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

gizmodo.com

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

#611

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…

FYI Austria and sometimes Italy have weighted self checkouts.

In Switzerland the age check is done by any cashier nearby. Sometimes so fast that you don't even notice that there was a check.

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

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that warrant a warning? That's just a natural occuring discussion, and selecting threads to follow is basic forum-reading skill. The rare gems of surprising insight are often found in the depths of slightly off-topic discussions. Previously I've noticed another kind of meta-comment, the top level complaint by a self-appointed moderators about the overall shape of the discussion elsewhere, instead of engaging dir…

Yes. With intellectual pursuits, you can always find diamonds in the rough. Simply due to the effort YOU are putting in, given your then state of mind, knowledge and experience. You can wade through a conversation on creationism and evolutionary denial and understand humanity or even deepen your skills. However that's you - your unique circumstances bringing more to the table. Others would very much appreciate a warn…

With a little forum experience, who has trouble scanning a thread and seeing it meander away from their interest? So I question the need.

Even if there is the need, who should be the judge for others over the quality of a subthread? I would feel presumptuous to pass judgement beyond my vote for each comment.

Aren't those diamonds all that matter anyway? Recently I increasingly find new and curious beginnings dampened and limited by intellectually lazy attitudes, by comments that start with "I mean...", that reiterate the default state rather than entertaining a new thought. Inadvertently, well-meaning soft-moderation like yours might steer even more people away from interesting topics.

I'd say, leave your vote and move on.

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

#613
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You maybe haven't actually spent any time in Sweden and compared to how people act towards each other there compared to other countries? Or, you haven't spent enough time in other countries than Sweden, making it hard to compare.

I lived there for my first 20 years, and have since lived in Spain. The amount of trust between people in the Nordics is definitely higher than most other places in the world.

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

#614
post #610

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Pivoting to nothing. > Skilled workers have long had historical import... Value, import(ance); potatoe, potartoe.

So you're trying to derail the discussion to something about "value", because the page I linked about "skill" has a passage about how skilled laborers were historically important to the economy? What does this have to do with the subjectivity/objectivity of "underpaid", "unfair wages", "unskilled labor", or whether a burger flipper is more "skilled" than an accountant? As I said earlier, even if you think that accoun…

First I'm pivoting now I'm trying to derail, when all I've done is answer you question; but to make it plain: yes, it's subjective. How else are certain skills valued more that others? There's no objective measurement to these. Comparing the skills of one disapline to another doesn't work, like apple to oranges.

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

#615
post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

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

There's no "factual" definition of "enough" as "enough" is subjective.

I'm also not sure what you're trying to argue. I already said that it can't be 100% for practical reasons and that the market actively incentivizes companies to aim for as close to 0% as possible instead. You pick 90% as an arbitrary percentage. So it might be 99% or 50% or 1%. But you're still agreeing that the measure for "enough" in this case is in relation to what the product of that labor can be sold for (after deducting the various costs). In reality that percentage is often much closer to 50% than to 90% - in many cases (especially so-called unskilled labor) it is closer to 1% than 90%.

A better rebuke would be that "enough" is normally about need, not revenue. Especially because it's nearly impossible to value the relative contribution to the bottom line for all labor involved (and in fact trying to minimize "cost centers" can lead to a rude awakening about this).

So if we define "need" as "enough to sustain a healthy existence in society and access to moderate leisure activities" (i.e. having a roof over your head, food in the fridge, access to medical care and transportation and enough spare change to spend on things like streaming services, books or the occasional trip to a nearby cinema, amusement park or restaurant) we can define a minimum monthly income and if we assume a 40 hour work week (which should be uncontroversial given that overall productivity has only gone up since its introduction and we need to provide some leisure time to accommodate family formation and the aforementioned leisure activities) we can translate that into a minimum hourly wage. Something tells me that this minimum hourly wage would be significantly higher than the legal minimum wage in the US, even if we don't actually consider the lackluster state of medical care affordability (note that I didn't assume public single-payer healthcare so Medicare/Medicaid is just a crutch to account for medical care being unaffordable otherwise at that level of income).

But of course the system is not set up that way. It's not about needs, it's about paying as little as you can get away with and this means that pay is proportional to power (i.e. C-level execs are paid a lot because they have a lot of control over the company and therefore "deserve" more even if all the value they "create" relies on the actual labor and competence of others) and the floor is theoretically infinitely low (i.e. you could realistically charge people to do labor for you, e.g. as a "training opportunity" to earn a meaningless qualification required to access other jobs) and ultimately the company needs to produce a lot of waste money (profits that are not re-invested in the company) that can be drained by its shareholders/owners (who ideally contribute literally no labor in return).

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

#616

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…

more like $30-$35

Yeah, I plan on paying approximately double (100% markup) if I'm ordering delivery on an app. That's why I only do it when I'm in a hotel room on a work trip and I don't have the rental car keys. Hotel food is not cheaper, not tastier, and I have way less options (I am a vegetarian).

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

#617
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…

> something like 'melting down discarded PCBs to recover trace metals' Better than shipbreaking. https://youtu.be/5jdEG_ACXLw

Is there a tl;dw? That's an hour long video.

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

#618
post #397

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> 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? IANAL but I'm confident the legal answer is "yes", the same as if someone was using sleight-of-hand with objects at a cashier-and-conveyor-belt checkout station. Whether charges are brought and how easily the case can be proved is another matter, but the intent is what makes i…

I thought one of the marketing lines was that Amazon was so confident/comfortable in their implementation was that they assumed all liability for mistakes (though as I type this I realise they may have worded it to encapsulate only honest mistakes rather than people trying deliberately to break the system).

>though as I type this I realise they may have worded it to encapsulate only honest mistakes rather than people trying deliberately to break the system

Exactly. Retailers generally assume liability for honest mistakes made by their system/employees and sometimes even their customers. However, when people knowingly exploit a loophole for financial gain it becomes fraud. Here's a real example - https://www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/local/greensboro-woma...

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

#619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

You do care about the experience though. Everyone does. If you have a bad experience you'll complain, or stop going to that Starbucks, or moan to your friends. To you, by the sounds of things, a good experience consists of asking for your order, paying, and getting out fast. An experienced retail worker will be able to read all that from your cues - not engaging in small talk, having your payment ready, moving along quickly, etc. They'll factor those things into their interactions with you, they'll remember you next time, and they'll make the experience what you want. All that takes time to learn, and few retail workers get good at it. I will concede that it doesn't require a PhD though. Few jobs do.

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

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. With intellectual pursuits, you can always find diamonds in the rough. Simply due to the effort YOU are putting in, given your then state of mind, knowledge and experience. You can wade through a conversation on creationism and evolutionary denial and understand humanity or even deepen your skills. However that's you - your unique circumstances bringing more to the table. Others would very much appreciate a warn…

With a little forum experience, who has trouble scanning a thread and seeing it meander away from their interest? So I question the need. Even if there is the need, who should be the judge for others over the quality of a subthread? I would feel presumptuous to pass judgement beyond my vote for each comment. Aren't those diamonds all that matter anyway? Recently I increasingly find new and curious beginnings dampened…

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