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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

#651

Post by ilikecakeandpie »

baumy wrote: post #365
idontwantthis wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Did anyone ever try that?

I worked for Amazon in Seattle when Amazon Go first launched. As you'd expect, lots of SDE teams made games out of trying to fool the thing in various ways. A few attempts were successful early on (passing items back and forth, one person moving something to the wrong shelf and another person picking it up, people dressing in identical outfits, etc), but the success rate in fooling the system was very very low. No me…

Seems a little cruel in retrospect considering it was humans watching you, but I suppose there wasn't an easy way to gain this information

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

#652

Post by nottorp »

cdchn wrote: post #627
nottorp wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always did that. But I keep large, solid, reusable bags in the trunk.

I've pretty much given up on reusable bags. I almost always do grocery shopping at random times, and never bring my bags with me when I leave the house.

That's why if you use a car you have more bags that you need on one run in the trunk. Then you keep bringing them in the house by twos or threes and at some point you drown in reusable bags and put them back in the trunk.

Having developed a hate for all those one use bags clogging your trash also helps. I've started doing this before it was the eco thing to do just because I hated accumulating bags.

Walking to the corner store(tm) if that option is available to you requires a bit more discipline, but I mostly remember to pick a bag when leaving home.

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

#653

Post by bombcar »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #640
onion2k wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't go to Starbucks anyway because they just keep that stupid ritual of "what's your name" and they can never understand what I'm saying so we are just standing there on the opposite side of the counter exercising our knowledge of the military alphabet. If that's the sort of skill required, sorry, anyone can do it. Tell me - how long does it take to serve your first coffee at Starbucks as a barista? Just sell me…

I think people talk past each other because one side takes "unskilled" to mean basically "anyone could do it with some training" (I can't run an espresso machine anymore, but I learned how in a few hours when I needed to). You get better at unskilled labor (anyone knows this, there are baristas who are much faster than others; able to run the entire shop which normally takes two).

The other side takes "unskilled" to be a derogatory term that means the worker isn't a human being with thoughts and wants and needs, and deserving of a wage.

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

#654

Post by bombcar »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #581
hnbad wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can onboard welding in less than 30 days too.

You can be doing useful work as part of a welding group in 30 days, but you will not be a master. Grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't and all that.

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

#655

Post by lm28469 »

Ajay-p wrote: post #80

I recently finished a book called "The Secret Life of Groceries" by Benjamin Lorr. Amazing book. I learned that grocery and supermarket stores of the past, seemed to have worked very hard to give the best customer experience possible. Today it feels that customer experience has been replaced by cost cutting. Self checkout has been rife with problems, internally and socially, but supermarkets keep pushing them. I can…

> Today it feels that customer experience has been replaced by cost cutting.

I feel like it's the case for literally every single industry, everything is getting worse for the end user point of view. Public services, jobs, hospitals, cars, new houses, online services, mobile apps...

I think globalisation allowed things to get better and cheaper up to a point and now that we can't delocalize to cheaper places we have to cut corners somewhere else and the entire stack is suffering from it

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

#656

Post by kjkjadksj »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #599
kjkjadksj wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home depot is so overengineered. They are using 24” high res touchscreen pcs with an i7 to just run self checkout. Whoever locked in that contract must be pretty pleased.

A couple hundred dollars is nothing compared to the costs surrounding that PC. Compared to how often systems like that get underbuilt and laggy, using an i7 is a good choice.

Yeah but its self checkout. Self checkout had no lag when it came out like 15 years ago. What did the engineers do to their codebase to require a modern i7, I wonder?

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

#657

Post by lm28469 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #163
Ajay-p wrote: post #80

I recently finished a book called "The Secret Life of Groceries" by Benjamin Lorr. Amazing book. I learned that grocery and supermarket stores of the past, seemed to have worked very hard to give the best customer experience possible. Today it feels that customer experience has been replaced by cost cutting. Self checkout has been rife with problems, internally and socially, but supermarkets keep pushing them. I can…

Self checkout is a better customer experience for me personally.

At least where I live it's a nightmare. Instead of having someone work as a cashier and weight my veggies I now have to weight my veggies myself under the supervision of a worker who's only job is to supervise a machine that is buggy enough to need human intervention for every other client.

It only serves the shop owner because he can have a single drone operating a few self checkout machines instead of a single line, but is that a net positive for society ? doubt, going to a supermarket is alienating enough, we didn't have to make it worse.

And of course they had to add a gate so now you can't even leave the shop without showing the receipt, when you don't find what you want to buy you have to call and wait for an adult to allow you to leave the premise like you're a fucking toddler getting out of the playground area.

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

#658

Post by Ellipsis753 »

Gutted to hear this.

I used these in London and they were magical and extremely convenient. I would show them to visiting friends as if they were one of London's main tourist attractions!

I knew they relied on some manual labor (bills were delayed), but assumed this was only an intermediate step to collect more real-world training data (until they sorted out the AI).

I still think this is the future though. They could reduce staffing costs and free-up floor space that would otherwise be used for self-checkouts. All the while actually drastically improving the customer experience too.

If someone cracks it, it may make it impossible for other supermarkets to complete economically.

As a fun aside, all the stores were incredibly over-staffed and helpful. If you couldn't install the app they had a browser-based fallback (type "fresh code" into the amazon searchbar on a mobile). They could also lend you a battery bank if you were low on battery. I think they even had phones to lend out to those without smartphones. It was all very optimized around customer experience first and foremost and with no real attempt for the stores to be profitable.

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

#659

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#660

Post by Shaanie »

account-5 wrote: post #534
WalterBright wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I didn't say all jobs, did I? You successfully listed (some) jobs that might take longer than 30 days to learn. The thing about "unskilled" jobs, everyone seems to look down their noses at, is that they facilite the people doing the lofty jobs of: lawyer, doctor, c++ programmer, etc. Without them getting done for you you couldn't do what you're doing. Can the brickie work without their "unskilled" laborer? Sure, but…

I don't understand your point. Yes, there's a lot of unskilled jobs, possibly a majority of jobs. Far from everyone looks down on unskilled jobs, and nobody is saying they're not important.
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