I believe that frictionless purchase encourage the wrong type of behavior.
May be good for the businesses but it isn’t good for the people.
“Just walk out” technology by Amazon
601–610 of 769 posts
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#602Aaaand 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…
There are number of tech companies directly competing in this space: https://standard.ai/ https://grabango.com/ https://www.getzippin.com/ https://www.v7labs.com/retail https://www.getzippin.com/ There are competitive options, if you’re in retail you do not have to give Amazon all your “retail data” or use their tech.
Do any of those companies actually have a live customer? Not a demo store, a real paying customer with more than one location live?
Standard.ai apparently has a demo store in SF, although it's been closed due to the coronavirus epidemic.
Grabango - one installation in test at a Giant Eagle store.
Getzippin - one installation in test at a Lojas Americanas store. Their site gives the impression that it's really about getting people to install their phone app, so they can be spied upon.
v7labs - we're AI, we don't need installations.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#603Aaaand 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…
There are number of tech companies directly competing in this space: https://standard.ai/ https://grabango.com/ https://www.getzippin.com/ https://www.v7labs.com/retail https://www.getzippin.com/ There are competitive options, if you’re in retail you do not have to give Amazon all your “retail data” or use their tech.
Another one is https://black.ai/
All the way down in Australia.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
No idea about the quality of their competition, but a startup called Standard Cognition has been in this market. https://standard.ai/
Jordan from Standard here. We absolutely believe that retailers will prefer to get this new technology from providers like us as opposed to Amazon, their biggest competitor. So far Amazon has also not shown their technology deployed in an existing store, rather than an Amazon Go. We're actively working on being the first to demonstrate this. Stay tuned over the next couple of months.
I've used amazon go - the tech worked very well for me. They have at least 4 or 5 stores in San Francisco alone - I'd guess 20+ at least if you include Seattle or wherever else they are operating. I haven't see the go grocery store yet.
Can you give us a sense of how many transactions standard is doing every day with it's tech that's further along / more deployed than Amazon? At least the SF location I visited had steady traffic so Amazon is collecting some real data (selection a bit limited so go grocery interesting to me)
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#605This really appears to be an extremely good fake. The syntax in the copy is off, and it does not follow Amazon style guidelines. It seems to be written by either a poor English speaker or an ESL writer.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
20 years ago was the year 2000. Amazon and eBay were founded in 1995. Also: imagine you could write what you want on a ground up dead tree, drop it in a special box and a few weeks later, the item shows up. That's a catalog, and Sears was making them in the late 1800s. I bet there are older examples.
> imagine you could write what you want on a ground up dead tree, drop it in a special box and a few weeks later, the item shows up.
And suddenly I'm reminded of If all stories were written like science fiction stories
https://web.archive.org/web/20040929041451/http://www.shrove...
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are number of tech companies directly competing in this space: https://standard.ai/ https://grabango.com/ https://www.getzippin.com/ https://www.v7labs.com/retail https://www.getzippin.com/ There are competitive options, if you’re in retail you do not have to give Amazon all your “retail data” or use their tech.
Another one: https://www.accelrobotics.com/
That store looks like a render.
There are some fully automated stores the size of shipping containers in Beijing, but they're mostly demos, too.
I don't think anybody really has this working well enough to deploy. It has that machine learning "we got to 95%" look. This is something that's easy to almost do, and the last 5% is really tough.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've always assumed it was repairmen. Some people really do need to buy toilet seats again, and again, and again, each time they do a job that requires replacing one (without ever needing a bulk order of 100.) They also might switch brands depending on whichever one is cheapest at the time; or order several different ones for different concurrent jobs to see which turns out best (like Backblaze does with hard drives.…
I have this experience every time I buy something. Monitor? Needs more monitors. Yoga mats? Clearly opening a studio. Trash bags? This man hasn't learned about dumpsters. Of course this pays off eventually, but it seems like they could come up with a better strategy when they have a bunch of purchase history.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are number of tech companies directly competing in this space: https://standard.ai/ https://grabango.com/ https://www.getzippin.com/ https://www.v7labs.com/retail https://www.getzippin.com/ There are competitive options, if you’re in retail you do not have to give Amazon all your “retail data” or use their tech.
Another one is https://black.ai/ All the way down in Australia.
They're so cool they don't even have a demo or a video But they can do a large-scale store installation in just days, they claim.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to imagine Amazon actually starting a bunch of retail locations. They'd probably buy Whole Foods or something…
Surprising to me that Whole Foods still doesn't have this tech integrated. You'd think that'd be the "beta" step after the Amazon Store's "alpha" step.
Maybe they don't want to draw attention to how many people are going to lose their jobs because of this yet. Cashier is the #2 job in the US (by number of people employed) [0].
If they released this at Whole Foods, I'd guess they'd fire all the cashiers there. That would make this rollout a lot less exciting for a lot of people.
I hope Amazon comes up with an awesome way to help the cashiers this technology replaces. Then if self-driving cars end up working out, that industry can learn from what Amazon did.
[0] https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/rudy-takala/top-2-us-jo...