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“Just walk out” technology by Amazon

justwalkout.com

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Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#251

Post by mason55 »

sykick wrote: post #198
deanCommie wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 sa…

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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#252

Post by [deleted] »

deanCommie wrote: post #186
nck4222 wrote: post #63

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 char…

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…

[deleted]

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#253

Post by tomjakubowski »

boublepop wrote: post #246

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…

No idea about the quality of their competition, but a startup called Standard Cognition has been in this market.

https://standard.ai/

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#254

Post by callmeal »

deanCommie wrote: post #186
nck4222 wrote: post #63

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 char…

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…

>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?

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#255

Post by baryphonic »

nullorundefined wrote: post #135
baryphonic wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

also, "it wasn't so bad?" were you there? suffering is suffering.

> were you there?

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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#256

Post by aguyfromnb »

boublepop wrote: post #246

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…

>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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#257

Post by Aeolun »

nck4222 wrote: post #63

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 char…

I think that is only problematic the first 5 times or so? After that you’ll likely trust the tech.

I’m sure they have a ‘you charged me incorrectly’ resolution service as well.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#258

Post by takeda »

nck4222 wrote: post #63

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 char…

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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#259

Post by scarejunba »

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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#260

Post by mrkeen »

tinyhouse wrote: post #233

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 cu…

> How many times you went inside a store and left after seeing a long line?

For food or coffee, constantly. For general retail I'm not sure I've ever done this.

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