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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

#191

Post by vkou »

michaelt wrote: post #91
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…

> I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech Unfortunately I doubt you'll ever see this happen. Sure, it's supposedly possible to buy an RFID chip for 1p - but you can buy a can of beans for 23p so that 1p is probably their entire profit margin. I've also worked with a variety of RFID readers; none of them can provide reliable reading, even in favourable conditions.

Exactly how many beans does this 23p 'can' contain? Is it more than a dozen?

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

#192

Post by ozim »

philipkglass wrote: post #117
RankingMember wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sort of surprised it wasn't just using their Mechanical Turk site

Mechanical Turk suffers from coordinated fraud by people who want to be paid for doing a task without actually doing it [1]. The company I work for had to spend more engineering effort on building an internal reviewing-the-reviewers system to make it useful than we spent on the original Mechanical Turk integration. I'm not surprised that Amazon would avoid Mechanical Turk for higher consequence applications. [1] e.g.…

It will be fun to watch as AI tools flood mainstream.

We already had a lawyer having case thrown out because he didn’t do the job properly and got hallucinations from LLM.

Mostly because people don’t want to work.

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

#193

Post by LightBug1 »

Feedback: I'm a Prime customer and I've never even got into one of the stores. Having the on-site staff waiting at the front of the store like bouncers just put me off as I walked by! Hahah ...

I also kind of like the idea of people having jobs, so that's also a factor. But I didn't even get a chance to try these out ... and I would have but for the henchmen and women waiting to welcome me, LOL

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

#194

Post by smugma »

Uniqlo (in Japan and at least in SF) has a cool checkout method.

You drop your clothes into a big bin (I’ve always done it one piece at a time, didn’t think to do all at once) and it adds up all your items. I’ve used this maybe 8 times, 100% accurate so far.

Not sure how it works but I guessed RFID and quick Google appears to confirm:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/uniqlos-parent-company-bets-big...

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

#195

Post by babypuncher »

CSMastermind wrote: post #163
Ajay-p wrote: post #80

I recently finished a book called "The Secret Life of Groceries" by Benjamin Lorr. Amazing book. I learned that grocery and supermarket stores of the past, seemed to have worked very hard to give the best customer experience possible. Today it feels that customer experience has been replaced by cost cutting. Self checkout has been rife with problems, internally and socially, but supermarkets keep pushing them. I can…

Self checkout is a better customer experience for me personally.

I hate it, especially for large trips to the store.

The scale freaks out too often after I scan an item and put it on the bed, because the weight is slightly off for whatever reason. Then I have to stop scanning and wait for an employee to come over and scan their badge to authorize the sale.

I've gone back to just waiting in line at the standard checkout unless I have < 5 items in my cart.

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

#196

Post by MisterBastahrd »

hackable_sand wrote: post #173
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the various jobs I had during the 90s to put myself through college was stocking store shelves in a large grocery store. During my time there, I placed every item on the shelf by hand, rotated forward, so that the shelves were easy to front and look respectable by the time the morning came. After a few months, it was fairly easy to eyeball an item in the case, lift it while rotating, and place it on the shelf…

I appreciate the effort. I think manual, menial labor is pushed very hard in the US today. One thing that really bothers me is that older stock is not brought to the front and they just push it back with the new stuff. It's doubly frustrating because sometimes products change so you'll find what you're looking for after digging through three layers of assorted items. I don't really blame the apathy directly, but ther…

Well, the stock issue is sort of a manpower issue. For example, back home, the shelf with canned green beans, corn, and pre-cooked red beans was 4 cans high, and each section of those items was about 12 cans across. It'd be nice if we could simply spend the time to rotate and stock the items, but that just isn't feasible. It's far easier and more cost effective for the store to periodically check for expired product than it is to rotate them. It's even harder with tiny items like seasoning bottles. It would be nice if someone could design a shelving system that could be moved and stocked from the back, but that'd be quite an engineering feat given the sheer weight of the shelves and the proclivity for items to fall over when they're moved.

All of these stores have budgeted in losses. My managers were almost fired for the sheer amount of negligence they gave the store when it came to ordering product. Each location has a certain cadence to them when it comes to what people are buying. My managers didn't understand it, so they ended up with 25 rolling carts packed solid with backstock (these are 8 feet tall and have two shelves), and another 20-30 pallets. If you're unfamiliar, for a normal sized grocery store, you should really only have backstock on the top sides of those carts. Instead of filling the shelves with the product they'd already bought for the store, they were buying entirely new product! I managed to wrangle the order gun from them for the grocery department and they went from losing $30K a quarter in inventory to gaining about $15K. I kept an inventory in my head of what we had in the back and made sure not to order it.

How? Because when pallets inevitably tumble in the distribution centers, the centers can't waste time sorting through inventory to determine what's damaged. So they count it as a loss and toss the product into crates so that store employees can sort through them. Good stuff goes on the shelf, damaged stuff goes in the trash. Apparently the distribution centers damaged a lot of product, lol. My managers got cash bonuses for turning things around, and I got a 6 pack of beer.

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

#198

Post by mateo1 »

beardyw wrote: post #37
phh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

It's also a step towards individualized pricing, which many people, myself included, absolutely hate. This can be done with self-checkouts but it'll work much better with handheld scanners. Normal price: 3x, member price:2x, individualized price: scan to find out.

Big chains plan to gamblify the prices in the next few years using their "member cards" points, some chains are already up to this with specific penetration targets before they move forward. And this is not insider knowledge they're upfront about it.

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

#199

Post by throwanem »

kjellsbells wrote: post #121
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…

In the US (mid-Atlantic states) the supermarkets have tried this for years with very little success. Giant (Ahold) in particular persists with this, perhaps because they have a unionized workforce and would like nothing more than to slash their employee count.

Is that why they're pushing it so hard? That's good to know.

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

#200

Post by seabass-labrax »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #100
Ajay-p wrote: post #80

I recently finished a book called "The Secret Life of Groceries" by Benjamin Lorr. Amazing book. I learned that grocery and supermarket stores of the past, seemed to have worked very hard to give the best customer experience possible. Today it feels that customer experience has been replaced by cost cutting. Self checkout has been rife with problems, internally and socially, but supermarkets keep pushing them. I can…

One of the various jobs I had during the 90s to put myself through college was stocking store shelves in a large grocery store. During my time there, I placed every item on the shelf by hand, rotated forward, so that the shelves were easy to front and look respectable by the time the morning came. After a few months, it was fairly easy to eyeball an item in the case, lift it while rotating, and place it on the shelf…

There is a possibly unexpected advantage to stocking the shelves with boxed items: if the customer wants to purchase items in bulk, they can retrieve the boxes just as easily as they were put there. As a customer, I do that a lot for unperishable goods.
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