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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

#451

Post by lupire »

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.

When Amazon Fresh first launched, it was just SWEs running to the grocery store when someone placed an order.

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

#452

Post by pcchristie »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #288
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.

Seems like a lot of ewaste to me for marginal convenience otoh

Agreed. It would be cool if you could recycle them then and there for re-use.

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

#453

Post by ametrau »

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…

> the workers might otherwise be doing: perhaps just toiling in the fields for 16 hours a day

That is robber barron propaganda to make you believe their enslavement of people (by creating the right situation where the people have no choice) is actual good for them.

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

#454

Post by winter-day »

someotherperson wrote: post #293
winter-day wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while I agree with the sentiment, as an Indian, I hope this doesn't happen in India. countries which typically do this mechanical turk-like work typically don't raise themselves out of poverty (esp. Philippines, Indonesia, etc.). If anyone wants a specific example, I lead an aspect of web crawling for a FAANG and then other public companies. Over the last 10 years we heavily used those offshore teams, aforementioned,…

That's just exploitative business. I know companies that operate in that space and they pay incredibly well, between $20 to $50/hour. > GPT APIs which perform just as well That's because they were also trained by exploiting third world groups, paying about $2/hour. The problem here isn't offering work to developing countries, the problem here is major corporations squeezing them for every cent and not allowing it to…

if you don't think FAANGs (and most companies) participate in "exploitative business" you should find out how your iphone was made (hint: lots of exploited workers).

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

#455

Post by geodel »

threecheese wrote: post #349
Johnny555 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

wrt DoorDash (and Instacart etc), along with this squeeze I’ve observed the quality of service decrease severely. Could just be that my sample of a now wider employee pool is crappy, or workers are trying to “scale” to make a living wage with many concurrent orders, but I believe it’s part of the race to the bottom. I love the convenience, but the experience is worsening. How can these vendors continue to profit when…

Well in my observation people keep adjusting lower quality of service. I mean it is not going to be the case that people will start shopping in stores and/or cooking in kitchens.

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

#456

Post by tru3_power »

data_ders wrote: post #444
mrangle wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion. As this is an immortal pressure and negotiating tactic. It is incentivized, and therefore we will get more of it. That works both ways, but at some point there has…

> Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact can you explain this a bit further please? also, what's the storm that's coming?

Yeah you’re leaving us hanging here! To me it seems like people are learning their worth a little bit more lately and are demanding a little bit more/less financial stress.

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

#457

Post by wiricon »

chrash wrote: post #310

this might be my first comment here heh. i've worked on a similar product before. there's no way they were turning a profit. they definitely missed stuff all the time even with a ton of sensors. and sensors aren't the only cost. annotation is by far the most costly operational expense. new product? needs several annotated photos and recalibrated weight sensors. merchant decides to put Christmas branding on the same U…

How well does simulated data work in this space? My first stab at doing this scalably would be as follows: given a new product, physically obtain a single instance of the product (or ideally a 3d model, but seems like a big ask from manufacturers at this stage), capture images of it from every conceivable angle and a variety of lighting conditions (seems like you could automate this data capture pretty well with a robotic arm to rotate the object and some kind of lighting rig), get an instance mask for each image (using either human annotator or a 3d reconstruction method or a FG-BG segmentation model), paste those instances on random background images (e.g. from any large image dataset), add distractor objects and other augmentations, and finally train a model on the resulting dataset. Helps that many grocery items are relatively rigid (boxes, bottles, etc). I guess this would only work for e.g. boxes and bottles, which always look the same, you'd need a lot more variety for things like fruit and veg that are non rigid and have a lot of variety in their appearance, and we'd need to take into account changing packaging as well.

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

#458

Post by siva7 »

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…

Mandatory item weighting was standard procedure in many western europe self-checkout kiosks for years. The experience sucked and the solution felt over-engineered. They just dropped it recently and moved to a trust-based model overseen by a single employee. Now it's much faster.

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

#459

Post by 6E696365 »

mrangle wrote: post #439
Johnny555 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion. As this is an immortal pressure and negotiating tactic. It is incentivized, and therefore we will get more of it. That works both ways, but at some point there has…

Fascinating that you can see "underpaid" and "fair" wages as political myths but not "unskilled labor."

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

#460

Post by dcow »

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…

This factoid made its way through my social circles back in 2019. I'm a little surprised it wasn't more common knowledge.
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