Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
When it rolled out to Amazon Fresh stores, it was a breadth of fresh air. The painful clunkiness of self-checkout was gone. The slow and pointless exercise of unloading and reloading your cart was gone. You could just bring your reusable shopping bags, throw stuff in, and walk home. By far the most hassle-free shopping experience to be had.
Scan as you shop is a big step backwards and feels like you've got the annoying self-checkout experience looming over you the entire time you're there.
The selection and operating hours both took a hit during covid and never recovered.
Before covid, the hours were much better too.
That's manual by any reasonable description.
If they manually reviewed most of the items on each shopping trip, then it's mostly manual.
If they only manually reviewed an item or few per trip, I'd consider it to be mostly automated.
> Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales.
> According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.
Even if the system was fairly accurate, if the vendor is charging Amazon too much for it, it can still be financially worthwhile for Amazon to switch to scanners in their carts.
Large corporations tend to tell the truth, but push it as far as they can.
That was quite unacceptable for a convenience store and it was then I got the feeling Amazon Go was still an experiment rather than a mature technology.
Others are so loose that you don't even have to take things out of your cart, scan and pay and go.
It uses your rewards card to determine your “risk”, I think. Just a theory. But whenever I’ve gotten a new card, they come check my bag a lot. Then after a dozen successes or so, they stop checking so often. Then hardly at all.
One of my friends forgot to scan an item once when they checked, and he had someone come to check his bag way more often for a while.
Given that "just walk out" apparently means "replace cashiers with offshore video analysts" I'd wager Whole Foods might do something similar and policing shrinkage in self-checkout is too expensive compared to just keeping track of cheats and throwing the book at them if they make a habit out of it.
If you don't get randomly selected for inspection, there is nothing stopping you from just walking out with groceries you didn't pay for worth a hundred dollars easy. People just don't. Another benefit of having a proper social safety net I guess.
It's especially annoying when I am waving an item furiously, trying to get the poorly printed barcode to scan, and when it finally accepts it, it double scans the item.
Then when I have to stand there waiting for someone to remove the item is usually where I get disgusted with the process and give up on shopping, especially when it happens multiple times.
Buying something for under 5 euro bucks in a shop where middle school kids buy their lunches is almost guaranteed check. More than one in three times.
A different shop and a bigger amount — checks almost never
I doubt it's as simple as this. People don't only steal because they could technically afford things. Just as people don't only kill in self defence.
Instead of cooperation under a system with a social safety net, we get a game theoretic weighting on defection without a social safety net.
There's a causal arrow in the other direction, IMHO: People like to believe in the 'law of the jungle' mentality and thus vote to cut the safety net. IME it's especially wealthy people for whom it's a kind of game, not trauma, deprivation (of education, health care, food, housing, safety) and survival, and who also get to pay lower taxes, Didn't Jamie Dimon talk about how he liked how 'animal spirits' have been awakened?
There is a safety net. Here's how I'd describe the situation:
There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was good that they were helped.
There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was not good that they were helped.
Most of politics around this topic is people's differing beliefs in the proportions of the above, and how bought in they are to minimising the latter count because they pay taxes.
I'm sorry, what? Only in the US helping someone can be sold as a bad thing. It's better to help a few more people that may not really need it than help a few fewer that actually did.
I think it's worth reading the complete comment and you'll see where what you said fits my wider point.
I enjoy stealin', it's just as simple as that
Oh well, it's just a simple fact
When I want something, man, I don't wanna pay for it
Obviously it varies location by location.
Remove from basket, scan, put in bag. Remove from basket, scan, put in bag.
The scale is the entire bagging area, and it detects when things were removed or added without being scanned, as far as I know that's all it does here. No specific weights.
Objectively false. Some stores in some areas do that. Most don't.
At Walmart if I only have a few items (most of the time I go to Walmart) I'll just grab the scan gun and scan everything without taking anything out of my cart. I'll bag when I get to the car.
I imagine everyone is still playing around to get the optimum ease-of-use vs shoplifting ratio right.
I live in the US and the only place I ever go to where they weigh the items you scanned is Costco. Everywhere else I go (my local Walmart, Target, Aldi, two local grocery stores, and CVS) the self checkout is mostly based on trust with maybe one employee somewhat monitoring some machines. No random sampling.
The only issue I ever run into with the self checkouts is double scanning the product. You do need employee to void items.
And now assholes are intentionally taking alcohol through the self-checkout, deliberately taking up that one employee's time making him or her perform the workaround to check the items out.
And the 20+ years of "unexpected item in the bagging area" bullshit... just get rid of it.
On the other hand, using the cashier is often frustrating. You have to self-bag anyway and the cashier won’t start scanning your items until the person in front of you has bagged all of their stuff, had a chat about the weather and counted their change. The bagging area is always way too small, making all of this take a while. A few times I’ve even waited while one cashier counts their float, leaves, and a new one comes and counts their float.
In some places, you had smoke-stained cashiers throwing your groceries to their side without so much as looking at you, except to complain you're not bagging fast enough. I think it's fair to say that in those places, self-checkout is a huge improvement.
In other places though, where cashiers have traditionally been more friendly and expected to bag your groceries, it feels like a less obvious improvement. Whereas before you had chipper high school kids working their first job bagging your groceries, now you have menacing terminals accusing you of being a criminal every time their scales misalign.
Self-checkout is a convergence on mediocrity: some places are going to get dragged up, and others down.
What happens every now and then to me is that the person in front watches open mouthed as their shopping gets scanned and piles up in the bagging area, then they pay and fuck around with their purse (honestly idk what they’re doing) then take forever to pack, while the cashier starts scanning my stuff and mixes it into theirs.
I don’t love self-checkout, it can be annoying when something doesn’t scan and I don’t have the ability to manually input the bar code like a normal cashier does. And sometimes there can be errors (“place the item into the bagging area” - when I already did), but I’m overall glad to have the option for self-checkout.
I feel this. It makes my blood boil. I wish I could flutter through life with such child like absent mindedness.
But yeah when you’re the other person in this scenario it’s irritating as hell :-D
- I never have to weigh anything except produce
- I rarely have to wait on an attendant except for something like spray paint
- I rarely have been to a store with absolutely zero cashiers, especially for a grocery store
- Usually the cashier will bag for me
I’ve had similar experiences whether I’m in an urban part of LA or some rich Orange County suburb.
My only two complaints are (1) finding parking at like a Trader’s Joes or Tokyo Central and (2) when the store is super busy, there are a bunch of cashiers, and yet there are still long lines
In Switzerland the age check is done by any cashier nearby. Sometimes so fast that you don't even notice that there was a check.
Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when much of the cost of operating was offset by underpaid workers and VC funds? Now that they don't have unlimited piles of money and cities/states are making them pay more fair wages, the cost-benefit of those services has diminished. I was ok paying $5 for $20 of food to be delivered, but now it's more like $10 - $15 in fees/tip, plus fees hidden in menu prices making that $20 food cost $27.50.
Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive?
The people making the app need a much bigger cut than Domino's. Domino's cut only needs to be big enough to pay their delivery drivers, they make their money selling pizza and the delivery is just an additional service that drives business.
The app maker needs a cut big enough to pay their delivery driver and also be the main revenue stream for their entire business since they're not making money off the pizza.
https://biz.dominos.com/about-us/innovations/
They're not just selling pizza to make money - but also looking at making cars.
https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/why-dominos-dxp-d...
While I'm not going to claim that was a good idea, the point is that Dominos sees making and delivering pizza as one and the same business.
> 154 examples of the DXP cars were built. Along with the delivery driver, each DXP car could carry up to 45 pizzas, 12 two-liter sodas, and all the extra dipping sauces one could ever want. Add to that the fact that the car’s still held their five-year 100,000-mile warranty, were cheap on gas, and created a surprising amount of buzz, it is hard not to look at the DXP program as a success, low production aside.
Edit: the Hagerty story was a nice read, thank you for linking to it
So I think a third-party delivery business must seek exclusivity contracts to be competitive with an in-house solution.
And if that could be done, maybe just 2 orders to start with (for example carpool benefits for 2 people), that will be awesome, but if you could pool 4-5 orders, that will make bank !
I guess this model, if scaled purely based on the model, will imply restaurants co-located (same parking lot) will benefit from such an arrangement.
This is a super good point. I didn't think about that.
So expensive for a frustrating cold food delivery.
All the delivery app companies are NOT making the food so the blame game starts AND they are not employees so a bunch of gaming is going on.
I know my one experience with Uber eats is such that I'll never use it again, and instead travel myself.
(And I'm not sure if my experiences were representative of each country, just that they were consistent in each city.)
After ton of investment investors are finally looking for returns now. And consumers have decided convenience reigns supreme. Right from the SAAS products to daily breakfast customers there is lot of premium on convenience.
We need a quippy phrase for this, but unfortunately "Pump and Dump" is already taken for a kind of stock-market manipulation.
Instead, I would like to coin/nominate "Tease and Squeeze".
First consumers are teased by the idea that the disruptive new service has invented a magic new secret to low prices and great value... But after the company as achieved some kind of market strangehold, those consumers are squeezed with price-hikes and quality-drops as the investors--who bankrolled the early predatory pricing [0]--try to recoup their investment plus additional profit.
[0] Note that the term "Predatory Pricing" usually refers to artificially low prices to destroy competitors, although I can totally understand why some may assume it means preying on customers with high prices.
Granted, Tease and Squeeze has a nicer ring. Then again, the enshittification neologism became standard langue in no time and is understood by everybody.
But at this point I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to mean.
First, the issue of intent and overall history. Tease and Squeeze implies it was the plan all along, but an "enshittified" product doesn't have to be that way. For example, a company could have been successful without any "Tease"--no predatory pricing or monopolistic behavior--and then taken a nosedive later when the founder retired and sold it to a new owner, meaning it's Squeeze-only.
Second, "Squeeze" doesn't require a quality-drop, it can include purely a price-hike, but "enshittified" products almost always mean a drop in quality, regardless of whether prices rise or not.
I for one like it
when it’s just starting out in something, you get instant classics.
when it’s out of ideas but still has the levers of access tilted all the way to “got mine bitches”, you get the late MCU, Uber for X, and OpenAI Larry Summers Edition.
Problem is, when you get an economy acclimated to false prices set by adversarial “business” “strategy”, the only logical result is depression when it’s time to actually create money for investors
Cheap wages? Both of your examples paid decent wages, especially in the example of Uber.
It was just an unprofitable business model subsidized by VC money or Amazon corporate profits.
That sounds like a good thing?
There is no effectively borderless world in which most are both employed and not "underpaid". It won't happen both ways. In fact, the pay trend is about to tip massively against fairness. In a manner that even will make economic rationalists uncomfortable. These "fair pay" efforts are a distraction before that storm.
can you explain this a bit further please? also, what's the storm that's coming?
So you can say the company is "greedy"...but that implies that the worker is also "greedy" - which is true for both IF you define it the way I described above. Or you could say that the company (owners) are trying to maximize their return on investment (time + money), and the the workers are trying to maximize their return on investment (of time).
Is that true though? I come from a family that works in the crafts, small business mostly (which is like 70% of businesses). Most employees are employed for life, what's being made generally costs a decent amount but quality is high, people are content when they make what's perceived as fair and enough to maintain a middle class lifestyle, and so on.
Nobody actually tries to rip each other off, cuts every penny and leaves for 5% higher salaries. People are around for decades. The MBA business logic isn't some universal truth, in fact it's not even how most people work.
If I pay a worker $20 per hour to make 20 doodads an hour in my doodad factory and then sell those doodads for $5 a piece, I make $5 for every $1 pay my worker. Of course that extra $4 per doodad has to account for the cost of the doodad factory itself (initial investment, maintenance, material) and the literal cost of doing business (taxes, permits, fees, paying an accountant) and of course market fluctuation (warehousing, building a financial buffer to remain solvent if sales lapse or production has to stop) but if the business is meant to be successful, that needs to add up to less than the extra $4 I'm making. And the bigger that difference is, the more profitable my company becomes and the more spare money I have to expand my business and get ahead of my competition up to the point where I can sell shares in my business to other people and pay dividends from my profits to them.
So in other words not only can't you pay workers exactly "enough" (i.e. 100% of the value they contribute to the company) but you're actively incentivized to pay them as little as you can get away with (and perversely, paying them more by reducing your profit margin may actually be worse for them by making your company less competitive and less resilient). This is before we even get into the politics of what work is overvalued or undervalued (e.g. the idea that CEOs should receive massively disproportionate compensation for their labor, which again creates pressure to compensate for this by underpaying lowly workers).
This, by the way, is why collective bargaining matters. No matter how cool and nice your employer is, the market actively incentivizes them to do the least for you they can get away with and punishes them for doing more. So by not taking advantage of collective bargaining (i.e. using the pressure of all employees to your advantage rather than just yours individually) you're leaving money on the table. Note that is still true if your role is proportionally overpaid relative to other workers in your company unless you literally co-own the company.
That's a silly definition of "enough" to label as a fact.
I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect, I think most people will agree that the worker getting 90% of the surplus value is "enough". (just as an example percent) There's no reason the bar should be the absolute extreme.
There's no "factual" definition of "enough" as "enough" is subjective.
I'm also not sure what you're trying to argue. I already said that it can't be 100% for practical reasons and that the market actively incentivizes companies to aim for as close to 0% as possible instead. You pick 90% as an arbitrary percentage. So it might be 99% or 50% or 1%. But you're still agreeing that the measure for "enough" in this case is in relation to what the product of that labor can be sold for (after deducting the various costs). In reality that percentage is often much closer to 50% than to 90% - in many cases (especially so-called unskilled labor) it is closer to 1% than 90%.
A better rebuke would be that "enough" is normally about need, not revenue. Especially because it's nearly impossible to value the relative contribution to the bottom line for all labor involved (and in fact trying to minimize "cost centers" can lead to a rude awakening about this).
So if we define "need" as "enough to sustain a healthy existence in society and access to moderate leisure activities" (i.e. having a roof over your head, food in the fridge, access to medical care and transportation and enough spare change to spend on things like streaming services, books or the occasional trip to a nearby cinema, amusement park or restaurant) we can define a minimum monthly income and if we assume a 40 hour work week (which should be uncontroversial given that overall productivity has only gone up since its introduction and we need to provide some leisure time to accommodate family formation and the aforementioned leisure activities) we can translate that into a minimum hourly wage. Something tells me that this minimum hourly wage would be significantly higher than the legal minimum wage in the US, even if we don't actually consider the lackluster state of medical care affordability (note that I didn't assume public single-payer healthcare so Medicare/Medicaid is just a crutch to account for medical care being unaffordable otherwise at that level of income).
But of course the system is not set up that way. It's not about needs, it's about paying as little as you can get away with and this means that pay is proportional to power (i.e. C-level execs are paid a lot because they have a lot of control over the company and therefore "deserve" more even if all the value they "create" relies on the actual labor and competence of others) and the floor is theoretically infinitely low (i.e. you could realistically charge people to do labor for you, e.g. as a "training opportunity" to earn a meaningless qualification required to access other jobs) and ultimately the company needs to produce a lot of waste money (profits that are not re-invested in the company) that can be drained by its shareholders/owners (who ideally contribute literally no labor in return).
I agree. Which is why "enough" is not an objective threshold of 100% of surplus value.
> I'm also not sure what you're trying to argue.
I'm arguing that "less than 100% means not enough" is an incorrect statement. That's all. The bulk of your post isn't relevant to what I was saying.
(To be extra clear, that's my paraphrase of this line: "in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value, i.e. making more money from selling the product of labor than you pay for that labor.")
> But you're still agreeing that the measure for "enough" [...] A better rebuke would be that "enough" is normally about need, not revenue.
But I did address that. "I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect,"
This is just a fyi when trying to write out your thoughts.
I just think "100% of surplus value" is a wrong definition, so using that definition to argue that "in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough" is a very flawed argument.
I don't think I need to offer my own definition to claim that, do I? They later said it's subjective, which seems to favor my claim.
Does that clear things up? Is there a reason you thought I was trying to give a definition, and failing? Is there something wrong with my argument?
Unfortunately, much if not most of the time this calculation by the worker will be in error. As they tend to exclude the company scaffolding that they are not responsible for but that enables them to make their contribution.
Either way, its amazing that there is so much legal opportunity today for anyone to build an asset (eg: business) that they own. Asset ownership being the key to legal and ethical economic success in this world. I feel like more children should be taught as much at an early age, with less emphasis on the "nobility of work" that tends to exclude the importance of assets.
If group ownership is important, workers can certainly begin a business with that in mind.
Last, stock is sometimes sold publicly (direct ownership of the asset).
I literally addressed that "company scaffolding" in more detail than you do here (second sentence of the second paragraph). There's no error here though as running the company and owning the company are two different things and while there are plenty of business owners who need to work for their own company to keep it running, we're specifically talking about surplus value after the cost of paying all labor (including your own, at market rate), i.e. what ends up either being reinvested at the end of the fiscal year or drained by the owners/shareholders as dividends. You may need someone to run the business side of things, you don't need that person to also own the company, be able to drain any profits and fire you at will.
> If group ownership is important, workers can certainly begin a business with that in mind.
We like to proudly talk about individualism when it comes to seeking praise for personal achievements but times like this demonstrate how it can blind us to systems thinking. Yes, you can create a worker cooperative. And yes, you can be a business owner who tries to be "fair" to their workers. But you exist in competition with other businesses who don't engage in such "waste" and you compete in a system where the "benefits" of such an approach are considered externalities and have no direct value (even if you try to argue it's "positive PR" that will only get you so far). In other words, the system disincentivizes and actively punishes redistributing surplus value to your (co-)workers - because it's literally based on profit-seeking (i.e. maximizing that surplus).
> Asset ownership being the key to legal and ethical economic success in this world.
Yes, and asset ownership is only attainable if you have the necessary capital to buy assets. Being self-employed won't get you far because you're still selling your labor for money (just with fewer middlemen but in practice not really) and if everyone owned their own business that's all they'd accomplish. If you want to be economically successful from asset ownership rather than labor, you want your "asset" to "do the work for you" (i.e. passive income). But in real-world terms this ultimately means you need to get a cut (i.e. profit) from someone else's labor (and they therefore can't take this advice or else they wouldn't be in that position for you).
I'm a business owner. I've been at various stages self-employed, an employer and a business owner using external freelancers and subcontractors. But I have no illusions that essentially the easiest "legal and ethical" economic success I've seen involved little more than either rent seeking (i.e. being paid for continuous usage of something you already built/bought) or scalping (i.e. selling something someone else made/did at an inflated price and pocketing the difference).
Because there is no disincentive for labor to ever-advance the claim that their wages are enough.
In addition, the incentive to ever-claim that wages are not enough is unable to be quneched due to the fact that there is no risk. That logic is what supports my point.
The point can be proofed to economic mechanisms, as well. The exchange of money for goods naturally sets prices via an auction mechanism that, in turn, naturally creates an economic hierarchy in purchasing power.
Which is a verbose way of saying that raising the wages of the working class, while periodically necessary, will always lead to rising prices to create relatively par pourchasing power over time. When speaking of wages, purchasing power is all that matters (assuming lack of debt).
Artificially and dramatically forcing wages up only creates economic churn in job availability, housing equality, and asset ownership. All negative for the working class. If forces them into unemployment, out of urban centers, and creates firesale auctions for assets that wealthy people take advantage of.
To make matters worse, the "forced equality" economics of communism are only feudalism in disguise (which is hidden on the balance sheet of the State and Feudal Lord). The closer that the working class gets to forced economic equality, the closer that they get to slavery.
The storm that's coming is a cyclical return to various feudalists battling it out for workers who are paid the lowest possible wages and who have no labor protection. But on a wider scale than we are used to seeing.
The problem with wage debates is that there is no solution aside from a delicate balance that is easily corruptable. In fact, its natural state is corrupt imbalance.
This problem is unsolveable because it is inherent in the system of money.
The storm may or may not come depending on how long your prediction time window is.
In any of these discussions about wages and fairness, I wonder if the people with strong opinions have ever tried to hire unskilled labor.
I don't think they literally mean "unskilled" vs "something that can be learned within a month".
I think everything is easy, given the right approach and mindset, or everything is approachable given the right approach and mindset and will to put enough effort to get to a given outcome.
On the other hand skilled vs unskilled labor, as well as the concept of human capital are well recognized concepts in economics.
> Skilled workers have long had historical import...
Value, import(ance); potatoe, potartoe.
Whether someone is getting "underpaid" or a "fair wage" on the other hand is entirely subjective, and you can come to whatever conclusion you want depending on your politics. On one side of the spectrum you could argue any sort of situation where the employer is capturing surplus value from the employee is inherently exploitative[1] and therefore "underpaid" and a "unfair wage". On the other end of the spectrum you argue that supply and demand curves are the ultimate arbiter of what's "fair", and any wage that is determined by the free market can't by "underpaid" or "unfair" by definition.
If you‘d have chosen a burger flipper and an aeronautical engineer or a surgeon, I‘d have agreed with you.
Unless we're talking about really high end burgers, you can take almost anyone off the street and train them to flip burger patties within a day. They might not willingly do it on account of it being boring/tiring/poorly paid work, but it's not exactly hard to learn either. I doubt you can do the same for an accountant, unless your idea of an accountant is something like "manually copying entries into a ledger". Even teaching excel to someone who hasn't used excel ever, to a capacity where they can do meaningful financial reporting probably can't be done within a day.
On an absolute scale, comparing skills of burger flippers, accountants, aeronautical engineers and surgeons, the first two basically lump together.
I look at skill gap more in terms of „how hard is it to completely automate/autonomize this job“. Which is fiercely easy both for the burger flipper and the accountant, yet a bit harder (though not impossible) for the other two.
It doesn't literally mean the workers don't know how to do anything. It's certainly not a myth - it's a classification of work, at least in the US.
This is nearly all jobs.
All unskilled labor jobs.
You're not going to learn welding in 30 days. Nor are you going to learn how to design a bridge. Or program in C++. Or diagnose a patient. Or be a lawyer. Or drive a race car. Etc.
The thing about "unskilled" jobs, everyone seems to look down their noses at, is that they facilite the people doing the lofty jobs of: lawyer, doctor, c++ programmer, etc. Without them getting done for you you couldn't do what you're doing.
Can the brickie work without their "unskilled" laborer? Sure, but good luck getting you house built in a reasonable time.
Neither are jobs like carpenters, roofers, pipelayers, cooks, truck drivers, clerks and many, many others.
There is nothing wrong with honest work - skilled or unskilled.
That makes it unskilled labor.
Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the instruction booklet and fly an airplane.
There are of course tons of ways a good, seasoned barista distinguishes themselves from a trainee with 3 days of onboarding but those are externalities. The difference between skilled and unskilled labor is not whether competence and experience can make a difference but whether that difference is measured as performance or only affects externalities.
I.e. "unskilled labor" is not about the worker but about the company. Notably these often do involve skill that directly contributes to performance but because the job is considered unskilled, it's instead treated as some nebulous a priori form of intelligence and personal aptitude. What's more, beyond a certain point skill is often actively punished (e.g. by raising quotas to take advantage of higher productivity, resulting in more work for the same pay).
You can onboard welding in less than 30 days too.
> As there is no meaningful metric for competence beyond that (or at least no metric that is measured and used) "good" doesn't apply.
Barista quality isn't much harder to measure than weld quality. "and used" is a cop-out.
You can be doing useful work as part of a welding group in 30 days, but you will not be a master. Grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't and all that.
But you won't be a master barista right away either.
And speed matters too.
Also, there are other coffee places than Starbucks. Saying barista is an unskilled job because Starbucks coffee is particularly bad is like saying programmer is an unskilled job because all Squarespace websites are equally bad.
A good weld is a thing of beauty.
Welding is also pretty dangerous. It takes a good welder to do it safely, and do it without ruining very expensive parts.
There's good reason that competent welders get paid a lot of money.
In 30 days, the new welder probably has learned how not to set himself on fire, blind himself, fill his lungs with poisonous gasses, etc.
There's a lot you can learn in many basic service jobs, and become much more effective than if you don't learn it.
But if the standard is "onboarding", then both are quick.
> In 30 days, the new welder probably has learned how not to set himself on fire, blind himself, fill his lungs with poisonous gasses, etc.
I am not a welder, but I've had some welding safety training. It doesn't take a month.
In any job there is a spectrum from bare minimum to a master. This goes for welding and baristas. Is someone who pushes a button on a Nespresso a barista? If I go get a soldering iron am I a welder?
You overlay the normal distribution of all baristas and welders and look at the difficulty in learning various skills. I'm sure they are not exactly equal.
I can be pretty sure welder beats barista, but by how much, how it relates to other jobs, how we set various bars, that's all a lot more difficult.
So in other words, we could have an objective, empirical look at whether welders or baristas actually need "more skill" and which skillset is easier to master for the average person (which is its own rest nest of considerations again) but if we did the necessary (if not impossible) prep work to even get started on that, we'd have to already agree that "unskilled" is a descriptor for jobs that has very little to do with the actual skill requirements and more with attitudes towards those skills or the people doing those jobs.
That part really stood out to me.
While a lot of us can agree that barista is an unskilled job, I heard people call barmen labor a skilled labor. Which is crazy, because it's essentially the same job (mix stuff up and serve in a cup). But it makes sense if "unskilled labor" is a function of an employer not an employee
From what I heard from a former Starbucks barista, the biggest challenge was to not scald the milk during steaming (which is not very difficult, basically just requires holding it at the correct angle to induce a whirlpool effect and keep things moving).
The skilled aspect is dealing with customers efficiently and pleasantly, and all the nuance/craziness that can entail.
Because I have gone to the same Starbucks every day for many years, and see many new hires as the staff turns over. It takes about 3 days to go from "cannot operate the cash register" to "efficiently fulfills customer orders".
Starbucks hires juniors and trains them to be good baristas. That takes a long time. Just because someone is able to work a coffee machine after a few days doesn't mean they're not skilled eventually. Your argument is like saying 'it only takes a few days for junior devs to be onboarded, so there's no real value in senior devs'.
It doesn’t take a phd to make a coffee, no matter how fancy the cinnamon/cocoa heart is.
All you're saying here is that you've failed to see the value in customer service, hospitality, speed, accuracy, politeness, etc that go with a retail coffeeshop job. The coffee is the same in pretty much every Starbucks, but the experience can vary wildly depending on how good the baristas are at everything else besides making coffee. Those skills take years to master.
Just sell me the damn coffee and bugger off with "experience". It doesn't require a "skilled" person to politely serve me a coffee. Just make sure the coffee doesn't taste like shit and I'll come back to you unless you spit at me or offend me. Again - no need to be "skilled" to not do that.
The other side takes "unskilled" to be a derogatory term that means the worker isn't a human being with thoughts and wants and needs, and deserving of a wage.
We've generally decided it's unreasonable for someone to need to work more than 40 hours a week so the minimum pay for 160 hours of labor had better be enough to live on without being on welfare or other government assistance. It might not be a glamorous life but you at least have to be able to make rent, pay for heat, AC, food, clothes, water, toilet paper, health insurance, a cheap cell phone, transportation to and from work, and some basic possessions like a bed. And if it's not then you're being underpaid. I think that's a pretty fair measure, it roughly represents the cost of a person's undivided labor.
And I think it's fair to say that for almost all Americans that cost has gone up and not insignificantly over the past 5 years. Folks that make good money by can take the hit but people on the bottom rung have nowhere to go. And people will given the opportunity begrudgingly sell their labor for unsustainable prices because it's better than nothing but that road leads to the record scratch in the economic game of musical chairs we're playing when money stops moving.
And that's when Socialist-inspired policies we have kick in and gov't has to forcibly redistribute wealth through higher taxes and even greater government spending to start the motor again. We've done it before and I'm sure we'll do it again. But I'm of the opinion that a little regulation to keep us out of the death spiral and letting the market allocate resources is better than when the government has to step in and do it.
"...in the political context the market is embedded in" is nonsense, especially when appealing to the "market sorting it out" in the next breath.
Which argument are you recruting? Political intervention or the free market? Both? That's nice hand waving, no offense. Seemingly to make it as if your position is so elevated that it satisfies all political ideals. Instead, choose. Unless you mean to imply that the (free) market is also the political market. But your language should be a lot more precise if that's your point, so as to eliminate the look of vague line straddling as a rhetorical tactic.
Your rebuttal over-simplifies my response and therefore seems like a word dump.
Your view, absent your muddled (imo) rationale described above, is included in my response. The complicating factors were a). the common simultaneous advocacy for importing millions of unskilled workers and b.) the implied fact that increasing wages decreases available jobs.
Those factors are included in my total "complaint" (observation). Which is not a "political conviction".
> "...in the political context the market is embedded in" is nonsense, especially when appealing to the "market sorting it out" in the next breath.
I meant:
complaining about (workers demanding higher wages instead of letting the market sort it out) is pointless
Not:
(complaining about workers demanding higher wages) instead of (letting the market sort it out) is pointless.
Agreed my wording could have been more precise there.
No, and I'm guessing you're just under the spell of market fundamentalism. An unfair wage is something like when the worker either
1. can't achieve a socially-acceptable living standard with the job,
2. when there's too-great of a mismatch between the labor-theory-of-value price and the market-theory-of-value price for their labor, or
3. or when the wage is below the actual the market price.
I made those up on the spot, so there may be some holes, bit it gets the gist.
> Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact.
Being underpaid is different than "wants more money."
> It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion.
No. I'd never talk about a fortune 500 CEO or a FAANG engineer as being underpaid.
> Yet the same people who demand that everyone earn a living wage, sometimes punctuating their points with riots, tend to be the same crowd who wants to import unskilled workers by the millions.
I see what you're saying, but the real world is a lot more morally complicated that the single-axis world where your comment here makes sense.
If you think that accusing me of "being under the spell of market fundamentalism" is a succesful rhetorical strategy, then you neither understood my post nor are you worth arguing with.
My comment was made in the context of mentioned complex factors that you are ommitting.
Your 1 and 2 numbered responses are pure nonsense. Response 1 reveals to me who I am dealing with. This is going to go nowhere. Response 2 is ideological hand waving. 3 is true, but I included points that addressed it in my post.
There is zero political (effective) difference in the labor market between being underpaid and wanting more money, if the ask is for more money.
If they are truly underpaid, then they should ask for more money and get it. If they are not underpaid and ask for more money lest penalty x, then the market effect for employers is the same.
A further problem, as illustrated by your definitions of underpayment with which I disagree, is who is to decide what being underpaid means?
The answer to that question is that what constitutes underpayment will always be murky as far as the market is concerned and therefore, again, my point stands. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact.
>No. I'd never talk about a fortune 500 CEO or a FAANG engineer as being underpaid.
"Never". That's a perfect example of the self-centered view of much of labor advocacy. Not only do they publicly only take the other side of the market into account when it opportunistically suits them (ie: when bucking for asset ownership or when owning assets themsevles), they have trouble comprehending how their own principles might scale to different skill levels in the labor pool.
> I see what you're saying, but the real world is a lot more morally complicated that the single-axis world where your comment here makes sense.
I disagree with your single-axis categorization. I disagree with the implication that this is largely a moral argument.
I disagree with the assumption you would be able to make moral assertions that had any impact on the economic forces that determine pay and job availability, given the mentioned constraint (mass immigration). My original point is that the labor market will not be able to have it all. It has to choose, and clearly it has made its choice.
But in its defense, the pro-labor market was co-opted generations ago by Business. That dissonance that you percieve and interpret as "moral complexity" is exactly their influence.
What Amazon is doing is different because they're actually doing something that adds value, and they're solving a problem that actually exists. Maybe I'm naive for believing any of this matters.
To be honest, I never thought much about how the whole system worked. I've only been in an Amazon Fresh twice. It had the "just walk out" thing but I don't have a Prime account so I never used it. I just figured it was UHF RFID. Seems like an obvious solution, but I'm not the engineer responsible for figuring out what to do if you put two exits next to each other.
1. The single website/app is not just useful for discovery, but also to provide a consistent ordering experience. An individual restaurant might take orders over the phone, via their website, or via their own app. Those options will vary from one restaurant to the next. Not great for customers.
2. In the old model, restaurants would have to decide how many drivers to have on hand at any given time. During quiet periods they would have to decide between not offering delivery at all, or having a driver sitting around doing nothing. A delivery service that aggregates demand & supply is very useful for restaurants & drivers. Pooling of resources & layering on surge pricing creates a lot of elasticity.
I would argue that what they should have done is tried to at this value at minimal cost to customers, drivers & restaurants. If they were leaner businesses the overall proposition could be a lot better.
Like the only success I can see is AirBnB and that's because houses are expensive and in short supply.
In the UK, outside of corporate chains, it was largely a cash in hand operation for both the restaurants and drivers.
Drivers would typically be paid a small sum for showing up on the night and then keep the delivery charge and any tips. The cost to the restaurant was pretty much negligible.
The middle-men, in addition to their own cut, have likely lead to a larger tax burden on many of the drivers and restaurants.
Under that model, wouldn't drivers only want to work for the busiest restaurants?
With delivery apps, a restaurant can have just a few orders per night and still be open for delivery.
I would bet that there's an order of magnitude more deliveries happening (and drivers working) these days vs pre-Uber.
It doesn't take many orders to keep an individual driver busy. Typically the restaurants would manage how many, and which, drivers worked each night. If the night was unexpectedly quiet then a driver might finish early.
> With delivery apps, a restaurant can have just a few orders per night and still be open for delivery.
Yeah, the main benefit of delivery apps is enabling restaurants who primarily serve sit-in diners to deliver also. The overall benefit to delivery focused restaurants is much more tenuous.
> I would bet that there's an order of magnitude more deliveries happening (and drivers working) these days vs pre-Uber.
Perhaps, but if a driver was already busy all night under the previous model, then they're potentially harmed by the current model.
The main drawbacks to these services are the outrageous fees they charge to make money, and that there's more than one so drivers and businesses have to manage an array of phones or tablets. This would address both of those things.
Aye. Arguably this is why old-school streaming Netflix won so well -- all of your options in one place. Likewise, there is one app for all food choices nearby.
Also agree on the second point, though presumably larger chains in built up areas could play the same game; e.g. Domino's in a borough of NYC has an "all-drivers-in-Queens" pool.
Vendored web POS is widely available, and was emerging before UberEats and DD ever did. See: Toast
> A delivery service that aggregates demand & supply is very useful for restaurants & drivers.
This is only true in theory. You aren't giving enough credit to the logistical skills of small business owners, they are really good at allocating and dispatching drivers. If you're small enough to have no deliveries for several hours, then don't schedule any drivers during that time. If a delivery comes in, tell your cashier the address and have them run the delivery. Besides being quite efficient, there's an added bonus that you're cross-training your staff. That's how we always did it, at least.
It's anecdotal evidence, sure, but every delivery driver I have asked (half a dozen from several different cities and states) has said that their job is harder and pays worse today than 10 years ago.
"Well, just be more lean!" What a concept, I'm sure they haven't thought of that. It's much easier said than done. Logistics software is extremely complicated at scale- there's a reason governments subsidize delivery logistics through services like USPS, Royal Mail, etc. However, at the one-business microcosm, it's a simple enough problem that a seasoned owner/manager can organize an optimal dispatch in their head, on the fly.
The value of convenience is significant. I happily pay to avoid the mental overhead of shitty restaurant websites or repeating a paragraph-long group order back and forth across a poor kitchen speakerphone call.
Yes the current system has many flaws but let’s not pretend it was utopia before.
These companies also made it possible for restaurants to be taken hostage and be registered for delivery services or marked as closed/unavailable on those platforms against their wishes, or pay even 60+% commission on an order for the service. Once only a couple of these companies are left standing and have all restaurants in a chokehold I'm convinced the situation will be even "better".
> the the fact that many (most?) people still use UberEats/DD is instructive
Yes, it says that too many people do what's best for them and them alone. It's not as instructive as you think. Many people had slaves because it was good for the owner. What did you learn from that case of "many people do it"?
> I happily pay
You don't and don't even realize that. You get an overall cheaper service but someone pays. Usually the restaurant owner, employees, and delivery people. Maybe some VCs too, for now, while they don't completely own the market. Just like Amazon's same day delivery means some driver has to pee in a bottle for close to minimum wage but otherwise it's absolutely a huge win for everyone who is you, needing the delivery now.
You're right, it sucked. Here's the thing: we can have the shiny, sleek ordering system without the stupid parts of the Uber/GrubHub/whatever business model. You've probably used Toast before.
> in areas like Manhattan, where city cabs and delivery options abound - the the fact that many (most?) people still use UberEats/DD is instructive
I would have leaned towards "destructive" but I get your point.
To me it is ridiculous that anybody thought local personal services like food delivery, dog walking, and taxi driving could ever be converted into durable, efficient, profitable national or global monopolies. In the absence of monopoly power such low barrier to entry commodity services invariably see their profit margins squeezed to cost from competition. All this is freshman or highschool level economics.
This shook a bit of illusion from my eyes, thank you. I never thought of Amazon's efforts in this as solving a real problem or adding real value! This is because for me, it doesn't, and I never thought it through beyond that.
Once again, the human tendency to think that our own situation represents the norm fooled me.
I made my case here, if you care: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39976007
In my country taxis were (and price wise still are) the worst; Uber is a vast improvement; better cars, nicer drivers, convenient booking (until very recently you had to call 1 day in advance to book a taxi) and a bizarrely lower price. The same trip with a normal taxi costing 130 euros is 30 with Uber. So yeah, no. Oh but the taxi companies made their own app! Which is of course a horrible failure.
Granted, the taxi service hardly any better in many countries. In the US, it's rapidly building a new underclass of indentured cheauffeurs, chained down by vehicle maintenance costs and massive fees from service providers.
is scanning your groceries manually really so cumbersome to say the "just walk out" model is adding value?
It's nice, but like you said. it's not really that better than existing solutions, and knowing the underworkings makes it much worse. Maybe the tech will catch up in a decade, but it was definitely unviable with the current system.
I always go to a human cashier whenever the option presents itself, simply so I don't have to deal with the miscarriage of engineering that is the self-checkout machine. Unfortunately, my local grocery stores don't staff their registers very often anymore.
Previously I've noticed another kind of meta-comment, the top level complaint by a self-appointed moderators about the overall shape of the discussion elsewhere, instead of engaging directly with the actual posts in question.
With intellectual pursuits, you can always find diamonds in the rough. Simply due to the effort YOU are putting in, given your then state of mind, knowledge and experience.
You can wade through a conversation on creationism and evolutionary denial and understand humanity or even deepen your skills.
However that's you - your unique circumstances bringing more to the table.
Others would very much appreciate a warning, because they already have working definitions, have seen this argument before and would prefer spending their time on other pursuits.
Even if there is the need, who should be the judge for others over the quality of a subthread? I would feel presumptuous to pass judgement beyond my vote for each comment.
Aren't those diamonds all that matter anyway? Recently I increasingly find new and curious beginnings dampened and limited by intellectually lazy attitudes, by comments that start with "I mean...", that reiterate the default state rather than entertaining a new thought. Inadvertently, well-meaning soft-moderation like yours might steer even more people away from interesting topics.
I'd say, leave your vote and move on.
I shop more often at Walmart, which has recently increased the number of manned checkout lanes and restricted their self-checkout to 15 items or less.
Wanting to make your life more convenient and pleasant isn't "entitled".
99% of jobs are things people would rather not be doing (otherwise you wouldn't be getting paid for it). The point is that we can allocate this work in a way that minimizes the amount of time everyone has to spend doing undesirable work.
Are you mad that I sometimes pay "poor souls" to do the "menial work" of cooking me food so I can avoid doing it myself?
> The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.
A very bizarre response to "darn, this was so convenient" - I wonder if this is a troll.
And the workers just sit idle when there is no customer and you have to physically go there. So I dont see the clear advantage, i see it more as a "choose your poison"
It wasn't all manual.
An important question to ask is how many minutes of camera-viewing there were per customer. Let's not assume too hard before we judge the level of wastefulness.
1. Not all work is equally undesirable and the way people are paid is not related to that in any way (in fact isn't usually inversely related)
2. Minimising the undesirable work done in total means some people end up doing almost all of it and some basically none (or, if you consider all work undesirable, some people do only the worst and some only the least bad work).
If before, for example, everyone would spend half an hour of their day to cook for themselves, which might be inconvenient but is overall not a big impact on your quality of life, now we have overworked and underpaid restaurant and related staff doing intense work for crazy hours, which is is a devastating hit to their (and their families') quality of life. The sum of human effort spent on cooking may have gone down in this example, but instead of everyone being a little annoyed by it, some people are living like kings and some are slaving away for their convenience (obviously this wording is exaggerated, but if we look globally, this is basically what's happening).
Cashiers may have an undesirable job and self-checkout may distribute this undesirable labor among the many instead of burdening a single person with it but those people don't get paid for doing that job whereas the cashier did get paid. Self-checkout is also often slower than checkout at a cashier (it has to be because the cashier is trusted to ring up items correctly whereas the customer has a huge incentive to cheat).
The desirability of being a cashier also isn't inherent to the job. It has more to do with attitudes towards the person doing the job, both from customers and from their employer. Service staff often act as a lightning rod for all frustrations and disdain targeted at their place of work, i.e. they frequently get punished for things completely out of their control. They're also often seen as unskilled labor by their employers so they are treated as easy to replace meaning there is very little incentive to invest in their job satisfaction.
In other words, we have systems that not only require people to work even if the jobs they end up doing are undesirable and undervalued but also actively makes certain jobs undesirable by undervaluing them. If you want to change that, you need to change the system that makes those jobs undesirable, not just do away with the undesirable jobs. People seem to have fewer problems grasping this when talking about the virtues of overseas sweatshops (where changing the system is presumed impossible because the implication is that the system arises from a lack of economic development or cultural inferiority).
I am quite aware (and rather disappointed) we don't live in a more socialist system, but as we seem to be pretty much stuck under particularly nasty version of capitalism at least for the near future. So unless someone finds a way to turn the whole system around any time soon, I still think at least trying to make some of the worst parts of capitalism somewhat less unbearable is a good thing.
According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.
Then manual reading was made remote. There were about 20 USPS remote envelope reading centers at peak. As the vision systems got good enough to read handwriting, then bad handwriting, those were cut back. Now there's only one remote envelope reading center in the US, and what gets there is really bad.
Now you're trying to redirect, and say "Oh well, those jobs would have lasted only a few years more anyhow!".
My respnse to that is the same:
I'm sure all those fired, new job seekers jn India agree fully with you.
Consider te perspective of those you aim to "protect".
My criticism is towards the entitlement of shoppers who think self checkout is too clunky and having to interact with a cashier is too annoying but expect an army of people to work behind the scenes (be it anywhere in the world) to make it easy for them.
Wow - I did not know this. This makes it all a whole lot less impressive and interesting that it was just people off shore watching you.
Or maybe they do know the difference, but wanted to bait audience.
Or not ...
> 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022.
I'm now picturing the remote workers constantly switching between cameras, studying: Did he put down the can of kidney beans or the can of corn there? Wait, the man picked up the bananas, but then he handed them to the woman in the white shirt. Let's charge them to her account. Wait, she handed them back at 14:42 in aisle 16. Going to switch them back to the man.
All day long, day in day out, for years. I am the last to criticize 'low wage jobs' paternalistically, because I know they may be much better than what the workers might otherwise be doing: perhaps just toiling in the fields for 16 hours a day (or worse: something like 'melting down discarded PCBs to recover trace metals'). But still, I do not think I would want to do this job nor that it was worth it. I get that they were supposedly trying to train an algorithm to do it. I'm glad that they aren't keeping at it any longer though now that it's proven so unworkable.
A few attempts were successful early on (passing items back and forth, one person moving something to the wrong shelf and another person picking it up, people dressing in identical outfits, etc), but the success rate in fooling the system was very very low. No method of trying to trick it that I ever heard of worked consistently, and it definitely seemed to get harder to fool the longer the store was open.
At the time I thought that whatever algos were being run on the camera feeds were getting better. Knowing that it was basically all manual, I'm not sure what the explanation is for the store seemingly getting harder to fool over time. Possibly just placebo, or people lost interest in trying so hard to fool it.
IANAL but I'm confident the legal answer is "yes", the same as if someone was using sleight-of-hand with objects at a cashier-and-conveyor-belt checkout station.
Whether charges are brought and how easily the case can be proved is another matter, but the intent is what makes it a crime.
To get a little pedantic, assuming such a promise existed, it actually doesn't mean as much as most people think.
A merchant saying "we won't sue you in civil court for the missing money" does not prevent the local government from criminally prosecuting that same person for theft.
American TV dramas often show the police asking people "Do you want to press charges?", but the idea that the question matters is a myth, since victims of crime don't get to decide that. At best, it's a terribly misleading shortening of: "Just for my own private curiosity, do you plan to lobby or press upon your local government officials into pressing charges?"
Exactly. Retailers generally assume liability for honest mistakes made by their system/employees and sometimes even their customers. However, when people knowingly exploit a loophole for financial gain it becomes fraud. Here's a real example - https://www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/local/greensboro-woma...
Better than shipbreaking.
Edit: On thinking about this tangent, it seems that if global regulation is the only solution, it would make sense to enforce regulation from the ship building side (in western countries), rather than the wrecking side (in developing countries) which will only displace the bad practices to less scrupulous countries. A solution might be sizable amount of money that had to be paid to escrow that could not be released back to the owner until the ship has been disposed of in an environmentally sound manner, incentivizing and funding the proper scrapping of ships. Or perhaps a levy which funds safety practices and equipment for scrapping companies
I used the term “globalization” as a proxy for free trade. That was bad on my part.
Most ships are built in Asia as well. The US basically doesn't have any sort of non-military ship building industry.
The industry is extremely polluting (to the environment and the workers) and the working conditions (incl. safety) are dire to put it nicely.
That is robber barron propaganda to make you believe their enslavement of people (by creating the right situation where the people have no choice) is actual good for them.
In these countries the cities are created around the factories etc and planned as part of the development.
You're not free once your subsistence relies on this corporation. It's slavery but because some tokens are being transferred (the food supply is probably also corp. owned--especially in the early stages of the development) it is possible to fool the naive / stupid into think this is not slavery.
This a real-life, genuine Flintstones-esque cartoon gag.
I heard this was behind mechanical turk. Sounds like the playbook remained the same.
Reminds me of the "delivery robots" that weren't really automated after all, they were remotely navigated by cheaper workers on playstation controllers in Brazil and the Philippines driving them on the streets through cameras.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/they-are-cute-pink-robots-w...
What's sad is putting cashiers out of work, and even worse is replacing them with outrageously piss-poor alternatives. Self-checkout is a clinic on incompetent system design, and has been for DECADES now. It's mind-bogglingly bad, all to take jobs away from people. Fuck that.
They're not wrong, they're just early. Which you could argue is the same thing on a micro scale, but not on a macro.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
How do the Amazon "Dash Carts" actually work though? If it were a traditional bar code scanner, I'd agree with you. But reading up on the tech makes it sound like you just place the item in your cart and that's it. If it worked like that I don't see at all what the problem would be.
It could be worse. Imagine a smart gate that refuses to open for wheelchair users, or claims the child in your arms is an unpaid item - something that is getting rolled out in many Australian supermarkets.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-02/amazon-pu...
From Bloomberg:
"Amazon Go stores will still use Just Walk Out technology, and the company will continue to license it to other retailers. Smaller stores in the UK also will keep using the system."
i've worked on a similar product before.
there's no way they were turning a profit. they definitely missed stuff all the time even with a ton of sensors. and sensors aren't the only cost. annotation is by far the most costly operational expense. new product? needs several annotated photos and recalibrated weight sensors. merchant decides to put Christmas branding on the same UPC? now all your vision models are poisoned for that product. it needs to be re-annotated for the month and a half it exists and the models need to be swapped out once inventory changes over again. as long as merchants are redesigning products (always) your datasets will be in a constant state of decay. even if your vision sensors are stationary and know the modular design up front, you still need to be able to somewhat generalize in case things get misplaced (big problem for weight sensors) or the camera gets bumped.
between dataset management, technology costs, research costs, rote operational costs, etc this is a very expensive problem to solve. and large models with a ton of parameters are little help; they may lower annotation costs a bit but will increase the cost of compute.
once i really dug into this problem i saw Amazon Go's Just Walk Out for what it really was: a marketing stunt
For example, you are pointing out that annotating is costly, but that’s an expense that scales independently of the number of stores. So with enough scale it wouldn’t be as big a deal. Or if they figured out some R&D that could improve it too.
one advantages of the Amazon Go initiative is a smaller scope of products.
the simulated data also becomes an issue of cost. we have to produce a realistic (at least according to the model) digital twin that doesn't interfere too much with real data, and measuring that difference is important when you're measuring the difference between Lay's and Lay's Low Sodium.
i'm not saying it's unsolvable. it's just a difficult problem
Amazon bet that the federal govt would raise labor costs to $20/hr and all their competitors (besides themselves with this tech) would get wiped out. They even publicly campaigned and lobbied. That didn't come to fruition as the election promises turned to fluff, and the populists simply chose to empower unions instead.
in-store employees know where things are supposed to be and why, if at all, items are "misplaced" according to the modular design
> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts.
> According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.
> “The primary role of our Machine Learning data associates is to annotate video images, which is necessary for continuously improving the underlying machine learning model powering,” said an Amazon spokesperson to Gizmodo. However, the spokesperson acknowledged these associates validate “a small minority” of shopping visits when AI can’t determine a purchase.
The article is kind of all over the place, but it sounds like there were lots of sensors and also lots of human intervention.
Rather than giving itemized receipts, give just a total dollar value. Then just make sure that most customers are charged within 10% of the correct amount.
Only if the customer requests and itemized receipt, then go watch the video and generate them one. But after a while most customers won't request it, and that means you can just guess at a dollar amount and as long as you're close-ish (which should be easy based on weight and past purchase history), that's fine.
You drop your clothes into a big bin (I’ve always done it one piece at a time, didn’t think to do all at once) and it adds up all your items. I’ve used this maybe 8 times, 100% accurate so far.
Not sure how it works but I guessed RFID and quick Google appears to confirm:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/uniqlos-parent-company-bets-big...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715111
Unlikely to work for groceries given the costs of RFID tags, I imagine.
But if we really could scale RFID tag production down to 1 cent each, then we’d likely just throw them out. Not that I’m a fan of throwing away silicon…
Still more than printed paper but the cost is not astronomical. Some sellers on Alibaba even advertise 3c cad
If the store decides to eat the cost of those? Sure, I can buy that logic.
However, I don't see stores being unable to just raise the price of items by 10c without much pushback, which would eliminate that issue with the profit margin entirely (since the cost of it is offloaded to the customer).
I, personally, would love to be able to pay just 10c extra per item, if it meant that I can have a checkout experience similar to that of Uniqlo.
At even 10c a tag , it is equivalent to one person scanning 200 items a hour (assuming $20/hour wages) .
Factoring in time to bag and do a cash/card/coupon transaction etc a retail employee is not doing more than 500 or maybe 1000 items a hour .
A cost of 2c is definitely close to economic feasibility if 10c is not
I am not saying RFID will eliminate employees in retail , just that there is cost to not having RFID too, we should only see the diff as the cost of the tech not absolute numbers
Why is that relevant?
If 5 employees spend 20% of their combined time on checkout, and you get rid of checkout, you can go down to 4 employees, can't you? Why does the exact distribution matter? You'll still have a healthy variety of tasks to spread among those employees.
Saw this in the Honolulu location and was similarly impressed. It's got to be pretty close to a theoretical minimum in check out speed, while requiring no labor and no accounts.
Disclaimer: I work on a RFID reader manufacturing company
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350413738_A_Model_o...
And things like onions have a loose outer skin, which falls off. And grocery store clerks peel the outside (wilting) leaves off of things like local lettuce daily.
Seems like rfid on groceries would be hard for fresh produce, and we don't need everything wrapped in plastic.
Sure an apple or a squash is hard to track, but a large (probably a majority) of a modern grocery stores selection is prepackaged goods.
It it is a lot easier to run a veggienet or whatever on a small subset of the goods purchased.
Materials alone provide a huge challenge.
EAS is a purely psychological deterrent, for liability reasons stores can't really do much when it goes off. As more and more shrink is the result of ORC, RFID will have a place but money is better spent on alternative technologies like facial recognition and ALPR.
You need to basically have custom packaging so the tags are not easily swappable and the RFID tag is not free too, it could really add up for small price items.
The maybe e-waste problem? I'm not really familiar with how much of a problem this really is but on a grocery store size it could add up
I can’t imagine there’s that much untapped profit in the grocery business that Amazon could turn a profit with such an expensive and unreliable mess like Just Walk Out and I find it’s so typical Amazon to find out that the man behind the curtain is actually a bunch of offshore workers in India.
The closest thing I've seen in a convenience store, was a fully automated 7-Eleven that I ran across in Taipei last year. It seems to rely on smart shelves[1], rather than just product video recognition. This could work for most types of groceries.
[1] https://www.retail-insight-network.com/news/7-eleven-itri-st...
It's borderline ancient tech. So why is it not applied everywhere? Because stores would rather have you line up and buy stuff from the "impulse aisle" and tip or donate at their PoS (higher rates with an employee glaring at your selection)
RFID tags are expensive compared to printing barcodes. The volume of products moved in a grocery store is far larger than that of a clothing store like Uniqlo.
Why even bother? Self checkout or a cashier work so much better and I have a hard time believing they are less expensive. The store is plastered with cameras. Seriously, there must be 100 cameras in the place. That's a lot of video to process, which has got to be costly, whether it is a machine or people who are reviewing it.
Edit:
Looking over their marketing videos now and taking a more optimistic approach, is "just walk out" technology all that useful? It seems they pivoted to a product where is much clearer what the value add is (Predictive analytics, loss prevention, context-aware marketing). I imagine "just walk out" technology was likely pretty expensive to implement, but wouldn't have saved much more that self checkout. Maybe the lesson here isn't that "it didn't work", and more so "it wasn't economically efficient"
I tried the store in Seattle in 2021 and it was a shitty experience. Overpriced, bad stock, and since few are going to actually trust Amazon to get it right, you still find yourself with the Amazon app open the whole time
Wanted to comment on this part -- Prime itself was nothing more than faster shipping, though yes the difference between 4-6 weeks standard vs 2-days was massive (not just slightly faster). But the point is, Amazon excels at identifying friction points that others have just accepted as industry norms, but which, if unblocked, could actually meaningfully shift consumer behaviors.
Go might be a failed experiment, but "slightly faster shopping" is probably an unfair trivialization of what the experiment hypothesis was really about. A core thesis of Amazon in general is basically, to fanatically remove any unnecessary extra steps/friction/bureaucracy/etc., between a consumer and their act of purchasing.
For another example, think back to why Amazon cared so much about the 1-click patent -- legal validity aside, the idea that you can have 1-click checkout, was pretty revolutionarily customer-obsessed, compared to the average online shopping experience of the early 2000s.
And in fact, the natural progression from 1-click, is of course going down to "0 clicks", which is what things like, subscribe-and-save, memberships/subscriptions, or Alexa/Echo styling clothes for you, are meant to do -- they are meant to shift the consumer's mental model of shopping away from emphasizing the build-up from browsing into the climax moment of then clicking to purchase, to instead make the actual purchase decision more of a hidden-in-the-background/automatic thing, instead of a foreground conscious choice.
Someone remind the aws team about this
A cashier-less, grab and go store that works as advertised would be hugely convenient and valuable. But where we are now, people don't think it works, so they double check and get nervous.
And that goes doubly for Amazon. Amazon doesn't care about doing things right. They've shown that over and over via their (lack of) protections against counterfeit items.
Ask anyone in the eastern US, would you trust getting your eclipse glasses on Amazon?
Why would you trust them to get your grocery order right?
And that destroys the convenience.
Who does this? This wasn't in the article, do you mean yourself or did you read that somewhere else? I wouldn't get nervous about it.
> Ask anyone in the eastern US, would you trust getting your eclipse glasses on Amazon?
That's a real issue but it's an entirely different concept. I expect them to handle charging for the eclipse glasses just fine. Similarly, I'm not very worried about their checkout gimmick.
Sorry, I thought this was more common knowledge; I guess not.
It was sufficiently widespread that SNL did a skit/ad based on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS9U3Gc832Y
It's just early tech: They were working out the tech, then they'd figure out their market, stock, pricing, etc.
Self checkout has been rife with problems, internally and socially, but supermarkets keep pushing them. I can only conclude it is cost cutting.
As time went on, they hired a cleaning crew to clean the floors with a machine. They'd miss things. After my time, they started having their employees cut boxes and just plop entire boxes onto store shelves, ripping the fronts off of them. I'm sure it saves a little bit of time, but you end up with a store that is a complete mess full of discarded cardboard. All of that adds up to a terrible customer experience.
One thing that really bothers me is that older stock is not brought to the front and they just push it back with the new stuff.
It's doubly frustrating because sometimes products change so you'll find what you're looking for after digging through three layers of assorted items.
I don't really blame the apathy directly, but there are doubtless solutions over the horizon.
All of these stores have budgeted in losses. My managers were almost fired for the sheer amount of negligence they gave the store when it came to ordering product. Each location has a certain cadence to them when it comes to what people are buying. My managers didn't understand it, so they ended up with 25 rolling carts packed solid with backstock (these are 8 feet tall and have two shelves), and another 20-30 pallets. If you're unfamiliar, for a normal sized grocery store, you should really only have backstock on the top sides of those carts. Instead of filling the shelves with the product they'd already bought for the store, they were buying entirely new product! I managed to wrangle the order gun from them for the grocery department and they went from losing $30K a quarter in inventory to gaining about $15K. I kept an inventory in my head of what we had in the back and made sure not to order it.
How? Because when pallets inevitably tumble in the distribution centers, the centers can't waste time sorting through inventory to determine what's damaged. So they count it as a loss and toss the product into crates so that store employees can sort through them. Good stuff goes on the shelf, damaged stuff goes in the trash. Apparently the distribution centers damaged a lot of product, lol. My managers got cash bonuses for turning things around, and I got a 6 pack of beer.
When the savings are not passed on to the customer (and they usually are not, as in this case) it's more accurate and descriptive to call it "profit maximizing."
The scale freaks out too often after I scan an item and put it on the bed, because the weight is slightly off for whatever reason. Then I have to stop scanning and wait for an employee to come over and scan their badge to authorize the sale.
I've gone back to just waiting in line at the standard checkout unless I have < 5 items in my cart.
It may not prevent loss but from a customer experience, a good barcode scanning gun and legible barcodes is about as friction free as it gets.
There is no scale on the Home Depot units. You can scan as fast as the scan gun accepts scans. I’ve scanned 2-3 items per second with these.
Using an I7 is a move to future proof. These units will likely be in service 10, maybe 15 years from now.
It was truly fantastic, especially since the app would notify me afterwards how long I spent at the store, and seeing that number always made me feel good. TLDR on this: my average shopping experience from the moment I entered the store to the moment I left took around 3-4 minutes, with plenty of them being under a minute long.
scan barcode, place item on plate mostly works except when barcode is crumpled or something.
without barcodes it's a more of a crapshoot. Usually more than 1/2 of my basket doesn't have a barcode (fresh produce, etc.)
Maybe the ones near me are just too sensitive to weight variations.
Oh and one of them really loves to scan a points card 2x, then try an apply the second read as a product and fail.
Every time the machine gets confused, you have to wait for an attendant. All things being equal, the cashiers are faster than self scan. If the lineup for cashiers is longer, it can still be faster, but otherwise it's slower in my experience.
It only serves the shop owner because he can have a single drone operating a few self checkout machines instead of a single line, but is that a net positive for society ? doubt, going to a supermarket is alienating enough, we didn't have to make it worse.
And of course they had to add a gate so now you can't even leave the shop without showing the receipt, when you don't find what you want to buy you have to call and wait for an adult to allow you to leave the premise like you're a fucking toddler getting out of the playground area.
This seems to be true of all businesses, and I really hate it. Flying sucks, trying to reach a human for any reason sucks, lines are huge everywhere. Life just seems a lot more stressful purely to put a few extra bucks in shareholders' pockets.
I feel like it's the case for literally every single industry, everything is getting worse for the end user point of view. Public services, jobs, hospitals, cars, new houses, online services, mobile apps...
I think globalisation allowed things to get better and cheaper up to a point and now that we can't delocalize to cheaper places we have to cut corners somewhere else and the entire stack is suffering from it
I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan anything.
Their $15 shirts are the next cheapest thing they sell, I'd imagine.
I still don't think an RFID will eat that much into their profit margin, but Uniqlo is in the unique position of having stricter control over their supply chain. All the products they sell are Uniqlo-branded products, manufactured specifically for Uniqlo, and they can just have RFID tags embedded in the price tags for all the products with little extra cost.
Grocery stores sells cans, plastic jugs, glass bottles, shrink-wrapped fresh produce and even plain vegetable and fruit or grain and legumes by weight. All of these comes from a wide variety of manufacturers that don't produce directly for you (or even have any kind of direct relationship with you).
The wide variety of form factors makes attaching RFID to everything unrealistic, and even for the stuff you could attach RFID to, it's not like manufacturers would do that for you.
We've got Barcode guns at self-checkout here, and I've begun to arrange my items barcode-up in the cart, so I can just get everything rapidly. I often don't bring my bags with me, because I'm going to have to load everything into the car anyway.
Thats an interesting optimization. Don't bag your stuff in the store just walk out with a cart of loose groceries. Especially for someone who simply MUST bring all the groceries inside with one trip, I can just load up a crate.
You can get a lot of bags on your arms, and one or two jugs of milk in each hand depending on how long your fingers are.
It just isn't as fun with the reusable folding bags. Or the paper bags some retailers use -- the ones with handles are the worst, they rip a good part of the time. Actually easier to carry a normal paper bag than one with handles.
With mandatory paper bags they seem to have made them as flimsy as possible. I can't go grocery shopping when its raining any more, the bags just turn into mush at the slightest drizzle.
Having developed a hate for all those one use bags clogging your trash also helps. I've started doing this before it was the eco thing to do just because I hated accumulating bags.
Walking to the corner store(tm) if that option is available to you requires a bit more discipline, but I mostly remember to pick a bag when leaving home.
So I always bring a bag or a foldable crate, throw everything in while shopping and then put that in the car.
Heck, I even do the 'leave the bags in the car' trick too. I'm going to be using the cart anyway, so why do the extra step at the checkout instead of just loading it directly into the bags in the car.
Glad to know I'm not the only person who thinks this is a good way to do it.
The main usage I see is mainly self checkout.
Please note that I'm biased towards dense areas. We have on-the-go scanning in super stores as well, I feel it's not being used but I could be wrong
its empty because it’s considered rude to burden the poorly paid checkout person when you can self-service. Once all of the self-service lanes are occupied, the sentiment shifts and customers uneasily queue up in the manned lane, frantically watching if the self-service lane clears up so they can jump out of the manned lane.
One of those freak cases in behavioral econ where the causality is very straightforward and explicit.
In my own shopping, I just use whatever seems likely to be fastest or less hassle -- for me.
If I've got a bunch of stuff, I'm heading to the cashier because they're better-equipped to handle a volume of stuff than I am at self-checkout.
But if it's just a couple of small items, then the self-checkout seems fastest: Scan, plonk, scan, plonk, invoke the incantation so that it can take my money[1], and pay it.
(Unless one of those small items involves something like beer or something else requiring an ID check, wherein: It's back to the cashier.)
[1]: In my neck of the woods, Wal-Mart gets this best, with as few as one button-pushes required to pay and leave (and there was a time when it was zero button pushes to use a debit card at self-checkout there). Dollar General gets it worst, requiring at least 8 button pushes (with three different input methods! it requires input on two different touchscreens and one physical keypad) to pay them and get on my way.
It is?? I missed that memo. But in my part of the US, the manned cashiers always have a line for them, too.
The frustrating thing is that stores have fewer cashiers, so there's always a line. But often that line is shorter than the one for self-checkout.
Big chains plan to gamblify the prices in the next few years using their "member cards" points, some chains are already up to this with specific penetration targets before they move forward. And this is not insider knowledge they're upfront about it.
Why not? what makes it unpopular?
And then if you are unlucky you hit a random "let's recheck everything" at the cashier which nullifies all the work that you have done.
The fact that you have to remember to scan every time you put anything in your basket is just worse for the mental load I find.
Don't forget to mention that with the manned checkout dishwasher, it's fast and powerful but you're stuck standing there until it's done.
For one thing I think these things take years for broad acceptance and for another the current scanners with their bright and large displays are just what was needed to make it attractive for the young and elderly.
Give a retailer a large display, and they will fill it with ads, with the important info in tiny type. Or even a small display. I've seen user-facing credit card terminals where the small screen is 3/4 ads, 1/4 transaction.
If they'd just put up "Place card against screen here" marker that was 1) where the antenna is, and 2) fully synchronized with when the system is ready for a card read...
Which part of France are you in? Where I am, Paris suburbs, I see it used all the time in Carrefour.
There is a learning curve, which I think inhibits wider usage. I used it a couple of times, and every time I forgot to scan stuff, or forgot whether I scanned stuff, and had to go over the last scans to check.
I'm sure you're right. I suspect that there are massive variations from shop location to shop location, even within a region. I also suspect there are different kinds of shoplifting. I remember hearing a friend who is not the kind of person to just pocket an item and leave, bragging about ringing up protein powder from a bulk dispenser as flour to save money. That kind of behaviour is definitely going to be hard to model.
This is actually already somewhat solved. The other day I was at a Safeway and one carton of milk had an unreadable label so I scanned a different carton and put the unreadable one in the bag instead (same product). The system showed me a video of me doing that, highlighting the fact that I didn't put the item I scanned on the bag (!) and asked me to wait for an assistant. Pretty impressive.
Or shop somewhere where they have all that turned off.
Isn't that basically what Amazon had claimed they were doing here, except apparently maybe they weren't?
Even if you couldn't do this at the exit, seems like it would have been a far easier lift to incorporate the same idea into shopping carts or baskets all along.
You'll note that WalMart doesn't even use the EPCs at POS, which is telling: for most retailers, the main advantage of EPCs is far more actionable alarms at the exit. So they're limited to items where loss rates make the added cost worth it.
The problem is that the grocery industry has notoriously low margins, and the unit price of EPC tags can be the entire margin on a lot of products. On the one hand, Amazon may have been trying to work around the need for higher-cost tags to roll out this kind of automation. On the other hand, I have heard anecdotally that Amazon Fresh pricing was relatively high, so maybe EPCs would have been a wiser use of their extra revenue.
But that said, interesting point. Didn't know the cost of an RFID tag was that high -- after all, Uniqlo is putting them on some pretty cheap clothing items!
For apparel, on the other hand, source tagging is common - even before EPC on higher end goods, Calvin Klein used to sew magnetostriction tags into clothing. Apparel just has so much more price elasticity and loss prevention is a huge part of that industry. Tools are another industry where EPC and source tagging are common, once again, high dollar items with a lot of theft.
So if you have six of the same yoghurt, you have to scan them and then place them in your bag one at a time. And if you have a 24 pack of sodas, you need to haul it out of your cart onto the scales as you're checking out. And if anything goes wrong (item didn't weight what the system expected; you moved the item too fast onto the scales etc) then you get a "please wait while someone helps you", which involves an employee having to come and clear the error.
Scan-as-you-shop has been around for at least a decade at this point I think, at least in some parts of the world. ICA (supermarket in Sweden) been doing it for as long as I can remember, and I came across this image of the scanner being used at the store on Mediawiki: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Self_checkout_scanne... (Image uploaded 2011)
Surely this exists elsewhere too, or been judged to only work in certain contexts (like a high-trust environment like Sweden) and won't be the next realistic step.
When I moved to the UK, what surprised me is that Tesco self check out is so much more cumbersome. It weighs your stuff, stops working when something isn't exactly the right weight. Super annoying to use if you're used to the system used in Sweden and The Netherlands. But that was in stores in the middle of central London, it may be very different in more suburban "big" stores which is where it was first rolled out in NL as well.
And how that's set usually has more to do with the store's location than anything else.
I notice Costco has self-checkouts now.
I stopped using it after they required using their loyalty cards/apps to use it.
I also use one loyalty app only when I get an offer.
I’ve never seen a difference that huge before.
I think they just really want to display one price and charge a much higher one to most people.
Looks like they had it in 1996, 28 years ago. https://www.supermarketnews.com/archive/safeway-uk-expands-s...
You maybe don't know that Sweden is consistently near the top of shoplifting statistics in Europe.
I lived there for my first 20 years, and have since lived in Spain. The amount of trust between people in the Nordics is definitely higher than most other places in the world.
I think it’s great, I get to go around the shop with a little laser gun.
The only thing I don't like is that they have added the option to the machines to scan all your things there instead of using the portable scanner. Which in my area has resulted in queues at the self checkout... Which used to be very quick when it was only used for the portable scanners.
Walmart was also working on similar technology, but from what I heard they couldn’t convince suppliers to include RFID tags on all of their products.
Unfortunately I doubt you'll ever see this happen.
Sure, it's supposedly possible to buy an RFID chip for 1p - but you can buy a can of beans for 23p so that 1p is probably their entire profit margin.
I've also worked with a variety of RFID readers; none of them can provide reliable reading, even in favourable conditions.
If my Business Studies teacher ~20 years ago was, and still is, correct then they are a loss leader.
Why not wait a few years until even a can of beans has an rfid tag, put a rfid tag in 4 corners of the cart. You should be able to compute which tags are within the bounds of the cart and allow you to pay.
The hardware to read the tags is still too expensive to put in the carts and not liable to be available as part of everyone's phones that soon so the easiest thing to do is retain the existing self checkouts and just skip the part where you scan anything. Roll up to the front. Tap your prominently displayed cart number or numbers tap your card done.
Reducing checkout to 6 seconds from multiple minutes will obviate the new loathsome situation where you actually wait in line to self checkout and will be close enough to normal procedures that it should be easy to transition to.
I agree that having to scan out via the anti theft barriers is idiotic.
With American hardware at SCO the scanners are just peripherals like a keyboard and a person walking around the store with them would tie up an entire POS computer while items were being scanned with it.
If the portable scanner were itself a portable device this would be tractable however how do you keep people from stealing or destroying them?
Walmart and Sam’s Club have both had this for years. It is only available at Walmart if you have Walmart+. I tried it when I had a Sam’s Club membership and it was ok but occasionally I’d have account issues, alcohol purchasing issues, and someone still wants to see your app receipt when you walk out the door issues.
My current local grocery store has been my local grocery store for most of those 20-plus years. I remember when it was still a Super Fresh. It was a better place to shop then, and had about twice the current staff, despite at that time being quite a bit smaller.
That Giant has hollowed out the workforce is not in question. The question has been why; I didn't know grocery workers here were unionized, but if the union here is as effective as the one I hoped to join in my own high-school summer job days bagging groceries, then this frankly makes a lot of sense as a reason.
They work like this: Scan the barcode on the produce if it has one (or pick it from a picture-list, or search by name, or just key in the 4-digit PLU if you're cool like that), put it on the scale, and it spits out a barcode label that identifies the product and the weight.
At self-checkout, one just scans the generated barcode label and puts the produce in the bagging area like any other item.
Unlike the self-checkout kiosks themselves: There's never any wait to use these machines, so it's an easy process that doesn't involve making other people wait.
This process would work the same, I think, for applications where portable scanners are in-use.
And it has several problems as well with respect to loss (e.g. adding more items to the bag). To deal with that, you'd have to weigh it or count again to verify.
> so you might as well get that done in advance
1. The PLUs are posted on the price signs in the produce section, so it's easy to remember them accurately when I weigh stuff. Entering the 4-digit PLU for starfruit is faster than navigating a list of pictures or searching by name, and is easy when I just saw it a moment ago: Short-term memory is a blessing and a curse, and this process makes good use of it. (I probably won't remember the PLU by the time I finish shopping and reach the self-checkout, except for bananas: That PLU has made it all the way to long-term memory and is 4011.)
2. Stress. The whole time I'm weighing out my produce at one of these fancy scales (I have to weigh it eventually anyway), I am at ease and am free to work at whatever pace I wish. This is not necessarily the case at self-checkout when there is a line of people behind me who simply want me to get done and be out of their way, so they can be done and out of there themselves.
3. The self-checkout line moves faster when my produce is already weighed. This offers me do direct advantage. But unlike some people, I am not a sociopath: Given the choice to make a thing easier or harder for someone else, at about equal cost to me, I try to do the thing that makes it easier for them. So I prefer that the line move faster, even if that doesn't actually save me any of my own time.
tl;Dr, I could behave more like crabs in a bucket, but instead I choose a more-orderly path and weigh my produce in advance.
Definitely makes big shops easier.
I just scan everything at the end. Not really any different than going to self checkout.
I also use checkout as a time to organize my groceries for unloading at home.
Seriously, I have a hard time caring about this.
My city use it for public transit tickets
You scan your loyalty card (in my case a picture of it on my phone) and it releases a wireless barcode scanner with an android touchscreen phone-like thing in it.
Walk around the store, scan things and put them directly in my bags.
My favorite part is checking out without scanning anything and getting bemused looks (and occasional challenges) from other customers -- sometimes even from store staff.
Definitely saves time in my opinion over any other option. I only need to touch things twice vs 3 or 4 times and the wireless barcode scanner is much more reliable than the cacophony of things yelling at me with the self checkout. Weights don't always match, vision sensors think i'm doing the wrong thing.
I’d contend that even if a much more capable company like OpenAI tried this, they’d get much closer, maybe good enough for a product but this a really ill defined problem where even the best results may not be worth it.
Putting cameras on the roof doesn’t let you see everything a person grabs, there will always be weird occluded angles. On top of that the cameras need to be super high resolution and zoomed in to detect some of the smaller stuff in shelves. This is just for the trustworthy customers, now consider the thieves, they’re gonna have a field day with this, it’s not going to be easy to prevent a determined thief from not fooling the systems. A self checkout cart honestly makes much more sense, still prone to thieves but it at least lets you skip the line much more reliably.
> The uploader has not made this video available in your country
In UAE.
[1] e.g. https://timryan.web.unc.edu/2020/12/22/fraudulent-responses-...
We already had a lawyer having case thrown out because he didn’t do the job properly and got hallucinations from LLM.
Mostly because people don’t want to work.
(I have no idea if this is still the case, for the record.)
I know companies that operate in that space and they pay incredibly well, between $20 to $50/hour.
> GPT APIs which perform just as well
That's because they were also trained by exploiting third world groups, paying about $2/hour.
The problem here isn't offering work to developing countries, the problem here is major corporations squeezing them for every cent and not allowing it to be used as a means of getting out of poverty. And that's also why the workers end up performing half-assed work by using automated classifiers and faking their credentials. It's not hard to see where this goes for both.
Why, though? I'd say outsourcing that way is a clear indicator that loyalty is not part of the picture.
But last year I repeatedly saw ChatGPT-4 respond token-by-token much more slowly than a human would! E.g. several seconds between words. It was clearly not a human responding: at least a few times I was testing on preschool counting questions and GPT-4 was not able to answer them. I interpreted the slowness as GPT's poor quantitative reasoning. But what you're saying is simply not true, sometimes ChatGPT-4 is (or was) extremely slow.
Regardless, if OpenAI was running this con it probably wouldn't have been real-time humans writing. First of all it might be enough to have a human in the "mixture of experts" who decides the best of multiple responses when GPT-4 is unable to come to an automated conclusion. But humans could be writing ChatGPT responses due to a quirk in their UX:
- ChatGPT errors out on a certain question and asks you to try again later, as it does (or used to do) frequently
- the response is prepared by the human contractor while the user waits patiently for ChatGPT to resolve its technical difficulty
- when the user asks again ChatGPT can largely read off the answer, using its (genuine) language-processing abilities to handle variations in phrasing/etc
Also, even if nothing went wrong, they were so slow that I can't imagine people actually used them. Wonder if they were just pretending to deliver stuff.
For the more unsavory customers, it could offer video evidence that they're stealing stuff, lock the wheels at the door if more than $X isn't paid for, and create GPS reports of where all the stolen carts end up.
None of this has an impact on theft; however, it does a great job of making me feel like I live in a prison.
So the most the gait-tracking computer can do is alert that a flagged person might have entered and needs to be strongly identified in some other way. But if loss prevention already knows them on sight then that system is minimally useful.
Aldi has also been trialing the same "just walk out" shopping model at their Greenwich store in London[1]. I always suspected that theirs had some manual intervention involved because of the variable time it takes to get the bill. Sometimes I'd be charged nearly instantly after walking out of the store, other times it would be hours later. Aldi's one is more compelling, IMO, because you get the regular, competitive Aldi prices.
Maybe one advantage is it finally stops customers from asking to pay half with a check and half with cash for a $2 item in certain places. There's an entire Walgreens I avoid because that's happened 3 times already.
That's the only place where it has a step I don't need, it wants payment because capitalism, so there's a bunch of touch, tap, touch again sequences to get from it knowing what I took to being satisfied that I have exchanged money for goods and then I can go.
One thing I barely noticed at all until after it had happened was the removal of cashier operated checking out from most of the store. Ten years ago there were maybe 20 such checkouts, then sixteen after they added some self-checkout features - obviously rarely all manned but they existed. Today it's four, and often none of them are open, because almost nobody stands in a line to have somebody else scan your shopping, why would you?
Instead there are three distinct self-checkout zones. First, the one I use almost always, for people who have scanned their purchases already. There's nowhere to put anything, because these are just vertical terminals for taking payment. Then, short order terminals, a small built-in scale is provided so that you can buy say, lunch, but there's nowhere to load and unload a whole trolley of groceries. Finally the big shop terminals with lots of dedicated space for you to transfer from a trolley onto a scanner and weigh scales, then to your bags, this takes up most of the space previously occupied by cashiers.
If you've scanned everything you can actually use any of these areas, because the terminal understands that you've already done the whole job, but unless it's super-busy it will be easier to use the dedicated area for people who've done all the scanning.
A decently trained human can scan & bag far faster than I can at the self-checkouts.
The self-checkout machines are also sometimes buggy. Our local Safeway's self-checkout was extremely particular: if you scanned the next item prior to the computer registering and processing the weight from the previous item being set down, it would error out and require an attendant. That processing was quite slow — so you needed to lag yourself / rate limit yourself, so as to allow the machine time to think, before proceeding. I eventually figured out the cadence to go, such that I could avoid the error … but humans just don't have this issue.
Items too light to be detected just always error on some of these machines.
Here are the reasons I prefer the manned cashiers:
The line at the manned cashiers is often shorter than the line at self-checkout.
Scanning everything myself is a pain.
If something goes wrong or I make a mistake, I won't have to put up with being accused of shoplifting.
The time savings from self-checkout is usually minimal-to-nonexistent.
I get to have a little human interaction.
Since there's no discount for using self-checkout, I'm effectively paying extra in order to do more work.
I believe there’s still some AI based visual monitoring in place but it’s much simpler. Instead of needing to identify exactly what you’re picking up, it just needs to flag when it thinks you might have picked something up without scanning it. If that happens, it triggers a staff member to come have look in your bags when you scan your receipt to leave.
It seems like a much more pragmatic way to realise 80% of the value you get with “just walk out”.
I guess it is good that they figured it out in the long run, but they could have fixed this in 2020 if they had just listened.
I used these in London and they were magical and extremely convenient. I would show them to visiting friends as if they were one of London's main tourist attractions!
I knew they relied on some manual labor (bills were delayed), but assumed this was only an intermediate step to collect more real-world training data (until they sorted out the AI).
I still think this is the future though. They could reduce staffing costs and free-up floor space that would otherwise be used for self-checkouts. All the while actually drastically improving the customer experience too.
If someone cracks it, it may make it impossible for other supermarkets to complete economically.
As a fun aside, all the stores were incredibly over-staffed and helpful. If you couldn't install the app they had a browser-based fallback (type "fresh code" into the amazon searchbar on a mobile). They could also lend you a battery bank if you were low on battery. I think they even had phones to lend out to those without smartphones. It was all very optimized around customer experience first and foremost and with no real attempt for the stores to be profitable.
Notably, they are continuing “Just Walk Out” at a few locations in case future advances make the technology more viable.
I know this is ripe to use as a way to dunk on Amazon, but I sincerely doubt that it was as inane as it sounds. They likely had this workforce to train a system that they hoped would eventually operate autonomously. That being said, it sounds like it never panned out.
And this is why I think current “AI” technologies are a dead end. Once the rest of the market realizes that maybe we’ll finally get past this “AI” hype bubble.
What AI applications are in use where the error cost is imposed on the company using them, not the consumer? Reading paper checks and mail envelopes come to mind. Those are automated and work well. Waymo's automatic driving, but not Tesla's. What else?
This is a useful metric for gauging real progress.
If Tesla geofenced their FSD applications as aggressively as Waymo, I suspect the two would be near peers. You can hide an incredible lack of a capability by artificially limiting the scope of your application.
> This is a useful metric for gauging real progress.
Sure, cost / benefit analysis is always useful. I would propose a broader analysis for grading “AI” disruption though.
1. Are humans involved at any step?
2. What is the probability of success?
3. What is the consequence of failure? (Profit loss / property loss / personal injury, etc…)
4. How many variations on a domain (think winter driving, summer driving, driving in a tropical storm, driving dirt roads in a jungle, etc) can the application work in while maintaining consistent performance?
5. Can the model leverage its “learnings” to solve problems / reason about new domains that it hasn’t been trained on?
That’s just a few metrics I can think of off the top of my head that would help to distinguish a true disruptor from the hype.
Air Canada's website AI chatbot for one
I also kind of like the idea of people having jobs, so that's also a factor. But I didn't even get a chance to try these out ... and I would have but for the henchmen and women waiting to welcome me, LOL
To top that off, the associate carting out in the parking lot ridiculed us and gave us a "buh bye". So, Amazon Fresh is off the list for me. I don't even go to Whole Foods after that experience.
[1] https://www.rfidcard.com/uniqlo-has-rolled-out-rfid-technolo...
I like having a running total and being able to price check, it's mostly fantastic. Only downside is fruit and veg which you have to weigh and print a sticker for, that's about it.
In my mind the perfect experience would be a trolley/cart/basket with a screen on it that detects what was inside.
Self-checkout is the norm in my area.
The scale sensitivity was a bit off initially, but it seems okay nowadays. (If I dropped something on the bagging area it didn't wait for the item to settle.)
Amazon would have to add the stickers for now, but it could revolutionize retail. IIRC I read that a bookstore chain revolutionized their retail industry by putting barcode stickers on all their books, allowing computerized inventory, and now publishers print them by default.
Which isn't solved despite availability, because it's "solved" by just having someone else walk through a store, maybe doing a few customers orders all at once.
Like it would seem to me that for, at least packaged goods, an entire city could and should be serviced out of a couple of warehouses with better stocking and fulfillment systems?
In fact, that ad also shows how awkward the concept is (or maybe the fact that we're still not ready for it). It's a really fun well-made video but a thoroughly unconvincing advertisement.
Use carts like IKEA that hang your reusable bag. Scan as you pick up items. Walk out.
So they just outsourced the cashiers to India
I'd always peek through the windows and it never had any shoppers.
My experience using these locations is that I entered, grabbed the items I wanted and just left. Because they were closer to convenience stores, I was basically speedrunning it. A drink and a sandwich? Maybe 30 seconds tops. There wasn't any point in lingering. I wonder how much of that changed the dynamics of how many people were inside?
Chancery lane Tesco who also had one - darn I don't even have the Tesco app, I guess I'll wait for a normal shop.
For me the system would be better if you could just tap your card like everywhere else rather than needing an app.
(mixed reviews on Tesco GetGo https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Tesco+Express/@51.518437...)
Anyone who works in computer vision immediately knew this wasn't possible beyond a cool proof of concept in a tiny room with <300 SKUs. Even in 2024
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/21/inside-amazons-surveillanc...
Am I surprised? No, not at all. But there is a definitely "how it was marketed", "how it was implemented" here.
returning/replacing something at a grocery store shouldn't take hours of overseas phone-calls and arguments.
ask me how I know.
- "just walk out" - what a joke. just another way to capture more data points on your "shopping habits" and build more meaningful profiles against you. Oh John picked up the "Radical Juice X", let's start pushing out the "GOP" package of ads when John searches on Amazon for products. Prefer products with "red" color.
- "pay with your palm" [at Whole Foods] -- yea, right. I am going to give out my handprint to amazon. piss off
This is both sad and pathetic. Not to mention devastates the local community. Instead of kids being able to get their first part-time job in a local shop stocking shelves or doing checkout these opportunities were completely offshored abroad.
Theft is an obvious one. It happens in self checkouts in many ways. We had people come into our store to just leave with baskets of stuff, load their pockets, take stuff from one box to put in a cheaper one they bought, or even put raw eggs and meat in their pockets. That was with a ton of workers in the store looking out for thieves.
Errors could result in us being charged for what we didn’t buy. The amount could be lower or higher. Some people go through their whole receipt double checking it. Many of us just watch it as they ring it up, deal with it there, and stop thinking about it once we leave. Could this impact peace of mind?
Cost to operate seemed like it might be high. Aldi and Costco show a traditional self-checkout can be cheap to operate on top of serving high-end customers. (See theft/shrink, though.) I figured the machine learning alternatives would cost thousands to tens of thousands a unit for combinations of cameras, servers, and licensed software. They’d also need to be monitored and/or trained by humans which this article just confirmed.
I was also worried about fraud. My company bought a solution that monitored customers with infrared cameras, monitored checkouts, and predicted how many registers we needed. That was a terrible system that hurt us more than it helped. We were required to act like it worked to please those who spent hundreds of millions on it. I wondered how often such dishonest referrals helped the supplier sell them. Made me skeptical about more AI.
Finally, the human touch that comes with good cashiers increases customer satisfaction. Our customers often looked forward to seeing us. For some, we were the only or best social contact they got that week. Others liked getting out of the house for a long period of time. Sometimes they’d have us push products and services which, normally a negative for all, is largely how they drove up credit card use and feedback on the customer tracker.
For those reasons, I advised against using AI for anything other than helping employees do their jobs more easily. If for that, that it would be a support tool instead of trying to replace skilled, decision makers. Then, simply invest those millions to hundreds of millions in the employees. Worked for Costco and Publix. :)
> take stuff from one box to put in a cheaper one
isn't the scale supposed to catch this?
> predicted how many registers we needed
that seems like the dumbest because No.1. useless thing in a supermarket where cashiers see the lines :D
Re scales. The scale detects a weight difference between items. If the items are similar weight, the scale or cashier will ignore it. The scales also had a high, false alarm rate that often caused cashiers to ignore them. The thieves also use scanning methods that cause higher, false alarms to encourage that. None of that works with human cashiers and a bascart exchange.
Re registers needed. You would think. The company was top-down, micro-managed, low staff, and blame the worker. The supervisor had to open registers in time, maybe watch self-checkout while the attendant does price checks, and often work a register themselves for most of the shift. Good service was impossible in those conditions.
Instead of having cashiers, the executives decided an AI that thought for us would fix the problem. Of course, we had no cashiers to open registers. They marked us as failures on that, too.
Later, they had us force more people to use self-checkout, closed more registers to facilitate that process, and installed more self checkouts. I’ve been gone a few years. It seems the customers have grudgingly accepted the status quo because both major companies, the cheapest with most products, were intentionally making checkout terrible. Oligopolies in action…
JWO stands no chance in cultures where grift is the norm e.g. NYC where people jump turnstiles let alone snatch groceries. Even self checkout struggles. In these cultures, checkout staff invite their friends to shop then "accidentally" forget to ring up an item or two. If you can keep shrinkage to a few percent you're doing great.
Source: longtime in the industry and owned/operated 3 retail shops myself.
If anything, self-checkouts are a larger target to grift and yet they seem to do fine.
More of the same. I wonder if the incredible use of labor in India and other countries will cause their society to bypass their own growth so that the citizens of those countries become pure consumers, the majority of which can only ever get menial or gig jobs due to AI taking over most of innovation. In such countries, the only jobs left may be to aid in the extraction of larger and large amounts of natural resources required for the technological expansion of the west.
In this way, developing countries will never be able to gain independence from the few global powers at the top: instead, they will be forced to follow the folly of the United States and Europe: developing more technology for the sake of technology, and in return they will get a free Unlimited Streaming plan to watch the garbage that we have come to call entertainment.
Never gonna happen in India, by the sheer number of populace. You can see the thing you are talking about in some countries in Europe where a small population and a lack of heavy manufacturing drives the whole economy to the servicing sector. It's a question if you can label these countries as developing, though.
You went in, went up to the counter, told the clerk what you wanted, a series of clarifications, advice and suggestions, then clerk² would fetch your goods, wrap it up all nice for you, handle payment and hand you the goods.
All you did was request what you needed, got advice, paid for it and off you go⁴
Then came the supermarkets.
Suddenly every customer was a mouse running in a maze trying to find the cheese, milk, washing powder and whatever else. Endlessly walking up and down every isle desperately seeking what they needed. Then the customer had to accumulate all the products into bags or carts, Push or carry it all to the cash register. Where one person (per register) would sit on their ass, add it all up, you paid, you bagged, and you were on your way.
A lot of customers did not like that at all. It wasn't rational. In the old system the clerk at a store knew where everything was. It was not necessary for ever customer to memorize and learn every store they went to in order to go shopping. It was a massive inconvenience for everyone, except for the person at the register who was sitting comfortably.
These days, not only must you hunt in the maze, push it to the counter, now you must also do the checking out yourself.
Finally, the companies have outsourced all the labor to the customers themselves and they are happy about it.
There are of course still stores that operate the old way. but they are in the minority in most places.
When I read about it the first time it felt so backwards. It more convenient to be able to grab what you need and be on your way. Then as I was running up and down isles trying to find what I need i started noticing and thinking about it.
I dont really think it is rational that everyone has to do all that walking and hunting.
Perhaps with robots we can be back to the old ways.
But really the old system is back in places where you order things online and go pick it up, all picked by clerks, all you need to do is pay and be on your way. and I love it.
When it comes to groceries and many other products they will even deliver it to your house. Its how I get most of my groceries as well as other stuff.
Now I can sit on my ass, and I have outsourced all of that back to the store.
The old becomes new sometimes. In fact often.
I would be interested in a study that calculated what amount of our lives on average spent walking around in stores trying desperately to find what you need.
¹ It may not match what we think of as convenience today. ² The clerk may work on his own, or there might be more than one, there might be people working in the back fetching things from storage. But your point of contact would be the clerk. Of course often the owner in smaller stores. ³ Probably in most other places as well. ⁴
That line was unintentionally hilarious to me. Like looking inside a TV and finding a bunch of fast-working little people drawing images.
(This article is not the AWS service by the same name, though by the time you conclude reading the Wikipedia page, it should be obvious where the AWS service got its name, and what it does.)
Imagine that next time you are drunk, you can hire a driver who will drive you back home remotely (along with some AI to stop the car in case connection goes away).
They already have perfect resolution and data retention of everything you buy at checkout time when it's scanned, plus they can verify your identity rather than have to rely on facial recognition or other things. I don't think this is any creepier than what they already do so from their perspective it is "common sense."
Imho more like an anecdote than a sourced story, but a good one nonetheless.
Maybe not a bad idea - it is a step towards autonomous driving, and will probably ensure drivers have less unintentional down time.
Of course outsourcing to cheaper humans can be great. But that's not what tech is shilling to the world as "AI" right now.
Is this satire? It doesn't seem like a fantastic idea to allow someone to remotely pilot a car over a transoceanic Internet link.
If you go into a grocery shop to grab lunch, spending $8 on 4 items, and they make 5 cents of profit per item? They need to run an extremely lean operation.
Or target price-insensitive customers, I suppose.
they simply need to run a good ordering/inventory system. If they sell every item (on average) in each store every week, that's 2.39% return on the value of the inventory investment each week, or 52*.0239 or over 100% annual return on money they borrow for free because the store pays its grocery bills to suppliers in arrears, net 10 days, etc
Which is not much.
That’s what it’s actually like. It’s just strictly more work than simply having a cashier.
> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
But who knows, tech articles are so inaccurate that it might as well have been some misunderstanding regarding how the labeling/training was done.
Yup.
I got the chance to go shopping at one in 2018 (so it's been a while). You could tell there was some "reconciliation" happening, because your receipt didn't show up until 20-30 minutes after you left. My guess is that this was some person via mechanical turk crawling thru the data and indexing what you -really- bought.
Of course, my colleague and I (who were working on computer vision at the time) did stuff like take our bags off, put them in the middle of the floor, and roll a can of soda into the bag, just to see what would happen.
I'm many jurisdictions this could be enough to get you prosecuted for shoplifting if it evaded payment.
There have been some cases of self checkout prosecution too. They don't need any proof of intent. Even regular errors can be prosecuted.
Volunteer to work for free, with bonus legal liability, as a self-service cashier.
So convenient!
In Common Law jurisdictions, there's no intent required for prosecution of alleged theft, but there absolutely is intent required for conviction! Anything else is a miscarriage of justice.
So yeah, there's a lot of miscarriage of justice, or at least potential for it. Nobody really cares until it happens to them.
I work in the CV industry and this was a very badly kept secret. There is absolutely no financially feasible way to run something like this with current CV
Of course, costs change with time, but right now I don't see how this sort of application could approach being financially feasible.