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

gizmodo.com

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

#271

Post by JohnFen »

Ginobili wrote: post #129
shmatt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've written about this multiple times on HN and always got downvoted I work in the CV industry and this was a very badly kept secret. There is absolutely no financially feasible way to run something like this with current CV

i'm curious to know what the limitations of the technology are. Are the machine learning/CV algorithms not accurate enough to run it at scale?

I work with ML CV industrial systems, and they can certainly do accurate and detailed analysis and identification very quickly. The systems that do this are also necessarily very, very expensive -- much more expensive than any grocery store could possibly justify.

Of course, costs change with time, but right now I don't see how this sort of application could approach being financially feasible.

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

#272

Post by [deleted] »

wyager wrote: post #247
rwbt wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad it's gone for good, if the process really works like how it's described in the article. Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout (eww- the horror!). The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.

> Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout Wanting to make your life more convenient and pleasant isn't "entitled". 99% of jobs are things people would rather not be doing (otherwise you wouldn't be getting paid for it). The point is that we can allocate this work in a way that minimizes the amount of time everyone has to spe…

[deleted]

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

#273

Post by alsodumb »

madeofpalk wrote: post #254
bilalq wrote: post #190

This is pretty sad to read. Before Covid, the Amazon Go store experience was phenomenal. All the convenience of a 7-Eleven but with the pricing of a normal grocery store. The food options were really good and the BlueApron style meal-kits were amazing. The Alexa integration was also nice for being able to just verbally ask what's the next step on a recipe while you're busy stirring or chopping things. When it rolled…

> 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. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. Wow - I did not know this. This makes it all a whole lot less impressive and interesting that it was just people off shore watching you.

It's just a tech-illiterate journalist who can't seem to understand the difference between "annotators watching and labeling videos to validate the model" vs "people watching the videos live to remotely decide the cost of every user's purchase".

Or maybe they do know the difference, but wanted to bait audience.

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

#274

Post by franga2000 »

wyager wrote: post #247
rwbt wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad it's gone for good, if the process really works like how it's described in the article. Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout (eww- the horror!). The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.

> Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout Wanting to make your life more convenient and pleasant isn't "entitled". 99% of jobs are things people would rather not be doing (otherwise you wouldn't be getting paid for it). The point is that we can allocate this work in a way that minimizes the amount of time everyone has to spe…

> The point is that we can allocate this work in a way that minimizes the amount of time everyone has to spend doing undesirable work.

1. Not all work is equally undesirable and the way people are paid is not related to that in any way (in fact isn't usually inversely related)

2. Minimising the undesirable work done in total means some people end up doing almost all of it and some basically none (or, if you consider all work undesirable, some people do only the worst and some only the least bad work).

If before, for example, everyone would spend half an hour of their day to cook for themselves, which might be inconvenient but is overall not a big impact on your quality of life, now we have overworked and underpaid restaurant and related staff doing intense work for crazy hours, which is is a devastating hit to their (and their families') quality of life. The sum of human effort spent on cooking may have gone down in this example, but instead of everyone being a little annoyed by it, some people are living like kings and some are slaving away for their convenience (obviously this wording is exaggerated, but if we look globally, this is basically what's happening).

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

#275

Post by bombcar »

noodlesUK wrote: post #99
kube-system wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the relationship between the rate of shoplifting and ease of shoplifting is anywhere close to linear. Even before self-checkouts existed, people still shoplifted. And in some places, the honor system even works much of the time.

> I doubt the relationship between the rate of shoplifting and ease of shoplifting is anywhere close to linear. I'm sure you're right. I suspect that there are massive variations from shop location to shop location, even within a region. I also suspect there are different kinds of shoplifting. I remember hearing a friend who is not the kind of person to just pocket an item and leave, bragging about ringing up protein…

There's a number of people who openly admit to "self checkout discounts" as part of the "payment" for doing the work for the store.

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

#276

Post by kageneko »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #104
diggan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. Scan-as-you-shop has been around for at least a decade at this point I think, at least in some parts of the world. ICA (supermarket in Sweden) been doing it for as long as I can remember, and I came across this image of the scanner being used at the store on Mediawiki: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:S…

Wal-Mart tried it here in Canada for a bit, but it didn't last long at all.

One of the "perks" of my Walmart+ membership is scan-as-you-go. I think I've used it twice. Both times, I only had a few things and the store was packed solid with spring breakers. It was a decent experience but I still like the normal self-checkout the best.

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

#277

Post by semi-extrinsic »

saalweachter wrote: post #233
hn_user82179 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular grocery stores have really gone downhill as well. Whenever I shop, there’s at most 1 cashier doing checkout and usually 0 (only self-checkout being open). I consider myself pretty proficient about knowing what sets off the machine but still set it off 60% of the time (about some weight imbalance etc) that requires an attendant to come fix manually. I’ve gotten to dread the grocery store trips as they require…

Yeah, the "if anything goes wrong you now stand around with your thumb up your ass while one employee makes their way from broken kiosk to broken kiosk to manually resolve the problems" model has soured me on self-checkout. I find I have a very low "dealing with this bullshit" limit, to the point that if I have trouble I'm likely to just say fuck it and walk out of the store without completing my purchase.

Having used the UK/US type self checkout machines while travelling, I must say it is so nice to live in Northern Europe where the self checkout machines are largely just based on trust, with randomly sampling ~five items of every 100 shoppers. There is no weighing at any of the stores.

If you don't get randomly selected for inspection, there is nothing stopping you from just walking out with groceries you didn't pay for worth a hundred dollars easy. People just don't. Another benefit of having a proper social safety net I guess.

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

#278

Post by bombcar »

Salgat wrote: post #146
noodlesUK wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It's entirely a sketchy/nice dichotomy (though the local nice grocery store is tuned too damn high, I avoid that one).

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

#279

Post by b112 »

rwbt wrote: post #243
bilalq wrote: post #190

This is pretty sad to read. Before Covid, the Amazon Go store experience was phenomenal. All the convenience of a 7-Eleven but with the pricing of a normal grocery store. The food options were really good and the BlueApron style meal-kits were amazing. The Alexa integration was also nice for being able to just verbally ask what's the next step on a recipe while you're busy stirring or chopping things. When it rolled…

I'm glad it's gone for good, if the process really works like how it's described in the article. Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout (eww- the horror!). The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.

I'm sure all those fired, new job seekers jn India agree fully with you.

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

#280

Post by floren »

steelframe wrote: post #227

Cool. Now can I pay with cash? Because I'm not going to let anyone build a profile on whether I like warming lube or just regular lube, how much sugar and alcohol I consume, what kind of romance novels I read, how often I floss, and whether I feel I can afford organic fruit.

Hmm you make a good point, but have you considered that your health insurance provider really wants to know these things, and will pay up to $0.35 to learn them? It would be criminally negligent for Amazon not to build and sell that profile!
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