Can we start a list of technological magic that is actually "1000 people in India watching and labeling videos" (or functional equivalent)?
Not India, but my favorite example was the Kiwi food delivery robot fleet in Berkeley, CA. They were controlled manually from Colombia, and from the looks of it, seems like one person was trying to drive 20 robots at once.
A lot of these robot delivery things need to go out with a human handler 100 yards back lest people try and kick them open it seems. Whats the point at that point? Just have the person walk it over.
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…
I’ve never been nor seen anyone in the US get inspected at a self checkout. Not once.
Might be your neighborhood -- stores with a low shrink rate might be more lax about inspections. I've only encountered it a few times myself but I'm also not the primary shopper in my household.
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...
I have been able to dump about 7-8 items in there at once
I’ve used “Just Walk Out” at Amazon Fresh regularly over the past few years and it has been both convenient and reliable. But the machine learning is clearly stuck at a level where the need for ML data associates is cost-prohibitive: 70% requiring human verification is an order of magnitude off from their target of 5%.
Notably, they are continuing “Just Walk Out” at a few locations in case future advances make the technology more viable.
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...
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.
I actually prefer manned check-out. It tends to be much faster. The checkout people tend to be wicked fast at swiping groceries in front of those scanners, much faster than I can dig into the cart, find something, fumble around scanning it, then place it in that little post-scan cubbie---ughhhhh. And manned checkout is already parallelized: Next customer queues up groceries while current customer is being serviced.
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.
The wages of the scanning staff is a cost to be considered on the side .
At even 10c a tag , it is equivalent to one person scanning 200 items a hour (assuming $20/hour wages) .
Factoring in time to bag and do a cash/card/coupon transaction etc a retail employee is not doing more than 500 or maybe 1000 items a hour .
A cost of 2c is definitely close to economic feasibility if 10c is not
I’ve never been nor seen anyone in the US get inspected at a self checkout. Not once.
That's because all of the self checkouts in the US use the weight change to match against the scanned item and any discrepancy leads to having to wait for a self-checkout attendant to manually override to let you continue. That manual override is equivalent to the inspection you're talking about not seeing. And I in the US get blocked needing an attendant 60%+ of the time at some point in the process. Usually up fron…
At the Target next to where I live, the self checkouts don't weigh anything at all. I just scan something and put it in my backpack on the floor most of the time. And this is a Target where the toothpaste is locked up! I've never needed help from an attendant, and I've never been inspected either.
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.
It’s definitely trust issues here in the Netherlands.
Buying something for under 5 euro bucks in a shop where middle school kids buy their lunches is almost guaranteed check. More than one in three times.
A different shop and a bigger amount — checks almost never
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…
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…
wrt DoorDash (and Instacart etc), along with this squeeze I’ve observed the quality of service decrease severely. Could just be that my sample of a now wider employee pool is crappy, or workers are trying to “scale” to make a living wage with many concurrent orders, but I believe it’s part of the race to the bottom. I love the convenience, but the experience is worsening. How can these vendors continue to profit when lower quality leads to increased refunds?
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…
I’ve never been nor seen anyone in the US get inspected at a self checkout. Not once.
I know that Krogers has cameras that use some sort of intelligence. I held an object in my hand as I moved other items across the scanner, it set of an alarm and a bunch of still images of my checkout process came up with colored shapes highlighting different on screen items