Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If manned checkout is a dishwasher and self-checkout is handwashing dishes in the sink after the meal; scan-as-you-shop is eating next to a little basin where you wash each utensil as soon as you're done using it, before you're allowed to return to the meal.
Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
321–330 of 769 posts
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#323Earlier 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.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#324Uniqlo (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
#325This 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.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#326Which isn't solved despite availability, because it's "solved" by just having someone else walk through a store, maybe doing a few customers orders all at once.
Like it would seem to me that for, at least packaged goods, an entire city could and should be serviced out of a couple of warehouses with better stocking and fulfillment systems?
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#327this 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 U…
are larger image/video models unable to catch things like Christmas branding?
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn’t pointless, they were training an AI that never fully worked. It’s ultimately the same kind of thing as people monitoring self driving cars, a boring task that may be pointless or possibly remove a lot of drudgery longer term. According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per…
That sort of thing seems to improve over time. The USPS has had automatic sorting machines for a long time. At first they could only read pre-barcoded mail. Humans had to key in zip codes. Then character recognition got good enough that printed and typed addresses could be read automatically. Some items were still rejected, and they went through manual stations that added a bar-code sticker. Then manual reading was m…
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of services would be phenomenal when you can offload much of the cost to run them to cheap offshore labor. Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when much of the cost of operating was offset by underpaid workers and VC funds? Now that they don't have unlimited piles of money and cities/states are making them pay more fair wages, the cost-benefit of those services has diminished. I was ok paying $5 for $20 of…
I wish it could all be managed intelligently; I'm hungry but I can wait, let orders collect and make them all at once or something. Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive?
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#330This 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.