Maybe they also weight you when enter and leave the store. They can then cross check your weight with the weight of the items you have bought.
and if you use the restroom?
Amazon Go
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: Amazon Go
#312Guys this is not good. As much as I love the convenience of pick-and-go, this eventually will prove out to be drastic for a variety of bad socioeconomic reasons, that most of us are already aware of. Small businesses were already suffering at the hands of Amazon Prime. Now Amazon Go wants to not only kick out those businesses out of the block but it also wants to take away jobs of small retail salesperson. Unacceptab…
It's disappointing to see people downvote this post rather than respond to it.
I'm not going to argue that this sort of technology isn't going to have a decimating effect on employment, small business etc. It will. It will very likely have a huge socioeconomic impact for one simple reason: Most of us aren't planning for the next industrial revolution.
That fact that you're freaking out now tells me you really haven't been thinking deeply about the impact that automation is going to have on our society, nor have you been considering realistic solutions to these potential problems.
Automation will decimate jobs as it allows us to create lot more with less. It might give people more leisure time, or it might widen the income gap. We could send people back to school to learn relevant skills, and we might be able to do it cheaply if we maximized MOOCs and vocational training more and relied less on expensive universities with lavish facilities and football coaches with million dollar salaries.
We could also fuck up our opportunity to move forward by focusing our energy on preserving jobs that we know are going away. It's not if, it's when.
Not moving forward is not a realistic option. Even if had all the political power to get your way in this country, other countries will simply take the lead in automation. The countries that focus on their energy on educating their people to take on the next generation of jobs will be the economic leaders of tomorrow.
It's not a small problem and it's not going to magically work itself out like some laissez faire dipshits would like to tell you. This is going to be tough and painful. Now is the time to start planning for our future.
Re: Amazon Go
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the system works like that. From my first quick take of the video, the app+turnstyle is used to identify you to the store. The video system then tracks your position as you walk around. When you walk out, the items are recognized and tallied by a large RFID sweep. Funneling you back out through a turnstyle makes sure the vision system knows it's you. Notice that you don't need to barcode yourself on the…
Not as crazy as it sounds. With RAIN Rfid you can get the xyz location of a tag from ~30ft away accurate to 6" in realtime. Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1LykdRWTfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCA8L7v-R8
I don't think that helps in the use case presented here.
What is really needed is a way to talk to multiple RFID tags quickly without any crosstalk. Think of a handbag with a dozen candy bars in it. How do you scan them all quickly without missing any?
The goal has always been to scan something large in one pass, say a shrink-wrapped pallet of items that could number in the hundreds or thousands. Obviously this is technology that Amazon could benefit from as well, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of technology overlap here.
Re: Amazon Go
#314Thank you for this idea. I will be doing this every time I set foot in a wal-mart from this day forward. "Two pounds of ham, please. Can you slice it really thin? I have a date with the household appliance section of the store"
"I don't like the company that you wageslaves work for, so I'm going to create a big stinky mess for y'all to clean up. (And also waste some trivial amount of the company's money.)"
Re: Amazon Go
#315The futuristic supermarket I imagined as a kid was a warehouse-scale vending machine. Robotic carts roll down the aisles on tracks, and the shelves push the requested items out onto them. You show up after that's done and collect your cart.
Probably need some human labor for the produce section.
This is interesting but the checkout line is nothing compared to the time in the aisles.
Re: Amazon Go
#316What happens when you don't have enough money available to Amazon to cover all the things you grabbed? Do they give you a window to return items before banning you from the store and/or notifying police?
I'm thinking that the easiest/lowest-cost strategy on Amazon's part might be to allow your account to go into the red, and then blacklist you from store access until the debt is satisfied. In most cases this money can be easily recouped later, and they can probably get away with charging an "overdraft fee" of sorts. This would be coupled with clearly stated limits on dollar amount and duration of delinquency before the matter is escalated.
Re: Amazon Go
#317Thank you for this idea. I will be doing this every time I set foot in a wal-mart from this day forward. "Two pounds of ham, please. Can you slice it really thin? I have a date with the household appliance section of the store"
How about just not shopping at Wal-Mart? I stopped shopping there in 2009. When I returned to the US, I stopped shopping at Amazon because it had pretty much become the new Wal-Mart; maybe worse even. This is cool tech and I'd want to try it, but I hate shopping anything Amazon. They had sd cards at their brick and mortar store, but I decided to buy one at Office Depot instead, even though it was $10 more.
Upvoted for sensibility.
in many rural areas of the United States, it is literally impossible to shop anywhere but Wal-Mart. Nebraska and Kansas had a rather large economic dive in the early 2000's due to the expansion of the Waltons. Their business plan is essentially:
1) Announce intention to move into area
2) woo politicians for financial kickbacks to subsidize expansion
3) launch with prices _far_ lower than all the competing grocery stores and harware stores.
4) Wait as other businesses run out of money due to not being able to compete on price.
5) raise prices once monopoly is established.
I moved from one of these places. Now I have 5 wal-marts in my city. I have zero issues with sabotaging their expansion into another country (Canada).
Re: Amazon Go
#318Nice and all but I don't want a store to get my personal info just so I can shop at their place.
Re: Amazon Go
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm sorry but if you cost the store $25 by leaving a damned ROAST in the cereal aisle, I would be perfectly happy to never let you in the store again. Wouldn't a better solution be to charge the customer for the roast and if they complain, you explain: "sorry, you didn't put it on the proper shelf, the technology considers that as a purchase", and possibly eat the cost in the form of some incentive to come back to…
Aside from putting up the odd sign to discourage certain behavior, no, I do not think that stores have any good reason to bend over backwards to keep individual customers. Retail is far too accommodating already. Some people figure that being a “valued customer” means they can be an unending source of sunken costs in time, effort and stress, among other things. And those costs can be multiplied across the other custo…
Stores bake that into the cost of doing business, it's like dropping something and breaking it, in the vast vast majority of cases you won't be charged for it, just be clean up on aisle 3...
Heck I've dropped jars or similar things during bagging after paying for them several times and every time I was offered a replacement.
Mistakes happen, it's often considerably more expensive to deal with customer complaints especially in the age of social media than it is to replace an item.
It's also important to note that this is baked into the cost of doing business all along the supply chain, if items are not sold they will be often returned by the store to the distributor which would chuck them as a loss, or more often than not sell them for other uses other than human consumption.
Some perishables are thrown away others are then sold to other industries e.g. the roast that was left over might end up as dog food...
For a dog food company it's cheaper to buy discarded meat produce the dog food take samples and while it's being shipped do the cultures to ensure that there are no contaminants or bacteria and if something fishy is found just do a recall upstream for specific batch than it is to buy "fresh" meat and ingredients which are fit for human consumption.
Supply chains are huge and complex and all these little annoyances don't really count for much, it only really bothered very small stores that have to buy everything almost up front and they aren't leasing effectively shelf space for distributors.
Re: Amazon Go
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, any messaging in the format "sorry, $thingYouDid, the technology considers that as $notWhatYouDid" is a recipe for customer loss.
I agree with your point, but at the same time, you should be charged the price of the food if you grab perishable food and place it in an area that renders it unsafe. I worked in retail and at theme parks, and I'm personally of the opinion that it's better for everyone in the long run if you fire entitled customers.
, you should be charged the price of the food if you grab perishable food and place it in an area that renders it unsafe
That'd constitute a massive retooling of consumer behavior and logic and would require quite a bit of conditioning over many years, no?