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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

#521

Post by chrash »

jrpt wrote: post #435
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…

Come on, it isn’t anything to do with being a “marketing stunt.” Often products like this are expected to lose money at first, but they hope with enough R&D and scale that they can make it successful eventually. For example, you are pointing out that annotating is costly, but that’s an expense that scales independently of the number of stores. So with enough scale it wouldn’t be as big a deal. Or if they figured out…

right, that's how it starts. but the improvements in methodology simply aren't there as the ML sector has been laser focused on generality in modeling (GenAI as it's affectionately known). "at scale" doesn't just mean more stores; it means more products and thus more annotation. how many UPCs do you figure there are in a given Target or Whole Foods? i assure you it's in the millions.

one advantages of the Amazon Go initiative is a smaller scope of products.

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

#522

Post by awelxtr »

mike_d wrote: post #494
awelxtr wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self checkout systems based on RFID are very convenient, quick and quite accurate compared to self checkout on grocery stores'l. The main problem on groceries is that the tags are expensive compared to the product (tags prices are in the order of tens of cents depending on manufacturer and size) Disclaimer: I work on a RFID reader manufacturing company

It is almost here. Computer vision combined with some secret sauce that is cheaper than RFID that Walmart is asking supplier to implement. https://kioskindustry.org/walmart-self-checkout/

This doen't solve real time inventory. RFID does, also neither helps with EAS which RFID does'

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

#523

Post by FpUser »

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…

With all the increased productivity and advances if we can't support decent living for every person then what's the point? Work yourself to death to make some motherfucker rich?

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

#524

Post by manquer »

clintonb wrote: post #506
manquer wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wages of the scanning staff is a cost to be considered on the side . At even 10c a tag , it is equivalent to one person scanning 200 items a hour (assuming $20/hour wages) . Factoring in time to bag and do a cash/card/coupon transaction etc a retail employee is not doing more than 500 or maybe 1000 items a hour . A cost of 2c is definitely close to economic feasibility if 10c is not

Retail employees do more than checkout. You’ll still need them to stock, do customer support, clean, and more.

I obviously didn’t mean all employees ,only the employees who are doing the check out .

I am not saying RFID will eliminate employees in retail , just that there is cost to not having RFID too, we should only see the diff as the cost of the tech not absolute numbers

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

#525

Post by chrash »

wiricon wrote: post #457
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 ro…

as mentioned in another comment, "scale" is not just horizontal, it's vertical as well. with millions of products (UPCs) across different visual tolerances it's hard to generalize. your annotation method is indeed more efficient than a multistep "go take a bunch of pictures and upload them to our severs for annotators" but is still costly in terms of stakeholder buy-in, R&D, hardware costs, and indeed labor. if you can scope your verticals such that you only have, say, 1000 products the problem become feasible, but once you start to scale to an actual grocery store or bodega with ever-shifting visual data requirements the problem doesn't scale well. add in the detail that every store moves merchandise at different rates or has localized merchandise then the problem becomes even more complex.

the simulated data also becomes an issue of cost. we have to produce a realistic (at least according to the model) digital twin that doesn't interfere too much with real data, and measuring that difference is important when you're measuring the difference between Lay's and Lay's Low Sodium.

i'm not saying it's unsolvable. it's just a difficult problem

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

#526

Post by lnxg33k1 »

hackernewds wrote: post #501
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What skills are required to drive, walk or bike a delivery to make $30+tips/hr in NYC? I don't think they literally mean "unskilled" vs "something that can be learned within a month".

Where are all these js devs on minimum wage going paycheck-to-paycheck?

I think everything is easy, given the right approach and mindset, or everything is approachable given the right approach and mindset and will to put enough effort to get to a given outcome.

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

#527

Post by johnny22 »

lynx23 wrote: post #509
nradov wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That factor is driving the virtual restaurant (ghost kitchen) trend. There are commercial kitchens set up purely to service delivery orders. They use a single facility but have multiple different restaurant brands with different menus (burgers, Mexican, Italian, vegan, etc). These ghost kitchens have no dining rooms and you probably can't even directly order food outside of a delivery service. https://en.wikipedia.or…

These are the worst quality-wise. Yes, you can write a review if something went really bad. But not having customers right there who can complain and might even get an extra or a replacement gives less incentive to keep quality up. "Specialising" in everything, pizza-burger-kebab-china, is also likely a warning sign.

> But not having customers right there who can complain and might even get an extra or a replacement gives less incentive to keep quality up.

This is a super good point. I didn't think about that.

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

#528

Post by cammikebrown »

WalterBright wrote: post #510
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 local Starbucks over the years has had many turnovers in the staff. It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job. That makes it unskilled labor. Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the ins…

How could you possibly know that it takes “3 days” to get good at being a barista? You should try it out sometime, with a 50 person line. I’m sure it’ll be a cake walk and your labor will be fairly compensated. I’ll even give you a 3 day head start just to be fair!

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

#529

Post by onion2k »

WalterBright wrote: post #510
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 local Starbucks over the years has had many turnovers in the staff. It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job. That makes it unskilled labor. Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the ins…

It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job.

Starbucks hires juniors and trains them to be good baristas. That takes a long time. Just because someone is able to work a coffee machine after a few days doesn't mean they're not skilled eventually. Your argument is like saying 'it only takes a few days for junior devs to be onboarded, so there's no real value in senior devs'.

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

#530

Post by dawnerd »

ryukoposting wrote: post #469
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…

From my point of view, Uber and DD were always going to head in that direction because by any objective measure, they are worse than the solution that already existed. The introduction of a middleman created new costs for drivers, customers, and restaurants alike, yet it's actually worse at delivering food than the conventional "drivers work for the restaurant" model. Sure, you get one website where you can see all t…

Thankfully the local pizza place here still has their own drivers and it’s only a two dollar delivery fee. Totally fine with that. And everything always arrives fresh and fast and I know where and who to complain to and I know the drivers are at least somewhat vetted.
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