“Just walk out” technology by Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#351

Post by goatlover » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

Crazyontap wrote: post #314

mherdeg wrote: post #234

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 announce…

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.

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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#352

Post by ndelage » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

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".

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#353

Post by mkolodny » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

julienb_sea wrote: post #319

jessriedel wrote: post #265

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…

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…

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?

[0] https://sqoop.com/details/uspto/10064502

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#354

Post by rio517 » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

mherdeg wrote: post #234

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 announce…

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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#355

Post by Consultant32452 » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#356

Post by thu2111 » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

turc1656 wrote: post #294

heavenlyblue wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are only good because Ebay is pathetically bad.

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.

You talk as if Amazon was like an Uber or WeWork. That's really far from the truth.

Amazon were slightly profitable or break-even since 2003. There's a convenient chart of their profits since day one here:

https://qz.com/1196256/it-took-amazon-amzn-14-years-to-make-...

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.

https://www.quora.com/Who-were-the-original-investors-in-Ama...

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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#357

Post by hamandcheese » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #178

askafriend wrote: post #144

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…

> 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 (…

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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#358

Post by thu2111 » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #327

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? 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 vi…

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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#359

Post by goatlover » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #265

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…

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.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#360

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

korijn wrote: post #248

tinyhouse wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My life wouldn't be the same without communicating with the Pakistani dude who is looking at his phone when I buy something at 7/11...

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.