Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 769 posts

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

#581

Post by Dylan16807 »

hnbad wrote: post #560
cammikebrown wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

They likely meant that onboarding takes three days. As there is no meaningful metric for competence beyond that (or at least no metric that is measured and used) "good" doesn't apply. There are of course tons of ways a good, seasoned barista distinguishes themselves from a trainee with 3 days of onboarding but those are externalities. The difference between skilled and unskilled labor is not whether competence and ex…

> They likely meant that onboarding takes three days.

You can onboard welding in less than 30 days too.

> As there is no meaningful metric for competence beyond that (or at least no metric that is measured and used) "good" doesn't apply.

Barista quality isn't much harder to measure than weld quality. "and used" is a cop-out.

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

#582

Post by hnbad »

kevingadd wrote: post #266
bombcar wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really tunable and some stores are tuned to "Fort Knox" where even a fly landing UNKNOWN ITEM IN BAGGING AREA. Others are so loose that you don't even have to take things out of your cart, scan and pay and go.

The Whole Foods location nearest to me has self-checkout stations that don't even have a scale under the bagging area. You just scan, put it in your bag and go. I assume they can afford to tank the shrinkage that results from this due to their high profit margins, or they just don't consider the costs associated with the scales to be worth it.

There was a news story a while back about how some chain stores were not going after most shoplifters directly but would keep the recordings on file and press felony charges once a certain total had been exceeded, so instead of getting a slap on the wrist for a few dollars of shrinkage here or there they'd drop the entire weight of the law on shoplifters once those few dollars added up to an amount that qualified for felony theft.

Given that "just walk out" apparently means "replace cashiers with offshore video analysts" I'd wager Whole Foods might do something similar and policing shrinkage in self-checkout is too expensive compared to just keeping track of cheats and throwing the book at them if they make a habit out of it.

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

#583

Post by robertlagrant »

ScoobleDoodle wrote: post #339
robertlagrant wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another benefit of having a proper social safety net I guess. I doubt it's as simple as this. People don't only steal because they could technically afford things. Just as people don't only kill in self defence.

Social safety net is more than just being able to afford it. It's a combination of not being able to afford it and general erosion of social values leading to "take what you can get away with" mentality. So even those that can afford it will still try to get more since it's everyone for themselves. Instead of cooperation under a system with a social safety net, we get a game theoretic weighting on defection without a…

> Instead of cooperation under a system with a social safety net, we get a game theoretic weighting on defection without a social safety net.

There is a safety net. Here's how I'd describe the situation:

There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was good that they were helped.

There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was not good that they were helped.

Most of politics around this topic is people's differing beliefs in the proportions of the above, and how bought in they are to minimising the latter count because they pay taxes.

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

#584

Post by Dylan16807 »

hnbad wrote: post #566
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?

This isn't what they meant apparently but in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value, i.e. making more money from selling the product of labor than you pay for that labor. If I pay a worker $20 per hour to make 20 doodads an hour in my doodad factory and then s…

> pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value

That's a silly definition of "enough" to label as a fact.

I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect, I think most people will agree that the worker getting 90% of the surplus value is "enough". (just as an example percent) There's no reason the bar should be the absolute extreme.

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

#585

Post by rad_gruchalski »

onion2k wrote: post #558
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and McDonalds hires junior burger flippers and turns them into senior and skilled burger flippers. It doesn’t take a phd to make a coffee, no matter how fancy the cinnamon/cocoa heart is.

It doesn’t take a phd to make a coffee, no matter how fancy the cinnamon/cocoa heart is. All you're saying here is that you've failed to see the value in customer service, hospitality, speed, accuracy, politeness, etc that go with a retail coffeeshop job. The coffee is the same in pretty much every Starbucks, but the experience can vary wildly depending on how good the baristas are at everything else besides making c…

Yes, that’s what I’m sort of saying. I haven’t failed to see any of that. But it doesn’t take a phd to make coffee politely or less politely. All I want is the coffee. Don’t ask me what my name is. I don’t care about the „experience”.

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

#586

Post by Dylan16807 »

gruez wrote: post #467
CaptainZapp wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with enshittification[0]? Granted, Tease and Squeeze has a nicer ring. Then again, the enshittification neologism became standard langue in no time and is understood by everybody. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

It's arguably less descriptive. "enshittification" only really says "things getting worse", whereas "Tease and Squeeze" describes the whole cycle.

The original definition of enshittification is a platform that squeezes the users then squeezes the suppliers.

But at this point I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to mean.

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

#587

Post by hnbad »

franga2000 wrote: post #274
wyager wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout Wanting to make your life more convenient and pleasant isn't "entitled". 99% of jobs are things people would rather not be doing (otherwise you wouldn't be getting paid for it). The point is that we can allocate this work in a way that minimizes the amount of time everyone has to spe…

> The point is that we can allocate this work in a way that minimizes the amount of time everyone has to spend doing undesirable work. 1. Not all work is equally undesirable and the way people are paid is not related to that in any way (in fact isn't usually inversely related) 2. Minimising the undesirable work done in total means some people end up doing almost all of it and some basically none (or, if you consider…

Sure but you seem to ignore that we don't exist in a socialist society.

Cashiers may have an undesirable job and self-checkout may distribute this undesirable labor among the many instead of burdening a single person with it but those people don't get paid for doing that job whereas the cashier did get paid. Self-checkout is also often slower than checkout at a cashier (it has to be because the cashier is trusted to ring up items correctly whereas the customer has a huge incentive to cheat).

The desirability of being a cashier also isn't inherent to the job. It has more to do with attitudes towards the person doing the job, both from customers and from their employer. Service staff often act as a lightning rod for all frustrations and disdain targeted at their place of work, i.e. they frequently get punished for things completely out of their control. They're also often seen as unskilled labor by their employers so they are treated as easy to replace meaning there is very little incentive to invest in their job satisfaction.

In other words, we have systems that not only require people to work even if the jobs they end up doing are undesirable and undervalued but also actively makes certain jobs undesirable by undervaluing them. If you want to change that, you need to change the system that makes those jobs undesirable, not just do away with the undesirable jobs. People seem to have fewer problems grasping this when talking about the virtues of overseas sweatshops (where changing the system is presumed impossible because the implication is that the system arises from a lack of economic development or cultural inferiority).

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

#588

Post by lesostep »

hnbad wrote: post #560
cammikebrown wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

They likely meant that onboarding takes three days. As there is no meaningful metric for competence beyond that (or at least no metric that is measured and used) "good" doesn't apply. There are of course tons of ways a good, seasoned barista distinguishes themselves from a trainee with 3 days of onboarding but those are externalities. The difference between skilled and unskilled labor is not whether competence and ex…

>> I.e. "unskilled labor" is not about the worker but about the company

That part really stood out to me.

While a lot of us can agree that barista is an unskilled job, I heard people call barmen labor a skilled labor. Which is crazy, because it's essentially the same job (mix stuff up and serve in a cup). But it makes sense if "unskilled labor" is a function of an employer not an employee

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

#589

Post by Dylan16807 »

clintonb wrote: post #535
manquer wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I understand, and what I am saying is that it is rare to have retail employees that _only_ do checkout. Nearly everyone performs multiple roles. Eliminating checkout will reduce the overall workload, but won't necessarily reduce headcount, or enough headcount to offset the cost of RFID tags.

> it is rare to have retail employees that _only_ do checkout

Why is that relevant?

If 5 employees spend 20% of their combined time on checkout, and you get rid of checkout, you can go down to 4 employees, can't you? Why does the exact distribution matter? You'll still have a healthy variety of tasks to spread among those employees.

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

#590

Post by Dylan16807 »

margalabargala wrote: post #308
strgcmc wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And all for slightly faster shopping. Wanted to comment on this part -- Prime itself was nothing more than faster shipping, though yes the difference between 4-6 weeks standard vs 2-days was massive (not just slightly faster). But the point is, Amazon excels at identifying friction points that others have just accepted as industry norms, but which, if unblocked, could actually meaningfully shift consumer behaviors.…

The issue is that speed is not the only thing necessary. You need speed, and trust. A cashier-less, grab and go store that works as advertised would be hugely convenient and valuable. But where we are now, people don't think it works, so they double check and get nervous. And that goes doubly for Amazon. Amazon doesn't care about doing things right. They've shown that over and over via their (lack of) protections aga…

> But where we are now, people don't think it works, so they double check and get nervous.

Who does this? This wasn't in the article, do you mean yourself or did you read that somewhere else? I wouldn't get nervous about it.

> Ask anyone in the eastern US, would you trust getting your eclipse glasses on Amazon?

That's a real issue but it's an entirely different concept. I expect them to handle charging for the eclipse glasses just fine. Similarly, I'm not very worried about their checkout gimmick.

Post reply on HN