Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 769 posts

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

#361

Post by wolverine876 »

dangerwill wrote: post #231
nemothekid wrote: post #212

There was a startup, Standard Cognition, that offered the same experience, but I checked their website ( https://standard.ai/ ) and it seems they have given up on it too. Edit: Looking over their marketing videos now and taking a more optimistic approach, is "just walk out" technology all that useful? It seems they pivoted to a product where is much clearer what the value add is (Predictive analytics, loss prevention…

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…

> Overpriced, bad stock

It's just early tech: They were working out the tech, then they'd figure out their market, stock, pricing, etc.

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

#362

Post by worried4future »

seattle_spring wrote: post #312
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)

Another word for this is "theft"

Oh no. Jeff will have to make his next yacht 1 foot shorter.

Seriously, I have a hard time caring about this.

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

#363

Post by johnwalkr »

hn_user82179 wrote: post #226
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…

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…

I live in Western Europe and the self checkouts don’t have scales, except for weighing produce, and even for buying alcohol, they trust you to say you’re over 16. It’s always fast because you wait in one line for 4-8 self checkouts and take the first free one.

On the other hand, using the cashier is often frustrating. You have to self-bag anyway and the cashier won’t start scanning your items until the person in front of you has bagged all of their stuff, had a chat about the weather and counted their change. The bagging area is always way too small, making all of this take a while. A few times I’ve even waited while one cashier counts their float, leaves, and a new one comes and counts their float.

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

#364

Post by arcticbull »

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.

Sounds like fake-it-till-you-make-it stuff right? This is exactly how I would bootstrap a startup that wanted to do this. Kind of impressed with their scrappiness to be honest.

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

#365

Post by baumy »

idontwantthis wrote: post #340
xp84 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you did some kind of shell game with 5 different people all passing around their items, then you don’t get charged correctly is it theft? Did anyone ever try that?

I worked for Amazon in Seattle when Amazon Go first launched. As you'd expect, lots of SDE teams made games out of trying to fool the thing in various ways.

A few attempts were successful early on (passing items back and forth, one person moving something to the wrong shelf and another person picking it up, people dressing in identical outfits, etc), but the success rate in fooling the system was very very low. No method of trying to trick it that I ever heard of worked consistently, and it definitely seemed to get harder to fool the longer the store was open.

At the time I thought that whatever algos were being run on the camera feeds were getting better. Knowing that it was basically all manual, I'm not sure what the explanation is for the store seemingly getting harder to fool over time. Possibly just placebo, or people lost interest in trying so hard to fool it.

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

#366

Post by RichardCA »

xp84 wrote: post #305
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.

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…

> something like 'melting down discarded PCBs to recover trace metals'

Better than shipbreaking.

https://youtu.be/5jdEG_ACXLw

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

#367

Post by arcticbull »

FourOnTheFloor wrote: post #355
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…

But this was an obvious sham and a fraud that couldn't scale. I don't think its demise is sad at all. What's sad is putting cashiers out of work, and even worse is replacing them with outrageously piss-poor alternatives. Self-checkout is a clinic on incompetent system design, and has been for DECADES now. It's mind-bogglingly bad, all to take jobs away from people. Fuck that.

Why is it a fraud? Did they ever tell you it was entirely computer-driven? I thought their value proposition was you could just ... walk out. This feels pretty inescapably the future. Why have people do bad jobs like cashier work when computers could do them instead? This is why UBI is going to be critical. We're moving to a world where we'll have more people than work, and that's not just ok - it's fantastic.

They're not wrong, they're just early. Which you could argue is the same thing on a micro scale, but not on a macro.

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

#368

Post by ricardobeat »

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…

Self-checkout is seamless in Europe. I don't see anything that would stop the US from having the same.

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

#369

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

Timshel wrote: post #311
omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on how much each human reviewer did. If they manually reviewed most of the items on each shopping trip, then it's mostly manual. If they only manually reviewed an item or few per trip, I'd consider it to be mostly automated.

Well Amazon did not think so: > Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales.

They didn't even agree with the 700 out of 1000 trips needing review figure

> 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 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.

Even if the system was fairly accurate, if the vendor is charging Amazon too much for it, it can still be financially worthwhile for Amazon to switch to scanners in their carts.

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

#370

Post by saalweachter »

dambi0 wrote: post #352
DangitBobby wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without trust issues there would be no machine errors in my experience. Anytime there's an issue it's because I'm scanning too fast for the machine and it can't figure out how the weights work. Or I selected the wrong type of garlic and only the associate is allowed to remove items (why would you not let me remove items I personally added??).

Fair, the inability to remove your own items seems maybe a hang-up from an older view of privileged cashiers. The store I currently use doesn’t have weight checks except for weighed produce. You can leave your stuff in the cart and with the wireless scanner and a bit of forethought everything can stay in there. Different trust models makes things interesting. I have never been checked leaving the store and I don’t th…

Yeah, the not being able to remove items grinds my gears.

It's especially annoying when I am waving an item furiously, trying to get the poorly printed barcode to scan, and when it finally accepts it, it double scans the item.

Then when I have to stand there waiting for someone to remove the item is usually where I get disgusted with the process and give up on shopping, especially when it happens multiple times.

Post reply on HN