Aaaand there’s the play. Amazon wasn’t trying to compete with other retails stores by leveraging their tech edge, they were positioning themselves to becoming the single provider of retail checkout solutions for the future. You either opt-in to giving Amazon all your retail data, or you become the only old fashioned “wait in line to get served” store on the street.
And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this?
Do any of those companies actually have a live customer? Not a demo store, a real paying customer with more than one location live?
Standard.ai apparently has a demo store in SF, although it's been closed due to the coronavirus epidemic.
Grabango - one installation in test at a Giant Eagle store.
Getzippin - one installation in test at a Lojas Americanas store. Their site gives the impression that it's really about getting people to install their phone app, so they can be spied upon.
https://www.thirdeyelabs.com/
- real customers
- real money
- multiple-sites
Plus they beat Amazon to this concept by a good few months. https://www.thirdeyelabs.com/news. Granted all the focus/attention in this space is in the US. But it is happening elsewhere too.
"Beat them to this concept"? I can't even remember the first time I heard about this idea. 2003? 1995? I half-suspect I read about the idea in OMNI Magazine.
It's always been a question of when the supporting technology was going to be good enough to make it work. The idea has been around long enough for most of the early patents to expire.
History is full of examples of visionaries coming up with ideas that have inspired and fueled others--in some cases whole industries have been founded on these ideas. For instance, Doug Engelbart gave the "Mother of All Demos" in 1968 [1]. It was a proof of concept, but the ideas he talked about were implemented by other companies--who profited from it.
It is unfortunate that we live in a world where ideas hold such little monetary value, but they're most certainly not worthless.
Bell Labs was responsible for much of the underlying technology, and these applications had been foreseen. But they were undoubtedly deluded about their ability to deliver those applications.
Doing something well means you already imagined doing something well first.
Or, in other words, "imagining doing something well" is necessary, but not sufficient to actually do something well.
Coming up with an idea for something, and then sharing this idea with other people in an open manner, can plant the seed that germinates the execution for that idea.
To me, that's part of the reason why thought pieces are valuable to me. Also, unconventional tracks at academic conferences, like provocations at DIS 2020 [1] (which I cite here since it's on my mind because I'm personally applying to it right now).
I mean, you're not wrong, but at the same time whether you call it "imagining" or "coming up with ideas", if done well the results of said process are valuable.
One should also consider that good ideas usually come out of having a lot of domain knowledge in a particular area. And that requires effort and work ("execution" but in the past).
There are some fully automated stores the size of shipping containers in Beijing, but they're mostly demos, too.
I don't think anybody really has this working well enough to deploy. It has that machine learning "we got to 95%" look. This is something that's easy to almost do, and the last 5% is really tough.
I do love how the very first banner video standard.ai shows is how one person passes an item to another. I'm curious to see all the edge cases Amazon Go ran into over the year or two they ran. I can see a lot of messy cases like that coming up.
I think there is an argument to be made of an acceptable increase in false negatives as the cost can be recouped through the efficiency of the system. Not to mention that a system like this should also cut down on theft.
I don't think so, because people will figure out the weak spots and share this information. It will become a sport and people will think "last time I grabbed the milk like this, and they didn't charge me for it, what if I do it again tomorrow?" Hackers will start wearing special clothes with dazzle patterns or with grocery items to fool the system, etc.
What you're describing is no different than the thief mentality that exists today. Most people don't care to steal a carton of milk just because they can. And there's no denying the cost effectiveness of removing your checkout staff or else this tech wouldn't exist.
Yep. I've been sitting here thinking Amazon was going to spool up tons of retail locations that leveraged their tech to create a massive moat that other Brick & Mortars couldn't possibly compete with.
In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world.
Surprising to me that Whole Foods still doesn't have this tech integrated. You'd think that'd be the "beta" step after the Amazon Store's "alpha" step.
Maybe they don't want to draw attention to how many people are going to lose their jobs because of this yet. Cashier is the #2 job in the US (by number of people employed) [0].
If they released this at Whole Foods, I'd guess they'd fire all the cashiers there. That would make this rollout a lot less exciting for a lot of people.
I hope Amazon comes up with an awesome way to help the cashiers this technology replaces. Then if self-driving cars end up working out, that industry can learn from what Amazon did.
We're already most of the way there with self checkout. My local Home Depot only has self checkout now, with 1 person managing something like 10-15 registers. They left the person running the "Pro"/lumber checkout area, but that area looks like it's being set up for self checkout too. They also seem to have removed the Garden Center checkout.
I'm not saying it's a great thing, just that the jobs Just Walk Out will be replacing are already being replaced by self checkout.
I frequent Whole Foods, and I digital nomad a bit, so I visit a lot of Whole Foods-es.
Recently came back to the East Bay (SF) and the Whole Foods I'm staying near, more than the others, seems like a staging store for Buy Online & 1) Get Delivered, 2) Pick Up In Store.
There are often more WF employees shopping for pick-up orders than customers walking around the store. Navigating aisles that are full of these WF shoppers gives the store a pretty signficantly different feel than the other stores that I'm a regular at. Plus, the staging/storage area at the front for ready-orders is much bigger than at other stores.
Not as true at SF city WFs, or the ones in Reno, LA, Park City and Phoenix/Scottsdale that I'm familiar with.
I'm guessing this dynamic, plus "Just walk out" is where they're headed, at least in certain densities. And that's where some of the cashiers may be transitioned.
I'll choose the store where I can grab what I want and walk out over the store where I have to wait in a dumb ass line while the cashier yells for a price check and the customer in front of me can't remember her PIN so slowly counts out nickels and quarters.
It's a massive competitive advantage far beyond whatever data they get by watching me roam the store.
The third-last FAQ entry speaks precisely to your comment:
> Will people still be working in stores with Just Walk Out technology?
> Yes. Retailers will still employ store associates to greet and answer shoppers' questions, stock the shelves, check IDs for the purchasing of certain goods, and more - their roles have simply shifted to focus on more valuable activities.
> I hope Amazon comes up with an awesome way to help the cashiers this technology replaces.
I'm not sure why this should be on Amazon. It's on all of us to better train people to have the jobs of the future. Our education system hasn't really changed in 100+ years. It needs to.
Amazon doesn't rip the benefits alone, all of us do. Just like Apple doesn't benefit alone from having invented touch-screen smartphones.
And if these companies profit, they do so as a reward for spending the capital (dollars and manhours) in creating new technologies that improve productivity. Specifically total factor productivity in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobb%E2%80%93Douglas_product...
It's on all of us because it really isn't on anyone in particular, surely not on Amazon.
I can take your statement and flip it around just as easily: why should Amazon bear the costs of paying for many R&D ideas that may or may not pay off? We should all share that cost if we're all going to benefit from those innovations
The thing we need to come up with is a basic income allowing robots to take over our work. Not because it's the right thing to do or a kind thing to do, but because the alternative is civil unrest on a scale few of us are familiar with.
>In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world.
It's not just about "AWS"-ing the thing. It's about gaining access to all of the transaction data and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you. A retailer like Walmart would NEVER use this tech, they know their data is one of the most valuable things they have (in fact they don't share their data with anyone, while all the other FDM retailers do), but boutique retailers like J Crew or whoever would happily.
> and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you.
Amazon is always putting up ads for me based on my purchase history, but they're never what I wind up buying. I have no explanation for what is wrong with their algorithm.
I bought a new phone in a store, then bought a cover and a screen protecton on amazon. It sent me a notification: "We think you might be interested in a new phone".
It's pretty obvious that people don't go around shopping for screen protectors and then buy phones to match.
I've always assumed that was an artifact of free returns; if you bought one thing, maybe you're actually still shopping and want to know other options. I've noticed when I get these they're frequently more expensive than the one I already bought.
I've always assumed it was repairmen. Some people really do need to buy toilet seats again, and again, and again, each time they do a job that requires replacing one (without ever needing a bulk order of 100.) They also might switch brands depending on whichever one is cheapest at the time; or order several different ones for different concurrent jobs to see which turns out best (like Backblaze does with hard drives.)
I have this experience every time I buy something. Monitor? Needs more monitors. Yoga mats? Clearly opening a studio. Trash bags? This man hasn't learned about dumpsters. Of course this pays off eventually, but it seems like they could come up with a better strategy when they have a bunch of purchase history.
Nope. The fact is after you purchase something you are still in market for that product. So keeping you in a marketing segment will always be more profitable to the advertising team. Yes, you might be finished shopping now that you have finally decided on the best toilet seat, but the marketing segment that you fall into will always convert higher than a control group. There is just way too much data to confirm this.
It may make sense statistically, but for an individual customer it's just a strange experience. Look around this thread for all the comments pointing out the same thing, and wonder if a shopping app that was truly good would have all that people pointing out such strange behavior
They stopped free returns on Prime a long time ago. Now only a few select items offer it.
This was about the same time they stopped shipping things in cardboard boxes and went with bubble packs, and most recently, paper wrap with no padding whatsoever.
what are you talking about. i buy things from amazon weekly and i have never once received something in paper wrap with no padding and have never paid for a return.
Source? Literally everything I've returned on Amazon over the last couple years has had at least one free return option (usually via UPS / Amazon Hub dropoff).
Clothing comes to mind, that's also the only case I've ever received something in just a white plastic bag.
Basically, you choose why you're returning. In some cases if you say something other than "the item was defective", it'll only have options that cost money.
The worst was when I searched for gorilla glue once. Good ol' Jeffy B thought I'd also want a $100k watch, a racecar/nascar (themed) Bible, and an anatomical model of some gonads. Pretty sure I still have the screencap somewhere
Sometimes you can learn a domain-specific life-hack from that kind of thing. I'm guessing, for this example, that gorilla glue is the secret weapon of taxidermy—for all your mounting-a-deer-to-the-wall needs.
Turns out people who have just purchased something are far more likely to purchase that thing again than a random person.
This makes them the perfect person to advertise to.
Even if the percentage is quite low this can be better than advertising to the general population. Say the numbers were 1 in 10 000 impressions leads to a toilet seat sale, but 1 in 1000 people who have just bought a toilet seat buy another one soon after (first one was broken/distributor/toilet seat collector/remodelling whole home/etc).
If those were the numbers it would be silly to not advertise to recent buyers.
Essentially, the self selection of 'I just bought <x>' very often puts you in a category that is far more likely to buy <x> again than almost anyone else.
There is a simple answer. Once you have bought a turtle necklace, you are identified as a "turtle necklace buyer" as opposed to any other general consumer. Unintuitive as it may be, you are far more likely to buy another turtle necklace than any of 330 million Americans picked at random. Hope that makes sense.
Very helpful for identifying what’s hot and releasing your own version. Figuring out seasonal trends. Or getting competitive price information to match/beet. Walmart brags about their ability to presciently stock stores, which keeps turnover & capital efficiency high.
Following up on this: "Amazon promises not to use customer purchase data for anything other than emailing receipts, but that leaves all of the data entailed in actually making the system work." (via Stratechery). Changes the equation a bit.
Maybe their real algorithm is so scary good that they can only use it for internal use. Didn't they also show pregnancy-related items to women who didn't even know they were pregnant yet?
Or maybe showing a wild selection of weird products results in people "brainstorm" other shopping needs, as a kind of anchoring.
Yesterday I walked into target with my brother and said something along the lines of "I'd rather go to jury duty than shop at target."
I wonder if their creepy surveillance tech knows I said it. I was going there to pick up my brother's medicine from the pharmacy. It's a real shame. I used to LOVE shopping at Target. But the dang store has gotten greedier and super obnoxious over the years.
I was positive they used to use their tracking data to design store layouts with minimal clashing, such that they distribute the shoppers across the store. It seemed to really work, too.
In their newer layouts, I dunno what it is, but everything seems crammed together all in the same spot. They replaced the popcorn, icees, and hot dogs, with food I don't like that costs too much. They got rid of the handbasket things that were handy and all over the store, and got rid of the benches too. Then they sold their pharmacy to CVS.. which immediately threw out the kickass containers Target used to use and added a super obnoxious phone system.
No, that's a misconception. They sent letter(s) to at least one person who had been purchasing products commonly purchased by [knowingly] pregnant women. In at least one case, family members "discovered" the pregnancy this way.
And in this way Amazon gets a lot more data and avoids the "monopoly" issue. Better optics too. But this is the only way that Amazon can get tons of data from smaller companies that they can't (don't want to) compete with (niche products or physical spaces).
And they didn't just do that with AWS. They did it with ecommerce as well. Become the biggest online retailer, nail the implementation, then get everyone else to jump on your platform.
They are following it up with shipping and logistics. Amazon has been pushing us hard to switch from FedEx/UPS/USPS to using them for most of our packages, and it's working. Our defect rate is less with Amazon despite all of the anecdotal evidence of lazy/incompetent last mile Amazon personnel, and our rep bends over backwards to make sure she can fix any issues and get us what we need. She's sending us free label printers even though ours are generic enough to work with all carriers including Amazon, just because the labels for them are less expensive.
After shipping with Amazon for our non-Amazon orders for six months, we've moved about 80% of our shipments to them because they save us that much time, hassle, and money. FedEx picks up almost all the rest, with a handful of packages going out UPS and Postal due to address requirements, or customer preference on phone orders (all online orders are Amazon/eBay/website where we limit shipping choices; we are about 60% Amazon, 30% eBay, 8% website, and 2% phone orders on a typical day).
> Amazon has been pushing us hard to switch from FedEx/UPS/USPS to using them for most of our packages
I hope that there's always a USPS option. My apartment complex has package lockers that can only be used by the USPS, so that's the only safe way to get packages delivered when I'm not home.
They're only good because they were repeatedly given an infinite amount of money for 2 decades by investors while their retail operations lost money so that they could nail the implementation and the promise that they would figure out how to make it profitable.
Amazon effectively leveraged investment capital to do exactly what they said they would do - innovate, learn into the market, and improve iteratively. From investors' perspectives (and probably consumers' perspectives as well), Amazon has succeeded brilliantly.
Starting in 1997 they bled money with mounting losses until about 1999, when they began to turn things around. The dotcom pop is clearly visible but they recovered almost immediately and their losses continued to shrink until about 2001-2002 when they became break even. From 2002-2011 they either made small profits or nothing, but that was obviously because they were growing at a rapid pace and putting all the money back into the business. Once AWS launches in 2006 (so about 10 years after day 1 in retail) profits start growing but then are back into the red around the time of the GFC+recession, and again in the 2012-2013 European recession. After that it's stratospheric profits.
How much investor money is "infinite money"? Somewhere between $8-$9 million before they floated on the stock market.
Obviously, investors who put money into their IPO have done extremely well and cannot claim they were shovelling money into a furnace, far from it.
The inflation in investment round sizes over the past 20 years has been staggering. I see nothing that suggests Amazon was unusual in raising so little money (comparatively speaking) before they went public.
Did they really nail the implementation? I still refuse to buy anything that would go on or inside my body from amazon because I'm worried about getting counterfeits.
Yeah, ebay has much better buyer protections unless the item is Fulfilled By Amazon (which carries a cost premium). eBay prices also tend to be better. If you're going to buy cheap chinese crap anyway, just cut out the middleman.
Finally, Amazon's marketplace is just not navigable. Their search is pathetically bad, and this is nothing new, it's been a common complaint for years. Some fairly massive amount of their traffic is inbound from Google searches like "some product amazon" just because of how pathetically bad it is. The only other reasonable way to navigate their site is if their similar product suggestions or "commonly bought together" happens to nail the item you were looking for.
I've had searches where adding an additional keyword that is in the product title will actually cause the product to disappear from the search. What in the actual fuck.
Yes! Amazon's search has been driving me crazy but it went from bad (loose interpretation of what I typed with a whole bunch of irrelevant stuff) to worse (adding more sponsored results, i.e. even less what I want).
Their recommendation engine for related prducts used to be nice but that's been replaced by sponsored products which lowers the quality.
Now, the only way I use Amazon's search is when I have a SKU or part number and type it in directly. But I also do that in Google and often find the same thing elsewhere at similar or less cost (including shipping, though to be fair it may take a day or 2 longer).
eBay's search is still one of the best for me, in that it respects the keywords I put in and allows for extended query syntax to really hunt something down (which then can be turned into a saved search).
One of the most creative things I found on eBay was tool rental. I needed a tool to replace the bearings on my washing machine, and a seller was selling one explicitely as a rental: tool was charged about $120, with $35 shipping. When done, sent it back for a refund. The "shipping" included the rental fee and shipping both ways.
Yeah, I specifically find ebay search to be very powerful and useful as well. It accepts (keywordA, keywordB) as an "or" syntax, -badkeyword as "not" syntax, and filtering for most of their internal functionality (eg auction/buy-it-now format, item location, item price, etc).
The one that they're missing that I really wish they would include is "multi item BIN" formats. People will list a $1 item so that they're the first result that comes up, and then the item you're looking for is high priced. The prices are in fact so high that I go out of my way to try and exclude these items using "not" keywords, setting a minimum price, and filtering to US only, which collectively get most of them.
I have a lot of saved searches for "rare" items that only get listed infrequently, or for items that I'm waiting to come down in price.
The contrast between the way those two sites handle their search is stark.
I personally find eBay to be much better for items that I can't buy from the manufacturer already. Individual sellers have reputations & reviews separate from product reviews, and those ratings are among the first things you're exposed to when interacting with a seller.
> Yeah, ebay has much better buyer protections unless the item is Fulfilled By Amazon (which carries a cost premium). eBay prices also tend to be better. If you're going to buy cheap chinese crap anyway, just cut out the middleman.
That's what I thought until I was scammed by a Chinese on eBay... after countless emails, calls, even police reports, eBay did not return the 800 dollars I lost... not sure if it's an isolated case but it was pretty frustrating.
It's interesting that they rolled this out as a thing, but didn't start retrofitting all of their Whole Foods with it. Does it have problems with grocery stores? How does it handle fruits by weight, etc.
Amazon probably doesn't want to radically rock the boat when it comes to Whole Foods at the moment. It is an established well-working business, and they don't want another wave of "WF went to shit after Amazon bought it out, just look at all those changes they've implemented!", given that Amazon's reputation has already been kinda questionable in the public eye recently.
Last Thanksgiving, I visited my parents in the town where I lived before college, and we went to the Whole Foods where we used to shop at all the time.
It looked basically the same, except that there were these huge, bright blue Amazon Prime ads everywhere. It felt vaguely dystopian—a store of my youth invaded by the giant tech monolith.
If Amazon is trying to not noticeably change Whole Foods, they're doing a pretty lousy job.
Well, i didn't say they weren't changing anything at all. Given how perturbed you are by those Prime ads that don't functionally affect anything, imagine the magnitude of the public outcry if Amazon implemented something as radical as "just walk out" tech at Whole Foods.
See, I was thinking of it the other way around. If you're going to change things, you might as well go all the way. Because it's not like they're fooling anyone right now.
If the end goal was to transform all WF stores in the near future, I agree. However, I don't think that is what's happening here. For that transformation to work well, the whole "cashier-less shopping experience" needs to be normalized with the general public, and that's where the brilliance of Amazon's strategy with this tech can be observed.
WF has already served Amazon well by being a test bed for grocery delivery optimization, no need to screw up a profitable existing business with any additional radical changes. That's what Amazon Go stores are for, and now they can sell that tech to other stores. Once the tech is mass-adopted, they can smoothly switch all WF stores to "just walk out" tech with very little complaints, as that's the experience people would be already used to at all the other stores
On the other hand, if they did pull off a seamless integration of the tech into WF, it would be a massive selling point. Amazon Go demonstrates that the tech can work in a store designed around it, WF would show that it can be integrated into an existing business. But they have no reason to rush and use themselves as the guinea pig if they can offload that risk onto literally anyone else. Moving WF over will be the signal that they consider the tech mature enough for large-scale businesses to consider.
>But they have no reason to rush and use themselves as the guinea pig if they can offload that risk onto literally anyone else.
Not only that, Amazon would be literally paid by others to take over Amazon's own risk. This is such a nice play all around, they just need to manage not screwing it up somehow. But execution never was a weakness for Amazon imo, so I bet it will mostly go smoothly.
What? You don't want to buy an Alexa smart microphone device?! But we'll give you one for free! Here! FREE ECHO MINI DOT THING! -aggressively hands over- LET US SPY ON YOU AT HOME!!!one!
maybe it's just a coincidence, but I've noticed all kinds of everyday things being out of stock (eg, brussels sprouts and lettuce) at whole foods since the purchase. I'm wondering if amazon is getting more aggressive with the JIT inventory strategy.
I'd guess that that one's down to increased usage of grocery delivery services, rather than logistical optimization.
If you've got a Whole Foods and a less-upmarket grocery store equally far from you, you're gonna get your staple foods from the less-upmarket store, and just go to the Whole Foods for the things only they carry.
But if you're making an online order with a fixed-overhead delivery fee from Whole Foods, you're not going to make a separate online order with a fixed-overhead delivery fee from the less-upmarket store; so you're going to end up ordering the staple foods from Whole Foods, too.
> you're not going to make a separate online order with a fixed-overhead delivery fee from the less-upmarket store
If I were doing this, I would be far more likely to make a separate order online than physically. It takes no effort to do it online, but to shop at more than one physical store is additional inconvenience.
Part of Whole Foods experience is the customer experience. The cashiers pack your bags and overall try to engage you in a conversation. The "just walk out" thing would make it less personable.
Based on the video below, it would seem there are a few bugs to work out. For example, never pick up a whisk at an an Amazon Go Grocery store unless you intend to buy it. You will always be charged. [1]
> How does it handle fruits by weight
Fruit aren't priced by weight. This is also covered in the same video.
I know they have scales in the produce section, but I don't think I've ever actually used one. It's something I'll do occasionally if I'm buying from a bulk bin, but fruit or vegetables I just grab however many I think I"m going to need.
I buy my produce "just in time", so I'm frequently using those scales to be sure that I've purchased as close to exactly what I need as possible for what I'm making that day. I don't want leftover produce.
For example, I made two apple pies the other day. The recipe calls for 2 lbs of apples each, so I bought 5 lbs of apples (to account for the weight loss from coring and peeling).
Jordan from Standard here. We absolutely believe that retailers will prefer to get this new technology from providers like us as opposed to Amazon, their biggest competitor.
So far Amazon has also not shown their technology deployed in an existing store, rather than an Amazon Go. We're actively working on being the first to demonstrate this. Stay tuned over the next couple of months.
I've used amazon go - the tech worked very well for me. They have at least 4 or 5 stores in San Francisco alone - I'd guess 20+ at least if you include Seattle or wherever else they are operating. I haven't see the go grocery store yet.
Can you give us a sense of how many transactions standard is doing every day with it's tech that's further along / more deployed than Amazon? At least the SF location I visited had steady traffic so Amazon is collecting some real data (selection a bit limited so go grocery interesting to me)
Amazon is certainly in the lead in terms of total locations. All of their locations are stores they own, however. The race right now is to show this tech working in existing stores, with a fairly light (aka scalable) install process. We have multiple installs in existing stores at the moment, running in "shadow mode" to confirm the accuracy is the system. These sites are predicting the carts of hundreds of people a day, and seeing good results.
And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this?
One of the big tech companies in the 80's demonstrated this. I think it was either IBM or AT&T/Bellcore. Essentially, it was just a scanner at the door that read RFID tags in each item, and your credit card.
This was back when RFID was still oh-holy-shit technology.
The reason I think AT&T might have been involved is that the video demonstration was very similar to AT&T "You will" series of commercials that aired around the same time.
That's not the same thing at all. Doing it with RFID is trivial. The hard part here is the backwards compatibility with a retail ecosystem that uses UPC barcodes rather than (expensive) RFID tags.
Doing it with RFID is surprisingly non-trivial even in the physical sense. That is the error rate of RFID bulk reads is small enough for opportunistic tracking of stuff, but mostly unacceptable for basing any kind of financial transaction on that.
Don't do a bulk read, then. Build RFID readers—and an RFID-blocking envelope, and a 3G or WiMAX radio—into shopping carts/baskets. Detect each item as it enters/exits the cart using the RFID reader inside the cart, and then use the radio to report it to the store, to sync the physical state of the cart/basket with an equivalent virtual shopping cart. Then, put an RFID tag on the outside of the cart/basket, which will be detected by the door scanner when you leave. Charge for what's in the virtual basket when the physical basket leaves the premises.
Yes, you'll have to recharge your shopping carts/baskets. Just design them to ensure they pass through charge (like a string of Christmas lights) when stacked together, so you only have to plug in (or have a cradle for) the bottom one (for baskets) or frontmost one (for carts.)
It's still a worse idea than using computer vision, if you've got that, but it's not something we couldn't have pulled off a decade or more ago.
The simple solution is to simply make the customer to scan the item when they put it into the basket. It might be somewhat counterintuitive but in the end it makes better read rate.
The amazon thing is obviously based on computer vision which in the hindsight makes sense. And makes more sense than our ideas that includes CV as one of the source into sensor fusion magic...
And for the idea of doing RF magic for RFID: you to some extent want to do that, ant then you will find out that random Chinese sector antenna solves the same problem (obviously with the fact that it is simply not practical/possible to track everything with RFID tag that goes through the warehouse gate)
Well it goes to show you that this isn’t really solving a burning issue at all. If it was, they would have thrown the cheap RFID tags on everything 30 years ago.
I'd be really impressed if any large supermarket chain (outside of the US) would be ok to be so tightly coupled to amazon for virtually no benefits compared to self checkout. It's like a lot of what SV is pumping out, half assed solution to non existing problems.
> In Poland most shops allows you to scan and pay for products in matter of seconds without any help. No lines, no hassle.
In my part of the US this is common as well, but there's almost always a line to use the scanners that is about the same as the line for the a human checkout clerk. So I almost always opt for the human.
Where’s the evidence anyone will actually use this thing? Maybe eventually. You can already do this at apple, but does anyone do it? Perhaps, they will get used to it in time, but i don’t know.
I do it at Apple, but afaik Apples system is based mostly on trust? You just scan and pay with your device, then walk out. Granted, I haven’t tried to steal so there could be more tech than I realize.
I do. I think in my last ten purchases from an Apple Store I've only not had a zero-interactivity experience once. And that was because a Genius had get a Thunderbolt 2 to USB-C cable from the back. Even then, once she handed it to me, I still checked out on my phone with the Apple Store app.
Looking at the status of American retail, not a chance. We put chips in credit cards 20 years too late, and to this day in major metro cities plenty of name brand stores have a little scrap of paper taped to the card reader telling you to swipe. No one likes chip readers unless you have a fetish for security, they are slow and fail before the rest of the credit card. Swiping is instant and works with the scrappiest of credit cards, and that's what people prefer when given the choice. Apple pay and other touchless systems are not in heavy use, either, and have also been around for years.
This is an industry with a lot of inertia, and customers are not going to be driving this change like a lot of optimists at amazon might expect. They will struggle when the tech isn't working right and prefer the old ways, as they do now.
Plus there is the rampant theft that will occur, unless you hire someone to stand there and man the door. And at that point you've spent millions on this fancy tech that your shareholders salivated over to have the same exact payroll overhead as you did when you had someone sitting there scanning items.
If this makes amazon and the dime a dozen clone startups some money, good for them, but I don't see this changing the world.
> Where’s the evidence anyone will actually use this thing?
Well, who knows how much interest will truly materialize, particularly given the data leaked to amazon, but the post claims/implies that retailers reached out to Amazon and were interested in licensing the technology.
This will destroy more adtech companies than you can imagine. Amazon will have so much of your shopping habits. They'll have even more than just one credit card company will be able to have...
We have to consider the question: “why not both?” Consider that Amazon, in addition to serving a high scale, high availability e-commerce website, also offers white label services for fulfillment, payment, and serving high scale, high availability websites. In other words Amazon provides, as a service, virtually every piece of infrastructure needed to deliver Amazon’s core business. So I wouldn’t infer that this is an either/or. At the very least I’d expect Whole Foods to adopt this service, for instance.
Technically Walmart did this in their Rogers, AR flagship store in the late 90s, but consumers found it awkward/error prone and didn’t use it much. I have a feeling Walmart shockingly enough was just to far ahead of the curve technology and culture wise (if memory serves, self checkout wasn’t even a common thing back then or if so, was just becoming one).
Walmart. But they only care about what lowers costs. They've been researching RFIDs and stufff like this since at least the early 00s, and they rolled a lot of it out in their shipping/transit network, but I'm guessing they have too much shrinkage/theft to worry about in most of their stores. No cost savings, so it doesn't happen.
Fear not! Yesterday I shopped at a big box grocery store where all I did was scan my cart with my phone, pay with the attached card, and walk out the door.
Most UK supermarkets offer this service. You need a store scanner that you pick up with the trolly. Scan everything, then pay and leave. You'll get stopped very occasionally for staff to check you aren't stealing. But they don't do much other than make you pay for things you haven't scanned. "Oh the kids put it in there without me noticing."
>And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this?
Isn't the better question, "where is the product"? Is it a gimmick?
This looks awesome, but until I see it in action, working flawlessly, outside of the Seattle/Silicon Valley nexus, I'm not sure there will be (or needs to be) any competition.
I’ve seen a lot of very intolerable lines in the suburbs. It’s not unusual for me to wait 15 minutes to checkout at Target or Costco and last December I remember a 25 minute line.
I think this is a product. There’s about six different grocery store within a fifteen minute drive from my house. I’ll switch to the first one to implement this system.
What about self checkout or just adding more lanes ?
This really doens't sound like a problem that needs amazon and "technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning"
> And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this?
Um, Walmart and most major grocery stores already have self checkout areas. So “wait in line to get served” isn’t quite the comparison. Most companies will give zero fucks about adopting this unless it becomes the expected norm.
I may be misunderstanding your argument, but I think the parent argument still applies whether you are getting served by a human or being served by a machine which has the same "one checkout at a time per person" kind of bottleneck that a human has.
Edit: The "scan your own cart" model is a more compelling counter-argument than the self checkout machines currently at Wal-Mart, as this can accommodate a much higher throughput.
This is just an observation that doesn't contribute meaningfully to discussion, but ...
Twenty years ago this web site would 100% have looked like an April Fool's joke.
Don't know what to make of that. Maybe it's that although retail feels almost exactly the same as it always has, under the hood lots of parts have really been moving, and I just haven't noticed?
The parallel observation is that when Gmail was announced it totally did seem like a prank. You're offering how much storage for free? for everyone? How?.
Huh, that actually looks kinda suspicious. Reuters has an article up [1] quoting an amazon VP about the launch, so it seems like the info is legit.
But i don't see any link to this justwalkout.com from anywhere on amazon.com, justwalkout doesn't pull in any content hosted on amazon.com, the reuters article doesn't reference it, and all the other tech blogs talking about this seem to just be referencing the reuters article.
It's possible someone at Amazon is just gauging interest as they do with their test press releases and one pagers. They may or may not move forward based on how much interest they get (i.e. serious emails)
GMail solved a thorny problem: convince users to browse the web while logged in, preferably with their real life identity. To then collect and aggregate an extensive personalized dossier of their online activity without any fear of legal repercussions. This is priceless.
Then just play the trends: how much space the median user actually uses, user adoption trends, planned storage capacity, storage cost. Possibly the whole GMail never used more than 1% of of Google's total storage capacity.
That may have been an upside, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the plan at the time. I don't think Google had the notion of "user accounts" before GMail was launched. I think the plan was more likely "serve ads via search engine results, but for email."
That's precisely the point. GMail gave Google user accounts, which made the cost largely immaterial.
The 24/7 global corporate surveillance network has it's roots in Sun and its "The Network is the Computer", as early as 1984. Hard to believe Google just stumbled into a trillion dollar business model two decades later.
I'm not saying Google isn't evil, but I don't buy this particular piece of conspiracy theory. Every major browser including Google Chrome is starting to phase out third-party cookies, which prevents exactly that kind of tracking.
Just a couple of years ago, Google was one of the major tech companies who were strenuously defending the use of third-party cookies. They're shifting to eliminating them (someday) solely because they were forced to. The other major browsers were committed to doing it, and it became clear that this could pose a threat to the dominance of Chrome if Chrome didn't follow suit.
But at the same time, Google (as well as the rest of the marketing industry) is working on replacing the functionality of third party cookies without having to use them -- thus negating the entire reason to restrict third party cookies.
Except that Google can essentially track individual Chrome installations and all the activity that happens on that, so blocking third party cookies doesn't necessarily mean that Google can't track you...
IBM viewed this tech seriously enough to be marketing it to the public in 2006. It wasn't a "Hey, we're making this." ad but more of an, "We're cool because we're working on this, sorta maybe." ad.
14 years later, it's still vaporware. There are a lot of fairly tough problems that need to be solved to make it work. Today, Amazon is probably better positioned to sucker/bully retailers into adopting their solution than IBM is. It remains to be seen if they can actually pull off the tech side of things though. IBM is not a company that's easy to laugh at.
I was with you until that last line. Maybe it's because I never saw IBM in its prime or because I only happen to hear about IBM when there's a ton of media spin on a product that never shows up as anything more than a gimmick (IBM has 5nm chips in 2017!!! Look at Watson!). I just don't find laughing at IBM to be that far-fetched of a concept.
Yeah with all the innovation it indeed seems like we are living in a fairy tale. 20 years ago it would be impossible to think that you can order stuff from an unknown location/seller using a piece of glass. And soon we'll have drones coming to our house with packages.
20 years ago was the year 2000. Amazon and eBay were founded in 1995.
Also: imagine you could write what you want on a ground up dead tree, drop it in a special box and a few weeks later, the item shows up. That's a catalog, and Sears was making them in the late 1800s. I bet there are older examples.
> imagine you could write what you want on a ground up dead tree, drop it in a special box
And then, later, we could also order by phone and credit card, just giving our card number over the phone (since we didn't expect to be dealing with or be surrounded by assholes, like nowadays on the IoA) and getting the items after a few days (since the standard Post was better organised than the pitiful mess it has become now).
If I set aside the 'unknown seller', which is not really unknown: Mid 80's, France: order something with your Minitel (terminal available free of charge) from any of the major mail-order companies, get it delivered in 48 hours.
People were thinking of that in the late 90s. During the dot com bubble people were predicting the end of physical retail stores and people leaving their house to shop. A few years later people were predicting the end of printed materials.
LOL. At first, I thought you were trashing their website. ... "cause these days, tech giants put way more energy into their April's fools day jokes than Amazon put into this website."
Also, that name, OMG, there are going to be so many protest signs that use this.
The last few times I've gone to my local pharmacy (Rite Aid) I've watched a single cashier operate more than one checkout registers at a time. She did this because it took so long to process payment and print a receipt -- e.g. while she waited for my payment to go through (via credit card) she'd ring up the next customer on another register.
She's trying to ring up the most customers per minute possible and using a second register helps her increase her checkout rate.
It's not unusual that I spend more time waiting to check out than I do actually shopping. I'd love solutions like "just walk out" since my experience lately seems to be something along the lines of "grab what I need and stand in line unnecessarily".
Whilst Amazon Go is cool, that's not an argument in its favour. That's purely a US specific screwup. In the rest of the world you can clear contactless transactions in a few hundred milliseconds with competent retailers; that's why it's possible to tap your way through the gates at busy London Underground stations. And retailers love contactless exactly because it's so fast and it lets them reduce staffing/handle more customers.
I don't know about your part of the US but it's now pretty common everywhere in Europe to have nearly unmanned retail stores. All the checkouts are self service. You can grab a portable scanner at the front, scan items as you walk around grabbing them and then tap your card at a checkout kiosk.
Amazon's implementation sounds even easier (no scanning required), but in terms of raw throughput it's probably only a bit better.
That still doesn't solve the problem of waiting while people get all their items scanned, and I doubt that countries outside of the US have managed to solve that one.
Imo there is nothing in terms of convenience and speed that can beat "just walking out".
Cannot speak for the whole country, but after living in cities on both coasts, I can say it is extremely widespread. The issue is that even with 10 self-checkout stations, there will be a queue at "normal" times of the day, as there are a lot of people shopping at any "normal" time. And that's not even a particularly large store I am talking about, it is a local QFC. I spend at least 5 minutes just waiting in line every time wanting to buy something. Not even mentioning the process of scanning, bagging, etc.
One cool thing about Amazon Go is that it actually sends you an email afterwards telling you how much time you spent at the store. Without failure, my overall times range between 30 seconds and 2.5 minutes. While for a regular grocery store, I would estimate it to be at the very least 10 mins for an equivalent amount of items purchased. Maybe it is my own quirk, but it deeply annoys me to spend time doing things in an inefficient manner, whereas I know I can do them much more efficiently AND with less effort.
Self checkout is nearly ubiquitous in US grocery stores, where I barely ever wait at all for checkout. It's rare in places like convenience stores or the large pharmacies (would you call it a chemist if it sells overpriced groceries too?)
Judging from visits to London, our grocery culture is different mainly in that we usually buy weeks of food at once. Some people still use checkers to help them efficiently get through a giant cart of food. And our grocery stores are often gigantic, maybe dozens of lanes of checkout side by side, where in Europe I often see maybe... two?
I've waited in lines in UK and European stores, (Fortnam during the holidays?), but rarely waited in grocery stores over there, even in places without self check. There's just much less foot traffic in any individual grocery because they're so much smaller.
But maybe I'm just comparing US suburbs with UK cities, not sure.
Most of the major supermarket or big box stores has self checkout. They will always have a few lines with staff but the majority is self checkout these days. A good portion of the people buy a huge amount of stuff at a time and the lines can get long. Typically the people with a few items tend to go to the self checkout line.
It seemed rare 3-4 years ago, but now Kroger, Publix, Walmart, Target, they all have ~6-12 s/c registers, sometimes at each end of the store (often so far apart a line forms at one, while the other remains empty).
There seem to be a lot of cashiers on weekends, but fewer overall. So many unused lanes, most of the year.
What waiting to get items scanned? I can't remember the last time I had to wait for that. (you're talking about people waiting in line for other people to scan their items, right?)
We have pretty close to instant transactions here in Australia but I every now and then I find a place where it takes 30-60 seconds for it to process. I think the issue is actually just the store has bad network coverage and the machine fails multiple times before it can send the transaction properly.
I believe they do some sort of local batching of transactions then settle them all at once. You can see this sometimes if you go shopping early in the morning and you're the first person to use a particular EFTPOS terminal for the day, the UI will show a few extra steps in the processing workflow.
I'm not sure how this would work. Surely they must have to contact the card company to process the payment as soon as it happens since they have to show the accepted/declined message before the customer walks off.
There are retailers in other countries and payment terminals that have implemented the self-checkout to be very close to "just walk out".
- no item weight confirmation
- no steps in-between trying to sell me things
- no annoying voice overs
- decent UX (navigation) for the 99% case
Here is how I pay in those stores:
- scan my item(s) placing them directly in my bag: taking ~1s per item
- navigate through 3 screens by hammering the [Next] button that is in the same spot on all these screens: takes less than 1s
- pay contactless with my creditcard: takes less than 1s
i duno where you live but at my local pharmacy there used to be 3 cashiers, now there are none (just 2 kiosks). a person is around but they seem to usually be doing something other than checking people out (just tending to the machines when there is, for example, an elderly lady using coins)
the first gen kiosks were pretty bad (slow, overly sensitive, no way to go back if you click the wrong thing, etc) but the current ones are solving those issues and have all but eliminated lines in my experience
I feel like self checkout kiosks already solve this. Commodotized Amazon Go tech is a minute improvement in convenience compared to traditional cashier -> self checkout.
Minor compared to self checkout seems understating the impact depending on where you are and how busy the store is. I find myself waiting in line for a self checkout regularly. (Target and recently Home Depot.) Compared to just walking out, this would save at least 5 minutes for each visit in my experience.
Absolutely not. The difference in waiting times between cashiers and the self checkout lane is minimal (as it obviously should end up). Self checkouts require a reasonable amount of time to go through, even without a queue (when there often is one at the shops near me). Simply walking in and out would be a massive change from self checkout for buying a small number of items.
Self checkouts allow paying with cash as well. Even more so than regular checkouts. I tend to just empty all of my low value coins in to the self checkout knowing a machine won't be pissed off about counting them all.
The crucial difference is self checkouts displace the labor onto the end user with more or less the same delay as a checkout. This will remove both the delay and the checkout work task.
It it just me or are people massively underestimating this? I feel like the impact of this will be close to the self driving car in terms of a vast rollout of massive new automation.
I've been to Amazon Go a few times, the small one in NYC, and the selection is underwhelming but the walk out experience is amazing. And since then I've fantasized about just walking out pretty much every time I'm in a grocery store. The technology really feels special, like a sudden vast improvement in something I never really even thought could be improved.
If there are two grocery stores to choose between, I would go further and/or pay a bit more for the one I can "just walk out" of.
Not only that stores could cut staff pretty much right away. Amazon could charge some fraction of the payroll reduction + processing fees and it would be a no brainer for stores to implement, especially as the number of competing stores increases.
People are talking in this thread about how there is some competition "in the works", but amazon has multiple live deployments already. People are talking about the obvious dystopian angle here (spying on your data). Personally I'd give any company all by buying habits if it means I can skip lines after buying the stuff.
Personally I think this is going to be huge, and I will be betting big on Amazon.
I don't want to criticize or undermine this initiative in any way but someone like me who frequently uses Safeway's self-checkout machines at my local grocery store, to me this just feels like overengineering. I never had any problems with self-checkout and am always able to quickly scan-and-pay within a couple of minutes when I visit the store once a week.
So if you close your eyes and visualize a grocery store experience where you put stuff directly into your tote bags or your backpack and walk right out, with 0 time spent on anything after you have everything you need, this doesn't seem like something completely beyond self-checkout to you?
I've used plenty of self checkout lanes too and it's roughly the same satisfaction as going in a cashier lane. It's still X + Y steps where X is the number of items you have an Y is payment related steps.
(It's possible that I just hate lines (and self checkout?) way more than other people)
>So if you close your eyes and visualize a grocery store experience where you put stuff directly into your tote bags or your backpack and walk right out, with 0 time spent on anything after you have everything you need, this doesn't seem like something completely beyond self-checkout to you?
Not at all. It seems like a tiny, infinitesimal even, improvement over self checkout. Waiting in line is annoying, spending a minute or two scanning groceries is not. At least in my area, self checkout moves fast enough that I rarely have to wait for one to be available.
Now imagine you are shopping for a family of six for an entire month and you have two carts bursting with groceries. Still think it's only a tiny improvement?
No, I think it's a nightmare, because these stores are ridiculously small and don't have multiple carts and a parking lot. They're concept stores in urban areas that they can't monetize effectively
In the Netherlands, the two leading supermarket chains have handheld barcode scanners. You can walk around the store, scan whatever you put in your bag as you do it, and then the cashier just reads your scanner and charges you.
There are random spot checks of course, but I don't think this would work elsewhere, not with the high level of citizen trust that there is here. I'm sure they lose some money to people enticed by easier stealing, but the flow of people is so much faster that it's probably worth it many times over.
> this doesn't seem like something completely beyond self-checkout to you?
No, not really. It's more convenient and faster, sure, but it's not an incredibly significant sort of thing. And the cost/benefit ratio of it (considering the privacy implications) is nowhere near favorable enough for this to seem attractive to me.
I have never had a pain free experience with any grocery store's self check out. I suppose I am not proficient at scanning and placing items on the scale/bagging area one at a time. Or at following the prompts to swipe my credit card at the right moment. Self check out frustrates me to the point where I avoid it whenever possible.
What I mean is that people are looking at self-driving as the next huge thing in automation that is "around the corner" for some definition of that time frame.
But these stores exist today and make traditional cashiers obsolete in no uncertain terms, potentially across the entire brick and mortar retail industry, and the response is "eh, there's already self checkout lanes".
It really feel to me like one of those moments where people shrug off the iphone when it first launches.
SDCs exist today in limited scale as well. This announcement isn't more momentous than Waymo's recent one, it's just less baked into our thinking that retail jobs are on the chopping block like driving jobs.
But a much much more limited scale and years away from widespread usage. It's one ideal city hard coded into the technology vs tens of real stores using the real technology that could be installed in a 3rd party store today.
I could be wrong but the phrasing of the FAQ on on the information page seems to suggest 3rd party stores using this tech could start popping up in a few months.
To me the Waymo announcement would be as momentous if they said:
> How long will it take to install [self driving] technology in a [car]?
> The installation of the technology can take as little as a few weeks from the time we have access to your [car].
I suppose the page doesn't directly explain when they will start the installations. But from the phrasing, I wouldn't be surprised if we hear an announcement of some sort of launch plans with a partner store in the next Month. It seems relatively imminent. Of course, I think there were other Amazon Go related announcements that didn't pan so who knows.
My biggest problem with this is that from what I can tell, the only way to know how much you're going to be automatically charged (as well as what items the tech thinks you're purchasing), is to go to a kiosk in the store and get a receipt. Which seems to completely defeat the convenience of just walking out in the first place.
I wouldn't feel comfortable just walking out without knowing how much I'm going to be charged, so this tech is essentially useless to me.
Having used Amazon Go once as a tourist, it was frictionless only because of the Amazon app. You can scan the app instead of a credit card (your card is already linked to Amazon for payment), and when you leave the app tells you what you bought. In my case it thought I bought a drink when all I did was browse the options, so when I saw this in the app, I deleted the drink from the receipt by saying I didn’t get one, and it corrected the receipt without any human interaction that I could see. The app was essential for me to go back, otherwise I’d assume the system was inaccurate and not worth the trouble.
But, and I know I'm apparently in a minority here...
I don't want an app for my grocery store.
I do my shopping spread between 4 different grocery stores depending where in the area I'm closest to, what specifically I need, etc.. and I don't want an app for any of them. I already get pestered about loyalty cards, now I'm going to get pestered about installing my local Rite-Aid's mobile app?
It doesn't even need to be a special app, it could just be another Apple Wallet/Android Wallet card. If you tried the Amazon Go app, it is literally just an app that displays a QR code that you use to scan when entering the store. That's literally it, no notifications, no other extra functionality, nothing. As soon as Apple Wallet/Android Wallet integrate it, it will become even more seamless.
A good example for people familiar with electric car charing is the ChargePoint integration. I have the app, but I never open it, and I don't even really need it (as I only use it for rare circumstances where I am in an unknown area and need to find a charging spot asap). Whenever I want to charge my car at a ChargePoint station, I just open up the ChargePoint card in Apple Wallet, NFC scan it, and that's it. It already knows that the ChargePoint card is associated with my account, so I can later open the app and see how charged my car is, what's the charging rate at the moment, my billing history, etc. If I don't have the app, I can check it on the web just as well.
A QR code can be displayed as a saved image. The Amazon Go app on Android requires the following permissions:
Identity
find accounts on the device
add or remove accounts
Contacts
find accounts on the device
Location
approximate location (network-based)
precise location (GPS and network-based)
Wi-Fi connection information
view Wi-Fi connections
Other
receive data from Internet
view network connections
create accounts and set passwords
full network access
run at startup
use accounts on the device
control vibration
prevent device from sleeping
That's actually not as bad as some other apps, but horribly insecure from my perspective. I avoid all such apps myself, and will do so as long as I can. I'll never know what an app like that is doing, and that is unacceptable on MY phone.
I notice it's also labeled as displaying ads. And this is Amazon's debut offering. It's not going to get better from here as they get more adoption. I do not want this app on my phone.
Everything I know about about the mobile ecosystem tells me that if an app/card/integration is required for an unrelated service, it's going to go downhill over time. Everything I know about Amazon means that they are definitely going to eventually be advertising to me and pushing notifications and 'reminders' and whatever -- because they already do with the online store.
Even the charging example getting brought up as proof of this working: I can't imagine signing up for a special credit card that was required to fill up my car at a gas station. That's not innovative. The current system is I can use any credit card, or cash, or (increasingly) mobile pay at any gas station without any account with no decrease in quality of service. And with the current system, someone else can borrow my car without also needing to borrow my credit card or phone.
I'll stick my neck out and predict that over the next 3-5 years, ChargePoint's app and web interface are going to get progressively worse, and progressively more invasive. This is based purely on the knowledge that they require an online account and special credit card just to refill a car. I don't think there's any reason to have that business model other than a plan to eventually leverage the card/account in invasive ways.
They require a special credit card? I connected my usual credit card from my bank to the account half a year ago and have been using it successfully with Apple Wallet just fine.
I'm just going off of their FAQ[0]. I'll trust you as someone who actually uses the service.
Regardless, even linking my own cards, this is still kind of a crazy concept, isn't it? It's still strictly worse on nearly every single axis than a normal charge/gas station, where I can still just as easily pay with platforms like Apple/Google Wallet, but also with a spare twenty if I've left my phone at home or if I'm loaning my car to someone else.
It's very difficult to come up with a business model that says, "you must only pay us or interact with us in a special, tracker-friendly way" that isn't going to eventually become profitable by selling a lot of data or targeting you with ads. There are some exceptions to this rule, but they are very few and far between, and Amazon (and I suspect ChargePoint as well) are not among them.
In fact, you can already look at ChargePoint's privacy policy[1] and see that they're carving out terms that allow them to share your personal/location/purchase data with affiliates and partners, as well as to use your information to deliver tailored ads.
I just checked the iOS version, and it requires none of those permissions. The only ones I have noticed were access to use cellular data + background app refresh. No contacts access, no location access, nothing. I guess the devs must have just went all out on the Android version.
The closest I have to this today is the grocery store nearest me - I walk in, I pick up a scanner (you can use an app on your phone but I use their scanner because my phone locks immediately with a passphrase when unused so it's ghastly for this purpose) and I just wander about scanning items and putting them into bags. The scanner shows its estimate of the price paid, which in my experience is always 100% accurate but I guess "estimate" is needed because legally the shop is not promising to sell at this price yet. I walk to the exit and scan the exit and give back the scanner, it tells me the final price which is the same as that estimate and then I pay with my card and walk out.
This is still extra steps compared to "Just walk out" but it's close. There is no interaction with store employees (which suits some friends who struggle to do human interaction on "bad" days) for example, this store would seem to work just fine without any employees although of course it's a huge grocery store so it has dozens doing various things and couldn't in fact function without some.
The really nice optimisation of course is to get rid of the money. If you stop caring about trying to make the numbers add up and just rely on people going "Huh, I only need two cabbages, why would I take sixty cabbages? What am I going to do with sixty cabbages?" then this is all much simpler. But I think even Amazon doesn't expect to deploy this to a culture where that's realistic.
When I last used one of those systems, I found it to be reliable, as you said. And to keep people honest, they'd randomly pick shoppers to go through a regular checkout, which is both understandable and annoying.
I used something like this deployed to Coop stores in Denmark. It's a nightmare to use and the random check pissed me off enough so I deleted the app and decided never to use it again.
Try shopping with a little kid and using one hand on your phone and being randomly checked when there are 20 people waiting before you. This is not working in the current version of the technology.
We used to have that in some of our supermarkets years ago, but they've all disappeared over the years. It's all a mix of self-help checkouts/human checkouts now. Not sure why.
One of my local grocery stores has these mobile scanners and I strongly prefer it. I’ll go slightly out of my way to hit this store instead. While I am loathe to give Amazon more data/consumer insight and see this as massive consolidation play, I suspect people will, once accustomed to it, totally normalize this and not look back.
As long as the process for getting refunds is frictionless and well-implemented (perhaps similar to Prime Now), then if you can afford holding the charge on your credit card for a few days, this doesn't really seem like a problem. The process becomes: go to the store, pick up what you want, and then at some later point take a quick look at the "receipt" for verification, quickly flagging anything that seems off.
With Prime Now, you get your groceries delivered and pay for them in advance. Once in a while, you don't get an item, get the wrong item, a rotten piece of fruit, or an expired bottle of milk. When this happens, you simply go to the app where every item is listed, and follow the quick prompts to get a refund. You can optionally give a reason for asking, but in my experience they don't actually seem to care; in fact, whenever I've left a comment that, for example, one of the ten oranges I ordered was bad, they've always refunded me for _all_ the oranges on my order. I assume this is because the number of refunds is low enough relative to the number of purchases that they can afford to just always refund, keeping the customer happy enough.
If this is how it ends up working, then I'd gladly trade standing in long lines at the store for just walking out and reviewing my purchases later. The tracking part is still a bit creepy, though.
Do you memorize all the time whether you grabbed two or three bags of chips or exactly how many cans of beer etc?
How do you prove you didn't buy something? Or will they just accept your word? If anyone can just say whatever, then people will just ask for refunds of stuff. Will they check the footage in each case? But maybe it can work in the US. It sure as hell won't work in many other countries, where people look for loopholes all the time.
> How do you prove you didn't buy something? Or will they just accept your word? I
I'd imagine it's similar to the heuristic Amazon uses today with their A-Z Customer Guarantee.
If you request a lot of refunds for a single trip, or have a history of requesting refunds, your individual risk score goes up, and the hoops you jump through to get a refund increase.
Also for retail grocery stores now, loss prevention is already an issue.
Right now, a person can take an item off the shelve and hide it, leaving only security cameras and human personnel to watch for theft.
Adding in amazon's technology would be additional layers of defense.
How does amazons tech add defense? You still need human personnel to do anything about theft. People shoplifting don't care if the door is beeping while they walk out and disappear.
Without amazon tech, you take an item off the shelf, hide it, and leave. There are cameras with loss prevention staff monitoring the feeds, and in some stores, sensors that trigger an alarm upon leaving.
With amazon tech, in addition to manually monitored cameras, you add AI monitored cameras, and sensors on shelves to detect an item has been taken.
Without Amazon's tech stores rely on staff members witnessing the item being hidden.
With Amazon's tech, the item is taken and marked for payment as soon as it's removed.
>Do you memorize all the time whether you grabbed two or three bags of chips or exactly how many cans of beer etc?
Honestly, yes. What I worry more about is how well the names of items on the receipt actually match up to the products. From the summer I worked as a grocery cashier, I can tell you that people often end up confused at items on the receipt that they actually bought.
Combine that with mistaken items on the receipt and some number of more trusting people will just assume it's just a weird labeling of something they did buy and move on.
They'll extend you a varying degree of trust based on your burgeoning Amazon social credit score (taking into account your actual credit score as well I'm sure)
If there are enough kiosks to avoid a line, always getting the receipt is still a huge improvement over scanning, even if it falsifies the "just walk out" bit.
Another potential alternative for the anxious (and I definitely include myself) is an app showing up-to-the-second billing state on the smartphone screen. At a glance, usability issues seem hard but doable.
This is the "lame - no wireless, less space than a nomad" take.
Are the prices not listed on the individual items?
Purchasers make decisions on a product by product basis, not based on the total.
How often are you at the checkout and say "Wait, HOW MUCH is my bill? never mind then, going to go put some things back."
Sure, it happens, but it's a 0.0001% use case.
edit: OK, fair play to everyone who responded and said this is a common use case if you're poor. Not sure how relevant the food stamps argument is here, since this is an automatic pay and checkout system.
But, remember - this requires a credit card and an app. As you put things in your basket, your app shopping cart is also updated, and you can track your running tally.
I was a cashier in college for several years. Your scenario happens far more than 0.0001% of the case. It's fairly common amongst poor people. Then there are items that aren't acceptable for use by food stamps and must be paid for separately. Then there is WIK and trying return WIK items for cash refunds. You also have people who misread the labels. Then there are items that aren't in the right place and the label says a price different than what the register says. For instance, "Cambell's Tomato Soup" can is misplaced in the "Cambell's Healthy Alternative Tomato Soup" location. Most people don't carefully read labels of the items on the shelf. They just assume that the label under the item is correct.
Then this solution sounds like a huge improvement. Instead of getting to the register and finding out you grabbed the wrong thing or overspent, which is a huge inconvenience to you and the other people in line, you can now track everything as you go.
Put a can of soup in your basket. Oops! The alert I set up for items that aren't covered by Food Stamps just fired. Let me see what the issue is. Oh! I just got an alert because I went over my budget, let me review my items and figure it right away.
And even if you don't have a smartphone/app, the process of going to a kiosk to review your order will be much faster than at a register. Walk up to the kiosk and it instantly shows what's in your basket, with a total and flags for non-Food Stamp items. Now you can go swap things out or put things back and the whole interaction only took a second and was must less of a commitment than going through a checkout lane.
What you say seems plausible and I agree with it. I was responding only to the belief that not having enough money at checkout is 0.0001% of the cases.
To add. When I was poor and in college I definitely had a few instances where I had to put something back because the total was more than I could afford.
Hopefully the same tech used to measure when someone takes or replaces something on the shelf can be used to monitor when stuff is in the wrong spot, making stocking easier.
Amazon wants to spread this to more than just their stores. It's a mild problem now but most things are when new tech is introduced. Accessibility doesn't matter when only a few sites are on the web but becomes critical when the web is the default way to access information.
The Amazon Go I used to visit was maybe 200 square feet in size but had 4-5 people stocking and moving things around. And apparently there are others in the back assisting the cameras and making sandwiches and whatnot.
Yeah - actually, it does happen often enough... I'd say it's much higher.
I know a lot of HN is full of people who don't pay attention to prices (for whatever reason - probably the inordinate amount of obscenely high incomes) - but it's really common outside of this crowd.
When I was poor - I thoroughly examined prices and only bought things that were on sale. If it rang up and wasn't the price that it said it was - I put it back. An example in my mind would be something like a block of cheese being $12 instead of $10. It's only $2 but it's also $2 that I was not willing to pay. Sometimes the staff at the store were not removing the old sale tags - thus it looked like it was on sale but it wasn't.
In MA it's even better: if a grocery store item was labeled as $10 and rang up as $12, you'd just pay $2. The rule is that the item is free if it's less than $10 and $10 off if it's more than $10 (although this only applies to one item; you can't just go grab 20 of them).
Stores have problem with pricing all the time. If you don't look at your receipt when buying things at the grocery store, you are going to be overcharged sometimes. Especially at stores that don't have a "Over charged and you get it free" policy. Pricing problems are even more common when a new store opens. This tech is going to make mistakes all the time for quite awhile. I would definitely want to see a list of the items and prices the system charged me for before I left the store.
>How often are you at the checkout and say "Wait, HOW MUCH is my bill? never mind then, going to go put some things back."
That's a pretty common occurence for poor people. If you only have $70 and your bill comes to $72 because you did the mental math wrong you're gonna have to put something back.
Are you in the US? Because in the US it happens more often than elsewhere because you can't actually know the full price until you check out due to taxes not being included in the price on the box/shelf. Plus, especially with groceries, some items are taxed and some aren't in some states.
I'm more concerned about whether the store system gets my order right than whether I do. What if it, e.g., mistakes a can of soda for a 12-pack? Three hundred times on the order?
FWIW, I've been using Amazon Go stores regularly for a while and have never had any issues.
There's a link to dispute the receipt should something happen, right on the receipt itself. Now this is specifically Amazon Go app, but I would expect it to be same for other retailers.
Edit: I see that this is a little bit different than Go stores. It's far less convenient, but you can still get the receipt in your email by visiting a kiosk it seems.
Agreed. I feel like the point of this is to separate the buyer from the notion of total price. They may as well change the unit from dollars to "credits".
Given that the exact timestamp of when the system thinks an item is picked up is known, it should be trivial to review a 5-second clip and flag it as correct or not, training the ML model at the same time.
You've gotta be kidding me. The vast majority of Americans are constantly managing a battle between their means and their desires. The total bill matters immensely.
> Not sure how relevant the food stamps argument is here, since this is an automatic pay and checkout system.
Not sure why you feel the need to say that anyone who is conscious of their grocery budget is irrelevant to an automatic system? You don't say this, but that basically implies that anyone who does so is 'beneath' this tech/convenience.
just an observation, but it is pretty obvious you have never been poor or interact with poor people. That situation is a lot more common than you would think.
And how often do you stop your checkout clerk and tell them to stop scanning because you've exceeded N number of dollars? Once you've pulled your cart up to the checkout line, I'm betting you've most likely settled on what you want to buy.
I've seen people do just that often enough. They'll sometimes sort their items in order of descending importance, and ask to stop when the total exceeds some amount.
I don't want to say the "p" word and spark a huge social justice flame war, but a lot of comments in this thread are so obviously speaking from a place of financial advantage.
In response to your comment in particular, yes, I have done that. Not often, but it has happened often enough, and only a few dollars each time. Do you think people whip out Excel and keep a running tally of every item in their carts?
>Are the prices not listed on the individual items?
This is not aimed at deanCommie, but I just want to comment on the massive cognitive dissonance in effect when the issue of listing tax-included prices on individual items in America is raised.
Do none of those arguments hold anymore? Why? Because it isn't European tourists asking the question?
European VATs are routinely much higher than any state sales tax in the US.
I can't prove it, but I suspect this is directly related to the fact that in the US system, we see the tax on every purchase.
I admit it's annoying to not have a single number to work with, having to juggle sticker price and real price sucks (the same argument applies to tipping).
But sales taxes are regressive and I don't want them to creep upwards indefinitely. A compromise would be to always display both prices, and make the price-at-register larger.
Absolutely, large swaths of the population can't do simple mental arithmetic like this at all.
The US system discriminates against those people, no denying it. That said, I'm sure our European friends are absolutely drooling at the thought of a 7% VAT...
It's just part of the price, you don't really notice.
Like I do sometimes, but then I consider VAT policy somewhat interesting, in that it specifies the "essentials" (VAT is not charged on these) of what a tax authority thinks one should have.
But most Europeans tend not to think about it on a daily basis, because it's baked into the price.
Legally VAT isn't about essentials, although luxury taxes which pre-dated VAT were often specified this way.
VAT is just a tax on Value Added like it says, and the exclusions targeting items you see as essential aren't focused on somebody's idea of what's essential but are the result of various lobbying. That is, it was not the goal of the tax system to encourage petite women to buy clothes intended for children nor to punish the largest children (or their parents) with more expensive clothes that's just the consequence of a lobbied-for exemption for kid sizes.
So "But it's an essential" is a useful emotional tactic but has no legal implications for VAT.
If you live in the San Francisco Bay area, sales taxes in SF are 8.5% Tax rates in Oakland are 9.25%. South San Francisco: 9.75% Mountain View: 9% Humboldt County: 7.75% Sonoma: 8.75%
The mental effort is not in the calculation but in figuring out what the tax rate is where you are. There really is no excuse for retailers not listing "tax-included" prices.
Unfortunately the current system doesn’t exactly work in real time (sometimes it can take a while for a receipt to appear in the app) but I don’t think that’s a fundamental limitation. I also don’t think this is a major concern though; so long as there’s still price tags (which there are) and it’s easy to dispute mistakes in the app I don’t think most people will really have a problem with it.
I think the price tag only makes sense when tax is included on them. Things are taxed differently in different places, and sometimes people are tax exempt (in the US). But without the tax on the price tag, it’s literally impossible to know how much you’re going to pay (this is why I love living in the EU).
If my experience with Amazon hubs is anything to go by, the store employees will not be empowered to make any decisions or help you with anything and will direct you to call the customer-service number, and the customer-service people will not be empowered to fix any pricing errors on the spot.
When I've used to Amazon Go store, it has usually taken a while for the app to update with a receipt. Last time I went to the new, bigger store it was about an hour before they had the receipt available.
My receipt was in the app shortly after (I walked about two blocks and checked). I think it took longer for an email to show up, but can't recall exactly
More likely, there's a work queue and sometimes it gets a bit backed up or falls a little behind while autoscaling resources kick in. Having fully dedicated capacity for something that's handled asynchronously, fluctuates with time, and can tolerate many minutes of processing delay would be a waste of money.
It's Amazon, to me it seems more likely they are tuning their ML with human input than they somehow need an hour to spin up AWS for their shiny new baby.
You'll do that the first 5 times, then start to feel OK with it, and not do it any more. I felt the same about ordering fruit & veg for home delivery. Nowadays I don't even think about it any more, except when people who don't get groceries delivered say they don't trust they won't get the wilted ones.
> My biggest problem with this is that from what I can tell, the only way to know how much you're going to be automatically charged (as well as what items the tech thinks you're purchasing), is to go to a kiosk in the store and get a receipt.
You only need to use the kiosk once per credit card (to enter your e-mail address). From the page:
> If shoppers need a receipt, they can visit a kiosk in the store and enter their email address. A receipt will be emailed to them for this trip. If they use the same credit card to enter this or any other Just Walk Out-enabled store in the future, a receipt will be emailed to them automatically.
I’d expect amazon to email you a receipt with an easy way to dispute payments. I realize this is not the same as seeing the aggregate cost at the time of purchase but I’m skeptical this alone will create lots of friction in ppl adopting this.
To me, the biggest thing that has kept me from trying it is that I need to open my app and scan a QR code. Looks like they’re addressing this by left you swipe your card.
I mean, you do it a single time and your email is registered. Just like square. This is standard practice at this point and the inconvenience factor is eliminated pretty much immediately.
No way does that completely defeat the convenience. To just walk up and put your email in, is even much easier than ordering at kiosks at something like mcdonalds
That's the point of this technology - to increase impulse buying.
Credit cards purpose is that it hides from you how much money you have left. If you were paying in cash and see how much money you have left in your wallet, you're more likely end up not purchasing a given item.
This is one step further, since you now don't know how much you're paying (unless you calculating the cost in your head, which most people don't do) and typically you'll know once you get a CC statement.
Note that the kiosk doesn't print the receipt, it e-mails it, which makes it even harder to instantly see what you've paid.
You won't have to pay for cashiers but you will have to still pay for people stocking, security when people inevitably try and beat this system, customer service for when old people without cellphones get confused, etc. Maybe you shave off one minimum wage worker off your payroll, for the cost of however much amazon licenses this tech to you.
If I was the owner of the Store I would put a security guy to validate that it was paíd, if not then don’t let them put of the Store. I’m a tech guy but if it was my store I would like to double check somehow. From a security perspective it’s great to only let people in with credit and also I would be able to somehow track who was trying to do something wrong.
I don't think it's a lot to ask that I'm informed how much I'm going to be charged before I pay for something, which is the process for every sale I make currently works.
What if the item is marked as on sale but the database hasn't been updated so I don't get the sale price?
What if the price on the item is correct but someone fat fingered the price in the database?
What if a different customer moved an item from one shelf to another so the price on the shelf is for a different product?
What if I want to know the total with tax?
What if a camera sees me pick up a $500 item to look at but doesn't see me put it back on the shelf?
I don't want to go home, wait an hour+, see I've been mischarged, and then have to spend a week waiting for a refund to process.
I bet people said the same thing about credit cards — “how do I know there won’t be an error that causes my credit card bill to be wrong at the end of the month? I’ll stick with cash thank you very much”
I mean, until the technology had been proven, I think that's a valid question to ask.
Plus, when credit cards were introduced, you were still given the opportunity to agree upon the total on which you'd be charged, before you were charged. That's all I'm asking for with this.
I have to imagine that all of those will be rare enough situations that you don't really need to worry about it.
Many of them happen when you're checking out in person too.
You can simply go to the receipt kiosk every time if you're worried about being charged incorrectly.
In the United States taxes are not included on the sticker price. As a result adding up the total price of a purchase can be tricky.
However, I don't think this technology will be used extensively by people who purchase a large quantity of products at a time. Instead, this will be catered to the times when someone needs to pick up 5 or less things at a store. In this instance, these customers are not typically price-sensitive about what they need.
In certain places, tax is not added for certain goods. For example, in Seattle food is not taxed, unless it is prepared, like fast food or deli counters.
This is also routine in Europe where tax is included in the advertised price. Here for example the price shown for your hilarious Xmas sweater is inclusive of tax, the price shown for your toddler's equally hilarious sweater is not, because it's tax exempt (clothing for kids isn't taxed) and so in both cases the displayed price is the price you'll pay.
We added a sugar tax, so the sticker price for beverages like original Coke went up, but similar zero sugar products (Coke Zero, Pepsi Max) did not. Of course some stores just raised the before-tax price to capture the difference as profit, and others just eliminated sugary drinks. So... a mixed result.
The EU's focus is that consumers always pay what the sticker price says. So, no "plus tax", no "shipping fees not included" on items that unavoidably have to be shipped to you, no "service fees" no "card fees" nothing like that. I think even if you don't actively like this, you can see the point of this approach.
Would it be easier to get consumers angry about taxes if the tax wasn't "baked in" ? Maybe. But it's not as though it has proved impossible to campaign against, for example, tax on tampons or even toilet paper.
$2.99 at 6.5% tax is $3.18 (after rounding). Buy two and your total cost is $3.37. The government don't not want to be cheated out of that penny. (it adds up over all the people buying stuff)
I genuinely can't tell if you are being serious. If you are being serious, then how do you account for the behaviour of the customer possibly changing based on how the price is displayed (i.e including or excluding taxes etc.)
Since in the US tax is traditionally never included in any state (exception: gasoline is always advertised with all tax), consumers are not changing behavior. I suspect there are a few who split purchases knowing the above, but for the most part few people do.
Also, you seem to be putting more thought into this than our government has.
The cash registers at a normal store has to calculate the tax on items, so I don't see why this would be very hard for other computer systems to do. It will know where you are.
Yes. Amazon will know every item you buy, how much, and when. But not much different than grocery store discount cards already used by most everyone for decades. I'm sure that info is sold, traded around, and aggregated.
They will have data on how people walk around the stores, in what order, what shelves they look at, what items they take off and put back. What they put back and rather take as an alternative instead. How long they ponder before picking an item. Etc. etc. so much data to mine for advertisers and marketers to manipulate people into spending more.
Grocery stores also use cameras to see how customers behave. I have not heard of them connecting them to face recognition systems, but I would not be surprised if they do.
I agree that this is another increase in the invasion of privacy that will probably end in a bad place. We need laws to prevent these systems, not just a few people holding on to scraps of privacy with desperate measures, like not buying a new car.
This post looked kind of weird to me so I looked up the whois, it's registered to godaddy. Which is odd because it is not the same registrar as amazon.com or aws, and aws operates a domain registration service so I can't imagine a real amazon service would use godaddy. Combined with the fact that there's no concrete plans set in place, it seems really fake.
If someone else had registered the name at GoDaddy before Amazon wanted it (it was registered in 2013), and then Amazon bought it from them, would Amazon transfer it to their normal registrar right away or let it stay where it is until it is time to renew?
Some registrars don't allow you to transfer the domain away from them for a period of time after transferring ownership. If they acquired the domain recently that could be the reason.
Also, not sure if genuine mistake or sneaky "clickbait": The video has its `video_poster` image that's eerily similar to a YouTube screenshot, though the video itself is hosted on Amazon's servers, not YouTube.
Most of their other domains seem to be registered with MarkMonitor Inc. domain registrar.
Even if they recently bought this domain and it was pushed to one of their GoDaddy accounts, you think they would immediately initiate a transfer to MarkMonitor to put it in their portfolio of managed domains.
In July of 2019, the domain had a coming soon page on it, that was in German:
> In Just Walk Out-enabled stores, shoppers enter the store using a credit card. They don't need to download an app or create an Amazon account.
But you may as well. By giving them a CC# you're allowing Amazon to spy on you anyway -- and that's not even mentioning the copious surveillance in such stores in the form of cameras and behavior detection.
> If shoppers need a receipt, they can visit a kiosk in the store and enter their email address.
Oh, and if you want a receipt, you'll have to give Amazon your email address, too, which allows them to more easily tie your real-world identity and activity to the profile they already have on you.
This sort of thing is a privacy disaster. I wouldn't set foot inside a store that does this.
> But you may as well. By giving them a CC# you're allowing Amazon to spy on you anyway -- and that's not even mentioning the copious surveillance in such stores in the form of cameras and behavior detection.
Ha! They already have a decade of my purchase history from being a Prime customer and I shop using an Amazon Credit Card. They've got everything they need and I don't mind.
Few people would be bothered by something like this. If they would be bothered, we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases.
> we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases.
In my area, anyway, a huge outcry happened when these programs began to be adopted. Even now, eyeballing people checking out at the local shops, I'd say that only half of people (at most) are using loyalty cards. And many people I personally know who use loyalty cards do so in a manner to subvert the data collection (usually by having one loyalty card that is used by many people).
So it seems to me a substantial percentage of people really are bothered by them.
I don't use a loyalty card at any of the stores I shop at, and anecdotally, there's about a 50% chance that if I say "no" when the cashier asks if I have a card or want to create an account, I will later on discover that they've used a store code to give me the same discount.
This is without any prompting on my end, I never ask a cashier to do this for me.
So apparently it's common enough that some cashiers on-instinct just stick a store card in whenever someone says "no". It's common enough that none of them look at me surprised when I refuse.
Really you only have to use a (loyalty card, credit card) pair once for them to correlate all your purchases. But even then, I bet (store ID, name from credit card) is sufficiently unique in many cases to identify you.
Ah, something that tracks you based on appearance, and can later do so outside stores, is very different from a keychain fob that you can register with 555-867-5309.
I, for one, won’t ever go in an Amazon Go store. If other stores implement this tech without an opt-out, I will either start shopping in a ski mask or go without.
Just FYI, the local area code and Jenny's number (867-5309) is a default that exists for most loyalty programs. So if you don't want to be tracked you can use that. I've heard that this was implemented for military folks who tend to be a lot more transient than regular locals.
> So if you don't want to be tracked you can use that.
Or just not use anything at all. Or do what I do, and prefer shopping at stores that don't have a loyalty program. In my area, stores that have loyalty programs also have higher prices so that the "discount" from the loyalty card makes the price roughly the same as at similar stores that don't have a loyalty program.
So I go to the stores that don't have one. That's not only better for privacy, but is more frictionless and comes with no price penalty.
> Ah, something that tracks you based on appearance, and can later do so outside stores, is very different from a keychain fob that you can register with 555-867-5309.
That's a fair argument, but I think Amazon has enough about me that what you're suggesting is a minor concern relative to what they already have.
I'm much more concerned about my Amazon search history getting leaked as a .txt file than I am about Amazon using imagery of me to train their ML models.
> we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases
You'd be surprised how few people actually ever think about the motivations behind such loyalty programs. If you asked, they'd probably say it's good for the shop as it keeps us going to the place where we get discounts though these cards instead of the competitors (hence, "loyalty"). Most of them most definitely don't know how valuable that data is and how it can be used and for what purposes.
Not sure why you're harping so hard on the privacy front in regards to those statements. The quotes you've chosen (and the linked website) make no attempt to say that they are privacy related at all. The purpose of mentioning that they don't need to download an app or create an account are about mentioning the level of effort that patrons have to go through to sign up (as compared to current Amazon Go stores that do require an app and account).
If you want to talk about privacy, it's always a valid concern in this day and age, but your comment feels like you're building a strawman.
> The quotes you've chosen (and the linked website) make no attempt to say that they are privacy related at all.
I was pointing those out because of their obvious privacy implications, not because I thought that the article was presenting them as privacy-related.
> your comment feels like you're building a strawman.
How so? I was merely pointing out two of the several things the article said that got my spidey-senses tingling. I don't see how what I said is anything remotely like a strawman argument.
In your original comment, the statement "But you may as well" misses the entire point of the quote from the article. You only "may as well" if the only point of that quote is privacy related, but it is not. The benefit of not providing an account or downloading an app is that it provides less friction for the shopper, so you shouldn't "may as well" do it just because of an unrelated privacy side-note.
I was not commenting on the thing that the quote was intending to talk about. I was commenting on the privacy implications of what it actually said. From a privacy point of view, you may as well sign up for an account or install an app -- that's a problem for those of us who wouldn't sign up for an account or install an app due to security concerns.
> Exactly, and that's the definition of a strawman.
No, it's not. A strawman is when you are asserting that someone is making an argument they aren't making, so that you can knock down that argument rather than what they are really postulating.
I am not doing that. I haven't asserted that Amazon was making any sort of privacy argument here. I am the one making the privacy argument.
If I say that one way to improve early hand-eye coordination is to give all preschoolers loaded guns, and you tell me that the implications of giving all preschoolers loaded guns is that they will kill each other, that's not a strawman. You're just pointing out that my solution has problems.
I can't come back at you and say, "but I wasn't talking about mortality rates, I was just talking about hand-eye coordination. Your objection is irrelevant to my point."
Similarly, when Amazon makes a statement that using credit cards linked to email is a good way to get around making an Amazon account, and JohnFen correctly asserts that this does nothing for privacy whatsoever, and that Amazon will still make ghost tracking accounts for every shopper, that's not a strawman. They're just pointing out that Amazon's solution doesn't solve the problem.
The reason we don't want accounts isn't because making them is too hard or because we don't own smartphones -- it's explicitly because of the tracking. It's not a convenience problem; using a credit card and a smartphone are both equally convenient for most people.
Amazon is saying, "tell the people who are worried about making accounts that they don't need to, so it's fine." JohnFen is replying, "that doesn't address the reason people like me are worried about making an account."
It absolutely is not the definition of a strawman.
Reading between the lines of marketing (or any text, really) is an important element of critical thinking. There's no rule that says I have to only talk about what your commercial wants me to talk about.
Are you really suggesting we should just uncritically nod along with whatever facile ideas are fed to us by an advert? <-- (Psst...this is actually a strawman)
"A straw man (or strawman) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent."
Saying "but you may as well" gives the impression that you refuted the point the quote was making, but in reality you were refuting a point that, by your own admission, the quote was not making. That is a strawman.
Reading between the lines of a commercial is fine, and encouraged. Dismissing the point of the commercial entirely because of a semi-related tangent is not.
If you meant it differently (perhaps not to dismiss the quote's "argument" but instead to just bring up the privacy implications separately) that's great and I'll take your word for it (and even agree with it), I just found your original quote to be saying something different.
edit: I see that you are not the original poster of the comment. This comment was meant for that person, not you. Apologies.
Agreed; it's hard to execute trade in a society without abiding by the norms of the society regarding information exchange. I could also try walking into the 7-11 with a full face mask on (in my state at least, that's not illegal in general), but the owner and register operator really wouldn't appreciate me being that anti-social.
Privacy is a sliding scale and different people set the slider at different sensitivity levels.
And even if one's sensitivity level is high enough to cause personal problems, they're solvable. People that deeply concerned about their privacy have had proxy shoppers buy things on their behalf.
> This sort of thing is a privacy disaster. I wouldn't set foot inside a store that does this.
If they make it accessible enough, all stores may. Even if they don't, I imagine all stores will have something similar in some timeframe. So.. what will you do then?
> If they make it accessible enough, all stores may.
I think that's unlikely. There is likely to be a large enough percentage of shoppers who avoid this sort of thing to support at least a couple of stores who make it a selling point that they don't do this.
But, if there is no option then I'll have to figure out what my response will be. It would likely have to be a compromise position between buying as much as I can without involving a store at all (buy produce directly from farmers, do a lot more bartering with neighbors, etc.) and employing single-use credit cards when I can't avoid the store.
I really don't think there is. I think this is going to be more like the loyalty cards - at first people oppose it on principle, but it becomes so commonplace that opposing it seems absurd
> I think this is going to be more like the loyalty cards
That would be OK, actually -- there are still plenty of stores that don't use loyalty cards.
The difference between the two things, though, are that you can shop at a store that has loyalty cards without having to use them yourself. You couldn't shop at a store that uses this program without using the program yourself.
> the copious surveillance in such stores in the form of cameras and behavior detection.
this already exists in nearly every retail store already. full of cameras and for advertising purposes they have been building profiles on people for decades
Not in most (all?) online shopping scenarios, and I don't really see any uproar about privacy concerns with those.
AFAIK many retailers (Target, for example) use an identifier derived from your CC number and don't even need your email or phone number to build a profile on you.
I totally agree with being concerned about your privacy, but I don't understand the increased harshness on this service specifically as opposed to the already-pervasive services that already collect your data on a daily basis. Is it just because this one is Amazon and it's fun to hate on them?
>But this is real-life shopping, not online. Online shopping is 100% optional. Real-life shopping is not.
What? Is someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to go shopping? I don't understand this statement. "Real-life shopping" is just as optional as online shopping is. Hell, "real-life shopping" is more optional in this regard because you can always pay with cash and escape the aforementioned privacy concerns. You can't do that online.
I would guess even in these amazon stores you'll have the option to print a paper receipt right away.
There are probably laws requiring it in some places round the world, there are probably customers who want it, it speeds up the process by not requiring an email address to be typed in, and the total cost of a receipt printer is tiny.
No, but it removes the choice of paying via cash as part of your privacy defense strategy. Some of us don't pay with credit cards and never have receipts emailed, because of the obvious privacy issues involved.
It depends on what I'm buying. I do pay by card sometimes if the amount exceeds a certain level, or if it's an urgent situation. Otherwise, it's cash. It doesn't take that much dedication -- cash is not that inconvenient.
What it gets me is a few less entries in the databases of the store, credit card companies, and the marketers who buy credit card information. Every little bit helps!
Is it really spying if you are entering the store with full knowledge that your every move is being watched by a system in order to automatically track your selections?
If anything it's full disclosure high level surveillance. I imagine big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart already have sophisticated surveillance systems that attach your card info to visual surveillance systems for Loss Prevention. I've heard of people who were repeat shoplifters at Wal-Mart that eventually got caught; and when they did, Wal-Mart had essentially a running tab of all the things they had ever shoplifted and slammed them with a grand theft charge despite the fact the time they got caught they were only attempting to shoplift a $5 bottle of shampoo or something.
I'm not denying the privacy disaster you're worried about, but honestly I think we're already too far gone down this road to be able to do anything about it.
> Is it really spying if you are entering the store with full knowledge that your every move is being watched by a system in order to automatically track your selections?
True, I was being a touch aggressive in calling it "spying". However, if this sort of thing becomes so ubiquitous that its impossible to avoid, then it is 100% spying even if fully disclosed.
The difference between data collection being "spying" or not is one of voluntary, informed consent. If every store uses something like this, voluntary consent is no longer possible, and this would absolutely qualify as spying.
> Is it really spying if you are entering the store with full knowledge that your every move is being watched by a system in order to automatically track your selections?
Very few people going into retail stores understand the extent of the tracking going on. So yes, to the average person, this seems like creepy stalking and/or spying.
Privacy is thrown out the window, but for the most part it already is. I shop on Amazon regularly. What interesting new information are they gleaning about me that they don't already have?
Seeing a few negative comments here; I think these are short-sighted in the extreme.
Labor is a major cost for retail; anything that massively reduces labor costs is going to be hugely game changing. Combined with amazon promises that it takes only a few weeks to integrate (seriously??) if this works at all, this is going to be a super fast growth group at Amazon.
For reference think back to how many stories you’ve read about say managers short changing employees a few minutes at the end of work shifts.
This really could change retail permanently; the only question is if it works.
Having visited the Amazon Go stores in Seattle at-least 30 times over the last couple of years, including the newly opened Amazon Go Grocery store, I can confidently say that the technology works quite well for the typical shopper.
I agree, the question of, can this technology be integrated into existing retail spaces and still work well enough to be economically viable is important. But considering that there hasn't been any other retailer who's come up with a competing product over the last two years, tells me that Amazon could be way ahead of the competition on "Just Walk Out", and possibly dominate this space of retail automation for a while.
Theft doesn’t happen in an ideal world. They’ll discover the flaws at some point. Id say theft and hacking scheemes could make this unfeasible or a big pain in their rearend
It seems to me that this technology may actually deal with theft better than what's there now, because it can retroactively charge the thief once he's caught, and it has more eyes than any amount of human guards at a supermarket can possibly have.
At least it used to be true that self checkout systems are not primarily sold with the promise of reducing labor costs, but primarily that they take up so much less space. If I remember correctly, six self checkouts take up as much floor space as one manual given the longer queues of the latter. That's why they first were sold in the cities where space is at a premium.
You still need some employees around the check out area anyway, and even if one employee can serve several you also suddently have many more of them. The manned check out was never the most labour intensive part of running a store anyway so it wasn't the best selling point anyway.
This walk-out concept has to compete with the various self scanning schemes that already exist, not with the manned check outs of old. It will be interesting to see if they can offer a cheaper and more reliable experience to shoppers.
Another major cost in retail is "loss" ... I can see this being pretty effective at loss prevention and coupon fraud (even my small town grocery store require an associate to visit the self-check kiosks if a customer has a coupon).
Exactly, consider Apple Retail employees, who need to be searched [1] every time their shift ends due to suspected theft. Having automated cameras that can better track products could significantly alter this check.
They get searched because Apple devices cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.
If all the store sold was usb charging cables, there wouldn't be any searches.
Unless the grocery store is selling tins of caviar, the problem is simply not at the same magnitude.
Any other concerns about cheating the system for thefts are as ludicrous as people worrying about people shooting drones out of skies with shotguns or hijacking self-driving trucks.
I was actually just thinking about coupons and how this would change that landscape. Physical coupons would be pretty useless I could imagine, everything would have to shift to digital, unless you could scan them on your way out, which would then just defeat the purpose of "just walking out". I think my mailman would appreciate it regardless, due to the large amount of unwanted coupons that get put in my mail almost daily.
Seems like you'd want screens to help people with stuff, so they could double for scanning coupons. The problem with checkouts isn't the scanning, it's that they have to create a physical chokepoint.
I bet. Places like Kroger already apply coupons just by having them on your account and scanning your member barcode/QR at checkout, so that's most likely how couponing will work with this (if the store decides to have the 'scan your ID when you walk in' system for regular customers).
Do these actually reduce labor costs though? I frequently use the Amazon Go store in Seattle right next to the Spheres, and there seem to be as many if not more employees there than at an ordinary convenience store: there's always one person by the liquor area to check IDs, one or two people walking around the store restocking the shelves and helping the clueless tourists download the app, and several people in the kitchen making sandwiches and whatnot. I don't see any labor savings over a regular 7-11.
At my neighborhood 7-11, there are often 5-10 people waiting in line with one clerk at checkout. One person buying lottery tickets brings things to a complete halt.
There is always someone buying multiple lottery tickets/scratch cards in UK local stores and, yes, it does bring everything to a standstill.
Other regular delays seem to come from staff being perplexed by the complexity of the checkout system.
Also, mostly middle aged women being taken by complete surprise they are being asked to pay for stuff which leads to much fumbling around looking for purses and wallets and then they'll insist on counting out the exact change.
Then the constant 'Do you need a bag?', 'Do you want a receipt?' 'Do you have a stupid loyalty card?' routine.
Bring on automation please and make the world a much more happier place!
Id checking can probably be done through the app. Most online bank accounts simply require a 30 second video call with a person showing their face and their passport and the account becomes 'verified'. You only ever have to do that once, so very cheap.
Restocking is already a cost stores have to do. Restocking is also something which isn't too time sensitive - you can do more restocking at night if needed. It's also possible to design the shop to require less restocking, by for example having deeper shelving units where products slide towards the front.
Helping people use the app won't be needed as soon as it becomes universal.
The only remaining cost becomes store security, but if everyone has an attached account which has been verified by a passport, even security might no longer be needed. Just bill people for the items they take, ban them if they don't pay the bill, and call the police and ban anyone who is violent.
This sounds like the kind of thing that works better at scale. Against a regular 7-11, probably not. But what stops the model in question from being applied to a warehouse-style store with still only four employees needed?
Don’t forget “loss prevention officers” (i.e. security.) In the bad parts of my city, and especially at night, convenience store staffing is 50% security (= one clerk at the counter; one guard at the door.) And that staffing, unlike the clerks, can’t be done on minimum wage.
> For reference think back to how many stories you’ve read about say managers short changing employees a few minutes at the end of work shifts.
Curious what you're talking about here. I've never heard of that, and in all the time sheets I've ever done 15 minutes is the smallest unit of time - not possible to bill 55 minutes, only 45 or 60.
If only manual laborers in 1850s England didn't rely on jobs that were replaced by machines (England went on to be far wealthier and provide far more opportunities to its people after the industrial revolution).
The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place. Lots of people got very wealthy though, that's for sure.
This view of history as immutable, with the ends always meeting the means is the sort of thinking that I believe is holding us back as a society. Researchers are still studying the impact that the industrial revolution had on not just the environment, but also the mental health of the descendants of the working class in Europe: https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-the-industrial-revolution-l....
Those seemingly horrible jobs were better than what they had before. You can tell because people voted with their feet. They left their farms to take those jobs, and didn't go back.
Something similar plays out with "sweatshop labor" these days. People talk about the abuses, but there's often the same flow of people from the countryside lining up for the openings.
That's not to say that stopping stupid abuses and unsafe conditions isn't important, it's just important to keep in mind how bad things often were. Simply having a job with a salary that guaranteed you wouldn't starve was a huge improvement for some people.
Compared to what? Sure, it was awful compared to working at Google with unlimited snacks and all of that. Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad.
it was literally misery on scales that hadn't been seen before. children were expected to work in horrible and abusive conditions. everyone was working very long and gruelling days for next to nothing and had no way to protect themselves from exploitation.
In the UK industrial accidents were commonplace until the passing of The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The very many maimings and deaths it has (belatedly) prevented are less common in subsidence farming.
Of course farmers get sick, but they don't get the diseases created by industry. There are a great many respiratory conditions and cancers that don't occur naturally.
Not sure if you're talking about industrial revolution or present day labor conditions...? Okay, we have child labor outsourced to poorer countries, but still confusing.
>Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad.
the life expectancy in Liverpool and some other parts of England during the peak of industrialisation fell to 25 years, the average height fell by almost 10cm, so actually it was pretty bad and it took decades for the situation to improve. I would have very much preferred to be a self-sufficient farmer during that time. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens goes through a pretty big amount of data that shows that traditional communities and even hunter-gatherers lived much better and longer lifes than people that had to endure the human meatgrinder that was industrialisation.
Not being Nicolas Cage, I was not. However, there are many, many countries today who are similar to 19th century UK/US. Would you like to go to rural China and compare the peasant subsistence farming still happening there with urban China and its sweatshops?
> suffering is suffering.
Sure. People suffered. They suffered horribly as peasant farmers living on less than $2/day, or they suffered as laborers making possibly a bit more. Work was universally hard.
It's possible (likely) that future people will see what we went through - disease, hunger, unemployment, bad management, personal suffering/alienation and a host of other problems - and say literally the same thing about us. But although I think all of us can think of a few tweaks at the margins, we'd all utterly fail fully to replace the status quo most people accept, many try to change, a few succeed at changing and a precious few improve.
We should give the past the same courtesy we expect from future generations. And we should be willing to make some of the sacrifices today to ensure that future generations will endure. (And this includes things like ensuring the effects of climate change or nuclear weapons don't wipe us out.) The past is and forever shall be a foreign country.
> The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place.
Yes, and that's why the labor movement is important (I'd like it to be much stronger than it is still today). Is your view that neither the Industrial Revolution nor the labor movement should have happened?
The information revolution appears to be having the opposite effect, with massive productivity gains resulting in fewer employees needed.
One of the outcomes of this is that parts of the country have been 'left behind' economically. This isn't only in England, but happening in other countries too (e.g. the USA). The surge in 'nostalgic'[0] voting (Brexit and MAGA spring to mind, respectively) is one of the outcomes of that occurring.
I'm hoping I'm wrong, and I'm hoping there's something around the corner that changes the situation specific to the information revolution, rather than an outside force (like say, a virus causing a massive shift in demographics), but the way things look right now, that's not a given.
[0] I'm deliberately ignoring the more controversial and/or negative aspects to those voting choices, as that would derail the conversation
I think in the short term, the information revolution appears similar to the industrial revolution: a category of jobs become obsolete, but long term, the economy grows, and adds many more categories of jobs.
The possibility that it won't merits consideration. It's entirely possible that new industries will spring up, but it would be dangerous to rely on that and plan as if it were certain. Even the "long tail" that people predicted for artists to make a living in a widely-connected economy has thus far largely failed to materialize.
The fact that I can't imagine it is no proof that it won't happen, of course. But I feel that we've gotten lucky in the past, and I hate depending on my luck.
i guess if you take this idea to its logical conclusion, we will end up in a post-scarcity economy where nobody "needs" to work, yet all their needs are met. So far, it's unclear whether this outcome will occur, and I do agree it's unclear what the outcomes of the information revolution will be, in terms of overall economic comfort of individuals.
This doesn't seem to be guaranteed by any law of economics, though. Despite the massive economic growth since the 19th century, the absolute number of job openings for horses has decreased substantially.
>One of the outcomes of this is that parts of the country have been 'left behind' economically.
That's the whole point of the comment you're replying to. This isn't new or unique to recent technological advancements. This is always the case when new technology displaces existing structures.
> England went on to be far wealthier and provide far more opportunities to its people after the industrial revolution
To compare this to the Industrial Revolution is just wrong. Period. Just as comparing today to the Gilded Age is wrong. Those were period of massive productivity growth (and also wage growth) despite being periods of high inequality.
On the contrary, we are in an age of tiny productivity growth and almost no wage growth. We have been through a decade with basically zero interest rates (or negative interest rates in parts of the world). To say, we've been through this before and we are all going to be better off for it, is just not true.
I see this all the time as the response to the argument that people rely on these jobs. The difference will be if, like England, the replacement jobs are more valuable by having greater leverage and impact. Or, as I suspect, the replacement jobs are fewer with similar or less value. I suspect we will see the latter pushing our lower classes into a tighter and lower band of incomes.
As far as I can see many of the jobs we do these days don't provide any real value. In this case cashier doesn't provide real value so good riddance. But I'm not confident we'll find ourselves in a better place in the future.
Also, somehow we undervalue manual labor with some skill and unions don't seem to work as well for non-factory/hospital/plant jobs.
I think the one difference is that despite the 1850s UK having (some) protectionism and (loads of) imperialism, they didn't have massive bureaucracies forbidding everyone from doing everything without permission.
This is not actually a problem of technology but of governance. And we should keep in mind that this kind of improvement would make retail workers much more productive as well as the industry more sustainable.
A lot of business strategy these days tend to forget that their labor are often their customers in a somewhat symbiotic relationship. This was part of the realization Henry Ford had when developing Ford motors and during the heydays of labor rights.
Cut your labor and you strangle your customer base. Now we're seeing a tendency of businesses focusing on more wealthy clients, luxury goods, etc. Some modern mall strategies are gearing at primarily targeting luxury stores vs appealing to the masses because the mass labor force purses are growing ever tighter (mainly because they're emptying).
Seems like a natural progression as the "wealth trickle" progresses more and more to a drought and pools up at the top in guarded reservoirs away from the majority: the labor force.
It's one thing to automate away tasks people don't want to do and replace those tasks with tasks people do want to do (and get paid for). It's an entirely different story when you eliminate work and provide no alternatives, displacing large segments of the population, then simply accumulate the labor cost savings for your business and chief investors while stagnating growth.
Most counter arguments to this trend point at historic technological shifts where new industry popped up to supply alternative means of living for the labor force. This makes an assumption that the change is the same and ignores the trends, hand waving it away in ambiguous complexity and proposing we play the experiment out. Most wanting to play the experiment out have little to lose and much to gain. The other side have a lot to lose and relatively little to gain.
We're seeing a lot more of businesses pooling cash and asset reserves and not reinvesting them back into society and people are starting to get a bit cranky about it.
>Now we're seeing a tendency of businesses focusing on more wealthy clients, luxury goods, etc.
I saw this at the bakery I worked at before. The manager I worked under talked about how he wanted to target wealthier clients or at least people willing to pay a lot more for their products, which means eventually pricing out the current customer base that makes up the low income community that this business serves that were a lot more tight with their money. It's so sad and shortsighted. They are more than happy to sell out the customers they currently have in pursuit of the customers who don't/won't come in the first place. I think businesses like that deserve to die. It's a tragedy when good food becomes gated and the poor are left with options like McDonalds or other fast food chains.
Yes but it's a tragedy of the commons / prisoner's dilemma issue. If your store employs 1% of the people in a given area, and therefore also 1% of your customers, you can't prevent the other 99% from laying off their own workforce and affecting you, unless you collude with them somehow. On the other hand, increasing your workers' pay will give you no meaningful sales benefit as it can at most affect that 1%.
It could also drive up competition for good labor and increase turnover at other locations as more try to "move up" to a better paying location.
When I was in my late teens, I worked tech support at a given location... A new call center for another company opened up paying about 25% more. This had a lot of people switching jobs and pay overall for the area for that type of work went up. Other companies relaxed or offered other benefits (subsidized vending machines and food trucks, for example).
If 1% of the market for employees moves, that can have sweeping impacts overall. Take WinCo vs Walmart as another example. The shear impact of the appearance of a better workplace will often drive foot traffic, especially combined with competitive pricing. Brand image is a thing, and how a company treats it's labor is part of a brand's image.
I agree with your point and it seems (to me) to be a natural progression/emergent behavior of the current implementation of capitalism we subscribe to.
It could potentially be even more axiomatic than that and an unavoidable result of core/firmly held beliefs with trade systems that there will always be those to exploit the weaker (in an economic system) to the point where the system becomes unsustainable.
It often reminds me of agent based models of predator/prey systems where ultimately, the incorrect balance of predators, their efficiencies and successes result in a systematic collapse where the predators starve themselves to death by not allowing the prey to procreate and gather resources necessary that predators ultimately survive on.
In this case, if the wealthy (predators) don't allow the labor force (prey) to collect resources, create value, etc. before snatching added value up ('eating' if you'll humor the idea), they ultimately end up with no future value added from labor force (prey) because the labor doesn't have resources anymore to add value.
From your example following the same basic model, if some of the predators allow themselves to refrain from eating too much and allow the prey to better maintain stable set resources through self control, nothing stops their competitors (other prey) from focusing on their short term gains with no control (yum, more dinner). Ultimately, those predators looking at maintaining a long term stable system will starve if his/her competitors don't share the same views and are allowed to follow the more basic rules. It seems to me, you have to introduce artificial rules into the system to maintain the system (e.g., government regulation or new fundamental underlying rules to the dynamics).
Obviously, the real relationship is far more complex than this view and this model has many shortcomings, but it seems to provide at least some potentially valuable insight to the situation, IMHO.
This reminds me of the Aberhart quote recommending airports be built with spoons and forks, not modern machines, if a jobs program is what's required. Perhaps we could add more jobs by having people hand total receipts and the computers could just check them for accuracy :)
My own perspective is that it is basic reality that a large number of low-skill jobs will be automated over the next 10 to 20 years. Rather than complain, I prefer to think about what society can and should do about it.
In my case, I don't believe that we should create makework low skills jobs to 'solve' this 'problem' of humans no longer being needed to run cash registers though; I have a hard time imagining most people preferring to run a cash register as their ideal day job.
I don't understand the notion of moving backward in order to keep jobs for people. I get why people say they want that (fear of losing their jobs), but I don't really understand the logical progression to getting there and I believe its influenced by:
a) Practically, this imposes a big problem to future society if low-skill jobs are gone.
b) I'm definitely privileged to have a "high-skill" job so my fear factor here is irrelevant.
That said - if this were really a concern people were serious about, I don't see why we don't just ban cars/trains/airplanes/etc. and have caravans to do all trading once again. It would create tons of jobs all in the name of regress.
In the UK, many shop floor staff in supermarkets work part-time and it's been designed that way to exploit the benefit system. Very few traditional 40 hour week jobs are actually available but lots at 16 hours or so with lots of unfilled vacancies.
It is a rebuttal against calling this the "upside." It is a downside of automation in general too, one that many people have spent a lot more time than either of us thinking about.
In terms of cost-convenience trade-off, can someone tell me how is this better for a store when compared to self-checkout counters or scan-as-you-go apps (as suggested below) ?
I use these frequently at Walmart and Sams without any problems. Rarely have to deal with an actual checkout person unless I have to get a gift card.
IMO you can get very far simply addressing annoying latency and UX issues with self checkout counters.
Edit: There is also the advantage of seeing what you're exactly being billed for
I love self-checkout and use it when available and reasonable. However, I have seen lines. It feels the same as ATMs for me. Occasionally I am waiting behind someone who just takes forever. I always wonder what they are doing, how it can take what feels like 10 minutes to do what I attempt to get done in 1 minute.
Self-checkout is a bottleneck since there are a limited number of available machines. I can see efficiency gains by removing that bottleneck.
I'm surprised many people here mention lines at the self-checkout. I shop in a fairly busy Walmart and I never had to stand in line, even on Saturdays and Sundays. They have like 15 of those counters on each side.
In shops I frequent, there is usually a single line for all 3-8 self-checkout machines,
but separate lines for each individual cashier.
I've noticed that the line for self-checkout is usually roughly
the same length as the lines for individual cash registers, regardless
of how many machines there are.
I'm not sure if people just don't like self-checkout or if they have failed
to notice that the "go to the shortest line" heuristic doesn't work anymore
when one of the lines moves much faster than the others.
It is literally a supply and demand thing. You happen to have experienced high-supply/low-demand. Why are you surprised people mention low-supply/high-demand scenarios?
In fact, just follow the logic down that road. Consider highly-volatile demand purchase scenarios. A company might over-spend on self-checkout stations to cover high-demand scenarios that go unused on more typical days. A more efficient approach is to avoid requiring additional stations to cover changes in demand. Just create a single system (walk out purchasing) that handles all scenarios and be done with it.
I guess I'm just wondering if there's data on how often you these self-checkout bottlenecks. The way other commenters describe it makes it seem like it's fairly often. Hence the surprise.
Although I agree just-walk-out scales well with demand.
> The way other commenters describe it makes it seem like it's fairly often.
There's almost always a line at them when I walk by in the stores in my area. Usually, the line there is about as long as the lines at the manned checkouts.
I've had too many issues with self scan, I absolutely avoid them, and if a company eliminates all their non-self checkout, I'll go elsewhere. If I literally have 5 or so items, I'll use self checkout, anything more, nope.
The first time I brought a full cart through self checkout, that's when I understood road rage, so to speak. I was never so annoyed and angry and wanted to just walk out and leave it behind so much. "Please place item in the bag... please remove item from the bag... please place..." It may well be better, or getting better, but I'm out of the experiment.
-- edit:
Since then, there have been two times, I did walk out and leave my cart behind... one of those times about half a dozen others did the same. It was a Walmart, and the Friday before a holiday (Christmas was Sunday that year iirc). It was 6pm, and they had literally closed half their registers with an average of 11 carts in each line left. I had a full cart including a lot of refrigerated and frozen items. The other time was similar but less extreme at another store (not walmart).
In the end, some of us will pay a little more for actual people doing actual customer service and interaction. I tried the scan and go a couple times, and frankly it wasn't really any better. It seems that Millenials and Z are so averse to interaction, I just don't get it.
It's way nicer than self-checkout in my opinion. A big one is there's never any line -- you just get your stuff and walk-out. Here in SF, lots of store frequently have long lines.
I think just having an employee explaining "just leave, we'll send you a bill" would be pretty fast, and wouldn't hold up the queue for people who know what's going on.
We went in on Black Friday because we needed normal groceries. There was a 10+ minute wait to check out, even at the self-checkouts. This would mitigate that by allowing some customers to check themselves out.
And then with scan-as-you-shop (some shops even have apps, I know Asda does) latency is reduced further, it's only the time to transfer you're already scanned basket and to pay
yeah exactly. I guess I don't understand the marginal improvement in adding so many cameras and advanced processing, all so that you can "just walk out", with the possibility of having to deal with billing related customer service issues.
I wonder if it would be possible to integrate payment into the mobile apps they've already got in place, thereby meaning that the only time you'd need to go to the checkout at all would be if you were buying restricted goods (e.g. age limited, or items with security tags) - the risks would seem then to be tracking whether someone had paid. Maybe have a QR code shown on screen which security staff can scan if they're suspicious, giving a list of what items were purchased?
I see a version of the QR code check already in Sams Club. A person at the exit scans your bill and it tells them what to check for. Otherwise they will randomly scan an item and it will cross-check with the bill.
As a student I frequently will end up putting items in my backpack. It is way more convinient to just stuff stuff into my backpack than it is to get a cart and go through the grueling check out line that takes forever because someone has to scan every item, and a lot of people still don't use contactless payment. I hate this process so much now that I only get my groceries delivered now, but if there were a local convinience store with this technology then I would totally go there.
I won't do it. Because 1. I value what's left of my privacy more than saving a minute of human interaction here and there (are you really that busy? I'm not and I have 4 kids) 2. I won't contribute to twisting the arms of my local retailers and forcing them into amazon's yoke.
Famous last words, as I predict this going just as well as people in 2020 who use cash-only everywhere or, more extreme example, people not using any kind of cell phone just to avoid tracking by carriers.
When you decide to make it really difficult for the world to engage with you, the world will make sure to make it just as difficult for you to engage with the world as well.
To some extent I already do this. I deleted Facebook and twitter and have an inactive instagram I don’t check. Yes I am making it more difficult to “engage with” me by some standards. I do have email, cell, and text message and you can find my contact by googling me so it’s not like I’m actually hard to contact, but yes it is a hurdle some people won’t jump.
But you know what? I’m fine, and I feel a lot better without inviting the behavior manipulation and stress of keeping up with these social platforms.
You don’t have to be an RMS style purist to set boundaries. It’s just a matter of privacy/liberty vs convenience tradeoffs and what you’re comfortable with.
How's he making it difficult? This is how the world has operated for millennia, pick item and pay money to cashier. Its amazon that's going to make it harder for others.
This was mostly referring to the "no cellphone in 2020" scenario, and I hope it is pretty obvious how much more difficult it is to engage with someone who doesn't have a cellphone.
As for how that would apply to the grocery store scenario. When 99% of the stores are automated using similar tech, he would be making it difficult for retailers by (indirectly) demanding them to use cashiers and such, thus making it more expensive and inefficient for the stores. And the stores will strike back by simply not making such stores, thus making it extremely difficult for the parent poster to shop without having to drive far out in hopes of finding one of the few remaining non-automated stores.
From TFA:
>Shoppers can think of this as similar to typical security camera footage.
Great. Now they know not just what I bought, but also what I browsed as I was walking through the store.
How long is this footage going to be stored for, and who is it going to be sold to? If there's a crime of happenstance around the store, will everyone who purchased (or looked at purchasing) the item used in the commission of the crime be rounded up and made to prove their innocence?
Are you really going to steal from a store that requires you to sign your credit card and surveils you throughout the shopping process? If anything I could see significant improvements in typical loss prevention numbers paying off pretty favorably.
If there is a crime, would they know exactly who took the item and didn't pay, without you having to get "rounded up"? If not, can they really say their tech works?
Related to this post: I wonder if retails aren't already applying algorithms to browsing habits / security footage. Understanding whether large displays or end caps are working could be valuable.
I was talking about this[0] instance and not stealing from the store.
If there was a crime committed with an item available in the store, will everyone who handled, bought or looked at that item now be considered a suspect?
It is amazing to me that this is the technological solution to eliminating scanning barcodes at check-out lines. The obvious alternative is RFIDs, i.e., just push your cart through a scanner like airport security and all your items appear on the display. (The "automatically bill your Amazon account or credit card" part is optional either way.)
From talking to a couple supply chain people, the best explanation I have heard for why RFIDs aren't ubiquitous, even though they now cost less than a penny (EDIT: I'm wrong, more like 7-15 cents), is that barcodes are too entrenched; RFIDs aren't nearly as useful until everything has one (since if you have to barcode scan half your products, and they are intermixed with with the RFID'd products, you might as well scan them all), and even retailers like Walmart weren't able to pressure all their suppliers to switch at once.
I wonder if this could have been fixed years ago with a collective-action solution like a stronger industry standards body or government regulation.
EDIT: Huh, could have sworn the cheap passive RFIDs cost less than a penny now, but apparently they are still 7-15 cents. That would explain a lot. Presumably the price would fall quite a bit if every product in America had an RFID on it, but we're not there yet.
RFID are not good enough for this application. In the end you'd still need to take the items out of the bag to scan them, as RFID blocking tech is real, and RFID at a distance doesn't work that well - especially with a lot of different RFID chips involved.
It's also very wasteful and time consuming. You'd need to chip every item in the store, which is a LOT of human labor (expensive), plus those chips are essentially throwaway which adds ongoing marginal cost - adds up over time.
Amazon's solution is more expensive to spin up, but its a fixed cost. Vastly more efficient long term and vastly more scalable than RFID.
> RFID are not good enough for this application. In the end you'd still need to take the items out of the bag to scan them, as RFID blocking tech is real,
Like, obviously customers are blocking RFIDs en masse then the tech is a non-starter. I've never heard anyone say this was a serious threat; do you have a reference?
If you're just going based on some youtube video proof-of-concept: it's not at all clear that this hypothetical attacks are more realistic than hypothetical attacks I could dream up for Amazon's system.
> You'd need to chip every item in the store, which is a LOT of human labor (expensive),
I am not suggesting RFIDs as an alternative for Amazon's business contracting with storeowners. I am taking a society-wide view and wondering why suppliers didn't switch from barcodes to RFIDs.
I was under the impression that Amazon is using RFID for "just walk out". They filed patents for a "shelf with integrated electronics", which mentions RFID as a potential implementation [0].
Does anyone here know for sure whether "just walk out" uses RFID?
If this really is the same tech they use for Amazon Go then no. I'm not sure where they would have hid an RFID chip in the single apple I picked up from their larger store a week ago.
Apart from RFID, how many cameras would be "reading" everything and from how many angles? Will bluetooth be always on to track movement and where we paused and for how many seconds?
Just from these two technologies the "machine" can see that I picked one bag of crisps, one soda (oops wrong flavour I put it back and got the other flavour)(machine saw this and made the change).
RFID would only validate at the exit.
As for the cost 7-15 cents per RFID tag:
-cash management costs. A lot. If you only do e-payments then you save from that
-10 cashiers cost a lot (mistakes, skimming also costs)
Just from these two cost-cuts a super market can cover the cost to RFID everything in the store.
Also the fact that a retailer (I am thinking Carrefour of Sainsbury's that move millions of items per day can get far better prices on tags).
Maybe the RFID chips in question are just too low end ?
I have read an article about race timing chips runners have in their badges during a marathon and they can apparently handle large number of runners, about 50 per second:
While I agree with you totally, you would be surprised the extent to which RFID has permeated almost every market.
It's often not consumer facing, or simply invisible (there's a very good chance your shoes have a chip embedded in their sole...) but there are wide scale, functional examples in retail of exactly what you describe today.
Decathlon, for example, a very large EU sporting goods store has this technology: RFID tags are baked into every product. You fetch your products, throw them all into a basket at checkout, and it instantly "scans" them all.
Biggest problem with RFID is getting suppliers to add the tags to their products. After all you’re asking them to make a big change to their manufacturing processes.
Some companies have managed this, Decathlon is a good example, but normally manage it by owning almost their entire supply chain. Which means they benefit from extreme integration.
Basically anything that means universally modify packaging is usually a no-go for most retailers, it’s amazing we’ve even managed to standardise on barcodes.
There are RFID based shopping experiences, but I think it's too easy to hack. An RF-shielded shopping bag makes theft too easy. I'm also not sure how accurate the readers are when tags are all piled together.
If you're just worried about customer's bags, it's pretty easy to say customers have to shop with the store carts and can't use their bags until after they've checked out. You could also weigh the bag to make sure the expected weight of the successfully scanned products is in the same ballpark.
The collision problem is discussed by other commenters.
Problem is some people still prefer or need to pay in cash. Maybe I don’t want my shopping habits collected. Maybe I get paid in cash and don’t have a card. There’s lots of different kinds of shoppers.
Good or bad, this just tickles me because it reminds me of that ibm rfid commercial from the 90's (I think?) where it looks like a shoplifter is blatantly robbing a supermarket and the security guard stops them and says they forgot their receipt. They also had a bunch of other commercials that got super close like kids watching on demand streaming movies.
As I recall WalMart spent millions on it, and only gave up because if you buy a cart of razor blades the rfid would miss one. (razor blades because of the metal at weird angles is apparently the worse case)
Is any retailer going to actually be willing to trust amazon though? And what if it doesn't work and the customer ends up not paying - is amazon also taking on the liability for that?
Yeah, this is essentially outsourcing the part that's hard for Amazon to do -- operating a retail store -- but allows Amazon to benefit from all that sweet, sweet data.
And as you point out, any time Amazon strikes up a "partnership" with outside parties, its ultimate goal is to conquer or cannibalize them.
Businesses should approach partnerships with Amazon with the same level of skepticism/trepidation as Native Americans signing a treaty with the U.S. government 150-200 years ago.
Retailers already rely on the trust of dozens if not hundreds of vendors for operations. Trust is established through contractual obligations, pilot programs, etc.
Shrinkage in the US is about 1.38% on average currently. Any competent retailer would run a pilot and evaluate its effect on shrinkage rates.
I'm also referring to trusting amazon specifically. They're a competitor, and not one known for playing nice. I've heard that retailers are hesitant to even use AWS (I don't have a source for that and would love to hear otherwise if that's the case?) - because of competitive concerns- so will people want to work with amazon for something so core to their business?
Oh wow so that's worse than I had heard - not just avoid AWS but also force suppliers off of AWS.
Yeah, I wonder how retailers are going to feel about amazon having a direct pipeline of purchase data at all their competitors fed directly to a division of the company that I'm sure they'll claim is sealed off from the rest of operations. Even if amazon is playing totally fairly here, I don't see why it makes sense for people to trust them with so much at risk
But Amazon is a completely different beast - they've already shown they want to horizontally expand into the grocery market everywhere, so stores using their technology is just a stopgap on the journey to Amazon cutting into the profits of said stores via competition. When that happens, they better hope removing Amazon's system is as easy as it is to integrate it.
It might be slow for larger retailers, but I could imagine small independent "hipster" type shops opening up using this (people with the same mentality as the "no cash" bars/restaurants)
In France all our Decathlon (generic sport gear) stores already have RFID chips and checking out (at a free outlet to self checkout or at a cashier who'll basically do the same thing as you) consist of only putting the goods in a basket, the recognition / scanning of the RFID chip is very good and fast. If you walk out with goods you didn't buy the guard will have a notification on his smartphone with the list of unpaid items.
They're already very close getting to "Just Walk Out" from Amazon situation but I'm not sure how expensive putting an RFID chip in every product is.. ?
I went to a Decathlon in the UK to buy a bag and it was a weird experience. There was something a bit unnerving about interacting with a system with not enough feedback.
A reassuring 'beep' from the system would have helped me know it had scanned and was happy rather than waiting for it to show up on a screen.
Overall I find self-checkouts with barcodes quicker and easier. A scan and beep is a quick action. Putting something in a basket and waiting an unspecified amount of time was weird but no doubt would be something I'd get used to if it was a regular thing.
UK ones have baskets you put stuff in, but they appear to be using multiple barcode scanners, at least for low value items. I'm guessing there is a cost-benefit trade-off at some point, as well as a potential functional impact problem (hard to put an RFID tag in a solid lump of plastic!). The combination seems to work well though, and is certainly faster than most supermarkets.
This is some outright spooky tech. I think it is an overkill for something that could be implemented with a cart with RFID or barcode readers (or some similar tech), or even cameras but only on carts. It kind of reminds me of slapping IoT on Ts that need no Is and only adds security implications to them, only here it is about privacy. Or of any other businesses that slap high-tech onto stuff where people are content with much more basic solutions, in lieu of solving difficult problems.
Why is Amazon not putting this in Whole Foods? Same reason why Waymo is not putting the Waymo Driver into robotaxis that serve the public on anything that approaches a mass scale. The technology is not ready.
I hate the no people future, therefore, I hate this service. Unfortunately for me, that means nothing.
I see this service taking over, at the very least, a large percentage of the 7/11 bodega type of stores. I see a future where the corner store will return. Over the last few years, companies have gone large so they can take advantage of the economy of scale. This service will reduce labor costs and have costs fall relative to similar stores previously.
Pundits were talking about Amazon opening stores with this tech. Why bother when you can get someone else to do it while expanding your core business. Imagine this, a one-man store where I order my inventory from Amazon and have it delivered daily or close to that. They brought their multivendor Amazon model where anyone can sell online using their online tech to the real world. This is a case of most retailers playing checkers while Amazon is playing chess. Yikes.
Sure, there's downers everywhere but there are also positive people that affect your day positively! There's a great lady at the local supermarket where I live who has such high energy and good spirits that just seeing her manage her team is uplifting.
Absolutely, and I hope there will continue to be artisan shops providing that experience for those who want it. But I'm optimistic there will be, just as farmers' markets haven't been entirely eliminated by your local supermarket.
I buy my ham from the guy who slices it for me. I don't like thin shaved ham that all the pre-sliced it, instead I want the thick slices that the guy provides for me.
As long as there's still an option for human people to pay using their own money it's fine. But if these stores only allow for corporate people to purchase items (on behalf of their customer humans (credit cards)) then it is a very unethical system and probably should be made illegal.
Oh they will, but it'll be the minimum number of checkout lanes and you'll have to wait 15 minutes in line.
That's my experience at my local Walmart. There are maybe 2-4 lanes with human cashiers (2 when it's slow, 4 when it's busier, but I've never been there at peak) and 10-15 stations for self-checkout.
I agree, at least generally. However, something I've learned is that privacy always has a cost. I wouldn't count on retailers to pay it when most of their customers won't notice or care, and I wouldn't count on governments to deliberately avoid reducing friction in their economies either.
Either made illegal or made to comply with government intervention to issue all citizens an identification that can be used universally for this purpose.
Damn shame how there are no laws to regulate this sort of a thing. The obvious convenience means this tech will be the norm. Is it better to live in a society where my movement being tracked is the only way to buy groceries compared to a third world country where I barely survive? I don't know, but it truly is remarkable how technology has ruined even the most basic human freedoms and dignity. The more I look at new tech the more I wonder if technology is like a bell curve where right now humanity is over the peak and descending rapidly to the point where the benefits of tech are outweighed by it's harms. At the end, it isn't technology's fault but man's greed and arrogance
Yes. Recordings of video, not analysis of your movement and tracking people with their name,social information,history facial recognition and gait analysis.
Is there a difference between a security guard watching you and a person walking around writing down every move you make, every facial expression,posture,gesture,mood,interaction and instantly applying sophisticated correlation in conjunction with thousands of historical data points about you? Come on! There is a difference between a firecracker and thermonuclear bomb.
Yes, but what does that have to do with "Just walk out"?
Grocery stores across the country could do (or may be already doing) all the creepy things you're describing without implementing "Just walk out", with the security cameras they already universally have installed. Or, they could implement "Just walk out" without doing any of those creepy things.
They're irrelevant to each other.
I don't see why you have a problem with "Just walk out", it seems to me like your problem is with the prevalence of security cameras. That's a valid criticism of, say, Ring, because it's pushing to increase the prevalence of home security cameras, but "Just walk out" isn't going to increase the prevalence of retail store security cameras, they're already ubiquitous.
Removing staff from stores will make my life considerably less independent. I am blind, and depend on staff to help me find the items I need. In such stores, I imagine it will only be possible to buy stuff if you bring your own assistant. That is a considerable change in flexibility. When I have to organize assistance just to be able to buy butter and bread, things will be substantially more complicated.
Given that web accessibility is also breaking left and right, I truly wonder how long it will take until I really don't feel at home on this planet anymore. I am guessing in 10 to 20 years, technology and the "progress" it brings will totally have killed accessibility.
Whatever happened to the RFID concept where they (not Amazon, but others) previously envisioned attaching small, cheap RFID badges to all items and then you would just do one big, quick scan at the end and it would read all the RFID tags in your cart at once and you could walk out?
I like that idea better, honestly. It's more accurate and doesn't require video monitoring and all sorts of AI/ML/DL algorithms. Though, I don't know the practicality of attaching RFIDs to everything, nor the cost. And I assume some people would try to just rip them off, which I imagine would be the biggest concern, in addition to having the staff attach them to everything.
I would bet that the money maker isn't the actual technology. The data they could collect on consumer shopping habits, tied automatically to a cross-store profile + an expanded Amazon SSP/DSP would create huge value to Amazon and brands. Added onto their already fast growing advertising business.
If this is in fact their revenue play they could even sell this at a loss just to build up the ecosystem, get a unmovable majority monopoly on the tech -> and data.
Maybe even add on top something like Good RX where retailers pay amazon on top to drive traffic to their stores. And even combine with Brands who want to offer discounts. Double dip.
With the cornavirus, retail business will be down. Retail workers will get less shifts and lose their jobs, etc. Then, just like what happened during the GFC, their jobs will be automated before the economy recovers.
When I shopped with my wife for the first time, I was a little surprised that before leaving any store, she pulls her cart to the side and carefully goes over the receipt. The reason? Mistakes are made in pricing all of the time. I can’t count how many times things ran up for us at the wrong price. She would always go to the customer service desk and get an adjustment.
I probably missed out on hundreds of dollars just blindly trusting the receipt my whole life. It’s nothing nefarious. Systems have bugs.
Takeaway for me is that I can’t use a technology that doesn’t let me verify the price.
Amazon will have some record of all the transactions, at least initially to help in the transition, and that means it can figure out what’s selling best where, then undercut the stores online. Allowing Amazon inside your transactions is not a strategy for long term survival. Having said that it’s hard to see what other options retailers have when their competitors start using this tech and improving margins. High end retailers can differentiate by saying “we have actual people”.
I'm curious, how does this technology deal with items that aren't individually packaged? Is there a place for vegetables, meats, bulk foods, etc, or is the technology limited to acting like a giant vending machine?
I hope that stores like these will one day be hubs where we can refill all our bulk products and actually save on shipping and packaging. I fear that stores like these will just sell me individually wrapped apples because it's not worth the effort.
Here's an off the wall idea. This technology could be used in airport bathrooms to enforce hand washing during a pandemic.
It's well established that hand washing, or lack thereof, in an airport setting can supercharge the global spread of disease. The spread of coronavirus could be reduced by up to 60% by consistent handwashing[1] by air travelers.
This tech could flag people who walk out of the bathroom without stopping to wash their hands. The easiest way to enforce compliance would maybe to be have a loud, embarrassing alarm go off when the perpetrator leaves the bathroom. Social conformity and peer pressure would drastically increase hand washing compliance.
It is terrifying that people actually advocate for such authoritarian measures outside of mainland China. Every tyrant ever existed probably had at least one valid reason to justify their particular flavor of tyrannical rule. Coincidentally often it's not very difficult to find numbers that back up stripping people of their freedom, just find the right statistics.
Air travelers already submit too much more invasive measures. It's not like the airport is a bastion of civil liberties or privacy. I can guarantee you that the entrances and public parts of the bathroom (including the sinks) are already monitored by cameras.
Also, I don't understand how this proposal is authoritarian in the slightest. As written it involves zero coercion. The only enforcement mechanism is social pressure, a force that already molds everybody's behavior umpteen times a day to begin with.
> Air travelers already submit too much more invasive measures. It's not like the airport is a bastion of civil liberties or privacy. I can guarantee you that the entrances and public parts of the bathroom (including the sinks) are already monitored by cameras.
This is basically the definition of a slippery slope.
I wouldn’t count publicly shaming them as “zero coercion” and by definition authoritarian is “favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom”. Even though I do agree that everyone should wash their hands, this is not the way to do it.
Yelling at people "wash your filthy hands" isn't authoritarian. Social opprobrium is how a free society regulates itself: it's the authority of your peers rather than the authority of superiors.
While I agree with this specific premise in general, it is still disturbing as hell to have someone or something monitor what you do in a bathroom + it opens up a door for a lot of other things. Do you want bosses to know how much time you spend in bathroom on the phone vs. actually doing the deed? Because I can almost guarantee that's where this tech will head, if we continue down this route.
We need some meta tech innovation that precludes these slippery slope scenarios. Otherwise we’ll be in innovation paralysis because all roads lead to big brother.
We already pull people aside for an embarrassing and invasive search if they look brown enough in our airports. A buzzer when I leave the bathroom is the least of my worries.
What data does Just Walk Out technology collect from my shoppers?
We only collect the data needed to provide shoppers with an accurate receipt. Shoppers can think of this as similar to typical security camera footage.
A rather (wide) open door for Amazon to collect valuable data on customers. And is this really comparable to "a typical security camera footage"?
"Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. "
Basically, a computer will record everything I do in those store, analyze it, and store it.
I find that terrifying personally.
Especially because the feature is so amazing, like google map amazing, in term of how it can change the rhythm of your day.
So it will be like the smartphone revolution: at first we will fight having everything spied on, then it's so convenient we will give in.
I don't see how we will get out of the hole we are digging for ourselves, since the trap is that we are so eager to be in there.
>Will people still be working in stores with Just Walk Out technology?
>Yes. Retailers will still employ store associates to greet and answer shoppers' questions, stock the shelves, check IDs for the purchasing of certain goods, and more - their roles have simply shifted to focus on more valuable activities.
I think this raises questions about ethics in technology. Not to mention the creepy cameras watching your every move, retail is a large source of employment for non-academics and we're slowly phasing out the need for people to operate stores. Here we've seen the self-serve checkouts which has one staff-member supervise 8~12 self-serve checkouts. The amount of manned checkouts has reduced so drastically that there's only one or two or in some cases no manned checkouts open.
> I think this raises questions about ethics in technology
Does it? I have yet to see an instance where any amount of luddism makes any sense. Stifling progress "for the jobs" is always bad for humanity in the long run.
I think the real test for retail innovation is whether or not it manages to impact Aldi's, since they're already a skeleton crew. I don't doubt that JWO can eliminate some labor but can it eliminate enough to reduce employee count from 3 to 2 or 2 to 1?
> A receipt will be emailed to them for this trip.
Is there any other information on what format this receipt is? Is it just an image or something that's actually useful if I want to parse it and track my own purchases?
I want some sort of machine readable receipt format to exist so I can analyze my own spending. Unfortunately there is zero incentive to provide this. Instead the stores we visit get to know more about our spending habits than we do. And now you want to me to deliberately give all of this data not just to the individual stores but also to Amazon?
Yeah right. I'm not giving Amazon access to all of this data. Are you serious?
Am I the only one thinking this no-checkout comes at a huge cost of extreme surveillance? This is creepy as fuck. I would never want it in a store, no matter how much time I save. The self checkout machines at CVS make checkout already x-times faster. This would only be a small gain a price I am not willing to pay. Also there is some satisfaction in paying for things/checking out.
Amazon has a history for being awful with making web pages. I had to peruse the Amazon HTML code once for a research project not long ago, and their code was littered with issues, including duplicate id.
Their UX and even UI is rotten beyond belief.
Really? I've been consistently amazed with Amazon's web UI. It works perfectly no matter if you have javascript on or off, no matter what browser. I bet I could order in lynx if I wanted to. Almost no other large site does it as well.
So, maybe this will be the exception, but:
- Amazon bookstores have never been successful, that I've seen; I recall the headline "Amazon sucks all the joy out a physical bookstore"
- Amazon took Whole Foods over, and from what my wife tells me it is now kind of a creepy vibe because so many shelves aren't full
People don't just go to retail to get stuff; if that were all, they would all have gone delivery long ago. If the vibe at a store is wrong, they won't go in, for reasons that have more to do with subconscious than conscious reasoning.
The biggest advantage of this technology is not reducing labor cost. The Amazon Go stores have lots of employees inside the stores doing different things. It's about increasing traffic. How many times you went inside a store and left after seeing a long line?
It can have other benefits like stealing alerts or whatever, but those I think minor. One problem I see is that Amazon is a retailer so many of the potential customers for this would be reluctant to do business with a major competitor. I'm still waiting for this to be implemented in WF.
Wait, how does this even work? You can just walk in with any regular credit card and they can read all the information they need to charge you completely over the air?
My young sons rejoice in that now they can easily sneak snacks into the shopping cart at any "just walk out" store and us parents won't know until we already bought it. :)
This is awesome. I hope more places do this and I have to interact with the minimum number of people through the experience. It'll also be great if there were a high-end store that was for low-problem-shoppers only. i.e. I'd like a place I can shop at that can control loss through theft, etc. and pass the savings on to me.
It would be awesome if there were some sort of universal social credit score you could combine with that so that I won't have to share my store with thieves and all that.
I’ll use this tech if and only if Amazon sells it as a package of technology but aren’t themselves in the loop seeing the transactions.
That is, they should be either seeing none of the transactions, or they should be considered a third party that can’t collect or resell the data.
With contactless payments I fail to see the attraction too. Seems like it’s ten years too late. Back when people stood in line to wait for slow card transactions or people paying cash this thing would have worked.
I wonder how vulnerable this system is to adversarial attacks. This will depend on the details of the implementation and is probably easy to guard against (e.g. by using an additional, non-NN based tracker or out-of-distribution detection), but it is an interesting scenario. Would you get arrested for entering a shop with a sweater that features a (seemingly) random noise print, making the payment system malfunction?
> "Shoppers enter the store with a credit card, grab what they want and just walk out - it's that easy."
I suspect it's still going to be slightly more involved than that. At the very least, they need to know your credit card, so there's still going to be some checkout, even if not every product has to be scanned manually.
IDK what happened to it, but for a while the Mountain View Walmart had a system where your cart had a pricing gun thing and you'd scan stuff as you put it in your cart. Then when you got to self checkout you paid in the Walmart app and left with no other steps. I thought it was pretty convenient.
Its no longer there and I've not seen it anywhere else so I guess maybe it was a failed pilot program or something.
Face recognition is not really used here. It's more object detection and tracking, along with a bunch of other tricks (based on visiting the Go store in SF).
Yay more mass surveillance. Interesting how they avoid to mention anything regarding cameras and face recognition on this website.
Not sure if that’s even legal.
If shops adapt this, Amazon will have your name, address (credit card), a video of you and whoever you are with, and knows all the stuff you bought. Great for advertisement and law enforcement.
When I was in my younger university days, I ran the juggling club for a few years. One of our favourite gags was to “flashmob” a grocery store and juggle various fruits between each other. We’d gradually bring more and more of the supposed onlookers into the act, culminating into perhaps six people juggling 30 fruits.
I really want to see how they handle _that_ edge-case!
I suspect Amazon will not be licensing this as a traditional tech license -- they are more likely to take a percentage of your revenue. Just like their online store. Amazon gains in two ways: (1) percentage of your revenue and (2) data such as what is selling well in your store, which they will then use to compete against you. Just like their online store.
Interested to see how this works with allowing people to pay with cash and other non-credit methods.
A few regions have started passing laws banning cashless establishments for being exclusionary towards people without bank accounts, or who use alternative banking sources (In NYC it's something like 11% and 22% respectively). I would expect that trend to continue.
Fantastic. Right now I can pull up my Walmart app and see every receipt from a Walmart big box or grocery store from the last several years. There's even a picture of the thing I bought. I can't get this with Google play. I assume I'll get this with Amazon pay and then maybe the other payment networks will up their game.
Having used it a few times, it is really cool. I noticed my local Amazon Go locations never really had items worth stealing out on the shelves though, which make me wonder if they're not actually confident in its performance yet. I'd be curious to see if they're willing to give retailers some kind of loss prevention SLA.
I would love to test this in Brazil because people here are creative with stealing so it would be very interesting to see how this would rollout with people trying to say they didn’t pick things up or things in that manter, WhatsApp had e o change a lot because here in Brazil people abuse the security aspects to the maximum.
I'm a technologist, but I can't help but be reminded of the novel _This Perfect Day_ by Ira Levin here.
(Especially once you replace the question "do I have enough money to walk out the door with this item?" with "is my government-calculated social reputation score high enough to walk out the door with this item?")
What is the target market for this tech then? I feel like grocery stores and pharmacies have already invested somewhat heavily in self checkout kiossk and may also be leery of having Amazon tech in their stores. Is the target market retail 2.0 then, where you design a store from the ground up with this tech?
I know one of the big Norwegian retailers (Coop) have 2 prototype stores running in Oslo with the "Walk out" concept. I mean I am already giving my data to them in order to receive actual money back and coupons, so at least I get something back.
It's a little unfortunate that the FAQ doesn't address the "hey, I didn't take that but you billed me for it!" issue. How will the store adjudicate disputes? Video replays of the item being put in the cart?
do i understand correctly that this only works if all items in the store get an RFID tag?
i don't think that every banana and every tomato will come with an rfid tag, so cashiers at food retailers are probably safe, for now;
However they might create a special section in the supermarket reserved for the grocery and have everything else in a section with rfid tags, that would result in fewer jobs as cashiers.
however they might have to add people for adding rfid tags to each and every item in the store. Interesting how much every one of these options would cost them.
I like how they avoid explaining how this actually works. Does it use a mobile app? The MAC address of your cell phone? The RFID chip in many credit cards? Facial recognition? Some combination of the above?
I actually like this idea[0]. I have a couple of tweaks I'd like to see.
I'd like to walk in, swipe my CC and get a QR code printout. At any point, I should be able to scan the QR code with my phone and see a receipt showing what I have in my cart and how much it will cost me as well as my status (in/out of the store). Once I leave the store, I should be able to scan the QR and get my final receipt. If there's an issue, I can turn right around and get it resolved.
I don't want to have to deal with going to a kiosk unless I need help.
Also, I don't like that this is an Amazon thing.
[0] As an option. I don't want this to be the way of the future.
Tell me how the fuck Jeff Bezos can charge me for 2 liters of milk in my corner shop, without installing some freaky app or device that keeps track of whatever.
Fuck that. And fuck Jeff too. I don't want him to know what I shop. I don't want anyone to know, perhaps except Visa because that's like inevitable.
In Europe at least we have checkout counters where we can check out shit ourselves, from store, without some big corporation in between. Because we don't want that.
These fuckery companies don't pay tax here, they don't add to the community. All they fucking do is take and take.
Yeah I can think of plenty edge cases for something like this but it's a neat idea in theory.
I was wondering how it'd handle someone using a prepaid card or a credit card without enough credit left on it... Like some first credit cards might be as low as like 500 so if people bought other things also could see some people getting close... Does it contact you to pay up if some reason it couldn't charge you fully or is there some sort of indicator before you walk out?
City centre shops (downscaled versions of the big chains like Sainsburys, Tesco) in London are almost like this today; you walk in, gather what you want and pay using self-service check-out. There's no more than one or two cashiers but perhaps a dozen self-service checkouts. There's no interaction with anyone.
Perhaps. You could also interpret this in non-positive ways:
* The technology investment isn't going to pay off unless they scale up to thousands of stores very quickly.
* Running a small convenience store is boring and not very profitable. The technology is cool though, so lets see if someone else is will to do all the boring stuff while we focus on the interesting things.
is it just me? or is this website really bland by 2020 standards? That could be a good thing but I kind of expected more for a major product from Amazon
Somewhat related: Initially, I thought this was about the walk out protests happening (over politics and environmental concerns) at some big tech companies. I had some pretty big questions on why Amazon wanted a piece of that market.
What evidence is there of Amazon misusing the data they have? Of all the big data leaks in the last, say, ten years, how many have been from Amazon? I’d be much more worried about the security practices of the bank your credit card is attached to (have you looked at the data sharing terms?), your credit history (Equifax...), the thousands of security cameras already in stores and streets, or your phone carrier (see many examples of location data being shared or sold), or you maybe have a browser extension or two that has access to your browsing history...
I agree that Amazon has access to a lot of data, and will have more with this system, but they’ve been remarkably good at stewarding it so far. There are much bigger fish to fry in terms of data privacy right now.
>We only collect the data needed to provide shoppers with an accurate receipt. Shoppers can think of this as similar to typical security camera footage.
Well somehow I suspect that's a little misleading.
And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this?