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“Just walk out” technology by Amazon
371–380 of 769 posts
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#372My biggest problem with this is that from what I can tell, the only way to know how much you're going to be automatically charged (as well as what items the tech thinks you're purchasing), is to go to a kiosk in the store and get a receipt. Which seems to completely defeat the convenience of just walking out in the first place. I wouldn't feel comfortable just walking out without knowing how much I'm going to be char…
This is the "lame - no wireless, less space than a nomad" take. Are the prices not listed on the individual items? Purchasers make decisions on a product by product basis, not based on the total. How often are you at the checkout and say "Wait, HOW MUCH is my bill? never mind then, going to go put some things back." Sure, it happens, but it's a 0.0001% use case. edit: OK, fair play to everyone who responded and said…
> Not sure how relevant the food stamps argument is here, since this is an automatic pay and checkout system.
Not sure why you feel the need to say that anyone who is conscious of their grocery budget is irrelevant to an automatic system? You don't say this, but that basically implies that anyone who does so is 'beneath' this tech/convenience.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, i didn't say they weren't changing anything at all. Given how perturbed you are by those Prime ads that don't functionally affect anything, imagine the magnitude of the public outcry if Amazon implemented something as radical as "just walk out" tech at Whole Foods.
See, I was thinking of it the other way around. If you're going to change things, you might as well go all the way. Because it's not like they're fooling anyone right now.
If the end goal was to transform all WF stores in the near future, I agree. However, I don't think that is what's happening here. For that transformation to work well, the whole "cashier-less shopping experience" needs to be normalized with the general public, and that's where the brilliance of Amazon's strategy with this tech can be observed.
WF has already served Amazon well by being a test bed for grocery delivery optimization, no need to screw up a profitable existing business with any additional radical changes. That's what Amazon Go stores are for, and now they can sell that tech to other stores. Once the tech is mass-adopted, they can smoothly switch all WF stores to "just walk out" tech with very little complaints, as that's the experience people would be already used to at all the other stores
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#374Aaaand there’s the play. Amazon wasn’t trying to compete with other retails stores by leveraging their tech edge, they were positioning themselves to becoming the single provider of retail checkout solutions for the future. You either opt-in to giving Amazon all your retail data, or you become the only old fashioned “wait in line to get served” store on the street. And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all…
Or maybe the thing turned out not profitable/non-functional but they are trying to profit from it nonetheless.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#375>Will people still be working in stores with Just Walk Out technology? >Yes. Retailers will still employ store associates to greet and answer shoppers' questions, stock the shelves, check IDs for the purchasing of certain goods, and more - their roles have simply shifted to focus on more valuable activities. I think this raises questions about ethics in technology. Not to mention the creepy cameras watching your ever…
I think the real test for retail innovation is whether or not it manages to impact Aldi's, since they're already a skeleton crew. I don't doubt that JWO can eliminate some labor but can it eliminate enough to reduce employee count from 3 to 2 or 2 to 1?
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#376As long as there's still an option for human people to pay using their own money it's fine. But if these stores only allow for corporate people to purchase items (on behalf of their customer humans (credit cards)) then it is a very unethical system and probably should be made illegal.
Oh they will, but it'll be the minimum number of checkout lanes and you'll have to wait 15 minutes in line. That's my experience at my local Walmart. There are maybe 2-4 lanes with human cashiers (2 when it's slow, 4 when it's busier, but I've never been there at peak) and 10-15 stations for self-checkout.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#377Aaaand there’s the play. Amazon wasn’t trying to compete with other retails stores by leveraging their tech edge, they were positioning themselves to becoming the single provider of retail checkout solutions for the future. You either opt-in to giving Amazon all your retail data, or you become the only old fashioned “wait in line to get served” store on the street. And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all…
Not only your data, but the stores also. Now Amazon will know every item that sells, and at what price. Wonder what comes next?
Well, the most obvious is selling that data to competitors (store-level and product-level) and governments.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#378Aaaand there’s the play. Amazon wasn’t trying to compete with other retails stores by leveraging their tech edge, they were positioning themselves to becoming the single provider of retail checkout solutions for the future. You either opt-in to giving Amazon all your retail data, or you become the only old fashioned “wait in line to get served” store on the street. And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all…
No idea about the quality of their competition, but a startup called Standard Cognition has been in this market. https://standard.ai/
Jordan from Standard here. We absolutely believe that retailers will prefer to get this new technology from providers like us as opposed to Amazon, their biggest competitor.
So far Amazon has also not shown their technology deployed in an existing store, rather than an Amazon Go. We're actively working on being the first to demonstrate this. Stay tuned over the next couple of months.
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
#379This is just an observation that doesn't contribute meaningfully to discussion, but ... Twenty years ago this web site would 100% have looked like an April Fool's joke. Don't know what to make of that. Maybe it's that although retail feels almost exactly the same as it always has, under the hood lots of parts have really been moving, and I just haven't noticed? The parallel observation is that when Gmail was announce…
And why is this a standalone site and not inside the Amazon.com portfolio?
EDIT:
JustWalkout.com was registered anonymously at GoDaddy 7 years ago: https://www.whois.com/whois/justwalkout.com
Amazon.com has public DNS contact info: https://www.whois.com/whois/amazon.com
There's no TM or R marks around the term "Just Walk Out" on the page and no Favicon.
Are we sure this is real?
Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
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