571–580 of 769 posts
I really want to see how they handle _that_ edge-case!
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We have pretty close to instant transactions here in Australia but I every now and then I find a place where it takes 30-60 seconds for it to process. I think the issue is actually just the store has bad network coverage and the machine fails multiple times before it can send the transaction properly.
I believe they do some sort of local batching of transactions then settle them all at once. You can see this sometimes if you go shopping early in the morning and you're the first person to use a particular EFTPOS terminal for the day, the UI will show a few extra steps in the processing workflow.
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Grabbing a receipt at a kiosk is a lot quicker than manually scanning your items. My main problem with this is how invasively creepy it all is.
Yes. Amazon will know every item you buy, how much, and when. But not much different than grocery store discount cards already used by most everyone for decades. I'm sure that info is sold, traded around, and aggregated.
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I've always assumed that was an artifact of free returns; if you bought one thing, maybe you're actually still shopping and want to know other options. I've noticed when I get these they're frequently more expensive than the one I already bought.
They stopped free returns on Prime a long time ago. Now only a few select items offer it. This was about the same time they stopped shipping things in cardboard boxes and went with bubble packs, and most recently, paper wrap with no padding whatsoever.
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>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.
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…
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Reminds me of this old IBM ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA
Yes, IBM "thinks" the future. Other companies build them. Conclusion : ideas are worthless, Execution is key
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will
I was always confused as to why they'd spend money on vaporware advertising, since I don't think they were responsible for doing any of the things.
Here's an off the wall idea. This technology could be used in airport bathrooms to enforce hand washing during a pandemic. It's well established that hand washing, or lack thereof, in an airport setting can supercharge the global spread of disease. The spread of coronavirus could be reduced by up to 60% by consistent handwashing[1] by air travelers. This tech could flag people who walk out of the bathroom without sto…
It is terrifying that people actually advocate for such authoritarian measures outside of mainland China. Every tyrant ever existed probably had at least one valid reason to justify their particular flavor of tyrannical rule. Coincidentally often it's not very difficult to find numbers that back up stripping people of their freedom, just find the right statistics.
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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'm more concerned about whether the store system gets my order right than whether I do. What if it, e.g., mistakes a can of soda for a 12-pack? Three hundred times on the order?
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…
IBM viewed this tech seriously enough to be marketing it to the public in 2006. It wasn't a "Hey, we're making this." ad but more of an, "We're cool because we're working on this, sorta maybe." ad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA 14 years later, it's still vaporware. There are a lot of fairly tough problems that need to be solved to make it work. Today, Amazon is probably better positioned to sucker/bully…