Shut up and take my money.
Please just exit the store, we don't take cash here.
You joke, but when I was in Beijing a couple of months ago, the juice vendor wouldn't take cash from me. She only accepted AliPay and WeChat.
Amazon Go
851–860 of 1001 posts
Re: Amazon Go
#852Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment makes me suspect you may have never been to a farmer's market, or a market hall (of which Barcelona has some of the world's most glorious examples). While it's possible that some people "want groceries as cheap and fast as possible," I don't think either of those is true of the hundreds of people I join at my local market every week. I go there mainly because I like buying directly from the producers. I…
Farmer's markets will be unaffected by this, obviously. The possibility to buy your groceries in this manner would still exist, as that's a different "use case", and I absolutely support and enjoy it. In contrast, I don't believe there is anything worth saving regarding the human interaction in supermarkets - in fact, I think that working an 8 hour shift which consists solely of scanning items and saying a couple pre…
Depends on the supermarket I suppose. A few times a year I go to a rural-ish supermarket in the US (town of maybe 5K people) and it's very old-school, the check-out people are very nice and gregarious, the baggers bag with great skill, etc.
I certainly hope the poor folks who toil at Aldi or Safeway might find a better thing to do with their lives, and if those stores are displaced I won't be too sad.
Re: Amazon Go
#853Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the UK, Tesco have been running a 'Scan as you Shop'[0] thing for a couple of years now. Customers pick up a scanner as they enter, scan their items as they go into their cart, and they have special checkouts which read your scanner. There's a random chance that your scanner will be audited by a human against the contents of your shopping cart. Usually the first time you use it, then it backs off. [0] http://www.t…
Tesco also has pushed self scanning tills for years now. However, the number of employees working at the cash register is still the same because those scanners sometimes do not work and most importantly their user experience is deplorable. So, you frequently have to ask someone for help (and I'm in my mid-thirties and very tech-savvy. I can only imagine how someone twice my age would feel when using these scanners).
I used them in Tesco many times it's was horrible expirience too. Sometime they didn't work properly or failed to scan something.
What worse shortly after some stores in London got those there was less cashiers working at eventide. So you had to choose between unpleasant expirience or long queue.
Re: Amazon Go
#854Luddite fallacy.
We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13107601.
Re: Amazon Go
#855Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not thrilled with the socio-economic impact this will have, but it's inevitable. A big hope I have is that, similar to the automation and efficiency boost of agriculture (once upon a time most humans worked in farming), this will unlock huge sums of money that can be diverted to other hard to automate services that will employ these folks.
"this will unlock huge sums of money that can be diverted". Agree. But what guarantee do we have that Amazon or similar large companies such as Apple had ever re-invested their profits back into economies? So far none. Yes Amazon can hire more people for warehouses, but is it fair for a displaced retail person to go and work at warehouses (trust me I have worked at warehouses and it is not a FUN place to work at!)?
Well those warehouse jobs won't exist either...
Re: Amazon Go
#856Why is this a machine learning problem? Why not use some low-power tag for items, and scan all items on customer exit? Personal opinion: Amazon is not interested in creating supermarkets/wal-marts. Instead it wants to sell an ML solution to other brick & mortar stores, and this current effort is to prove plausibility. Selling an ML solution, with cameras and software, is harder to compete with than a tagging solution…
You're basically describing the old idea of 'tag everything with RFID' for the checkoutless grocery store. It didn't really catch on because it's a fairly expensive way to attack the problem given the small margins on most items and would require that EVERY manufacturer implement the tags or for the stores/distribution system to add tags to non compliant items which would also be fairly expensive.
So to get around needing to tag everything you can throw computer vision and machine learning at the problem to determine where the person is grabbing an item from and combined with well organized shelves you now know what they just grabbed off the shelves.
Re: Amazon Go
#857Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad. I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement).. I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables. I know all the people who work in these supermarket…
Playing devil's advocate here, what if those people didn't have to work these menial jobs and instead could just do art or hang out playing games with each other all day?
It's the social structure that says you need to work to survive, that while it's served us really well, will lead to a lot of hardship when the labor of people is not worth what they need to survive.
Re: Amazon Go
#858Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad. I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement).. I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables. I know all the people who work in these supermarket…
As someone who has worked behind a checkout till it is not a job I think anyone is dying to do. For you, as the customer, maybe it seems cute and fine as a job but from my time in the job it's basically hours of mindless labour that teaches you little and offers no room for growth. Your opinion on this is actually kind of despicable. You want people to perform robotic menial jobs because you feel like it adds humanit…
I hope all of the bleeding-heart armchair economists in this thread see your post. They've clearly never worked these jobs they claim to value so much.
Re: Amazon Go
#859Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, that's an "incentive" that should be illegal. You should only get charged for something if you actually take it home or use it. Anything else is a cop out to push the costs of a deficient system onto the user/customer.
Why? If it's understood that the way the system works is that it's in your 'virtual cart' as soon as you take it off the shelf, why isn't it the customer's job to put it back if they don't want it anymore? There are other checkoutless systems that use the customer scanning a barcode as they pick up each item; same deal there.
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Re: Amazon Go
#860Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad. I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement).. I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables. I know all the people who work in these supermarket…
To offer a counter point. In the three cities I've lived in in the US this is not the case. The vast majority of people do not know anyone that works at their local grocery store.
From my perspective it's annoying. I need to go in to a crowded market get all my stuff. Once I've done that I either need to wait in line for an automatic check out station (because there are not enough), or wait in line for a cashier which takes forever especially if someone decides to pay with cash.
For me this potentially gets me out of the store faster so I can do things I actually want to do. I honestly wish I did know the people but that's not really how it works and so this is exciting for me