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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

#511

Post by WalterBright »

account-5 wrote: post #503
Aloisius wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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. This is nearly all jobs.

> This is nearly all jobs.

All unskilled labor jobs.

You're not going to learn welding in 30 days. Nor are you going to learn how to design a bridge. Or program in C++. Or diagnose a patient. Or be a lawyer. Or drive a race car. Etc.

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

#512

Post by gruez »

nojster wrote: post #507
gruez wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that the difference in skill level between a burger flipper and an accountant is purely subjective?

With the two examples you chose, I‘d say there is not much of a skill gap. If you‘d have chosen a burger flipper and an aeronautical engineer or a surgeon, I‘d have agreed with you.

> With the two examples you chose, I‘d say there is not much of a skill gap.

Unless we're talking about really high end burgers, you can take almost anyone off the street and train them to flip burger patties within a day. They might not willingly do it on account of it being boring/tiring/poorly paid work, but it's not exactly hard to learn either. I doubt you can do the same for an accountant, unless your idea of an accountant is something like "manually copying entries into a ledger". Even teaching excel to someone who hasn't used excel ever, to a capacity where they can do meaningful financial reporting probably can't be done within a day.

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

#513

Post by samus »

account-5 wrote: post #503
Aloisius wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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. This is nearly all jobs.

Indeed, unskilled labor is a large part of the job market.

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

#514

Post by dotinvoke »

account-5 wrote: post #503
Aloisius wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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. This is nearly all jobs.

Credentialism has certainly gone too far in many fields, but I’d still like my doctors, lawyers, and engineers to have more than 30 days of training in their field.

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

#515

Post by gruez »

account-5 wrote: post #504
gruez wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that the difference in skill level between a burger flipper and an accountant is purely subjective?

Since that depends on the burger flipper, I'd say yes. Gordon Ramsay would likely agree.

That's just playing with words. Putting Gordon Ramsay in the same bucket as "burger flipper" makes as much sense as putting Linus Torvalds in the same bucket as "keyboard monkey".

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

#516

Post by johnwalkr »

troad wrote: post #487
johnwalkr wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Great point, I’m from Canada and lived in Japan for a decade, in those two places I would say it’s a downgrade. Especially Canada where there is usually a scale.

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

#517

Post by [deleted] »

ametrau wrote: post #453
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…

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#518

Post by imp0cat »

kiwijamo wrote: post #374
FourOnTheFloor wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it almost always DOES go wrong. Seriously 75% of the time when I'm done scanning and I press "pay now," it inexplicably says "calling for assistance" and refuses to do anything until an employee comes over. WHY? And now assholes are intentionally taking alcohol through the self-checkout, deliberately taking up that one employee's time making him or her perform the workaround to check the items out. And the 20+ ye…

Strangely that issue has almost vasnished for me in the last couple of years, here in New Zealand at least across the several supermarket chains I frequent (although they all seem to use the same self service POS supplier). Sure it was a big issue when these first came into stores but I think they've realised they need to increase the tolerances a bit (e.g. accept even if the weight is <1% off) and it all just works…

I do that, too (scan, pay then bag), but it's a tradeoff - you get smoother checkout experience in exchange for some speed. If everyone was throwing all their scanned stuff in a bag immediately, the checkout would be a lot faster.

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

#519

Post by chrash »

hackernewds wrote: post #500
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…

the biggest cost is not annotators at the scale you're imagining. it is labor costs. Amazon bet that the federal govt would raise labor costs to $20/hr and all their competitors (besides themselves with this tech) would get wiped out. They even publicly campaigned and lobbied. That didn't come to fruition as the election promises turned to fluff, and the populists simply chose to empower unions instead.

i mean, labor cost (as in in-store labor) is the target for this cost optimization. unfortunately for the time being labor cost is not as significant as the other costs associated with annotation and dataset curation. technology costs are not really significant if this can be pulled off at scale.

in-store employees know where things are supposed to be and why, if at all, items are "misplaced" according to the modular design

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

#520

Post by gitaarik »

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.

To solve this issue you can integrate the person into the car.
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