[HN Gopher] Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its groc...
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Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
Author : walterbell
Score : 203 points
Date : 2024-04-02 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| barrkel wrote:
| I think this was probably a machine learning play, generating
| data for training, and I guess it didn't add up in the end.
| speff wrote:
| > Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on
| more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to
| ensure accurate checkouts.
|
| That line was unintentionally hilarious to me. Like looking
| inside a TV and finding a bunch of fast-working little people
| drawing images.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I often wonder how much human intervention goes into self-
| driving car fleets.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| That reminds me of this, https://xkcd.com/1897/ perhaps it
| was based on something after all.
| leviathan303 wrote:
| 2-4% of the time according to the former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt
| in a Hacker News comment.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997
| fsckboy wrote:
| those grocery delivery robots you see in LA, turns out are
| being monitored/operated by people in a central location with
| all their camera feeds.
| deathanatos wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk, on the off
| chance you've never heard of it.
|
| (This article is _not_ the AWS service by the same name, though
| by the time you conclude reading the Wikipedia page, it should
| be obvious where the AWS service got its name, and what it
| does.)
| speff wrote:
| Thanks for the link. I knew of the concept and the Amazon
| service, but wasn't aware of the connection between the two.
| Interesting stuff.
| saddist0 wrote:
| It isn't that bad an idea.
|
| Imagine that next time you are drunk, you can hire a driver who
| will drive you back home remotely (along with some AI to stop
| the car in case connection goes away).
| munk-a wrote:
| I disagree - at a basic level if people are able to tell
| which products you're picking up the resolution is
| necessarily high enough that there's a huge creep factor. I
| am sometimes amazed at what companies will pursue without a
| glance towards common sense.
| stemlord wrote:
| Someone will reply to you saying "I have nothing to hide"
| cdchn wrote:
| Is high enough resolution to identify products more creepy
| than simple ubiquitous surveillance?
| saghm wrote:
| One creepy thing existing doesn't mean that another thing
| can't also be creepy. Getting rid of one of many creepy
| things is still nice even if it's not the only one.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm a huge privacy advocate and don't think stores should
| track what you buy at all, so don't confuse what I say next
| with the is/ought fallacy.
|
| They already have perfect resolution and data retention of
| everything you buy at checkout time when it's scanned, plus
| they can verify your identity rather than have to rely on
| facial recognition or other things. I don't think this is
| any creepier than what they already do so from their
| perspective it is "common sense."
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| The scandal where Target data scientists bragged to
| reporters about knowing when teenage girls are pregnant
| before their fathers broke in 2012, and they said they
| were doing it since 2002. It was based entirely on data
| mining purchase histories with rewards cards at the
| register. No fancy AI or facial recognition needed.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
| habits....
|
| Imho more like an anecdote than a sourced story, but a
| good one nonetheless.
| nemomarx wrote:
| That's fair as far as tracking purchases go, but high
| resolution cameras while You're in the store could also
| read your phone screen or other things on your person
| right? That seems more concerning than normal cashiers.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yes very fair point. I just had a dystopic thought of
| dynamic prices (electronic price tags?) that update in
| real time based on information. Is the person undecided?
| Brand A bids to lower their price slightly. Is the person
| looking at the same item on Amazon? Read the price and
| beat it by 10 cents or whatever. Those are situations
| where it might benefit the shopper, but I could easily
| see it going the other direction also. _not_ looking at
| the item on Amazon? Now you 're gonna pay too much. And
| of course, store the complete history of what strategy
| works with which people so "the algorithm" can tune for
| your individual weaknesses.
| f_allwein wrote:
| This actually exists - testing in Berlin, running in Las
| Vegas: https://vay.io
|
| Maybe not a bad idea - it is a step towards autonomous
| driving, and will probably ensure drivers have less
| unintentional down time.
| Avicebron wrote:
| So instead of hiring an uber you're purchasing a car
| specialicially designed to be controlled remotely by a third
| party..
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| Except all these trillion dollar valuations in the AI bubble
| are based on the belief that AI is replacing humans, not just
| outsourcing to cheaper humans.
|
| Of course outsourcing to cheaper humans can be great. But
| that's not what tech is shilling to the world as "AI" right
| now.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Imagine that next time you are drunk, you can hire a driver
| who will drive you back home remotely (along with some AI to
| stop the car in case connection goes away).
|
| Is this satire? It doesn't seem like a fantastic idea to
| allow someone to remotely pilot a car over a transoceanic
| Internet link.
| michaelt wrote:
| The grocery industry generally has pretty low margins. Wal-
| Mart's profit margin is 2.39%.
|
| If you go into a grocery shop to grab lunch, spending $8 on 4
| items, and they make 5 cents of profit per item? They need to
| run an _extremely_ lean operation.
|
| Or target price-insensitive customers, I suppose.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _They need to run an extremely lean operation._
|
| they simply need to run a good ordering/inventory system.
| If they sell every item (on average) in each store every
| week, that's 2.39% return on the value of the inventory
| investment _each week_ , or 52*.0239 or over 100% annual
| return on money they borrow for free because the store pays
| its grocery bills to suppliers in arrears, net 10 days, etc
| michaelt wrote:
| What I mean is: If you're making 5 cents of profit per
| item, and your workers cost $10/hour then the difference
| between a profit and a loss is 18 employee seconds per
| item.
|
| Which is not much.
| avhon1 wrote:
| Like a taxi or bus?
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Imagine you hire a taxi, but the taxi driver follows commands
| of someone in another country who receives video stream from
| the car.
|
| That's what it's actually like. It's just strictly more work
| than simply having a cashier.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Mechanical Turk
| ribosometronome wrote:
| The article they link for that isn't readable without
| subscription. Were they actually labeling data live? That
| sounds like effectively a secret concierge following you around
| and writing down what you're getting & like it would be pretty
| difficult to keep up with. Otherwise, labeled data and machine
| learning kind of go hand and hand. It's not wild that Amazon
| would dogfood its own product while creating training data to
| improve it.
| diggan wrote:
| It does sound like a person was watching the shopper live:
|
| > Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied
| on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling
| videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply
| moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
|
| But who knows, tech articles are so inaccurate that it might
| as well have been some misunderstanding regarding how the
| labeling/training was done.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Yeah, that's line was what got me trying to look at the
| article they cite, which is unfortunately paywalled. It'd
| be one thing to do that at like... several stores to
| generate the training data. But scaling it to dozens while
| it still requires that? Baffling.
| skywhopper wrote:
| It sounds like the receipts weren't necessarily "live",
| sometimes taking hours to appear, so I'm guessing they did it
| as live as possible and when they got backed up they would
| just revisit recorded video. Something tells me the
| expectations for throughput were also pretty overwhelming to
| the individuals who worked there.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Kind of reminds me of how back when speech-to-text started to
| get good enough to use (in the form of Google Assistant/Siri),
| my parents wondered if there was someone on the other side
| doing the transcription.
| mikehollinger wrote:
| > Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied
| on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos
| to ensure accurate checkouts.
|
| Yup.
|
| I got the chance to go shopping at one in 2018 (so it's been a
| while). You could tell there was some "reconciliation"
| happening, because your receipt didn't show up until 20-30
| minutes after you left. My guess is that this was some person
| via mechanical turk crawling thru the data and indexing what
| you -really- bought.
|
| Of course, my colleague and I (who were working on computer
| vision at the time) did stuff like take our bags off, put them
| in the middle of the floor, and roll a can of soda into the
| bag, just to see what would happen.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Of course, my colleague and I (who were working on computer
| vision at the time) did stuff like take our bags off, put
| them in the middle of the floor, and roll a can of soda into
| the bag, just to see what would happen."
|
| I'm many jurisdictions this could be enough to get you
| prosecuted for shoplifting if it evaded payment.
| walterbell wrote:
| After advertising "Just Walk Out"?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, the author is trying to see what would happen if
| they roll a can into the bag. This is meant to conceal
| the act from the computer. The act of concealing
| merchandise is all that is required in many
| jurisdictions. If they walked out without the concealing
| act, then I would think the error should be on the store.
|
| There have been some cases of self checkout prosecution
| too. They don't need any proof of intent. Even regular
| errors can be prosecuted.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> Even regular errors can be prosecuted._
|
| Volunteer to work for free, with bonus legal liability,
| as a self-service cashier.
|
| So convenient!
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| > They don't need any proof of intent. Even regular
| errors can be prosecuted.
|
| In Common Law jurisdictions, there's no intent required
| for _prosecution_ of alleged theft, but there absolutely
| is intent required for _conviction_! Anything else is a
| miscarriage of justice.
| shmatt wrote:
| i've written about this multiple times on HN and always got
| downvoted
|
| I work in the CV industry and this was a very badly kept
| secret. There is absolutely no financially feasible way to run
| something like this with current CV
| Ginobili wrote:
| i'm curious to know what the limitations of the technology
| are. Are the machine learning/CV algorithms not accurate
| enough to run it at scale?
| JohnFen wrote:
| I work with ML CV industrial systems, and they can
| certainly do accurate and detailed analysis and
| identification very quickly. The systems that do this are
| also necessarily very, very expensive -- much more
| expensive than any grocery store could possibly justify.
|
| Of course, costs change with time, but right now I don't
| see how this sort of application could approach being
| financially feasible.
| PreachSoup wrote:
| It's me, aws Mechanical Turk again!
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| So what we thought was automation was really just outsourcing.
| fullshark wrote:
| So they are offloading checkout onto the consumer via dash carts.
| There's no value proposition for the consumer unless somehow they
| are able to lower prices by not hiring cashiers.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| If I can scan as I shop, that could save me time. I am
| repeatedly stuck behind individuals with ludicrously full
| carts, ill suited to self checkout.
| brightball wrote:
| Sam's Club does this now. You scan on the mobile app while
| you shop, then pay right there on the app. It's great.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| You can also do this at Walmart (with Walmart+), though you
| still need to stop at the self checkout on the way out to
| get a receipt. It's pretty handy. I wish Costco would adopt
| this too.
| bshep wrote:
| I agree, and if you bring bags with you, you can bag as you
| scan. Works great for quick shopping trips, not so much when
| I'm making a big purchase.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I am just a few minutes walk from my local grocery store,
| so I go frequently. Rarely use a cart, just my canvas bag.
| Will there be portable scanners, or will I have to drag a
| cart around to benefit from real time scanning?
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| It's a huge advantage if you don't have to wait in line for
| self checkout machines or human checkout.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I don't feel like checking out is any faster than it used to
| be. They replace 10 human checkout lanes with maybe 15 self-
| checkout lanes and 2 human checkout. Maybe the self-checkout
| is a cheaper so they can have more, but people are so much
| slower on those that it doesn't win in the end. Dunno if the
| store is even really incentivized to make checkout fast,
| given that they sell high-margin stuff in the lines.
|
| Maybe one advantage is it finally stops customers from asking
| to pay half with a check and half with cash for a $2 item in
| certain places. There's an entire Walgreens I avoid because
| that's happened 3 times already.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| My local grocery store replaced about half the human
| checkout lanes with 3-per-lane self-checkout, and about 90%
| of the time I go shopping I don't have any line to wait
| for. The problem arises when they try to do a 1:1 (or
| nearly so) replacement.
| tialaramex wrote:
| But I don't _want_ to interact with the cashier. The store near
| me is _almost_ the thing I actually want. I walk into the
| store, I wander about picking items I want off shelves, and
| scanning them with my phone, I put them in a bag I happen to
| have with me, or my pockets, or my backpack, or whatever, it
| doesn 't matter, then I walk to the big graphical terminals
| near the exit and scan that too.
|
| That's the only place where it has a step I don't need, it
| wants payment because capitalism, so there's a bunch of touch,
| tap, touch again sequences to get from it knowing what I took
| to being satisfied that I have exchanged money for goods and
| then I can go.
|
| One thing I barely noticed at all until after it had happened
| was the removal of cashier operated checking out from most of
| the store. Ten years ago there were maybe 20 such checkouts,
| then sixteen after they added some self-checkout features -
| obviously rarely all manned but they existed. Today it's four,
| and often _none_ of them are open, because almost nobody stands
| in a line to have somebody else scan your shopping, why would
| you?
|
| Instead there are three distinct self-checkout zones. First,
| the one I use almost always, for people who have scanned their
| purchases already. There's nowhere to put anything, because
| these are just vertical terminals for taking payment. Then,
| short order terminals, a small built-in scale is provided so
| that you can buy say, lunch, but there's nowhere to load and
| unload a whole trolley of groceries. Finally the big shop
| terminals with lots of dedicated space for you to transfer from
| a trolley onto a scanner and weigh scales, then to your bags,
| this takes up most of the space previously occupied by
| cashiers.
|
| If you've scanned everything you can actually use any of these
| areas, because the terminal understands that you've already
| done the whole job, but unless it's super-busy it will be
| easier to use the dedicated area for people who've done all the
| scanning.
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _because almost nobody stands in a line to have somebody
| else scan your shopping, why would you?_
|
| A decently trained human can scan & bag far faster than I can
| at the self-checkouts.
|
| The self-checkout machines are also sometimes buggy. Our
| local Safeway's self-checkout was extremely particular: if
| you scanned the next item prior to the computer registering
| and processing the weight from the previous item being set
| down, it would error out and require an attendant. That
| processing was quite slow -- so you needed to lag yourself /
| rate limit yourself, so as to allow the machine time to
| think, before proceeding. I eventually figured out the
| cadence to go, such that I could avoid the error ... but
| humans just don't have this issue.
|
| Items too light to be detected just always error on some of
| these machines.
| hot_gril wrote:
| That and I also just like interacting with a person instead
| of a machine, especially if the machine is yelling at me.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > because almost nobody stands in a line to have somebody
| else scan your shopping, why would you?
|
| Here are the reasons I prefer the manned cashiers:
|
| The line at the manned cashiers is often shorter than the
| line at self-checkout.
|
| Scanning everything myself is a pain.
|
| If something goes wrong or I make a mistake, I won't have to
| put up with being accused of shoplifting.
|
| The time savings from self-checkout is usually minimal-to-
| nonexistent.
|
| I get to have a little human interaction.
|
| Since there's no discount for using self-checkout, I'm
| effectively paying extra in order to do more work.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely
| the next realistic step for grocery stores. I really like using
| them, as they allow me to put stuff directly into my bags as I
| go.
|
| I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to
| use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through
| the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got,
| and then there's no need to scan anything.
| underyx wrote:
| See also the RFID tags Uniqlo and Decathlon use for self-
| checkout. You just place your shopping bag in a bin and it
| reads all the items within in a second.
| f_allwein wrote:
| used it only once, but it seemed neat.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| My guess is that right now this isn't viable for lower margin
| food products. Uniqlo and decathlon probably don't sell that
| much for less than PS10. It's going to be a while before you
| can reasonably do that for a pint of milk.
| skyyler wrote:
| You're right - the cheapest thing uniqlo sells are $5 pairs
| of socks.
|
| Their $15 shirts are the next cheapest thing they sell, I'd
| imagine.
| sircastor wrote:
| It's like a gift-registry, but you take all the stuff with you
| when you're done instead of letting other people buy it for you
| later.
|
| We've got Barcode guns at self-checkout here, and I've begun to
| arrange my items barcode-up in the cart, so I can just get
| everything rapidly. I often don't bring my bags with me,
| because I'm going to have to load everything into the car
| anyway.
| cdchn wrote:
| >I often don't bring my bags with me, because I'm going to
| have to load everything into the car anyway.
|
| Thats an interesting optimization. Don't bag your stuff in
| the store just walk out with a cart of loose groceries.
| Especially for someone who simply MUST bring all the
| groceries inside with one trip, I can just load up a crate.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Back in the days when we got plastic shopping bags, I
| considered it an art form to see if I could get an entire
| trunk load of groceries into the house in a single trip.
| Without squishing the bread.
|
| You can get a lot of bags on your arms, and one or two jugs
| of milk in each hand depending on how long your fingers
| are.
|
| It just isn't as fun with the reusable folding bags. Or the
| paper bags some retailers use -- the ones with handles are
| the worst, they rip a good part of the time. Actually
| easier to carry a normal paper bag than one with handles.
| nottorp wrote:
| Always did that. But I keep large, solid, reusable bags in
| the trunk.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Interesting, it works the other way around here. You get a
| portable barcode gun that you carry around the store or put
| in a sort of cup holder on the cart.
|
| So I always bring a bag or a foldable crate, throw everything
| in while shopping and then put that in the car.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'm in the US, and we have both. It varies by store. Some
| have scan-as-you-go, some have self-checkout with fixed
| scanners, some have gun scanners. My personal preference is
| gun scanners at self checkout.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That's become a thing at Home Depot, and I do exactly the
| same. I wish all the self-checkouts would use guns. Once you
| get used to just putting things in the cart code-up, it makes
| checkout pretty painless.
|
| Heck, I even do the 'leave the bags in the car' trick too.
| I'm going to be using the cart anyway, so why do the extra
| step at the checkout instead of just loading it directly into
| the bags in the car.
|
| Glad to know I'm not the only person who thinks this is a
| good way to do it.
| phh wrote:
| We've had that in France for years, and noone uses that as far
| as I can tell.
|
| The main usage I see is mainly self checkout.
|
| Please note that I'm biased towards dense areas. We have on-
| the-go scanning in super stores as well, I feel it's not being
| used but I could be wrong
| beardyw wrote:
| Yes, same in the UK. Most stores have scan as you shop, but
| most people do self checkout. I get the impression scan as
| you shop is seen as being a bit prissy.
| weinzierl wrote:
| As a German it is always a culture shock to see how popular
| self checkout is in the UK, even though I see it used more
| often recently in Germany too. I think Germany is about a
| decade behind...
| drusepth wrote:
| Wait until you see how popular it is in the US! I can't
| remember the last time I saw someone use a manned
| checkout line; my local grocery store has 1 manned lane
| and 12 self checkout lanes, and the manned one is almost
| always empty.
| dxbydt wrote:
| > 1 manned lane and 12 self checkout lanes, and the
| manned one is almost always empty
|
| its empty because it's considered rude to burden the
| poorly paid checkout person when you can self-service.
| Once all of the self-service lanes are occupied, the
| sentiment shifts and customers uneasily queue up in the
| manned lane, frantically watching if the self-service
| lane clears up so they can jump out of the manned lane.
|
| One of those freak cases in behavioral econ where the
| causality is very straightforward and explicit.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Wait, I've never seen the manned lane empty. People use
| whatever is fastest.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I've certainly observed what looks like that kind of
| behavior, but I don't personally feel rude at all for
| using the services of a cashier.
|
| In my own shopping, I just use whatever seems likely to
| be fastest or less hassle -- for me.
|
| If I've got a bunch of stuff, I'm heading to the cashier
| because they're better-equipped to handle a volume of
| stuff than I am at self-checkout.
|
| But if it's just a couple of small items, then the self-
| checkout seems fastest: Scan, plonk, scan, plonk, invoke
| the incantation so that it can take my money[1], and pay
| it.
|
| (Unless one of those small items involves something like
| beer or something else requiring an ID check, wherein:
| It's back to the cashier.)
|
| [1]: In my neck of the woods, Wal-Mart gets this best,
| with as few as one button-pushes required to pay and
| leave (and there was a time when it was zero button
| pushes to use a debit card at self-checkout there).
| Dollar General gets it worst, requiring at least 8 button
| pushes (with three different input methods! it requires
| input on two different touchscreens and one physical
| keypad) to pay them and get on my way.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > it's considered rude to burden the poorly paid checkout
| person when you can self-service.
|
| It is?? I missed that memo. But in my part of the US, the
| manned cashiers always have a line for them, too.
| graemep wrote:
| I hate self-checkout. As far as I am concerned you are a
| decade behind us in a decline!
| JohnFen wrote:
| I hate self-checkout as well.
|
| The frustrating thing is that stores have fewer cashiers,
| so there's always a line. But often that line is shorter
| than the one for self-checkout.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Oh. That's a shame. In Poland (nearly?) every Lidl has
| self-checkout.
| mateo1 wrote:
| There's a simple formula that makes you chose it: they
| keep as few manned checkouts open as possible, as long as
| the wait for the manned checkouts is inconvenient enough
| the majority of people will use the self-checkouts.
| bigger_cheese wrote:
| Yep this is my experience here in Australia, the manned
| checkouts are understaffed the stores want to
| deliberately funnel you into the self checkout.
| mateo1 wrote:
| It's also a step towards individualized pricing, which many
| people, myself included, absolutely hate. This can be done
| with self-checkouts but it'll work much better with
| handheld scanners. Normal price: 3x, member price:2x,
| individualized price: scan to find out.
|
| Big chains plan to gamblify the prices in the next few
| years using their "member cards" points, some chains are
| already up to this with specific penetration targets before
| they move forward. And this is not insider knowledge
| they're upfront about it.
| imadj wrote:
| > We've had that in France for years, and noone uses that as
| far as I can tell.
|
| Why not? what makes it unpopular?
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| I don't know if it's really unpopular, but it's only used
| at self checkout in Decathlon which is a chain of
| supermarkets selling sports equipment and clothes.
| realusername wrote:
| You have to remember every time to scan what you get which
| is a bit annoying and tedious.
|
| And then if you are unlucky you hit a random "let's recheck
| everything" at the cashier which nullifies all the work
| that you have done.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Same reason I usually don't go to self-checkout.
| realusername wrote:
| Yeah that's basically the same issue. I do think the self
| scanning is even worse than the self checkout because at
| least at the self checkout you scan everything once at
| the end when you're done.
|
| The fact that you have to remember to scan every time you
| put anything in your basket is just worse for the mental
| load I find.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If manned checkout is a dishwasher and self-checkout is
| handwashing dishes in the sink after the meal; scan-as-
| you-shop is eating next to a little basin where you wash
| each utensil as soon as you're done using it, before
| you're allowed to return to the meal.
| satellite2 wrote:
| Because the trust level is under zero. In France you have
| to put items one by one and the weight of your shopping bag
| has to add up before you can scan the next article. It's
| the prison feeling with the speed of an 90 year old in any
| other country's self checkout. 0/10 would not recommend.
| weinzierl wrote:
| We have it in Germany for years too (in densely populated
| areas) and my subjective impression is that next to none was
| using it for a long time but that it's picking up slowly.
|
| For one thing I think these things take years for broad
| acceptance and for another the current scanners with their
| bright and large displays are just what was needed to make it
| attractive for the young and elderly.
| Animats wrote:
| > scanners with their bright and large displays
|
| Give a retailer a large display, and they will fill it with
| ads, with the important info in tiny type. Or even a small
| display. I've seen user-facing credit card terminals where
| the small screen is 3/4 ads, 1/4 transaction.
|
| If they'd just put up "Place card against screen here"
| marker that was 1) where the antenna is, and 2) fully
| synchronized with when the system is ready for a card
| read...
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I see a couple people using it at the shops near me in the UK
| (but it's not that popular here either). It's pretty
| universally available in the bigger shops, but rare in the
| little metro shops. I really like just slinging my bag in the
| trolley and running around the store with a scanner. It's
| dramatically easier than unpacking a trolley for self-
| checkout or the old school checkouts. It's annoying when
| there are security tagged items though, because it defeats
| the purpose of the self scanning.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Similar in my area (in the US). We've had scan-and-go at the
| local grocery/everything store for many years, but I really
| don't see that many people actually using it.
| lgfrbcsgo wrote:
| What would prevent someone from lining their shopping bag with
| metal to shield the RF?
| noodlesUK wrote:
| Nothing, the same as current self-checkout systems. You can
| already easily just put stuff in your pocket or ring
| expensive items up as incorrect, cheaper things. I suspect
| shops have done a risk analysis and decided that they'd
| prefer to have more shoplifting and fewer staff.
| kube-system wrote:
| I doubt the relationship between the rate of shoplifting
| and ease of shoplifting is anywhere close to linear. Even
| before self-checkouts existed, people still shoplifted. And
| in some places, the honor system even works much of the
| time.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| > I doubt the relationship between the rate of
| shoplifting and ease of shoplifting is anywhere close to
| linear.
|
| I'm sure you're right. I suspect that there are massive
| variations from shop location to shop location, even
| within a region. I also suspect there are different
| _kinds_ of shoplifting. I remember hearing a friend who
| is not the kind of person to just pocket an item and
| leave, bragging about ringing up protein powder from a
| bulk dispenser as flour to save money. That kind of
| behaviour is definitely going to be hard to model.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a number of people who openly admit to "self
| checkout discounts" as part of the "payment" for doing
| the work for the store.
| Salgat wrote:
| At least in Walmart I've had workers come over to me
| multiple times to verify I correctly scanned things.
| There's definitely more scrutiny involved when you have a
| centralized self-checkout (this only happens in the more
| sketchy Walmart, the nicer one seems to trust people more).
| bombcar wrote:
| It's entirely a sketchy/nice dichotomy (though the local
| nice grocery store is tuned too damn high, I avoid that
| one).
| I_AM_A_SMURF wrote:
| > You can already easily just put stuff in your pocket or
| ring expensive items up as incorrect, cheaper things
|
| This is actually already somewhat solved. The other day I
| was at a Safeway and one carton of milk had an unreadable
| label so I scanned a different carton and put the
| unreadable one in the bag instead (same product). The
| system showed me a video of me doing that, highlighting the
| fact that I didn't put the item I scanned on the bag (!)
| and asked me to wait for an assistant. Pretty impressive.
| bombcar wrote:
| They've gotten a bit more advanced, but that can be
| bypassed too, you just need to know where the cameras
| are.
|
| Or shop somewhere where they have all that turned off.
| saghm wrote:
| > I think a further improvement on a system like that would be
| to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk
| through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what
| you got, and then there's no need to scan anything.
|
| Isn't that basically what Amazon had claimed they were doing
| here, except apparently maybe they weren't?
| throw1230 wrote:
| Nope, they were using camera technology and QR codes
| timr wrote:
| It always seemed so needlessly complex, relative to well-
| established RFID tech -- Uniqlo can count the number and
| type of garments in a pile in a big bucket, and compute an
| invoice from that.
|
| Even if you couldn't do this at the exit, seems like it
| would have been a far easier lift to incorporate the same
| idea into shopping carts or baskets all along.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| The cost-per-unit on RFID product tags (EPCs) has tended
| to limit them to products with a relatively high margin
| and a relatively high theft potential---clothing being
| the most obvious example and the most common application
| of EPCs, with retailers all the way down to WalMart using
| them for apparel.
|
| You'll note that WalMart doesn't even use the EPCs at
| POS, which is telling: for most retailers, the main
| advantage of EPCs is far more actionable alarms at the
| exit. So they're limited to items where loss rates make
| the added cost worth it.
|
| The problem is that the grocery industry has notoriously
| low margins, and the unit price of EPC tags can be the
| entire margin on a lot of products. On the one hand,
| Amazon may have been trying to work around the need for
| higher-cost tags to roll out this kind of automation. On
| the other hand, I have heard anecdotally that Amazon
| Fresh pricing was relatively high, so maybe EPCs would
| have been a wiser use of their extra revenue.
| timr wrote:
| Amazon Fresh was definitely not the cheapest option. It
| was on par with Whole Foods for groceries, IME.
|
| But that said, interesting point. Didn't know the cost of
| an RFID tag was that high -- after all, Uniqlo is putting
| them on some pretty cheap clothing items!
| Iulioh wrote:
| Rfid tags are really cheap, some sellers advertise prices
| as low as 3c per tag but realistically 10c is probably
| the cost of a finished product (print, glue, maybe extra
| protection of the plastic)
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| That's the problem though - $0.05 is a LOT to a grocer,
| that's all they keep on a lot of products. Barcodes are
| free since they mostly go on labels that are being
| printed anyway. They could push for source tagging, but
| the vendor would pass on the cost, and grocery is a very
| price sensitive industry.
|
| For apparel, on the other hand, source tagging is common
| - even before EPC on higher end goods, Calvin Klein used
| to sew magnetostriction tags into clothing. Apparel just
| has so much more price elasticity and loss prevention is
| a huge part of that industry. Tools are another industry
| where EPC and source tagging are common, once again, high
| dollar items with a lot of theft.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Stop and Shop (in New England) had hand scanners you could do
| this with 15 years ago. I have been shocked that the technology
| didn't spread. It was so easy to scan and bag then just plug
| the scanner in at checkout and pay.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Stop and Shop now has self-checkout where you have to scan
| and move your items one at a time into your bag, because it's
| doing continuous weight-based reconciliation.
|
| So if you have six of the same yoghurt, you have to scan them
| and then place them in your bag one at a time. And if you
| have a 24 pack of sodas, you need to haul it out of your cart
| onto the scales as you're checking out. And if anything goes
| wrong (item didn't weight what the system expected; you moved
| the item too fast onto the scales etc) then you get a "please
| wait while someone helps you", which involves an employee
| having to come and clear the error.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There should be a hand scanner and a "skip bagging" option
| that allows you to keep heavy things on your cart. I'm
| pretty sure I have seen it at stop and shop before too.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Most of the large chain supermarkets in the UK have this, but
| my anecdata is that it's relatively less used that self
| checkoit by a ratio of 3:1
| diggan wrote:
| > 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:Self_checkout_scanne...
| (Image uploaded 2011)
|
| Surely this exists elsewhere too, or been judged to only work
| in certain contexts (like a high-trust environment like Sweden)
| and won't be the next realistic step.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Jup it has been available for a very long time in the
| Netherlands as well.
|
| When I moved to the UK, what surprised me is that Tesco self
| check out is so much more cumbersome. It weighs your stuff,
| stops working when something isn't exactly the right weight.
| Super annoying to use if you're used to the system used in
| Sweden and The Netherlands. But that was in stores in the
| middle of central London, it may be very different in more
| suburban "big" stores which is where it was first rolled out
| in NL as well.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's entirely up to the store how sensitive (or if it cares
| about weight in the bagging area at all).
|
| And how that's set usually has more to do with the store's
| location than anything else.
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| Wal-Mart tried it here in Canada for a bit, but it didn't
| last long at all.
| yencabulator wrote:
| US side Sam's Club (same Sam Walton) has scan-as-you-shop.
| bombcar wrote:
| Membership clubs can get away with quite a bit more
| because they're controlled access.
|
| I notice Costco has self-checkouts now.
| kageneko wrote:
| One of the "perks" of my Walmart+ membership is scan-as-
| you-go. I think I've used it twice. Both times, I only had
| a few things and the store was packed solid with spring
| breakers. It was a decent experience but I still like the
| normal self-checkout the best.
| graemep wrote:
| All the supermarkets where I live (English Midlands) have
| scan as you shop.
|
| I stopped using it after they required using their loyalty
| cards/apps to use it.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I'm not a fan of the data tracking that I know those
| loyalty programs are for, but at least in the US most
| stores overcharge you if you don't use them (they present
| it as giving a "discount" if you use them but really you
| are just getting the fair price denied to non-members) so
| you would need to have deep pockets to resist them out of
| principle.
| graemep wrote:
| Around here the main difference is lower pricing on some
| items, so I mostly just buy those items somewhere else.
|
| I also use one loyalty app only when I get an offer.
| charlieflowers wrote:
| Just yesterday I bought some steaks that were $55 with
| the loyalty card and $130 (no typo) without.
|
| I've never seen a difference that huge before.
| JohnFen wrote:
| In my part of the US, anyway, there are several grocery
| stores that don't use loyalty cards at all, so you can
| avoid the extortion by shopping at those.
| xp84 wrote:
| The latest evolution in these are really devious: A shelf
| tag advertises a price in large print: $7.99 with smaller
| print "with digital coupon" And then underneath, in the
| color usually used to show the "non-sale price," you see
| "$12.99." A lot of people just glance at the tag which
| looks a lot like the normal 'sale price' tag and thinks
| they're paying $8. Of course, you have to get in the
| sluggish, stupid app, and best case scenario scan the tag
| or the item and get to the right part of the app to
| "Clip" the coupon. Assuming you can get a good enough
| signal in that part of the store, and that you haven't
| become logged out of the app... etc. etc. And assuming
| you don't make a mental note to clip it in a minute when
| you get out of this crowded aisle and then forget.
|
| I think they just really want to display one price and
| charge a much higher one to most people.
| fragmede wrote:
| apps are a new thing. before, when it was just a phone
| number, 867-5309 in the us would usually work to get the
| discount while being usefully trackable
| orra wrote:
| Scan as you shop goes back _way_ further! Safeway UK had it,
| and they were bought over yonks ago.
|
| Looks like they had it in 1996, 28 years ago.
| https://www.supermarketnews.com/archive/safeway-uk-
| expands-s...
| ck425 wrote:
| Yeah, I remember it as a kid. But it surprised me when they
| brought it back because people rarely used it. I still
| don't really get the point of it tbh, scanning items as you
| pick them up just spreads out the faff of scanning things
| and slows people down in the aisles.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Yes. In Switzerland Migros you have this as well, at least in
| the bigger ones. But they also added scanning with the phone.
| So you don't need a special scanner, just your phone.
| PodgieTar wrote:
| Albert Heijn does this in the Netherlands, tied to your loyalty
| card. You can even import your shopping list and show it on the
| little hand scanners. At the end, you scan your loyalty card
| and it shows up on the self checkout.
|
| I think it's great, I get to go around the shop with a little
| laser gun.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Yes it's great. Put everything straight in your bag, no
| packing at the end.
|
| The only thing I don't like is that they have added the
| option to the machines to scan all your things there instead
| of using the portable scanner. Which in my area has resulted
| in queues at the self checkout... Which used to be very quick
| when it was only used for the portable scanners.
| gsa wrote:
| An even nicer thing about the Albert Heijn self checkout is
| that I can use my own phone from start to finish. Connect to
| store wifi, scan items using their app (using the phone
| camera), pay with my phone (contactless payments) on the self
| checkout and use my phone to scan an exit barcode at the
| turnstile. My visits to the store usually last only a few
| minutes and I don't mind popping in multiple times a week.
| sarchertech wrote:
| When I worked there back in 2005, Best Buy had an RFID test
| setup in the basement of their HQ that could tell what you had
| in your cart without scanning.
|
| Walmart was also working on similar technology, but from what I
| heard they couldn't convince suppliers to include RFID tags on
| all of their products.
| skywhopper wrote:
| The problem with your second suggestion is that it gives the
| customer no recourse for improperly tagged/scanned items.
| Interaction with a human or checkout system before leaving the
| store is necessary, given how ripe for abuse a totally
| automated checkout system would be.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| Agreed - I think there's also the issue of people needing to
| be pre-registered with such a system, and not being able to
| accept cash. I would expect that in the future, systems like
| that will be an "express lane" for the particularly prepared,
| but not necessarily the default.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I think a further improvement on a system like that would be
| to use the cheap RFID tech_
|
| Unfortunately I doubt you'll ever see this happen.
|
| Sure, it's supposedly possible to buy an RFID chip for 1p - but
| you can buy a can of beans for 23p so that 1p is probably their
| entire profit margin.
|
| I've also worked with a variety of RFID readers; none of them
| can provide reliable reading, even in favourable conditions.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think there's another technical issue with using RFID. If
| you have a basket of a few dozen different RFID chips,
| there's going to be a lot of collisions in the data they
| transmit, further reducing reliability.
| vkou wrote:
| Exactly how many beans does this 23p 'can' contain? Is it
| more than a dozen?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Scanning with your phone camera sucks its very slow and
| scanning as you pass the anti theft barriers normalizes running
| the barriers which will make catching thieves basically
| impossible. It also runs contra to shoppers expectations.
| Raises the question of charging the wrong person when multiple
| phones are nearby as when multiple people are shopping together
| or just adjacent to one another or when carts are just too
| close to the barriers. It also assumes that reading is instant
| and faultless when its not and fails to support anyone who
| wanders in from the street without an account set up expecting
| normal payment options. This makes it suitable for a membership
| club which expects to set up payment as part of setting up
| membership and useless for the 99% of stores that don't work
| like that.
|
| Why not wait a few years until even a can of beans has an rfid
| tag, put a rfid tag in 4 corners of the cart. You should be
| able to compute which tags are within the bounds of the cart
| and allow you to pay.
|
| The hardware to read the tags is still too expensive to put in
| the carts and not liable to be available as part of everyone's
| phones that soon so the easiest thing to do is retain the
| existing self checkouts and just skip the part where you scan
| anything. Roll up to the front. Tap your prominently displayed
| cart number or numbers tap your card done.
|
| Reducing checkout to 6 seconds from multiple minutes will
| obviate the new loathsome situation where you actually wait in
| line to self checkout and will be close enough to normal
| procedures that it should be easy to transition to.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| The scan as you shop systems that I am referring to are where
| you are given a little barcode scanner with a display, and
| you go around the shop scanning your items as you pack them.
| At the end of the shopping trip, you still go to the self
| checkout machine, but you just transfer your scan list from
| the portable barcode scanner to the till. At no point are you
| using a phone camera to scan items. Usually the trolleys have
| a little mount point for the scanner so you don't even need
| to touch anything.
|
| I agree that having to scan out via the anti theft barriers
| is idiotic.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Walmart is demoing a scan as you shop system that I think
| relies on user cameras and the app. At least that was my
| impression.
|
| With American hardware at SCO the scanners are just
| peripherals like a keyboard and a person walking around the
| store with them would tie up an entire POS computer while
| items were being scanned with it.
|
| If the portable scanner were itself a portable device this
| would be tractable however how do you keep people from
| stealing or destroying them?
| kjellsbells wrote:
| In the US (mid-Atlantic states) the supermarkets have tried
| this for years with very little success. Giant (Ahold) in
| particular persists with this, perhaps because they have a
| unionized workforce and would like nothing more than to slash
| their employee count.
| throwanem wrote:
| Is _that_ why they 're pushing it so hard? That's good to
| know.
| hot_gril wrote:
| The hardest things are produce and by-weight items. Even self-
| checkout doesn't handle that well a lot of the time.
| jcotton42 wrote:
| The Wegmans I shopped at in Rochester had scales that would
| produce a special barcode you could scan into the app that
| would record both the item and the weight.
| hot_gril wrote:
| If customers are willing to use an app, that makes things a
| lot easier to implement. Safeway/Vons in the US only have
| self-checkout machines. Seems like it's shifted towards
| per-item produce pricing, but the stickers often fall off.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| At Meijer stores I've shopped at, there are fancy scales in
| the produce section.
|
| They work like this: Scan the barcode on the produce if it
| has one (or pick it from a picture-list, or search by name,
| or just key in the 4-digit PLU if you're cool like that), put
| it on the scale, and it spits out a barcode label that
| identifies the product and the weight.
|
| At self-checkout, one just scans the generated barcode label
| and puts the produce in the bagging area like any other item.
|
| Unlike the self-checkout kiosks themselves: There's never any
| wait to use these machines, so it's an easy process that
| doesn't involve making other people wait.
|
| This process would work the same, I think, for applications
| where portable scanners are in-use.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| They have the same at my local Wegman's but there's really
| no incentive to use it. I'm not any faster than the cashier
| so there's no time savings.
|
| And it has several problems as well with respect to loss
| (e.g. adding more items to the bag). To deal with that,
| you'd have to weigh it or count again to verify.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Was going to say, this process sounds a lot more
| complicated than just putting stuff in my bag and letting
| a cashier deal with it. If they want to automate the
| cashier away, fine, but I'm not doing their job for them.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| The advantage comes during shopping trips when one is not
| planning to use a cashier to check out, wherein: You're
| going to have the weigh the produce yourself, anyway, so
| you might as well get that done in advance.
| badwolf wrote:
| HEB in Texas has scales and label printers scattered
| throughout the product section for you to weigh and print a
| label while you shop for this reason.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Weigh each customer/cart going in and going out. Make sure the
| weight of each item is a prime number. And... remove any
| restrooms from the store.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| 2+3=5. In general, the weight idea is impossible. For any two
| items, you can find the LCM in units of the precision of the
| scale, and then you won't know if they got LCM/a of one or
| LCM/b of the other.
| signal11 wrote:
| Scan as you shop is already mainstream in a bunch of British
| supermarkets (exception: Costco UK).
|
| Definitely makes big shops easier.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I refuse to use those (although I will probably need to use it,
| eventually), because they do this annoying "BING!" when I pass
| whatever item they are trying to push.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Sam's club offers this. I've stopped using it because it's too
| easy to forget to scan something.
|
| I just scan everything at the end. Not really any different
| than going to self checkout.
|
| I also use checkout as a time to organize my groceries for
| unloading at home.
| asdff wrote:
| I can't wait for food to be expensive and the ewaste from
| supplying an rfid chip with every tomato and potato
| whyenot wrote:
| peel off the RFID tags from the expensive vine ripened
| tomatoes and replace them with tags from the really cheap
| ones (people already do this with the plastic stickers)
| financypants wrote:
| Even easier to scan organic tomatoes as regular ones,
| similarly with other fruit/vegetables. The "self check out
| discount"
| whyenot wrote:
| How would this cheap RFID system work for produce and other
| items sold without packaging or by weight? (for example
| fruit/veg)
| Iulioh wrote:
| I don't see the problem, you just need a machine that prints
| a custom tag with the information.
|
| My city use it for public transit tickets
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on
| more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to
| ensure accurate checkouts.
|
| More of the same. I wonder if the incredible use of labor in
| India and other countries will cause their society to bypass
| their own growth so that the citizens of those countries become
| pure consumers, the majority of which can only ever get menial or
| gig jobs due to AI taking over most of innovation. In such
| countries, the only jobs left may be to aid in the extraction of
| larger and large amounts of natural resources required for the
| technological expansion of the west.
|
| In this way, developing countries will never be able to gain
| independence from the few global powers at the top: instead, they
| will be forced to follow the folly of the United States and
| Europe: developing more technology for the sake of technology,
| and in return they will get a free Unlimited Streaming plan to
| watch the garbage that we have come to call entertainment.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > I wonder if the incredible use of labor in India and other
| countries will cause their society to bypass their own growth
| so that the citizens of those countries become pure consumers
|
| Never gonna happen in India, by the sheer number of populace.
| You can see the thing you are talking about in some countries
| in Europe where a small population and a lack of heavy
| manufacturing drives the whole economy to the servicing sector.
| It's a question if you can label these countries as developing,
| though.
| ortusdux wrote:
| SNL had a great sketch about them -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS9U3Gc832Y
| sgarman wrote:
| Skit or ad?
| code_runner wrote:
| amazon is notorious for paying late night sketch comedy shows
| to make fun of them in order to promote their niche projects
| that only exist in a few cities.
| pimlottc wrote:
| do you have a source for this?
| steelbrain wrote:
| > Video unavailable
|
| > The uploader has not made this video available in your
| country
|
| In UAE.
| Voultapher wrote:
| I like this one better https://youtu.be/gc12eBPuxwg
| jimbob45 wrote:
| There was a really neat company called Digimarc[0] a while back
| that promised to bake the barcode into the packaging such that
| you could scan any part of the label and receive a barcode
| successfully. I have no idea what happened to them because it
| seemed like a slam-dunk idea that would have greatly improved the
| purchasing process virtually everywhere (and you could just have
| a traditional fallback barcode in case the baked-in one fails).
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimarc
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The problem with that is the same problem with self-checkout
| and Amazon Dash. It's solving a problem the retailer has -- the
| cost of employees -- by turning shoppers into store employees.
| But it doesn't really solve any problems that the shopper has
| because scanning all of your own stuff and laying it out on the
| scale is so inconvenient that it ruins everything else. The
| only place where I've seen self-checkout be as good or better
| than having a checker is Lowes or Home Depot, because they
| don't require you to weigh each item in turn to unlock the
| scanner so you can move as fast as a checker can. But I think
| grocery shopping will be the last place self-checkout moves in
| in a big way because the grocers insist on weighing everything
| you buy before unlocking the scanner.
| deciplex wrote:
| > I think grocery shopping will be the last place self-
| checkout moves in in a big way
|
| Self-checkout is the norm in my area.
| heywire wrote:
| Most of the retailers in my area have turned off the bag
| scale security. But I live in a pretty small town, so maybe
| theft is at an acceptable level where they're willing to make
| that trade off. They're also using more and more computer
| vision to ensure what passes into the cart is scanned
| (Everseen and others), so perhaps they're finding better
| success with that than the bag scale.
| vultour wrote:
| Wait what? When did they reveal it's offloaded to workers in
| India? I remember this being touted as fully automated when it
| was announced, surely being watched by strangers from creepy
| angles would discourage a large portion of customers.
| dboreham wrote:
| Sometimes people are lying.
| rchaud wrote:
| ChatGPT is also trained by the efforts of thousands of people
| in low income countries getting paid a pittance. We don't hear
| about it much because it's easier to credit a few suits at the
| top as harbingers of the future.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Yep https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
| shmatt wrote:
| There is usually a mention of "humans in the loop" when
| articles discussed Amazon Go[1]. Amazon just always refused to
| give actual numbers. The best "give" that humans were watching
| you was that Amazon Go receipts often arrived in your email
| many hours after you left.
|
| Anyone who works in computer vision immediately knew this
| wasn't possible beyond a cool proof of concept in a tiny room
| with <300 SKUs. Even in 2024
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/21/inside-amazons-
| surveillanc...
| deathanatos wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrmMk1Myrxc says nothing
| about humans in the loop, and that it's technology, all
| automatic.
|
| Am I _surprised_? No, not at all. But there is a definitely
| "how it was marketed", "how it was implemented" here.
| bonton89 wrote:
| Less creepy being watched by actual people I think. They'll
| usually just forget about you after a few days instead of
| cataloging every time you lingered at a shelf selling
| hemorrhoid cream and storing it in a database forever.
| k8svet wrote:
| I feel like Sams Club has this down pretty well. You self-scan as
| you shop. You checkout as you walk towards the door. You flash a
| QR code to them and then they quick scan spot check items to make
| sure you weren't missing anything.
| fhub wrote:
| FWIW, this was the fourth attempt by Walmart to get Scan'n'Go
| working well (each one a complete reboot). It was majority
| designed and built by two talented developers who were acqui-
| hired and managed at at distance by another acqui-hire
| developer.
| whyenot wrote:
| "Ginger Market" on the SJSU campus has attempted to use a similar
| "Just Walk Out" approach. It has not worked well. I've been
| double charged, charged for items I did not take, not charged for
| items I've taken, etc. The refund process was also a pain. It was
| so bad that they had to stop using it last spring, although they
| claim they are going to give it another go.
|
| Why even bother? Self checkout or a cashier work so much better
| and I have a hard time believing they are less expensive. The
| store is plastered with cameras. Seriously, there must be 100
| cameras in the place. That's a lot of video to process, which has
| got to be costly, whether it is a machine or people who are
| reviewing it.
| spike021 wrote:
| Doesn't that take away jobs students used to get? Which
| storefront is that? The one at the bottom of MLK Library or
| McQuarrie Hall?
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| No, students just have to wait until after graduation to get
| retail jobs now.
| kbos87 wrote:
| > Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on
| more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to
| ensure accurate checkouts.
|
| I know this is ripe to use as a way to dunk on Amazon, but I
| sincerely doubt that it was as inane as it sounds. They likely
| had this workforce to train a system that they hoped would
| eventually operate autonomously. That being said, it sounds like
| it never panned out.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > They likely had this workforce to train a system that they
| hoped would eventually operate autonomously. That being said,
| it sounds like it never panned out.
|
| And this is why I think current "AI" technologies are a dead
| end. Once the rest of the market realizes that maybe we'll
| finally get past this "AI" hype bubble.
| Animats wrote:
| That's an interesting point. Amazon tried an AI application
| where errors were a cost to Amazon, rather than to the
| consumer. They failed to make it work well enough to use.
|
| What AI applications are in use where the error cost is
| imposed on the company using them, not the consumer? Reading
| paper checks and mail envelopes come to mind. Those are
| automated and work well. Waymo's automatic driving, but not
| Tesla's. What else?
|
| This is a useful metric for gauging real progress.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > Those are automated and work well. Waymo's automatic
| driving, but not Tesla's.
|
| If Tesla geofenced their FSD applications as aggressively
| as Waymo, I suspect the two would be near peers. You can
| hide an incredible lack of a capability by artificially
| limiting the scope of your application.
|
| > This is a useful metric for gauging real progress.
|
| Sure, cost / benefit analysis is always useful. I would
| propose a broader analysis for grading "AI" disruption
| though.
|
| 1. Are humans involved at any step?
|
| 2. What is the probability of success?
|
| 3. What is the consequence of failure? (Profit loss /
| property loss / personal injury, etc...)
|
| 4. How many variations on a domain (think winter driving,
| summer driving, driving in a tropical storm, driving dirt
| roads in a jungle, etc) can the application work in while
| maintaining consistent performance?
|
| 5. Can the model leverage its "learnings" to solve problems
| / reason about new domains that it hasn't been trained on?
|
| That's just a few metrics I can think of off the top of my
| head that would help to distinguish a true disruptor from
| the hype.
| Ajay-p wrote:
| 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 only conclude
| it is cost cutting.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| One of the various jobs I had during the 90s to put myself
| through college was stocking store shelves in a large grocery
| store. During my time there, I placed every item on the shelf
| by hand, rotated forward, so that the shelves were easy to
| front and look respectable by the time the morning came. After
| a few months, it was fairly easy to eyeball an item in the
| case, lift it while rotating, and place it on the shelf facing
| forward. It also became reflex to hear something fall and catch
| it without looking. We also mopped the entire store by hand,
| twice, before getting down to the business of fronting the
| shelves one final time.
|
| As time went on, they hired a cleaning crew to clean the floors
| with a machine. They'd miss things. After my time, they started
| having their employees cut boxes and just plop entire boxes
| onto store shelves, ripping the fronts off of them. I'm sure it
| saves a little bit of time, but you end up with a store that is
| a complete mess full of discarded cardboard. All of that adds
| up to a terrible customer experience.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| I appreciate the effort. I think manual, menial labor is
| pushed very hard in the US today.
|
| One thing that really bothers me is that older stock is not
| brought to the front and they just push it back with the new
| stuff.
|
| It's doubly frustrating because sometimes products change so
| you'll find what you're looking for _after_ digging through
| three layers of assorted items.
|
| I don't really blame the apathy directly, but there are
| doubtless solutions over the horizon.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Well, the stock issue is sort of a manpower issue. For
| example, back home, the shelf with canned green beans,
| corn, and pre-cooked red beans was 4 cans high, and each
| section of those items was about 12 cans across. It'd be
| nice if we could simply spend the time to rotate and stock
| the items, but that just isn't feasible. It's far easier
| and more cost effective for the store to periodically check
| for expired product than it is to rotate them. It's even
| harder with tiny items like seasoning bottles. It would be
| nice if someone could design a shelving system that could
| be moved and stocked from the back, but that'd be quite an
| engineering feat given the sheer weight of the shelves and
| the proclivity for items to fall over when they're moved.
|
| All of these stores have budgeted in losses. My managers
| were almost fired for the sheer amount of negligence they
| gave the store when it came to ordering product. Each
| location has a certain cadence to them when it comes to
| what people are buying. My managers didn't understand it,
| so they ended up with 25 rolling carts packed solid with
| backstock (these are 8 feet tall and have two shelves), and
| another 20-30 pallets. If you're unfamiliar, for a normal
| sized grocery store, you should really only have backstock
| on the top sides of those carts. Instead of filling the
| shelves with the product they'd already bought for the
| store, they were buying entirely new product! I managed to
| wrangle the order gun from them for the grocery department
| and they went from losing $30K a quarter in inventory to
| gaining about $15K. I kept an inventory in my head of what
| we had in the back and made sure not to order it.
|
| How? Because when pallets inevitably tumble in the
| distribution centers, the centers can't waste time sorting
| through inventory to determine what's damaged. So they
| count it as a loss and toss the product into crates so that
| store employees can sort through them. Good stuff goes on
| the shelf, damaged stuff goes in the trash. Apparently the
| distribution centers damaged a lot of product, lol. My
| managers got cash bonuses for turning things around, and I
| got a 6 pack of beer.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| There is a possibly unexpected advantage to stocking the
| shelves with boxed items: if the customer wants to purchase
| items in bulk, they can retrieve the boxes just as easily as
| they were put there. As a customer, I do that a lot for
| unperishable goods.
| deciplex wrote:
| > cost cutting
|
| When the savings are not passed on to the customer (and they
| usually are not, as in this case) it's more accurate and
| descriptive to call it "profit maximizing."
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Self checkout is a better customer experience for me
| personally.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I hate it, especially for large trips to the store.
|
| The scale freaks out too often after I scan an item and put
| it on the bed, because the weight is slightly off for
| whatever reason. Then I have to stop scanning and wait for an
| employee to come over and scan their badge to authorize the
| sale.
|
| I've gone back to just waiting in line at the standard
| checkout unless I have < 5 items in my cart.
| ska wrote:
| I've never experienced one reliable enough for this to be
| true (for me).
| brogrammernot wrote:
| It's working fine across several stores in San Francisco based on
| what I see on Twitter
| ein0p wrote:
| Apple Store in Oakland is moving a lot of merchandise that way,
| too. Customers just walk out all the time.
| jonnycat wrote:
| Can we start a list of technological magic that is actually "1000
| people in India watching and labeling videos" (or functional
| equivalent)?
| RankingMember wrote:
| sort of surprised it wasn't just using their Mechanical Turk
| site
| philipkglass wrote:
| Mechanical Turk suffers from coordinated fraud by people who
| want to be paid for doing a task without actually doing it
| [1]. The company I work for had to spend more engineering
| effort on building an internal reviewing-the-reviewers system
| to make it useful than we spent on the original Mechanical
| Turk integration. I'm not surprised that Amazon would avoid
| Mechanical Turk for higher consequence applications.
|
| [1] e.g. https://timryan.web.unc.edu/2020/12/22/fraudulent-
| responses-...
| ozim wrote:
| It will be fun to watch as AI tools flood mainstream.
|
| We already had a lawyer having case thrown out because he
| didn't do the job properly and got hallucinations from LLM.
|
| Mostly because people don't want to work.
| LawnGnome wrote:
| Expensify was a pretty well known case of this several years
| ago -- their marketing was all about their advanced scanning
| technology, and it turned out they were using Mechanical Turk
| in many cases with little concern for PII (or corporate
| security) concerns.
|
| (I have no idea if this is still the case, for the record.)
| mparkms wrote:
| That would explain why their receipt scanning is so damn slow
| even for easily scannable PDF receipts.
| winter-day wrote:
| while I agree with the sentiment, as an Indian, I hope this
| doesn't happen in India. countries which typically do this
| mechanical turk-like work typically don't raise themselves out
| of poverty (esp. Philippines, Indonesia, etc.). If anyone wants
| a specific example, I lead an aspect of web crawling for a
| FAANG and then other public companies. Over the last 10 years
| we heavily used those offshore teams, aforementioned, to do
| sanity checks/labeling, etc. Now, we have initiatives with GPT
| APIs which perform just as well for pennies on the dollar we
| spent offshore - and the offshore team that's been loyal for
| years? They're getting cut.
| someotherperson wrote:
| That's just exploitative business.
|
| I know companies that operate in that space and they pay
| incredibly well, between $20 to $50/hour.
|
| > GPT APIs which perform just as well
|
| That's because they were also trained by exploiting third
| world groups, paying about $2/hour.
|
| The problem here isn't offering work to developing countries,
| the problem here is major corporations squeezing them for
| every cent and not allowing it to be used as a means of
| getting out of poverty.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| I wonder if GPT-4's performance has degraded in recent months
| because there are less human data contractors on standby to
| answer questions GPT flags as low-confidence. GPT might be
| "refusing to answer questions" because it's not able to
| escalate tough queries to a human.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| Not plausible, even when it's on slow mode it's too fast to
| be contacted out to humans
| nicklecompte wrote:
| To be clear: ChatGPT-4 is in general both far too fast and
| far too stupid for humans to be answering any more than a
| tiny fraction (<< 1%) of the queries.
|
| But last year I repeatedly saw ChatGPT-4 respond token-by-
| token much more slowly than a human would! E.g. several
| seconds between words. It was clearly _not_ a human
| responding: at least a few times I was testing on preschool
| counting questions and GPT-4 was not able to answer them. I
| interpreted the slowness as GPT 's poor quantitative
| reasoning. But what you're saying is simply not true,
| sometimes ChatGPT-4 is (or was) extremely slow.
|
| Regardless, if OpenAI was running this con it probably
| wouldn't have been real-time humans writing. First of all
| it might be enough to have a human in the "mixture of
| experts" who decides the best of multiple responses when
| GPT-4 is unable to come to an automated conclusion. But
| humans could be writing ChatGPT responses due to a quirk in
| their UX:
|
| - ChatGPT errors out on a certain question and asks you to
| try again later, as it does (or used to do) frequently
|
| - the response is prepared by the human contractor while
| the user waits patiently for ChatGPT to resolve its
| technical difficulty
|
| - when the user asks again ChatGPT can largely read off the
| answer, using its (genuine) language-processing abilities
| to handle variations in phrasing/etc
| jrhizor wrote:
| In robotics this was called a "wizard of oz" approach. Where
| when you pull back the curtain it's much less impressive than
| it seems on the surface.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Not India, but my favorite example was the Kiwi food delivery
| robot fleet in Berkeley, CA. They were controlled manually from
| Colombia, and from the looks of it, seems like one person was
| trying to drive 20 robots at once.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Quite a few of the current LLM chatbots from big players are at
| least partially trained in this way.
| omgbear wrote:
| There was one in London I used to walk past all the time. It was
| a neat experience to shop there once, but the selection was very
| slim and ocado was even more convenient.
|
| I'd always peek through the windows and it never had any
| shoppers.
| Shank wrote:
| > I'd always peek through the windows and it never had any
| shoppers.
|
| My experience using these locations is that I entered, grabbed
| the items I wanted and just left. Because they were closer to
| convenience stores, I was basically speedrunning it. A drink
| and a sandwich? Maybe 30 seconds tops. There wasn't any point
| in lingering. I wonder how much of that changed the dynamics of
| how many people were inside?
| lulznews wrote:
| How many execs got promoted over this nonsense?
| seydor wrote:
| Can they change the title to say "Amazon walks out ..."
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| I wish Target would add computers to their carts. For most
| people, it'd be a nice alternative towards the self checkout area
| with limited space to place things.
|
| For the more unsavory customers, it could offer video evidence
| that they're stealing stuff, lock the wheels at the door if more
| than $X isn't paid for, and create GPS reports of where all the
| stolen carts end up.
| akira2501 wrote:
| They already have good videos of thefts. Wheel locks have been
| around forever. I can just _tell_ you where all the stolen
| carts "end up."
|
| None of this has an impact on theft; however, it does a great
| job of making me feel like I live in a prison.
| op00to wrote:
| Target has such good video capabilities they can
| automatically recognize repeat thieves, keep a record of what
| they steal, and wait until it reaches felony level after
| multiple trips before they flag a person to be detained. All
| in super duper high definition.
| mudlus wrote:
| This is another thing Japan has implemented in certain areas.
| There's a supermarket near us called Trial that has this method
| of checkout: https://www.trial-net.co.jp/prepaid/regi-cart/
| bilalq wrote:
| This is pretty sad to read. Before Covid, the Amazon Go store
| experience was phenomenal. All the convenience of a 7-Eleven but
| with the pricing of a normal grocery store. The food options were
| really good and the BlueApron style meal-kits were amazing. The
| Alexa integration was also nice for being able to just verbally
| ask what's the next step on a recipe while you're busy stirring
| or chopping things.
|
| When it rolled out to Amazon Fresh stores, it was a breadth of
| fresh air. The painful clunkiness of self-checkout was gone. The
| slow and pointless exercise of unloading and reloading your cart
| was gone. You could just bring your reusable shopping bags, throw
| stuff in, and walk home. By far the most hassle-free shopping
| experience to be had.
|
| Scan as you shop is a big step backwards and feels like you've
| got the annoying self-checkout experience looming over you the
| entire time you're there.
|
| The selection and operating hours both took a hit during covid
| and never recovered.
| alden5 wrote:
| What never made sense to me with their go stores was why a
| store that only needed 1-2 people max to operate had such bad
| hours. Hearing now that getting the bill is a mainly manual
| process i guess their hours had to line up with their data
| entry team in india so people could get their recipes quickly.
| insane to think about
| bilalq wrote:
| It's not manual. This is a case of mistaken journalism. The
| labeling is for training data of the models.
|
| Before covid, the hours were much better too.
| sunshowers wrote:
| > 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human
| reviewers as of 2022
|
| That's manual by any reasonable description.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| I think it depends on how much each human reviewer did.
|
| If they manually reviewed most of the items on each
| shopping trip, then it's mostly manual.
|
| If they only manually reviewed an item or few per trip,
| I'd consider it to be mostly automated.
| hn_user82179 wrote:
| 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 so much
| overhead time. I really wish the "just walk out" could've been
| popularized and caught on at more stores.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Yeah, the "if anything goes wrong you now stand around with
| your thumb up your ass while one employee makes their way
| from broken kiosk to broken kiosk to manually resolve the
| problems" model has soured me on self-checkout. I find I have
| a very low "dealing with this bullshit" limit, to the point
| that if I have trouble I'm likely to just say fuck it and
| walk out of the store without completing my purchase.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| All the local self-checkouts where I am in London are
| just scan and go, no scales.
| BytesAndGears wrote:
| That's how the popular grocery chains in the Netherlands
| all work. You just scan a few things, put it in your bag,
| and leave. I almost never interact with anyone.
|
| It uses your rewards card to determine your "risk", I
| think. Just a theory. But whenever I've gotten a new
| card, they come check my bag a lot. Then after a dozen
| successes or so, they stop checking so often. Then hardly
| at all.
|
| One of my friends forgot to scan an item once when they
| checked, and he had someone come to check his bag way
| more often for a while.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Having used the UK/US type self checkout machines while
| travelling, I must say it is so nice to live in Northern
| Europe where the self checkout machines are largely just
| based on trust, with randomly sampling ~five items of every
| 100 shoppers. There is no weighing at any of the stores.
|
| If you don't get randomly selected for inspection, there is
| nothing stopping you from just walking out with groceries
| you didn't pay for worth a hundred dollars easy. People
| just don't. Another benefit of having a proper social
| safety net I guess.
| raegis wrote:
| Perhaps operating costs were more expensive than just hiring
| humans to run it like a traditional grocery store?
| Johnny555 wrote:
| 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 food to
| be delivered, but now it's more like $10 - $15 in fees/tip,
| plus fees hidden in menu prices making that $20 food cost
| $27.50.
| bombcar wrote:
| I wish it could all be managed intelligently; I'm hungry but
| I can wait, let orders collect and make them all at once or
| something.
|
| Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come
| everything with an app is so much more expensive?
| kevingadd wrote:
| There is some degree of that in these apps already, for
| example I believe both grubhub and doordash will group up
| orders so one courier can do multiple deliveries back-to-
| back in a single trip.
| xp84 wrote:
| They do, and they also make that a profit center too by
| allowing you to pay another $3 to ensure a nonstop point-
| to-point delivery to you.
| themadturk wrote:
| Shopping there always felt supremely weird to me. Scanning in,
| getting stuff, and walking out, but I always felt incomplete
| without a receipt being right there in my email, wondering if
| I'd done something wrong and had just inadvertently shoplifted.
|
| I shop more often at Walmart, which has recently increased the
| number of manned checkout lanes and restricted their self-
| checkout to 15 items or less.
| bombcar wrote:
| The local Walmart expanded self-checkout and it works
| surprisingly well (the bag scale seems to be very loosely
| calibrated or off). I wonder if they're doing things
| differently depending on how much product walks out the door.
| xp84 wrote:
| Just in the past month or two, in my (low-crime suburban)
| area, Walmart appears to have closed the two large self-
| checkout areas entirely and replaced them with a (relative
| to before) army of cashiers. I have always found their
| machines to be very hassle-free, but the shockingly-
| adequate level of cashier staffing made my last visit
| surprisingly quick and convenient. I could live with this.
| rwbt wrote:
| I'm glad it's gone for good, if the process really works like
| how it's described in the article. Thousands of poor souls
| doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few
| entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout (eww- the
| horror!). The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.
| wyager wrote:
| > 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 spend doing undesirable work.
|
| Are you mad that I sometimes pay "poor souls" to do the
| "menial work" of cooking me food so I can avoid doing it
| myself?
|
| > The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.
|
| A very bizarre response to "darn, this was so convenient" - I
| wonder if this is a troll.
| rwbt wrote:
| If you don't like going to the grocery store pay someone to
| go get them for you. Thousands of people remotely
| "following" you around and scanning things for you, just so
| that you can avoid using self checkout sounds ridiculous
| and excessive.
| saynay wrote:
| Is it more ridiculous than having someone standing at a
| cash register in the store doing the same task, while
| also having to bag for you and pretend to smile?
| soerxpso wrote:
| I don't see where you're getting the impression that
| 1,000 workers are monitoring every single individual that
| walks into the store. The figure used was the total
| amount for the whole program (many locations), only one
| person was reviewing each case, and they were only even
| reviewing 70% of cases. Your argument is no different
| than saying that every time you go to McDonald's, you're
| entitled for expecting the hundreds of thousands of
| McDonald's employees globally to band together to make
| you your burger.
| franga2000 wrote:
| > 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 all work undesirable, some people
| do only the worst and some only the least bad work).
|
| If before, for example, everyone would spend half an hour
| of their day to cook for themselves, which might be
| inconvenient but is overall not a big impact on your
| quality of life, now we have overworked and underpaid
| restaurant and related staff doing intense work for crazy
| hours, which is is a devastating hit to their (and their
| families') quality of life. The sum of human effort spent
| on cooking may have gone down in this example, but instead
| of everyone being a little annoyed by it, some people are
| living like kings and some are slaving away for their
| convenience (obviously this wording is exaggerated, but if
| we look globally, this is basically what's happening).
| Retric wrote:
| It wasn't pointless, they were training an AI that never
| fully worked. It's ultimately the same kind of thing as
| people monitoring self driving cars, a boring task that may
| be pointless or possibly remove a lot of drudgery longer
| term.
|
| _According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk
| Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely
| missed Amazon's internal goals of reaching less than 50
| reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization
| inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews._
| bbarnett wrote:
| I'm sure all those fired, new job seekers jn India agree
| fully with you.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied
| on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos
| to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved
| off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
|
| Wow - I did not know this. This makes it all a whole lot less
| impressive and interesting that it was just people off shore
| watching you.
| alsodumb wrote:
| It's just a tech-illiterate journalist who can't seem to
| understand the difference between "annotators watching and
| labeling videos to validate the model" vs "people watching
| the videos live to remotely decide the cost of every user's
| purchase".
|
| Or maybe they do know the difference, but wanted to bait
| audience.
| kadoban wrote:
| Or it's a tech-literate journalist who knows that usually
| it's the latter and they have vague plans to transition to
| the former later.
| anthony__j wrote:
| always mturk all the way down
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Feedback: I'm a Prime customer and I've never even got into one
| of the stores. Having the on-site staff waiting at the front of
| the store like bouncers just put me off as I walked by! Hahah ...
|
| I also kind of like the idea of people having jobs, so that's
| also a factor. But I didn't even get a chance to try these out
| ... and I would have but for the henchmen and women waiting to
| welcome me, LOL
| smugma wrote:
| Uniqlo (in Japan and at least in SF) has a cool checkout method.
|
| You drop your clothes into a big bin (I've always done it one
| piece at a time, didn't think to do all at once) and it adds up
| all your items. I've used this maybe 8 times, 100% accurate so
| far.
|
| Not sure how it works but I guessed RFID and quick Google appears
| to confirm:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/uniqlos-parent-company-bets-big...
| browningstreet wrote:
| My local library does the same thing (books not clothes, glass
| surface not bin).
| pembrook wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this is global, have experienced it at all
| their locations throughout Europe as well.
| dyim wrote:
| The one by Barclays (in NYC) has the same thing! It's the best
| self-checkout experience I've had.
| kungito wrote:
| Decathlon has the same
| mathgeek wrote:
| Uniqlo in Orlando also does this. Wonderful system.
| gambiting wrote:
| Decathlon in the UK has the same thing. You just drop
| everything in a bin near a till and it "magically" knows what
| you've put in.
| rgmerk wrote:
| It's been discussed before on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715111
|
| Unlikely to work for groceries given the costs of RFID tags, I
| imagine.
| colinng wrote:
| If we had a better Blue Bin system it might work. Remove tags
| at home and place in compartment of Blue Bin, and at the
| recycling centre they get sorted out and sent back to the
| retailers.
|
| But if we really could scale RFID tag production down to 1
| cent each, then we'd likely just throw them out. Not that I'm
| a fan of throwing away silicon...
| Iulioh wrote:
| I mean, they cost 5-10c
|
| Still more than printed paper but the cost is not
| astronomical. Some sellers on Alibaba even advertise 3c cad
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Orders of magnitude more than existing barcodes which are
| practically free due to being printed on the packaging. A
| 10c RFID tag would be 10% of the cost of many products,
| which im sure is unacceptable to grocery stores which I
| can't imagine have great margins.
| dahdum wrote:
| > Uniqlo (in Japan and at least in SF) has a cool checkout
| method.
|
| Saw this in the Honolulu location and was similarly impressed.
| It's got to be pretty close to a theoretical minimum in check
| out speed, while requiring no labor and no accounts.
| awelxtr wrote:
| 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
| parhamn wrote:
| Any ideas whats stopping it from becoming much cheaper? RFIDs
| on everything seem like a good move in the robotics age.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Seems like a lot of ewaste to me for marginal convenience
| otoh
| bbarnett wrote:
| I don't want rfid tags in my apples, and putting them on
| the outside of each one seems costly.
|
| And things like onions have a loose outer skin, which falls
| off. And grocery store clerks peel the outside (wilting)
| leaves off of things like local lettuce daily.
|
| Seems like rfid on groceries would be hard for fresh
| produce, and we don't need everything wrapped in plastic.
| Iulioh wrote:
| Decathlon does it but it's a little harder to implement in a
| grocery store.
|
| You need to basically have custom packaging so the tags are not
| easily swappable and the RFID tag is not free too, it could
| really add up for small price items.
|
| The maybe e-waste problem? I'm not really familiar with how
| much of a problem this really is but on a grocery store size it
| could add up
| a_random_canuck wrote:
| As far as I can tell, every Uniqlo has this. And you're right,
| this is by far the best checkout experience. It's what Amazon
| wishes they'd built.
|
| I can't imagine there's that much untapped profit in the
| grocery business that Amazon could turn a profit with such an
| expensive and unreliable mess like Just Walk Out and I find
| it's so typical Amazon to find out that the man behind the
| curtain is actually a bunch of offshore workers in India.
| browningstreet wrote:
| In Sherman Oaks, CA they had a Whole Foods with the "just walk
| out" system...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That's Amazon too.
| nemothekid wrote:
| There was a startup, Standard Cognition, that offered the same
| experience, but I checked their website (https://standard.ai/)
| and it seems they have given up on it too.
|
| Edit:
|
| Looking over their marketing videos now and taking a more
| optimistic approach, is "just walk out" technology all that
| useful? It seems they pivoted to a product where is much clearer
| what the value add is (Predictive analytics, loss prevention,
| context-aware marketing). I imagine "just walk out" technology
| was likely pretty expensive to implement, but wouldn't have saved
| much more that self checkout. Maybe the lesson here isn't that
| "it didn't work", and more so "it wasn't economically efficient"
| dangerwill wrote:
| Well from the article it's clear that this camera+ai based
| detection of purchases never worked for Amazon. They had to
| rely on Indian contractors watching people remotely. It never
| technically worked, and even if it did, then yeah I agree that
| it wouldn't make economic sense. Cameras with that level of
| fidelity and with 100% coverage, tracking N customers at once,
| are probably a huge capital expense. And all for slightly
| faster shopping.
|
| I tried the store in Seattle in 2021 and it was a shitty
| experience. Overpriced, bad stock, and since few are going to
| actually trust Amazon to get it right, you still find yourself
| with the Amazon app open the whole time
| strgcmc wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Go might be a failed experiment, but "slightly faster
| shopping" is probably an unfair trivialization of what the
| experiment hypothesis was really about. A core thesis of
| Amazon in general is basically, to fanatically remove any
| unnecessary extra steps/friction/bureaucracy/etc., between a
| consumer and their act of purchasing.
|
| For another example, think back to why Amazon cared so much
| about the 1-click patent -- legal validity aside, the idea
| that you can have 1-click checkout, was pretty
| revolutionarily customer-obsessed, compared to the average
| online shopping experience of the early 2000s.
|
| And in fact, the natural progression from 1-click, is of
| course going down to "0 clicks", which is what things like,
| subscribe-and-save, memberships/subscriptions, or Alexa/Echo
| styling clothes for you, are meant to do -- they are meant to
| shift the consumer's mental model of shopping away from
| emphasizing the build-up from browsing into the climax moment
| of then clicking to purchase, to instead make the actual
| purchase decision more of a hidden-in-the-
| background/automatic thing, instead of a foreground conscious
| choice.
| mrbonner wrote:
| Meanwhile stores in SF and Seattle are doubling down on "Just
| Walk Out" technology. It is literally just grab and walk. They
| won't even charge you. /s
| hot_gril wrote:
| Seattle Target was the worst shopping experience I've ever had.
| No cashiers because the employees are tasked with opening
| locked cabinets instead, even for sunscreen. Security guards
| with bulletproof vests add to the ambience. Gave up on buying
| oranges cause the checkout machine wouldn't scan them.
| steelframe wrote:
| Cool. Now can I pay with cash? Because I'm not going to let
| anyone build a profile on whether I like warming lube or just
| regular lube, how much sugar and alcohol I consume, what kind of
| romance novels I read, how often I floss, and whether I feel I
| can afford organic fruit.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| I think it should be a fundamental right to pay for goods with
| cash.
| floren wrote:
| Hmm you make a good point, but have you considered that your
| health insurance provider _really_ wants to know these things,
| and will pay up to $0.35 to learn them? It would be criminally
| negligent for Amazon _not_ to build and sell that profile!
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| My concerns about this were theft, mistakes, cost to operate, and
| opportunity costs.
|
| Theft is an obvious one. It happens in self checkouts in many
| ways. We had people come into our store to just leave with
| baskets of stuff, load their pockets, take stuff from one box to
| put in a cheaper one they bought, or even put raw eggs and meat
| in their pockets. That was with a ton of workers in the store
| looking out for thieves.
|
| Errors could result in us being charged for what we didn't buy.
| The amount could be lower or higher. Some people go through their
| whole receipt double checking it. Many of us just watch it as
| they ring it up, deal with it there, and stop thinking about it
| once we leave. Could this impact peace of mind?
|
| Cost to operate seemed like it might be high. Aldi and Costco
| show a traditional self-checkout can be cheap to operate on top
| of serving high-end customers. (See theft/shrink, though.) I
| figured the machine learning alternatives would cost thousands to
| tens of thousands a unit for combinations of cameras, servers,
| and licensed software. They'd also need to be monitored and/or
| trained by humans which this article just confirmed.
|
| I was also worried about fraud. My company bought a solution that
| monitored customers with infrared cameras, monitored checkouts,
| and predicted how many registers we needed. That was a _terrible_
| system that hurt us more than it helped. We were required to act
| like it worked to please those who spent hundreds of millions on
| it. I wondered how often such dishonest referrals helped the
| supplier sell them. Made me skeptical about more AI.
|
| Finally, the human touch that comes with good cashiers increases
| customer satisfaction. Our customers often looked forward to
| seeing us. For some, we were the only or best social contact they
| got that week. Others liked getting out of the house for a long
| period of time. Sometimes they'd have us push products and
| services which, normally a negative for all, is largely how they
| drove up credit card use and feedback on the customer tracker.
|
| For those reasons, I advised against using AI for anything other
| than helping employees do their jobs more easily. If for that,
| that it would be a support tool instead of trying to replace
| skilled, decision makers. Then, simply invest those millions to
| hundreds of millions in the employees. Worked for Costco and
| Publix. :)
| pierrec wrote:
| Say goodbye to the future! The one that IBM promised us 18 years
| ago in this advertisement: https://vimeo.com/29120357
|
| In fact, that ad also shows how awkward the concept is (or maybe
| the fact that we're still not ready for it). It's a really fun
| well-made video but a thoroughly unconvincing advertisement.
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