Should beta test this where you can keep what ever you manage to get out of the store without paying.
Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks
91–100 of 107 posts
Re: Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much per item do you pay for cashier staff though. Might be the same as the tag cost. Also in regards to RAIN RFID tags vs dumb print tags yep you are talking about a 5 cent increase. But you also lift inventory accuracy from ~70% to 99.9%.
A cashier can process tens of thousands of items per hour, at a wage of under $15 per hour. This means that the cost of a cashier can be around 0.1¢ per item sold for a busy store
Generously assuming a cashier can check one item a second for an hour, he can check only 3600 items. "Tens of thousands" seems off by at least an order of magnitude.
Re: Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> for some reason Hmm, maybe it's because he's your identical twin?
Forgot to mention that Microsoft claims that I shouldn't be able to do that.
Really? Microsoft says a webcam should be able to instantly tell the difference between you and someone who looks literally exactly identical to you?
Re: Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
A cashier can process tens of thousands of items per hour, at a wage of under $15 per hour. This means that the cost of a cashier can be around 0.1¢ per item sold for a busy store
Generously assuming a cashier can check one item a second for an hour, he can check only 3600 items. "Tens of thousands" seems off by at least an order of magnitude.
I was thinking of some costco cashiers I've seen, and they do far more than one item per second. That said, when you consider the downtime of processing the transaction, your estimate is probably not too far off. It makes the low end cost of transponders comparable, though just.
Re: Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks
#95I wonder if these stores will suffer any more from shoplifting than regular stores. I assume they will function roughly the same, i.e. an alarm goes off as an unpaid high ticket item leaves the store, but what's the psychological impact of having a human near the front door? will people feel they are stealing from a robot rather than a person (in fact they are stealing from neither), and will that lower the cognitive…
I guess there will be security that will stop non-Amazon customers, and probably help setting up accounts.
Re: Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen supermarket chains do away with automated checkout (Jewel which parent company is Albertsons) systems because they increased loss factors.
Here in Australia our two major chains just convinced the police to station publicly-funded officers in the checkout area: http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/home/crackdown-of-self-serv... Cut staff numbers without having to pay for increased security! That's just good business sense.
> without having to pay for increased security!
They don't pay for the police?
Re: Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in Australia our two major chains just convinced the police to station publicly-funded officers in the checkout area: http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/home/crackdown-of-self-serv... Cut staff numbers without having to pay for increased security! That's just good business sense.
> without having to pay for increased security! They don't pay for the police?
No, the police are paid for via taxes.
Re: Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
And once they hear Amazon can't track a lot of people moving quickly... A lot of people will decide to start moving quickly.
You know you can already get things for free at current stores. It's called shoplifting and it's REALLY EASY. The truth is in Western Society most people don't do this. And after an initial novelty factor (which I'm sure Amazon will account for), people won't bother any more than they shoplift now. P.S. Nor will they shoot Amazon Prime AIr drones out of the sky like other HN threads fret.
Shoplifting by outpacing a tracking algorithm has high levels of plausible deniability.
It's not illegal to hurry, and if Amazon fails to notice you picking up a product, that's their problem due to the system they thought up.
That would entice a lot of people.
Re: Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that any better though? The receipt checking probably takes just as long as scanning the items through the till. Unless they just take a cursory glance and just say "well whatever you're probably trustworthy"
At a shop I visit often, the receipt checking is random, triggered by some prediction algorithm based on your history and current cart contents when you swipe your membership card when you exit the store. You get selected once out of perhaps 20 to 50 visits. As a bonus, you get a small candy bar or similar "sorry we bothered you" gift if the check does not find any errors.
Do you get something better if they find they have made an error?
Re: Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems easy to estimate. At my local large suburban supermarket doing weekly shopping for a hungry family I have a receipt with the last line listing "53 items". So at 5 cents per tag, that's $2.65 of tags ending up in the landfill per week. The cashier takes less than 5 minutes for the entire transaction including scanning and payment and small talk, so (5/60)*7.25 = about 60 cents. Now cashiers are not 100% bus…
Tags used to be 60 cents. Now 5 cents. If they got used for masses of things e.g. groceries, they'd go down to a negligible cost. Folks like WalMart can actually drive this themselves.
Walmart already uses RFID in the backroom and for palettized loads, but not for stock that customers handle.
In my own work with RFID, the main problem we have is (after disregarding the cost of the transponders) is getting someone to put a transponder sticker on every single widget - stores already stopped using those "pricing guns" when they adopted UPCs/EANs, they don't want to regress backwards.
The solution is universal adoption of the EPC RFID system, but that requires all suppliers and logistics infrastructure to also adopt it. It's happening... just very slowly.