With the cornavirus, retail business will be down. Retail workers will get less shifts and lose their jobs, etc. Then, just like what happened during the GFC, their jobs will be automated before the economy recovers.
“Just walk out” technology by Amazon
361–370 of 769 posts
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon probably doesn't want to radically rock the boat when it comes to Whole Foods at the moment. It is an established well-working business, and they don't want another wave of "WF went to shit after Amazon bought it out, just look at all those changes they've implemented!", given that Amazon's reputation has already been kinda questionable in the public eye recently.
Last Thanksgiving, I visited my parents in the town where I lived before college, and we went to the Whole Foods where we used to shop at all the time. It looked basically the same, except that there were these huge, bright blue Amazon Prime ads everywhere . It felt vaguely dystopian—a store of my youth invaded by the giant tech monolith. If Amazon is trying to not noticeably change Whole Foods, they're doing a prett…
Well, i didn't say they weren't changing anything at all. Given how perturbed you are by those Prime ads that don't functionally affect anything, imagine the magnitude of the public outcry if Amazon implemented something as radical as "just walk out" tech at Whole Foods.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#363This post looked kind of weird to me so I looked up the whois, it's registered to godaddy. Which is odd because it is not the same registrar as amazon.com or aws, and aws operates a domain registration service so I can't imagine a real amazon service would use godaddy. Combined with the fact that there's no concrete plans set in place, it seems really fake.
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Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#364The 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 s…
Whilst Amazon Go is cool, that's not an argument in its favour. That's purely a US specific screwup. In the rest of the world you can clear contactless transactions in a few hundred milliseconds with competent retailers; that's why it's possible to tap your way through the gates at busy London Underground stations. And retailers love contactless exactly because it's so fast and it lets them reduce staffing/handle more customers.
I don't know about your part of the US but it's now pretty common everywhere in Europe to have nearly unmanned retail stores. All the checkouts are self service. You can grab a portable scanner at the front, scan items as you walk around grabbing them and then tap your card at a checkout kiosk.
Amazon's implementation sounds even easier (no scanning required), but in terms of raw throughput it's probably only a bit better.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#366I'd love to see this at airports or something. Kind of hard to imagine in a real supermarket but maybe someday.
City centre shops (downscaled versions of the big chains like Sainsburys, Tesco) in London are almost like this today; you walk in, gather what you want and pay using self-service check-out. There's no more than one or two cashiers but perhaps a dozen self-service checkouts. There's no interaction with anyone.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I've been sitting here thinking Amazon was going to spool up tons of retail locations that leveraged their tech to create a massive moat that other Brick & Mortars couldn't possibly compete with. In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world.
>In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world. It's not just about "AWS"-ing the thing. It's about gaining access to all of the transaction data and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you. A retailer like Walmart would NEVER use this tech, they know their data is one of the most valuabl…
> and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you.
Amazon is always putting up ads for me based on my purchase history, but they're never what I wind up buying. I have no explanation for what is wrong with their algorithm.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#368>Will people still be working in stores with Just Walk Out technology?
>Yes. Retailers will still employ store associates to greet and answer shoppers' questions, stock the shelves, check IDs for the purchasing of certain goods, and more - their roles have simply shifted to focus on more valuable activities.
I think this raises questions about ethics in technology. Not to mention the creepy cameras watching your every move, retail is a large source of employment for non-academics and we're slowly phasing out the need for people to operate stores. Here we've seen the self-serve checkouts which has one staff-member supervise 8~12 self-serve checkouts. The amount of manned checkouts has reduced so drastically that there's only one or two or in some cases no manned checkouts open.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#369Earlier 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.
I.e. Amazon has long term thinking.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last Thanksgiving, I visited my parents in the town where I lived before college, and we went to the Whole Foods where we used to shop at all the time. It looked basically the same, except that there were these huge, bright blue Amazon Prime ads everywhere . It felt vaguely dystopian—a store of my youth invaded by the giant tech monolith. If Amazon is trying to not noticeably change Whole Foods, they're doing a prett…
Well, i didn't say they weren't changing anything at all. Given how perturbed you are by those Prime ads that don't functionally affect anything, imagine the magnitude of the public outcry if Amazon implemented something as radical as "just walk out" tech at Whole Foods.
See, I was thinking of it the other way around. If you're going to change things, you might as well go all the way. Because it's not like they're fooling anyone right now.