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Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

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Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#141

Post by michaelmrose »

noodlesUK wrote: post #135
michaelmrose wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scanning with your phone camera sucks its very slow and scanning as you pass the anti theft barriers normalizes running the barriers which will make catching thieves basically impossible. It also runs contra to shoppers expectations. Raises the question of charging the wrong person when multiple phones are nearby as when multiple people are shopping together or just adjacent to one another or when carts are just too…

The scan as you shop systems that I am referring to are where you are given a little barcode scanner with a display, and you go around the shop scanning your items as you pack them. At the end of the shopping trip, you still go to the self checkout machine, but you just transfer your scan list from the portable barcode scanner to the till. At no point are you using a phone camera to scan items. Usually the trolleys h…

Walmart is demoing a scan as you shop system that I think relies on user cameras and the app. At least that was my impression.

With American hardware at SCO the scanners are just peripherals like a keyboard and a person walking around the store with them would tie up an entire POS computer while items were being scanned with it.

If the portable scanner were itself a portable device this would be tractable however how do you keep people from stealing or destroying them?

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#142

Post by scotty79 »

weinzierl wrote: post #55
beardyw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, same in the UK. Most stores have scan as you shop, but most people do self checkout. I get the impression scan as you shop is seen as being a bit prissy.

As a German it is always a culture shock to see how popular self checkout is in the UK, even though I see it used more often recently in Germany too. I think Germany is about a decade behind...

Oh. That's a shame. In Poland (nearly?) every Lidl has self-checkout.

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#143

Post by ssl-3 »

dxbydt wrote: post #103
drusepth wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you see how popular it is in the US! I can't remember the last time I saw someone use a manned checkout line; my local grocery store has 1 manned lane and 12 self checkout lanes, and the manned one is almost always empty.

> 1 manned lane and 12 self checkout lanes, and the manned one is almost always empty its empty because it’s considered rude to burden the poorly paid checkout person when you can self-service. Once all of the self-service lanes are occupied, the sentiment shifts and customers uneasily queue up in the manned lane, frantically watching if the self-service lane clears up so they can jump out of the manned lane. One of…

I've certainly observed what looks like that kind of behavior, but I don't personally feel rude at all for using the services of a cashier.

In my own shopping, I just use whatever seems likely to be fastest or less hassle -- for me.

If I've got a bunch of stuff, I'm heading to the cashier because they're better-equipped to handle a volume of stuff than I am at self-checkout.

But if it's just a couple of small items, then the self-checkout seems fastest: Scan, plonk, scan, plonk, invoke the incantation so that it can take my money[1], and pay it.

(Unless one of those small items involves something like beer or something else requiring an ID check, wherein: It's back to the cashier.)

[1]: In my neck of the woods, Wal-Mart gets this best, with as few as one button-pushes required to pay and leave (and there was a time when it was zero button pushes to use a debit card at self-checkout there). Dollar General gets it worst, requiring at least 8 button pushes (with three different input methods! it requires input on two different touchscreens and one physical keypad) to pay them and get on my way.

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#144

Post by justsomehnguy »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #15

> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. More of the same. I wonder if the incredible use of labor in India and other countries will cause their society to bypass their own growth so that the citizens of those countries become pure consumers, the majority of which can only ever get menial or gig jobs due…

> I wonder if the incredible use of labor in India and other countries will cause their society to bypass their own growth so that the citizens of those countries become pure consumers

Never gonna happen in India, by the sheer number of populace. You can see the thing you are talking about in some countries in Europe where a small population and a lack of heavy manufacturing drives the whole economy to the servicing sector. It's a question if you can label these countries as developing, though.

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#145

Post by deathanatos »

tialaramex wrote: post #81
fullshark wrote: post #5

So they are offloading checkout onto the consumer via dash carts. There's no value proposition for the consumer unless somehow they are able to lower prices by not hiring cashiers.

But I don't want to interact with the cashier. The store near me is almost the thing I actually want. I walk into the store, I wander about picking items I want off shelves, and scanning them with my phone, I put them in a bag I happen to have with me, or my pockets, or my backpack, or whatever, it doesn't matter, then I walk to the big graphical terminals near the exit and scan that too. That's the only place where…

> because almost nobody stands in a line to have somebody else scan your shopping, why would you?

A decently trained human can scan & bag far faster than I can at the self-checkouts.

The self-checkout machines are also sometimes buggy. Our local Safeway's self-checkout was extremely particular: if you scanned the next item prior to the computer registering and processing the weight from the previous item being set down, it would error out and require an attendant. That processing was quite slow — so you needed to lag yourself / rate limit yourself, so as to allow the machine time to think, before proceeding. I eventually figured out the cadence to go, such that I could avoid the error … but humans just don't have this issue.

Items too light to be detected just always error on some of these machines.

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#146

Post by Salgat »

noodlesUK wrote: post #30
lgfrbcsgo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would prevent someone from lining their shopping bag with metal to shield the RF?

Nothing, the same as current self-checkout systems. You can already easily just put stuff in your pocket or ring expensive items up as incorrect, cheaper things. I suspect shops have done a risk analysis and decided that they'd prefer to have more shoplifting and fewer staff.

At least in Walmart I've had workers come over to me multiple times to verify I correctly scanned things. There's definitely more scrutiny involved when you have a centralized self-checkout (this only happens in the more sketchy Walmart, the nicer one seems to trust people more).

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#147

Post by realusername »

hot_gril wrote: post #96
realusername wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to remember every time to scan what you get which is a bit annoying and tedious. And then if you are unlucky you hit a random "let's recheck everything" at the cashier which nullifies all the work that you have done.

Same reason I usually don't go to self-checkout.

Yeah that's basically the same issue. I do think the self scanning is even worse than the self checkout because at least at the self checkout you scan everything once at the end when you're done.

The fact that you have to remember to scan every time you put anything in your basket is just worse for the mental load I find.

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#148

Post by ssl-3 »

hot_gril wrote: post #131
noodlesUK wrote: post #6

I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. I really like using them, as they allow me to put stuff directly into my bags as I go. I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan a…

The hardest things are produce and by-weight items. Even self-checkout doesn't handle that well a lot of the time.

At Meijer stores I've shopped at, there are fancy scales in the produce section.

They work like this: Scan the barcode on the produce if it has one (or pick it from a picture-list, or search by name, or just key in the 4-digit PLU if you're cool like that), put it on the scale, and it spits out a barcode label that identifies the product and the weight.

At self-checkout, one just scans the generated barcode label and puts the produce in the bagging area like any other item.

Unlike the self-checkout kiosks themselves: There's never any wait to use these machines, so it's an easy process that doesn't involve making other people wait.

This process would work the same, I think, for applications where portable scanners are in-use.

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#149

Post by rootusrootus »

phh wrote: post #19
noodlesUK wrote: post #6

I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. I really like using them, as they allow me to put stuff directly into my bags as I go. I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan a…

We've had that in France for years, and noone uses that as far as I can tell. The main usage I see is mainly self checkout. Please note that I'm biased towards dense areas. We have on-the-go scanning in super stores as well, I feel it's not being used but I could be wrong

Similar in my area (in the US). We've had scan-and-go at the local grocery/everything store for many years, but I really don't see that many people actually using it.

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#150

Post by heywire »

throwway120385 wrote: post #122
jimbob45 wrote: post #27

There was a really neat company called Digimarc[0] a while back that promised to bake the barcode into the packaging such that you could scan any part of the label and receive a barcode successfully. I have no idea what happened to them because it seemed like a slam-dunk idea that would have greatly improved the purchasing process virtually everywhere (and you could just have a traditional fallback barcode in case th…

The problem with that is the same problem with self-checkout and Amazon Dash. It's solving a problem the retailer has -- the cost of employees -- by turning shoppers into store employees. But it doesn't really solve any problems that the shopper has because scanning all of your own stuff and laying it out on the scale is so inconvenient that it ruins everything else. The only place where I've seen self-checkout be as…

Most of the retailers in my area have turned off the bag scale security. But I live in a pretty small town, so maybe theft is at an acceptable level where they’re willing to make that trade off. They’re also using more and more computer vision to ensure what passes into the cart is scanned (Everseen and others), so perhaps they’re finding better success with that than the bag scale.
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