421–430 of 769 posts
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...
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’d contend that even if a much more capable company like OpenAI tried this, they’d get much closer, maybe good enough for a product but this a really ill defined problem where even the best results may not be worth it.
Putting cameras on the roof doesn’t let you see everything a person grabs, there will always be weird occluded angles. On top of that the cameras need to be super high resolution and zoomed in to detect some of the smaller stuff in shelves. This is just for the trustworthy customers, now consider the thieves, they’re gonna have a field day with this, it’s not going to be easy to prevent a determined thief from not fooling the systems. A self checkout cart honestly makes much more sense, still prone to thieves but it at least lets you skip the line much more reliably.
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>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…
I would contend that Dominos is a pizza logistics company rather than a seller of retail pizza (compare Pizza Hut). https://biz.dominos.com/about-us/innovations/ They're not just selling pizza to make money - but also looking at making cars. https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/why-dominos-dxp-d... While I'm not going to claim that was a good idea, the point is that Dominos sees making and delivering pizza as o…
Edit: the Hagerty story was a nice read, thank you for linking to it
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…
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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…
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?
when it’s just starting out in something, you get instant classics.
when it’s out of ideas but still has the levers of access tilted all the way to “got mine bitches”, you get the late MCU, Uber for X, and OpenAI Larry Summers Edition.
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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.
And if that could be done, maybe just 2 orders to start with (for example carpool benefits for 2 people), that will be awesome, but if you could pool 4-5 orders, that will make bank !
I guess this model, if scaled purely based on the model, will imply restaurants co-located (same parking lot) will benefit from such an arrangement.
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> 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 n…
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> 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.
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>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…
I would contend that Dominos is a pizza logistics company rather than a seller of retail pizza (compare Pizza Hut). https://biz.dominos.com/about-us/innovations/ They're not just selling pizza to make money - but also looking at making cars. https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/why-dominos-dxp-d... While I'm not going to claim that was a good idea, the point is that Dominos sees making and delivering pizza as o…