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

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

#391

Post by gamepsys »

i_am_jl wrote: post #371
bombcar wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive? The people making the app need a much bigger cut than Domino's. Domino's cut only needs to be big enough to pay their delivery drivers, they make their money selling pizza and the delivery is just an additional service that drives business. The app maker needs a cut big enough to pay their delivery driver and also…

The margins of the delivery business could be razor thin because the scale at which the app can operate is much bigger than domino's. There are ~7000 domino's in US, and hundreds of thousand on uber eats. I think as more apps offer the same service we'll see a race to the bottom and have a reduction in cost, but not to the VC subsidized levels we saw five years ago.

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

#392

Post by randycupertino »

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.

> 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.

Reminds me of the "delivery robots" that weren't really automated after all, they were remotely navigated by cheaper workers on playstation controllers in Brazil and the Philippines driving them on the streets through cameras.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/they-are-cute-pink-robots-w...

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

#393

Post by Solvency »

ScoobleDoodle wrote: post #336
WrongAssumption wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Literally not true. neither Whole Foods nor Gelsons weigh anything you scan.

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

#394

Post by im3w1l »

gamepsys wrote: post #391
i_am_jl wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive? The people making the app need a much bigger cut than Domino's. Domino's cut only needs to be big enough to pay their delivery drivers, they make their money selling pizza and the delivery is just an additional service that drives business. The app maker needs a cut big enough to pay their delivery driver and also…

The margins of the delivery business could be razor thin because the scale at which the app can operate is much bigger than domino's. There are ~7000 domino's in US, and hundreds of thousand on uber eats. I think as more apps offer the same service we'll see a race to the bottom and have a reduction in cost, but not to the VC subsidized levels we saw five years ago.

Picking up one order from a restaurant takes the same amount of time as picking up a dozen. This is a much more important economy-of-scale than having a large app country-wide install base to spread dev costs over.

So I think a third-party delivery business must seek exclusivity contracts to be competitive with an in-house solution.

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

#395

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

breadwinner wrote: post #330
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.

I wonder if the same "tech" could be used for "self-driving" cars.

I'm pretty sure this idea has been kicked around, and is generally seen as not-super-useful because it requires a perfectly reliable low-latency connection.

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

#396

Post by throwaway2037 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #329
bombcar wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The company Weee which primarily sells Asian products does this sort of batch order, and their prices are the same as grocery stores because they rightly knew that their initial Chinese userbase (and other Asians in general) is extremely price conscious and won't accept such increased fees for delivery. I just listened to a podcast episode about them on How I Built This which is where I got this information, people s…

Very nice suggestion. Thank you to share! Here is the open Spotify link to that episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/69PURAcVOhzBcRUQrjkDfc

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

#397

Post by Terr_ »

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?

> 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?

IANAL but I'm confident the legal answer is "yes", the same as if someone was using sleight-of-hand with objects at a cashier-and-conveyor-belt checkout station.

Whether charges are brought and how easily the case can be proved is another matter, but the intent is what makes it a crime.

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

#398

Post by wnevets »

> . 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

So they just outsourced the cashiers to India

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

#399

Post by [deleted] »

Izkata wrote: post #390
arcticbull wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'r…

> Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out Technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you're done shopping, you can just leave the store. A little later, your receipt will be availab…

[deleted]

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

#400

Post by Reason077 »

I've shopped at Amazon Fresh's London stores occasionally, mainly for the convenience and novelty. And sometimes I've had Amazon orders shipped there for collection. But never really felt the desire to do regular daily shops there because the prices seemed higher than Tesco etc for roughly the same sort of products?

Aldi has also been trialing the same "just walk out" shopping model at their Greenwich store in London[1]. I always suspected that theirs had some manual intervention involved because of the variable time it takes to get the bill. Sometimes I'd be charged nearly instantly after walking out of the store, other times it would be hours later. Aldi's one is more compelling, IMO, because you get the regular, competitive Aldi prices.

[1] https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/shopandgo

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