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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

#301

Post by dambi0 »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #277
saalweachter wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot of the waiting is for age restricted items or machine errors rather than trust issues. I have never once been randomly sampled after self surface purchase in either the UK/US.

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

#302

Post by robertlagrant »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #277
saalweachter wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Another benefit of having a proper social safety net I guess.

I doubt it's as simple as this. People don't only steal because they could technically afford things. Just as people don't only kill in self defence.

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

#303

Post by filoleg »

madeofpalk wrote: post #261
Iulioh wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they cost 5-10c Still more than printed paper but the cost is not astronomical. Some sellers on Alibaba even advertise 3c cad

Orders of magnitude more than existing barcodes which are practically free due to being printed on the packaging. A 10c RFID tag would be 10% of the cost of many products, which im sure is unacceptable to grocery stores which I can't imagine have great margins.

> A 10c RFID tag would be 10% of the cost of many products, which im sure is unacceptable to grocery stores which I can't imagine have great margins.

If the store decides to eat the cost of those? Sure, I can buy that logic.

However, I don't see stores being unable to just raise the price of items by 10c without much pushback, which would eliminate that issue with the profit margin entirely (since the cost of it is offloaded to the customer).

I, personally, would love to be able to pay just 10c extra per item, if it meant that I can have a checkout experience similar to that of Uniqlo.

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

#304

Post by kjkjadksj »

financypants wrote: post #186
whyenot wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

peel off the RFID tags from the expensive vine ripened tomatoes and replace them with tags from the really cheap ones (people already do this with the plastic stickers)

Even easier to scan organic tomatoes as regular ones, similarly with other fruit/vegetables. The “self check out discount”

A buddy of mine would scan meat as bananas in college. Probably saved hundreds.

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

#305

Post by xp84 »

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.

Apparently this news came out in May 2023. I also was bamboozled into thinking that sophisticated computer vision algos -- that worked -- were doing this.

I'm now picturing the remote workers constantly switching between cameras, studying: Did he put down the can of kidney beans or the can of corn there? Wait, the man picked up the bananas, but then he handed them to the woman in the white shirt. Let's charge them to her account. Wait, she handed them back at 14:42 in aisle 16. Going to switch them back to the man.

All day long, day in day out, for years. I am the last to criticize 'low wage jobs' paternalistically, because I know they may be much better than what the workers might otherwise be doing: perhaps just toiling in the fields for 16 hours a day (or worse: something like 'melting down discarded PCBs to recover trace metals'). But still, I do not think I would want to do this job nor that it was worth it. I get that they were supposedly trying to train an algorithm to do it. I'm glad that they aren't keeping at it any longer though now that it's proven so unworkable.

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

#306

Post by Timshel »

alsodumb wrote: post #273
madeofpalk wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022.

Or not ...

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

#307

Post by CodeWriter23 »

LightBug1 wrote: post #193

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

Heh, Read the instructional sign outside the store. Opened up my Amazon App and got the QR Code on my screen. Could not figure out where on the turnstile to scan it, and I'm a barcode app guy. There was a screen prompting me for my palm print. Um, no. You don't get my money AND my biometrics. We turned around and walked out.

To top that off, the associate carting out in the parking lot ridiculed us and gave us a "buh bye". So, Amazon Fresh is off the list for me. I don't even go to Whole Foods after that experience.

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

#308

Post by margalabargala »

strgcmc wrote: post #255
dangerwill wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well from the article it's clear that this camera+ai based detection of purchases never worked for Amazon. They had to rely on Indian contractors watching people remotely. It never technically worked, and even if it did, then yeah I agree that it wouldn't make economic sense. Cameras with that level of fidelity and with 100% coverage, tracking N customers at once, are probably a huge capital expense. And all for slig…

> And all for slightly faster shopping. Wanted to comment on this part -- Prime itself was nothing more than faster shipping, though yes the difference between 4-6 weeks standard vs 2-days was massive (not just slightly faster). But the point is, Amazon excels at identifying friction points that others have just accepted as industry norms, but which, if unblocked, could actually meaningfully shift consumer behaviors.…

The issue is that speed is not the only thing necessary. You need speed, and trust.

A cashier-less, grab and go store that works as advertised would be hugely convenient and valuable. But where we are now, people don't think it works, so they double check and get nervous.

And that goes doubly for Amazon. Amazon doesn't care about doing things right. They've shown that over and over via their (lack of) protections against counterfeit items.

Ask anyone in the eastern US, would you trust getting your eclipse glasses on Amazon?

Why would you trust them to get your grocery order right?

And that destroys the convenience.

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

#309

Post by filoleg »

ska wrote: post #220
CSMastermind wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self checkout is a better customer experience for me personally.

I've never experienced one reliable enough for this to be true (for me).

Well, have you tried the one at Amazon Go stores? I've been using those once every month or so, since the year the very first one opened in Seattle, and not once have I had any issues at all.

It was truly fantastic, especially since the app would notify me afterwards how long I spent at the store, and seeing that number always made me feel good. TLDR on this: my average shopping experience from the moment I entered the store to the moment I left took around 3-4 minutes, with plenty of them being under a minute long.

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

#310

Post by chrash »

this might be my first comment here heh.

i've worked on a similar product before.

there's no way they were turning a profit. they definitely missed stuff all the time even with a ton of sensors. and sensors aren't the only cost. annotation is by far the most costly operational expense. new product? needs several annotated photos and recalibrated weight sensors. merchant decides to put Christmas branding on the same UPC? now all your vision models are poisoned for that product. it needs to be re-annotated for the month and a half it exists and the models need to be swapped out once inventory changes over again. as long as merchants are redesigning products (always) your datasets will be in a constant state of decay. even if your vision sensors are stationary and know the modular design up front, you still need to be able to somewhat generalize in case things get misplaced (big problem for weight sensors) or the camera gets bumped.

between dataset management, technology costs, research costs, rote operational costs, etc this is a very expensive problem to solve. and large models with a ton of parameters are little help; they may lower annotation costs a bit but will increase the cost of compute.

once i really dug into this problem i saw Amazon Go's Just Walk Out for what it really was: a marketing stunt

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