“Just walk out” technology by Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#511

Post by x__x » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 12:43 AM UTC

chipperyman573 wrote: post #296

This post looked kind of weird to me so I looked up the whois, it's registered to godaddy. Which is odd because it is not the same registrar as amazon.com or aws, and aws operates a domain registration service so I can't imagine a real amazon service would use godaddy. Combined with the fact that there's no concrete plans set in place, it seems really fake.

Most of their other domains seem to be registered with MarkMonitor Inc. domain registrar.

Even if they recently bought this domain and it was pushed to one of their GoDaddy accounts, you think they would immediately initiate a transfer to MarkMonitor to put it in their portfolio of managed domains.

In July of 2019, the domain had a coming soon page on it, that was in German:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190709115714/http://justwalkou...

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#512

Post by zbruhnke » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 12:44 AM UTC

codazoda wrote: post #503

boublepop wrote: post #246

Aaaand there’s the play. Amazon wasn’t trying to compete with other retails stores by leveraging their tech edge, they were positioning themselves to becoming the single provider of retail checkout solutions for the future. You either opt-in to giving Amazon all your retail data, or you become the only old fashioned “wait in line to get served” store on the street. And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all…

I don't see it mentioned elsewhere, but Amazon could very easily disrupt credit card companies as part of this play as well.

BINGO - this is basically the ultimate play for getting rid of the networks almost entirely if not entirely

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#513

Post by BigJono » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 12:45 AM UTC

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #485

thu2111 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst Amazon Go is cool, that's not an argument in its favour. That's purely a US specific screwup. In the rest of the world you can clear contactless transactions in a few hundred milliseconds with competent retailers; that's why it's possible to tap your way through the gates at busy London Underground stations. And retailers love contactless exactly because it's so fast and it lets them reduce staffing/handle mor…

We have pretty close to instant transactions here in Australia but I every now and then I find a place where it takes 30-60 seconds for it to process. I think the issue is actually just the store has bad network coverage and the machine fails multiple times before it can send the transaction properly.

I believe they do some sort of local batching of transactions then settle them all at once. You can see this sometimes if you go shopping early in the morning and you're the first person to use a particular EFTPOS terminal for the day, the UI will show a few extra steps in the processing workflow.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#514

Post by beloch » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

mherdeg wrote: post #234

This is just an observation that doesn't contribute meaningfully to discussion, but ... Twenty years ago this web site would 100% have looked like an April Fool's joke. Don't know what to make of that. Maybe it's that although retail feels almost exactly the same as it always has, under the hood lots of parts have really been moving, and I just haven't noticed? The parallel observation is that when Gmail was announce…

IBM viewed this tech seriously enough to be marketing it to the public in 2006. It wasn't a "Hey, we're making this." ad but more of an, "We're cool because we're working on this, sorta maybe." ad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA

14 years later, it's still vaporware. There are a lot of fairly tough problems that need to be solved to make it work. Today, Amazon is probably better positioned to sucker/bully retailers into adopting their solution than IBM is. It remains to be seen if they can actually pull off the tech side of things though. IBM is not a company that's easy to laugh at.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#515

Post by labster » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

lazersharkman wrote: post #434

WalterBright wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you. Amazon is always putting up ads for me based on my purchase history, but they're never what I wind up buying. I have no explanation for what is wrong with their algorithm.

The worst was when I searched for gorilla glue once. Good ol' Jeffy B thought I'd also want a $100k watch, a racecar/nascar (themed) Bible, and an anatomical model of some gonads. Pretty sure I still have the screencap somewhere

Wait, I don’t understand. Why did you even need the gorilla glue if you weren’t going to to tell time on your Bible-mounted truck nuts?

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#516

Post by IanCal » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 12:48 AM UTC

AllanHoustonSt wrote: post #467

ndelage wrote: post #352

The last few times I've gone to my local pharmacy (Rite Aid) I've watched a single cashier operate more than one checkout registers at a time. She did this because it took so long to process payment and print a receipt -- e.g. while she waited for my payment to go through (via credit card) she'd ring up the next customer on another register. She's trying to ring up the most customers per minute possible and using a s…

I feel like self checkout kiosks already solve this. Commodotized Amazon Go tech is a minute improvement in convenience compared to traditional cashier -> self checkout.

Absolutely not. The difference in waiting times between cashiers and the self checkout lane is minimal (as it obviously should end up). Self checkouts require a reasonable amount of time to go through, even without a queue (when there often is one at the shops near me). Simply walking in and out would be a massive change from self checkout for buying a small number of items.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#517

Post by banana_giraffe » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 12:49 AM UTC

kylebarron wrote: post #470

awb wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why is this a standalone site and not inside the Amazon.com portfolio? EDIT: JustWalkout.com was registered anonymously at GoDaddy 7 years ago: https://www.whois.com/whois/justwalkout.com Amazon.com has public DNS contact info: https://www.whois.com/whois/amazon.com There's no TM or R marks around the term "Just Walk Out" on the page and no Favicon. Are we sure this is real?

Well the SSL certificate was issued by Amazon.

As is pbs.org, or nasa.gov, or a bunch of other CloudFront websites that are only connected to Amazon because they use AWS.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#518

Post by wingworks » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 12:50 AM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #146

nck4222 wrote: post #63

My biggest problem with this is that from what I can tell, the only way to know how much you're going to be automatically charged (as well as what items the tech thinks you're purchasing), is to go to a kiosk in the store and get a receipt. Which seems to completely defeat the convenience of just walking out in the first place. I wouldn't feel comfortable just walking out without knowing how much I'm going to be char…

The closest I have to this today is the grocery store nearest me - I walk in, I pick up a scanner (you can use an app on your phone but I use their scanner because my phone locks immediately with a passphrase when unused so it's ghastly for this purpose) and I just wander about scanning items and putting them into bags. The scanner shows its estimate of the price paid, which in my experience is always 100% accurate b…

We used to have that in some of our supermarkets years ago, but they've all disappeared over the years. It's all a mix of self-help checkouts/human checkouts now. Not sure why.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#519

Post by philbarr » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 12:51 AM UTC

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #422

zhoujianfu wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, for me it was hammocks.. for years! Just call me The Hammock Man!

Matter of fact, they're all in the same complex; it's the hammock complex on third.

Upvote for a random Simpson's reference.

Re: “Just walk out” technology by Amazon

#520

Post by wott » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 12:51 AM UTC

Crazyontap wrote: post #314

mherdeg wrote: post #234

This is just an observation that doesn't contribute meaningfully to discussion, but ... Twenty years ago this web site would 100% have looked like an April Fool's joke. Don't know what to make of that. Maybe it's that although retail feels almost exactly the same as it always has, under the hood lots of parts have really been moving, and I just haven't noticed? The parallel observation is that when Gmail was announce…

Yeah with all the innovation it indeed seems like we are living in a fairy tale. 20 years ago it would be impossible to think that you can order stuff from an unknown location/seller using a piece of glass. And soon we'll have drones coming to our house with packages.

If I set aside the 'unknown seller', which is not really unknown: Mid 80's, France: order something with your Minitel (terminal available free of charge) from any of the major mail-order companies, get it delivered in 48 hours.