291–300 of 769 posts
Such as: New rfid (or image) spoofing tech, etc.
-or-
Stories "Just walk out" store forgot to activate rfid tags on some product and customers walked out w/ (x) number of items for free.
This will be interesting to see how it plays out.
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.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 only good because Ebay is pathetically bad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 strate…
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%.
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.
(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?")
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…
There's no way a cart full of goods will scan properly if you roll through a scanner. RFID scanners don't handle RFID tags being stacked very well.
Even decades old protocols support interacting with a plurality of tags simultaneously.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singulation
(Edit: added wiki article discussing anti-collision, which specifically references grocery examples)
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 someth…
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.