’t have a great answer to what the best option is. You can try and force there to be 2-3 companies in every sphere…but that’s barely competition. You can try and regulate the massive companies…but almost inevitably large cash-rich employers end up with sway over the government. You can try for lots of local competition and shut out foreign companies…and lose out on the many benefits of free trade. You can try and cut a balance between all of the concerns, but it seems that whenever government tries for nuance it ends up creating a very expensive bureaucracy.
Amazon has emerged as an oligarch that will be broken up like the Bell system, Standard Oil, rail monopolies, and others before it - provided it and other oligarchs haven't fully compromised the government who hosts it. If Amazon, and the other FAANGs operating predatory surveiilance bureaucracies continue to exist in their current form in 4-5 years, we will know for sure the US is irrepairably compromised and once again, a generation will need to reckon with whether their self determination and survival is worth accepting sacrifices for.
Late stage capitalism is indeed dystopian, but if we call it early stage socialism somehow we're conspiracy theorists. The failure mode of the principled civilization created by the founders of the US reverts to the eurasian continential cultures and systems its citizens escaped. Those were pretty brutal, so much so that their own colonists revolted against them and achieved independence, and that's why american values are important to teach.
Every human endeavour fails without maintenance and upkeep. Being on the side of the forces of failure isn't the right side of history, it's forfeiting your humanity to the currents of inevitability.
If we're going to let tedious, low-effort tropes about "capitalism" stand, consider this one rebutted.
sounds good to me. over time the world's wealth accumulates with the already wealthy. this makes sense, it's much easier to make money if you already have money. under the current system, inequality inexorably, unsustainably grows
last time we were here it took a pandemic, a massive depression and two world wars for serious change to occur. and even then it only lasted 30 years or so, until the Thatchers and Reagans rolled it all back. and here we are now. late stage capitalism once again. what will be the final domino before change this time? nuclear war? some kind of AI disaster? hyperinflation? Covid clearly wasn't enough.
it seems like kind of the people that would typically be concerning themselves with this kind of societal correction have been successfully distracted by bullshit culture wars
I have no love for amazon, but besides the lack of receipt, this seems like an issue they created for themselves
And they really aren't necessary. The Amazon app has location services permission; it knows when I'm in the store. That's apparently enough to track me along with my purchases, and to flag anyone who tries to enter the store without the app. So what's the point of the turnstiles, exactly?
It’s one thing to stop a shoplifter at a normal store. Turnstiles reinforce the notion that this facility actively enforces access control.
This is similar to Passport Control line at the airport. If I have Mobile passport (MPC) app installed, I use a dedicated and usually empty lane. The same is true if I have my Global Entry card. It takes a couple of minutes to setup MPC while walking, but most people choose to wait in the main line.
Was a big fan of the one in Chicago (I'm now remote). Never had any issues. Great selection of food/snacks/drinks. App always worked flawlessly.
This has been the case for decades. It's how they catch shoplifters.
I rather like the fact it can be used for customer convenience now, rather than just punitively.
The main issue isn't that cameras are expensive, it is that monitoring that many cameras is expensive/impractical, and automated theft detection systems are still in their infancy. So they just target high value/common areas, and rely on deterrents (like people believing they have a lot of cameras, off-duty cops at the door, and PR around some super secret new technology).
Quite seriously: Stores really need to look into vending machines for certain items. In particular with how advanced Gift Card Theft-Clone-Return Activation fraud is. Thieves have message-boards not dissimilar to this where they can share "pro-tips," and things have become quite sophisticated.
Do you have a source for that?
Because at my local grocery store for example, above the customer service area they have a whole wall of TV's showing the live camera feeds. They're all working.
My local convenience store has the live TV's too, by the cashier.
I know people who work there.
Your average Walmart has hundreds of camera housings. Every single aisle has a couple. The amount of cabling alone to populate them all simply doesn't exist (as you can often see, it is an open-box ceiling), and monitoring that many cameras is impractical (in particular for a store staffed at BARELY sustainable levels).
Just look at how understaffed the floor of these stores are, then ask yourself why they'd have a disproportionate number of loss-prevention staff working relative to the floor staff. A big store absolutely will have tens of cameras, but even all those may only have a single person for all (or zero persons depending on shifts/staffing).
That being said: Some stores have legitimately rolled out facial recognition to pick up known thieves as they enter the store. But that requires four-ish cameras and the technology is pretty turn-key.
Regardless of how many there are, I believe the point is not to monitor them live but to have recordings if the store wants to bring charges for something.
I had facial recognition in a nightclub over a decade ago. Modern cameras’ capabilities are scary.
Right, but is it recording, and does the camera feed go anywhere other than just up to the little monitor showing you the video?
It's like the recording they play once in a while over the PA that says "security to section 3" or whatever. It's theater. Because actual security costs real money and grocery stores are tight margins.
I mostly ignore such things, but Home Depot annoys me. I guess they have a more significant problem with theft, because some aisles have cameras with monitors and a bell that goes DING-DONG when you walk by, just to remind you they think you're a criminal. A few miles away there's even a Home Depot that has a portable tower-of-cameras out in the parking lot with bright lights and flashing blue lights on it, so you can further feel like a criminal. Luckily my local location doesn't feel the need to do that.
Completely self-inflicted problem, happy to see such schadenfreude unfold. There's already a gift card that's pretty much immune to fraud (or at the very least makes fraud the bank's problem): money.
Gift cards are horrible waste and scam and ultimately only benefit the store at the expense of the buyer or the recipient of the card - you're turning good, actual cash, in something that's less valuable because now it has usage restrictions on them.
The same is mostly true for every crime. If you steal something of value and the insurance company gets reimbursed, that's just a bonus.
This lines up with what I've heard on TikTok and from in person conversations with kleptomaniacs. (It's not uncommon for folks to go on thieving sprees throughout a mall. They think they're getting off scott-free, but are being secretly followed by security. Once they hit $950 the big guns come out.)
But people also have rights, including the right to a trial with a jury of peers. Innocent people can be wrongly accused of stealing large amounts. It's worth the expense of a jury trial to force the prosecution to justify their case and give the innocent the change to defend themselves. And cost effectiveness plays no role here.
They also have a top forensic lab that some smaller law enforcement units rely on, and they do it for free!
https://corporate.target.com/article/2012/02/an-unexpected-c...
In high school my friend was caught and arrested for stealing a bottle of luxury cosmetic shampoo (dumb teenager brain). Not cheap but certainly not felony limit
> "[If] you take a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff, they're gonna be like 'Bye gorgeous. You have a great day.'"
> However, the self-identified ex-employee said that there is a catch - if the shoplifting becomes a pattern, Target allegedly takes action, as they track stolen items.
> Hannah claimed that the company waits "until you're thousands and thousands of dollars in debt" to "put you behind bars."
> This would generally make the stealing a felony-level charge.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/target-thefts-shoplifti...
https://www.the-sun.com/news/6797941/target-employee-theft-s...
More information on some of Target's loss prevention techniques: https://www.businessinsider.com/target-employees-say-store-d... (Archive link: https://archive.is/wRol8)
I'd heard that they wait until losses reach above the felony threshold before prosecuting, documenting what particular individuals are stealing. Several videos about this had gone viral, and I'd heard about it from a friend but never looked into it until now.
From the Business Insider interview with several anonymous employees, though, the intent of the surveillance is more to catch high volume thieves, employees stealing, and career shoplifters, rather than folks stealing a few necessities. I could see most of their prosecutions rising to the felony threshold because of this tactic, since high volume is likely to cross the dollar amount for a felony. In other words, the intent is not being punitive for the sake of it, but actual loss prevention.
I tend to believe the anonymous sources, because they have nothing to gain from talking anonymously with the reporter, versus the influencers who are trying to accumulate followers. It's not a Les Miserables type situation.
A lot of the commenters on one particular video linked from the article seem to be pro-shoplifting, even without need, so there is to some extent people believing what they want to believe: https://www.tiktok.com/@jodessy/video/6899962247590743301
Examples:
"All I'm hearing is I have $499 in store credit" - 1700 likes
"I'm sorry but what?? I've stolen CELL PHONES from target" - 242 likes
"I def stole over $20k including but not limited to laptops, jbl speakers, ... only got probation so jokes on them!" - 103 likes
Anyway, I just thought I'd share this even though it's only tangentially related to the story since I'd just previously believed the viral rumor without really looking into it.
If you want to see a shopkeeper care about that sort of thing, patronize an owner-operated small business.
I get the point of shoplifting watchers not caring about queues, but am I just naive that this should be easy enough to solve with tech? You have lots of images from multiple directions, you know how the store looks empty, you can probably do a decent-enough image discovery to find out roughly where people are. If there are 15 people in front of the checkout, ring a small bell somewhere and have a person check whether it's time to open another checkout.
I can shop, scan the products while I walk through the shop with my phone, pay with the app and open a gate to bet let out with my purchased goods, but the computer can't use the camera signal to figure out how where people are?
But not an incentive to use it.
edit: I include zero because a lot of it is seeing that a "suspicious type" has entered the store, and running to the back room to watch their every move until they leave.
Some US cities, you show up for a conference or something, walk to the corner store across from your hotel, and find that all of the toothbrushes and bags of trail mix are locked away.
How little are they paying these people who are doing the unlocking, that it's worthwhile for such small items?
Nobody is going to come down and slap a fine on you for having a dozen cameras stolen. They very certainly will if that cough syrup wasn’t distributed correctly.
I don't know what exactly Amazon is trying to do though. Their prices aren't competitive and the "don't mess around with checking out" benefits aren't exactly a huge time saver, self checkout is a solved problem and doesn't take a ton of time.
Not being able to immediately see your receipt on exit is also a big downside - they charged me for something I put back on the shelf which makes me not want to go there either, I need to remember to check my receipt at some unknown later point in time and try to match it up with stuff that has probably already been put away.
All around IMO it's a worse grocery store to go to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/nyregion/nyc-cashless-ban...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/10/amazon-exec-tells-employees-...
I know there are still speed bumps and problems to address, but cashier in a convenience store is one of those awful jobs I don't think anyone should have to do if we can avoid it.
I've had plenty of friends and family work those jobs, and briefly did it myself (at a gas station). Often these friends worked overnight, with the risk of being held up at 3am when no one is around. Usually it's just standing around waiting for a customer, with occasional chores to be done.
And it always pays as little as legally possible.
Let's destroy this job.
These jobs are also an opportunity for students to earn money and get work experience. But yes, "Let's destroy this job" simply because you don't like it?
Since your profile states you are a staff developer at Shopify, here's a Shopify link that outlines the value that the role of cashier brings to a retail environment:
There is a reason why for example living human beings do not manually switch phone lines anymore when you make a phone call - you could rationalize it as much as you can, but frankly humans we born for better stuff.
What I have stated is that entry level positions are a means of advancement in retail environments. This based on empirical fact.
>"There is a reason why for example living human beings do not manually switch phone lines anymore when you make a phone call"
No, the reason "human beings do not manually switch phone lines anymore" is because the growth of subscriber lines exceeded the capacity for manual switching in Central Offices. It had nothing to do with nature of the job.
The people in need get the money, but no one has to do the awful job. Win-win.
Or we could just pay them to dig holes and fill them back in again, if you demand that they must perform labor to "earn" their way.
These are needless jobs. They should be destroyed.
It's easy to create these fantasies in one's head, but think about it realistically for 5 seconds and it all breaks down.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90860480/amazon-hq2-construction...
This is significant in that the HQ2 bidding process was basically a competition by local governments to see who could give Amazon the largest tax breaks and other incentives so that Amazon would choose their city as the site its location. See:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/five-economic-development...
For whatever reason there's also a Whole Foods and an Amazon Fresh near by as well. Woodland Hills is well stocked with Amazon retail!
I am honestly shocked and confused when people enjoy this. Or targeted ads or *GPT generated content. I am not anti-tech by any means. Maybe I am just not impressed and awed enough by these technologies to overlook the downsides?
I don't support "all progress is good progress" mentality with tech. I find these cashierless stores lazy and needlessly compromising on privacy. Just have a man-trap (locking revolving door for the unaware) that lets you in after you scan a card or speak/type your amazon id and give shoppers a smart cart thay detects what you put in and use cameras only to enforce all items you take are put in the cart. That and facial recognition privacy protection will get me to go there (but hey, i order everything for delivery anyways).
They can do better while protecting consumers but choose not to because of the precedent set allowing them to track movements on a store as a feature. So why can't this be used to keep you safe in apartment complexes, parking lots (car theives),etc... soon facial recognition will be id'ing me everywhere I go! The laws to protect people are nowhere near where they should be. So what are my choices? Move to the arctic and build an igloo?
Amazon also owns Ring which can be used to protect your home (although it’s certainly less sophisticated). I own a Ring home security system and I’m very fond of it. Same for my parents when they go for their vacation home - big game changer for their ease of mind. Now, I’m not super fond of how Ring shared footage without consent in some countries with authorities; but it’s probably the company I trust most with my personal data footage etc. And I deem them more capable in protecting my data.
Some people believe these are amazing things. They tell other people that these are amazing things, so more people believe it, or at least accept it as default. Whereas I look at these things and think I live in bizarro-world with how much other people seem to enjoy them.
I was very impressed, sneaking stuff off the shelf, passing it between multiple people and a few other obvious tactics all get noticed. Only way I've found to defeat it is to throw stuff into your cart from over 3 feet away. I never repeated it after I got my free bag of chips, but it was fun breaking it
A few months ago she was pepper sprayed after confronting a shoplifter who had an entire cart of things, but only scanned and paid for 3.
Then last month, someone came in and just wheeled out the entire tobacco shelving unit with a dolly.
These are just a couple egregious examples. We hear other shoplifting stories from her every week.
The police don't respond to shoplifting calls anymore, and the thieves know it. Employees are now instructed to not confront shoplifters in any way after she got pepper sprayed.
It's a total free for all. My mother-in-law estimates the theft to be $10,000 per day at her store.
My point is that anywhere that unmanned stores with cameras can work, so would self-checkout.
That seems intolerably high but I’ve never worked a day in a grocery store. Do grocery stores generate enough revenue to sustain? Fifty two-hundred dollar carts of cash is a lot to let go.
My mom and dad regularly lifted from wally world to make sure our family had enough. Always taught my siblings and I that stealing from regular people or small local/ethical businesses is wrong, but against enormous manifestations of brazen greed it was was open season. As I grow older and more crotchety old person assertive I realize it's more true than ever, and much more even than when I was in need of baby food 40 years ago.
I miss you dad.
You're not actually stealing from the "ruthless retail corporation". You are stealing from the customers who don't steal.
The larger supermarkets seem to pull in on the order $100-150k/day in revenues, with the median half of that.
So... yeah, the numbers don't add up. If it's $10k/day, even at an extremely large store, that's 6-7% theft rate. Given that grocers aren't high-margin, that's stark enough to wipe out any revenue. $1k/day theft rate is a more reasonable estimation.
And how would 'shutting off the self-checkout lanes' solve that?
If the goal is cashierless, why not just have a store full of vending machines? You pick what you want, tap your card or phone, then you get it, then walk out.
At that point, a self checkout machine is probably better in every way.
There is a bit of a misunderstanding on staffing, though. There are still about as many people as you would need for a grocery store of that size, from what I remember. They just don't work the checkout line. So, you get all of the restocking and similar capabilities that machines just can't do, yet.
https://blog.bestbuy.ca/tv-audio/headphones-tv-audio/best-bu...
and
https://thepointsguy.com/news/things-sold-airport-vending-ma...
Picking an apple, banana, or bunch of grapes off a shelf is more difficult for a machine. The items are not uniform in size or shape. For a lot of produce, no mechanized handling system exists for quantities smaller than a bushel.
Also, when people change their minds about buying something, stores need to re-shelve that product. That's probably more labor intensive for vending machines than for regular shelves. For that matter, stocking it in the first place is probably more labor intensive.
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[1] Every obstacle you encounter, even a tiny inconvenience, will reduce the odds that you go through with a purchase.
So, it's much more convenient, you'd never be embarrassed because you forgot to scan something or the scan didn't work properly. Security guards won't be profiling you as you walk around. I find it great.
It provides value that less sophisticated solutions don't. So, I'd consider it well engineered.
They could just as easily have set it up such that I could walk in and they could figure out what I've bought and just let me tap a card or put cash/coins into a self service machine at the end to open the turnstile. No tappy tap = no open turnstile.
But they don't, because... I dunno. Less data? I mean, they could facially recognise me and track me that way if they really wanted.
If Amazon the website required an app then I wouldn't use it. I bet they'd lose out on a significant number of customers.
Once you want to checkout, you drop everything you bought into a big bin near the checkout area - it calculates the total based on all RFID tags, you pay, take everything and leave.
Imo this is better than checkout in the carts - don't need to attach a payment POS and carry bags to every single cart lol.
I do remember doing this as well at Decathlon.
My guess is that that the time savings aren't large enough to offset the cost for stores with lower-cost goods (especially since most time-intensive products in a supermarket are things like produce that needs to be weighed and self-service pastry).
We have the tech to do this. They library system where I am put RFID tags in all the books. You put the all books you want in a special tray at checkout. (There is still a checkout counter with a machine.) The computer will instantly display all the books you have on the tray. You touch the screen to confirm all the books and it will check them out and print a paper receipt.
They can probably eliminate the checkout too, maybe. I imagine that they do it so that the user (you) can confirm what items the computer thinks they wanted to check out.
However, because RFID chips are too weak to be reliably read in bulk and at a distance, you need to deposit your items one by one in a special trough that scans them. And this is only possible because both Uniqlo and Decathlon are 100% house brand and can thus ensure the chips are present in everything, which is why random corner stores or supermarkets can't copy them.
The idea does not fail in countries with labour shortages. Even with increased shoplifting- it is simply too asinine employing people sitting on their ass all day scanning groceries. Labour costs real money here.
You do need to put the items in a box at the exit to pay (you can't just walk out of the store with the shopping cart), but no manual scanning.
Edit: should have refreshed the page before commenting, Decathlon and uniqlo are popular here
I could give a list of different features I disliked, but in the end, it kind of comes down to the fact that the overall vibe is "The Opposite of Trader Joe's".
We have had vending machines for centuries, most kinds of shops (that don't need a social aspect) could easily just be sealed warehouses with product dispensers dotted outside the walls.
Returns could be implemented.
I guess it is possible, but it sounds like it’s all the disadvantages of Instacart with all of the disadvantages of going to the store.
It's amazing, I love it.
In small enough groups where there is a good sense of community it’s amazing what can work.
So, basically something a vending machine could provide?
We've had those since like the '50s, except without computer vision, user tracking and machine learning.
I don't know why Amazon was trying to reinvent the wheel here in the most expensive way possible.
Maybe the largest extra expense of vending machines is that store refrigerators are _deeper_ which means they need to be restocked less, or that the most popular products can take up less 'slots' because the total number of drinks per slots is larger.
They don't want to fiddle around with a payment system that might reject their five dollar bill for being too wrinkled, or fail to accurately read their card, just to be served a bruised apple at the end of it.
Think about other even more perishable items, like seafood. Do you want a fish vending machine? Or do you want to be able to examine your food before you decide to purchase it?
Vending machines work well for nonperishables. Grocery stores work well for perishable items.
Grocery stores have a massive time cost for picking up your items, so it makes sense to get a lot of things at once, which only compounds the waiting problem for other customers.
Amazon's solution gets rid of that time cost. The only part you have to worry about is the trouble of getting in the door, and that takes the same amount of time no matter how many items people are buying. The barrier to entry would be being technologically sophisticated enough to download an app on your phone. Some people don't want to do that, and they're free to shop at other stores.
The Amazon Go stores aren't expensive over-engineered vending machines. There's still a time cost to using a vending machine. The innovative part is saving people time.
We have them in London and they are pretty convenient.
Probably 20-30 seconds faster than a normal place? I actually do like the idea in general but the implementation is ok at best and I didn’t even have to use yet-another-proprietary-app
i wonder often what minimizing humans interacting with each other will cause on a grand macro scale/timeline.
On the other hand, I detest waiting in line for 5 minutes to pay, as happens frequently in e.g. CVS. Or 10 minutes at the supermarket.
It's not worth 5-10 minutes of my time for small talk with a cashier, especially when half the time the cashier isn't even in a social mood. (I'm sure I wouldn't be either half the time if it were my job.)
Amazon bought One Medical because there's massive overlap between Prime Members and One Medical members.
Look at convenience store shoppers and Prime members, and I don't think there's massive overlap between those customer bases.
Guess what is predominant in BEV chargers? Yeah, stupid apps.
When asked why Amazon has decided to shutter the eight stores in Seattle, New York City and San Francisco, the spokesperson said that like with any retailer, Amazon periodically assesses its portfolio of stores and makes optimization decisions along the way.
Theft
I asked how they know what’s in my basket to charge me for it and they said that there are cameras watching me the whole time and noting what I take off the shelf and put in it.
I was beyond creeped out by the whole experience. Never went to that store again.
Knowing that they not only watch what I’m buying but also recording and analyzing my gate, motion, gaze, microecpressions etc freaked me out.
Amazon’s vision to cattle-ize humanity for profit is not attractive to me.
Amazon Go's system knows who I am, what item I grab off the shelf, put back and then what I ultimately leave with. There's so much personal information they gather from that order and it shows up downstream across their other products.
Bluetooth tracking can't attach a face to that and that is a far more appropriate use of tracking. It aids restocking decisions, promotions, etc, that I have no problem participating in.
My point is, if I like a particular item, I don't mind the store knowing that and keeping it stocked, and paired with other items I buy together with it. I just don't want the store to know my emotional state, confusion, and speed at which I grabbed an item.
They simply don’t let people in who don’t already have an account with them: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/22/16920784/amazon-go-cashie...
It makes you wonder why they decided this was a good idea in the first place. Seemed sort of obvious that they'd have a shoplifting problem in a region where it's already not too uncommon.
Perhaps they assumed the surveillance would deter thieves, but surveillance is only a deterrence if the local police can afford to enforce the law effectively.