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

gizmodo.com

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

#411

Post by h0l0cube »

RichardCA wrote: post #366
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…

> something like 'melting down discarded PCBs to recover trace metals' Better than shipbreaking. https://youtu.be/5jdEG_ACXLw

Thanks for that

Edit: On thinking about this tangent, it seems that if global regulation is the only solution, it would make sense to enforce regulation from the ship building side (in western countries), rather than the wrecking side (in developing countries) which will only displace the bad practices to less scrupulous countries. A solution might be sizable amount of money that had to be paid to escrow that could not be released back to the owner until the ship has been disposed of in an environmentally sound manner, incentivizing and funding the proper scrapping of ships. Or perhaps a levy which funds safety practices and equipment for scrapping companies

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

#412

Post by Fricken »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #395
breadwinner wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Phantom Auto did this. They had cars ferrying people around CES 2018 in Vegas driven by remote drivers in LA. Apparently the company folded just a few weeks ago.

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

#413

Post by innocentoldguy »

I think this is funny. I worked on this team at Amazon for two years after successfully building an app similar to Dash Cart for another company using Elixir (which is still going). I repeatedly tried to convince Amazon to do Just Walk Out differently, but their toxic culture wouldn't hear of it. I got bored with the project (and a little disgruntled, to be honest) and left after my signing bonus ended.

I guess it is good that they figured it out in the long run, but they could have fixed this in 2020 if they had just listened.

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

#414

Post by CaptainFever »

throwanem wrote: post #199
kjellsbells wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US (mid-Atlantic states) the supermarkets have tried this for years with very little success. Giant (Ahold) in particular persists with this, perhaps because they have a unionized workforce and would like nothing more than to slash their employee count.

Is that why they're pushing it so hard? That's good to know.

It's a piece of speculation on HN, not fact.

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

#415

Post by burntalmonds »

baumy wrote: post #365
idontwantthis wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me…

Thomas Crown Affair at the grocery store.

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

#416

Post by dannyobrien »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #277
saalweachter wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the "if anything goes wrong you now stand around with your thumb up your ass while one employee makes their way from broken kiosk to broken kiosk to manually resolve the problems" model has soured me on self-checkout. I find I have a very low "dealing with this bullshit" limit, to the point that if I have trouble I'm likely to just say fuck it and walk out of the store without completing my purchase.

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…

The weighing thing seems to be an adjustable feature: in my /extremely/ low-trust Safeway in San Francisco, they started with narrow weight limits that were super-frustrating. Now that misfeature is turned off completely (but they have a little gate you need to wave your receipt at).

I imagine everyone is still playing around to get the optimum ease-of-use vs shoplifting ratio right.

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

#417

Post by tempest_ »

b112 wrote: post #289
parhamn wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any ideas whats stopping it from becoming much cheaper? RFIDs on everything seem like a good move in the robotics age.

I don't want rfid tags in my apples, and putting them on the outside of each one seems costly. And things like onions have a loose outer skin, which falls off. And grocery store clerks peel the outside (wilting) leaves off of things like local lettuce daily. Seems like rfid on groceries would be hard for fresh produce, and we don't need everything wrapped in plastic.

This is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Sure an apple or a squash is hard to track, but a large (probably a majority) of a modern grocery stores selection is prepackaged goods.

It it is a lot easier to run a veggienet or whatever on a small subset of the goods purchased.

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

#418

Post by unscaled »

skyyler wrote: post #214
noodlesUK wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that right now this isn't viable for lower margin food products. Uniqlo and decathlon probably don't sell that much for less than £10. It's going to be a while before you can reasonably do that for a pint of milk.

You're right - the cheapest thing uniqlo sells are $5 pairs of socks. Their $15 shirts are the next cheapest thing they sell, I'd imagine.

These would be 290 yen ($1.90) 790 yen ($5.20) in Japan respectively.

I still don't think an RFID will eat that much into their profit margin, but Uniqlo is in the unique position of having stricter control over their supply chain. All the products they sell are Uniqlo-branded products, manufactured specifically for Uniqlo, and they can just have RFID tags embedded in the price tags for all the products with little extra cost.

Grocery stores sells cans, plastic jugs, glass bottles, shrink-wrapped fresh produce and even plain vegetable and fruit or grain and legumes by weight. All of these comes from a wide variety of manufacturers that don't produce directly for you (or even have any kind of direct relationship with you).

The wide variety of form factors makes attaching RFID to everything unrealistic, and even for the stuff you could attach RFID to, it's not like manufacturers would do that for you.

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

#419

Post by CaptainZapp »

Terr_ wrote: post #376
geodel wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how come everything with an app is so much more expensive? After ton of investment investors are finally looking for returns now. And consumers have decided convenience reigns supreme. Right from the SAAS products to daily breakfast customers there is lot of premium on convenience.

> After ton of investment investors are finally looking for returns now. We need a quippy phrase for this, but unfortunately "Pump and Dump" is already taken for a kind of stock-market manipulation. Instead, I would like to coin/nominate "Tease and Squeeze". First consumers are teased by the idea that the disruptive new service has invented a magic new secret to low prices and great value... But after the company as…

What's wrong with enshittification[0]?

Granted, Tease and Squeeze has a nicer ring. Then again, the enshittification neologism became standard langue in no time and is understood by everybody.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

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

#420

Post by pcchristie »

Terr_ wrote: post #397
idontwantthis wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I thought one of the marketing lines was that Amazon was so confident/comfortable in their implementation was that they assumed all liability for mistakes (though as I type this I realise they may have worded it to encapsulate only honest mistakes rather than people trying deliberately to break the system).
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