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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

#481

Post by ghufran_syed »

tru3_power wrote: post #456
data_ders wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I took it to mean that whatever amount of money people currently think would be needed to be "fair", say, an increase from $20/hour to $25/hour, would within a year or so become "unfair" again, even if inflation was zero. Employers will always want more work for less money, employees will always want more money for less work. Same as the seller of any product would like more money for that product, and the buyer would always like to pay less for the same product.

So you can say the company is "greedy"...but that implies that the worker is also "greedy" - which is true for both IF you define it the way I described above. Or you could say that the company (owners) are trying to maximize their return on investment (time + money), and the the workers are trying to maximize their return on investment (of time).

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

#482

Post by ianstormtaylor »

tempest_ wrote: post #417
b112 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some would argue that trying to eliminate self or manual checkouts from groceries stores is letting the perfect be the enemy of good.

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

#483

Post by lnxg33k1 »

tbrownaw wrote: post #464
6E696365 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you saying that "unskilled labor" is like the other two in just being spin on "I don't approve of market forces"?

To me its funny that those who always talk about unskilled labour are the same who don’t have a driving licence, nor know how to make an omelette

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

#484

Post by b112 »

rwbt wrote: post #433
b112 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure all those fired, new job seekers jn India agree fully with you.

If the system did end up working as designed, wouldn't they get the shaft anyways?

You were upset that due to the "entitled" west, Indians had jobs. You were glad the jobs were gone.

Now you're trying to redirect, and say "Oh well, those jobs would have lasted only a few years more anyhow!".

My respnse to that is the same:

I'm sure all those fired, new job seekers jn India agree fully with you.

Consider te perspective of those you aim to "protect".

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

#485

Post by throwazr »

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…

You underestimated the silicon valley engineers

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

#486

Post by swores »

kshacker wrote: post #427
im3w1l wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So what we need is bundling of orders based on 1) restaurant location 2) recipient location 3) time 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…

At least in the UK this is the default behaviour from Deliveroo, standard delivery does cost money but might get your driver/biker go to multiple other houses on their way to you, or pay extra to get it direct. It made me stop using them, as there's no way to guess whether the normal option will bring the food fresh or not, and paying the premium each time made it feel too expensive.

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

#487

Post by troad »

johnwalkr wrote: post #363
hn_user82179 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular grocery stores have really gone downhill as well. Whenever I shop, there’s at most 1 cashier doing checkout and usually 0 (only self-checkout being open). I consider myself pretty proficient about knowing what sets off the machine but still set it off 60% of the time (about some weight imbalance etc) that requires an attendant to come fix manually. I’ve gotten to dread the grocery store trips as they require…

I live in Western Europe and the self checkouts don’t have scales, except for weighing produce, and even for buying alcohol, they trust you to say you’re over 16. It’s always fast because you wait in one line for 4-8 self checkouts and take the first free one. On the other hand, using the cashier is often frustrating. You have to self-bag anyway and the cashier won’t start scanning your items until the person in fron…

I travel extensively, and I think attitudes towards self-checkout vary heavily depending on what preceded it where you are.

In some places, you had smoke-stained cashiers throwing your groceries to their side without so much as looking at you, except to complain you're not bagging fast enough. I think it's fair to say that in those places, self-checkout is a huge improvement.

In other places though, where cashiers have traditionally been more friendly and expected to bag your groceries, it feels like a less obvious improvement. Whereas before you had chipper high school kids working their first job bagging your groceries, now you have menacing terminals accusing you of being a criminal every time their scales misalign.

Self-checkout is a convergence on mediocrity: some places are going to get dragged up, and others down.

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

#488

Post by uolmir »

gruez wrote: post #475
6E696365 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The concept of "underpaid" and "fair" wages is fundamentally subjective. Is a burger flipper underpaid because he cant raise a family a buy a house on that wage, "underpaid"? Or is his labor simply not that valuable? Is a techbro making $300k "underpaid" because his employer is making $500k off his work? On the other hand skilled vs unskilled labor, as well as the concept of human capital are well recognized concepts…

Ah yes, the famously objective field of economics.

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

#489

Post by Aloisius »

6E696365 wrote: post #459
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…

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

Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs where any specialized skills required can be learned on the job in a short period of time, usually less than 30 days.

It doesn't literally mean the workers don't know how to do anything. It's certainly not a myth - it's a classification of work, at least in the US.

https://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/cfr20/416/416-0968.htm

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

#490

Post by stringsandchars »

diggan wrote: post #54
noodlesUK wrote: post #6

I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. I really like using them, as they allow me to put stuff directly into my bags as I go. I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan a…

> I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. Scan-as-you-shop has been around for at least a decade at this point I think, at least in some parts of the world. ICA (supermarket in Sweden) been doing it for as long as I can remember, and I came across this image of the scanner being used at the store on Mediawiki: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:S…

> (like a high-trust environment like Sweden)

You maybe don't know that Sweden is consistently near the top of shoplifting statistics in Europe.

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