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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Go seems incredibly overengineered. Why is this superior than a portable scanning plus toggleable RFIDs that disable items on scan and alarm gates? Cameras everywhere and computer vision seems overkill.

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The Decathlon (sporting equipment stores like REI or MEC) stores in Spain (and other countries, I’m sure) have RFID self checkout and it works way better than the type where you scan everything yourself. There’s a big “basket”, you put in your items, and they’re just detected as they are put in. Then you just pay and go. They have the little barcode scanner guns for the bulky items that don’t fit in the “basket”.

Uniqlo does the same, at least in the UK.

I'm pretty sure some of the larger Uniqlo stores in the US also do this.

In the midwest we have a giant store called Woodman's that just does low-tech self-checkout lanes and 24-hour stores... Self-checkout is just you doing the scanning and paying yourself... Aside from a high-precision scale and one worker for all of the self-checkout lanes (to assist in errors), it's more or less honor system that just works for the most part.

My mother-in-law operates the self-checkout lanes at a Kroger brand store in the midwest. The honor system definitely does not work there. Shoplifting is through the roof over the past couple years. It's gotten so bad that management is debating shutting off the self-checkout lanes.

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.

That's not really a self-checkout problem though is it. I mean, SF has stores that don't have self-checkout but the thieves that come in and wheel out a tobacco shelving unit are not taking advantage of "self-checkout"... they are taking advantage of the fact that 1) there is no proper security and 2) the police don't respond.

My point is that anywhere that unmanned stores with cameras can work, so would self-checkout.

I think there's an important difference between unmanned and self checkout which you missed from the post you replied to: the person who scans a few items but steals others at a self checkout. In a no checkout store you already identified yourself in order to get inside and the store knows what you picked up and took out.

Their high precision scale works remarkably well for this though. It forces you to put all your stuff on the scale and so it becomes obvious to the one store clerk if you leave stuff in your cart that means you haven't scanned/paid for them.

Still one person trying to watch over about 10 customers. No match for a tireless machine watching the whole store through dozens of cameras.

> $10,000 per day at her store.

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.

The anecdote is almost certainly made up nonsense. Grocery stores are incredibly low-margin businesses.

A lot of people seem to have been raised with this attitude that pretty theft from a ruthless retail corporation is some kind of unthinkable sin.

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.

> A lot of people seem to have been raised with this attitude that pretty theft from a ruthless retail corporation is some kind of unthinkable sin.

You're not actually stealing from the "ruthless retail corporation". You are stealing from the customers who don't steal.

Incorrect, it is stealing from the retail corporation.

Looking up statistics, shrinkage rates at a grocery store are typically 2-3%. Theft appears to be about ⅓ of shrinkage (food spoilage is a bigger cause than shoplifting), so about 1% of revenue amounts to theft on average.

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.

>Then last month, someone came in and just wheeled out the entire tobacco shelving unit with a dolly.

And how would 'shutting off the self-checkout lanes' solve that?

Trusting customers to key in the correct product code when using the scale is foolish though. Supposedly there's a store out there that sold more bananas in weight through the self-checkout than they had shipped in.

The one thing about sushi and peanuts is that they both have a weight…

>Cameras everywhere and computer vision seems overkill.

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.

I'm guessing the longer term interest Amazon has is to use these stores to generate a dataset for their computer vision system, which they could license as a loss prevention technology to other stores

to be honest I'm surprised no one has funded such an effort.

That would be way less convenient than Amazon stores, having to pick what you want on a screen and then wait for it is much slower than just grabbing it off a shelf.

At that point, a self checkout machine is probably better in every way.

Doesn't sound like a very enjoyable experience for many kinds of shopping

Is it supposed to be enjoyable now??

"Vending machines you can walk into" is, amusingly, how I describe them to folks.

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.

Vending machines have very strict packaging requirements. They simply can’t handle a wide variety of products.

That hasn't been true in a very long time. A walk through any major airport shows otherwise. The Best Buy Express vending machine is 10 years old at this point and that is just one of many brands now that have similar offerings. See:

https://blog.bestbuy.ca/tv-audio/headphones-tv-audio/best-bu...

and

https://thepointsguy.com/news/things-sold-airport-vending-ma...

Those are all uniform packages that meet strict requirements. Grocery stores, including Amazon cashierless stores, sell things like produce.

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.

If you look at the photo at the top of the first link you can very clearly see that almost every single row has different size package footprints, not only from row but even between packages in the same row. There is no uniformity present. Further from the second link, there is no uniformity from machine to machine which is fundamentally no different the variation and shelf configuration from from shelf to shelf or aisle to aisle in a traditional brick and mortar retail store.

Having a package is a significant uniformity. Having a conveyable shape is a significant uniformity. Produce is often packaged only in bushel quantities, which are not the quantities that shoppers purchase.

This might generate more buyer friction[1]. Grabbing an item from a shelf is very easily reversible. But when you push a button for a vending machine to dispense something, it's not obvious how to undo that. So you will hesitate more.

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.

Wouldn't that require people typing in the product id and making a payment several times if they want more than one thing?

Cost. RFIDs have to be manufactured and I think those add up fast. The antenna can be made of etched copper, but with prices as they can be, it might aslo be in aluminum or conductive ink. That many tags on that many products day after day.. I would imagine the commodity prices would deeply impact their use.

I find it nice that you don't have to scan anything, use a shopping cart or even move items from one place to another. Just grab it from the shelf, put in your backpack and go. Sure you have to scan your phone when you come in but you'd have to do that when you pay anyway.

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.

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