Wow. So groceries without checkout.
I thought that at some point RFID would replace barcodes providing similar experience. However, this system claim to be based on cameras and image recognition.
replies(3):
Very interesting choice of comparison ha... I suppose this is Amazon trying to attract the tech crowd? It almost sounds satirical.
Not to downplay the tech -- this looks incredible.
Yes, seems like you check-in with an app.
There's already social anxiety when people pay for things and walk past a security guard, or a security barrier. Whether it's an airport, or a clothes store, or a ticket barrier, there's always a nervousness about being called out.
It's bad enough in the Apple Store where you can pay and walk out, this will take some real getting used to.
edit: I just realized how they can deal with that -- take a picture when the person walks in and tie it to the account they scanned. There still seem to be a bunch of fraud issues, but this is certainly interesting.
And while shoplifting is a legitimate threat, are non-shoplifters going to be turned into shoplifters without a checkout? Are normal shoplifters stopped by checkouts? These are the core questions, and until it is tested nobody will know for sure.
Target is getting awfully close to this. With their Cartwheel app you're meant to scan all your items as you shop (so it auto-applies coupons and discounts); but they haven't taken it to the next logical step and allowed you to provide your Cartwheel output at the checkout for checking out.
I will say that the way Target has implemented smartphone barcode scanning makes me think that there might be a future in all this. It is extremely painless, they just need to stop kicking you out of the scan screen when it finds a discount (i.e. it doesn't kick you out if no discount is found, but does when a discount IS found, that's problematic for efficiency reasons).
The current checkout process entails the acceptance of common legal tender, but this process will require I have their app, and presumably allow it quite a bit of tracking permission.
A cool demo, sure, but I think I'll stick to shopping like the normal folks.
How would you even define fraud in that context? Presumably there are things you could do to confuse or mislead the technology, but it seems to me that as presented the onus is on Amazon to just charge you the correct amount based on what you leave the store with.
Crazy to think we're actually here now. And even sans-RFID.
Probably there will be a guard at the entrance: the barrier will beep when someone enters without signing in, and the guard will stop them.
What's more interesting is that there can be absolutely no dead angles for this to work.
They might have cameras inside each shelve, mounted on top, to correlate products taken with the person standing in front.
But what if two persons stand close together, one leans over and takes something...
Or what if you go into the store with a friend or your kids. And you all pick up items which are supposed to go on your tab.
It's definitely a challenging problem.
Like, how long I hesitated before I picked up something, what I had already in my "cart" at the time, what deals I looked at but passed on, etc.
I sort of doubt i'll ever see these Amazon stores though, Brick and Mortar is quite hard. I suspect i'll see someone (Amazon or otherwise) add this to the big chains i already use, though.
Either way, lets get rid of lines please.
There's a random chance that your scanner will be audited by a human against the contents of your shopping cart. Usually the first time you use it, then it backs off.
I wonder how this tech deals with that? Maybe they figured that out, too. But I was amused in the video when I saw the customer putting it back where it belonged, because that's not how I remember that going...
All that said, this is fantastic and exciting.
Edit: I also hope they're already thinking about EBT cards and WIC.
And I'm no shoplifter, never done that, I just tinker with stuff all the time. It's a kind of occupational psychosis. Same with lockpicks.
So, probably there's something needed from the phone as well: NFC, low energy Bluetooth, inertial location tracking? I guess that we will see when we look at the supported devices list.
If that's the problem, couldn't these companies just test it? I mean, even if all the items in the single pilot store were stolen, would it really be such a big cost for Wallmart R&D department to have exact empiric knowledge as opposed to "perceived threat"?
[0] http://www.samsclub.com/sams/pagedetails/content.jsp?pageNam...
Talking about Rewe and German supermarkets, it's unbelievable how horrible the whole experience of doing grocery shopping is here in Germany. You almost always need to queue a lot, there is no space to pack your groceries and the cashier don't give you any time to pack until pushing the next customer's groceries to the small space.
They try to be efficient here, but the reality is quite chaotic.
Tesco in the UK is already doing that. You just finish your shopping by scanning an "end of shopping" barcode, you pay and then you go with your trolley. You sometimes need someone to remove the security tags or check that you're 18+ for alcohol but that's it.
However, home delivery is even better in my opinion, it's very common in the UK nowadays. You see those vans everywhere, from nearly all big supermarkets.
Now I can't stop thinking about the behavioral analytics. Can they get rough pupil dilation data? I'm sure they can get facial expressions and maybe gaze tracking.
Next step is using kiva bots to rearrange/restock the isles when no one is looking.
On another more on-topic note, what an awesome time to be alive! :) When I was younger concepts like this were usually paired with flying cars and space travel in cartoons, but now it's real.
Better make sure to carefully balance the samples in your training set to avoid confounding variables though, or else your AI is going to get quite racist and sexist very quickly.
The difference between scanning and not scanning is pretty important.
It's usually one of two things: a purchase that must be approved (either alcohol or some medicine) or scanning the single item barcode of a multi-item
I'm not sure it buys them anything, though. That's a very noisy signal against the loud-and-clear signal of what the measurements say when you come in to the doctor. Who cares what your shopping habits say when you come in with high blood pressure and morbid obesity, or good blood pressure and normal weight?
The change is specifically in in-store behavior. And even that's more because Amazon has the money and skillset to fund the software; the supermarkets already have the data in the sense that they have the video streams, they just don't have the money to fund people running beyond-cutting-edge vision research on it to get that level of analysis.
However, the number of employees working at the cash register is still the same because those scanners sometimes do not work and most importantly their user experience is deplorable. So, you frequently have to ask someone for help (and I'm in my mid-thirties and very tech-savvy. I can only imagine how someone twice my age would feel when using these scanners).
* How does my Amazon account get associated with the items I take?
* How are items detected when leaving the store? If my friend and I walk out side by side, how does it know (if it does) which items are mine and which are hers?
* What happens when someone picks up an item and leaves without first doing whatever check-in/registration/setup is necessary?
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-10-m...
From my first quick take of the video, the app+turnstyle is used to identify you to the store. The video system then tracks your position as you walk around.
When you walk out, the items are recognized and tallied by a large RFID sweep. Funneling you back out through a turnstyle makes sure the vision system knows it's you. Notice that you don't need to barcode yourself on the way out, and the exit system is phone agnostic (it's not checking for an NFC or Apple Pay tag or anything).
The whole "tracking individual items as they come on and off the shelves" task is a very complex thing. But tracking bodies as they walk around a 1,500 square foot room isn't that hard.
They don't have the money. It's a very competitive business and margins are not high enough to be doing that level of cutting-edge computer science research.
I've seen them try just to build software that allows you to shop from home and get it delivered either curbside or to your home. They can. But in my opinion, it's also clearly at the limit of their capability, and with all due respect to the programmers involved, also clearly just barely staffed adequately.
One could respond that you can never truly shop lift if you follow the rules.
First, you have to check in when you enter. Second, they tell you to grab and go.
As long as you don't try to be malicious about it, then it's on Amazon to figure out what to charge you for. If they fail to see something, that's on them.
That stupid scale isn't going to stop any shoplifter, but it does inconvenience me every time.
EDIt - Grammar.
https://medium.com/the-mission/silicon-valley-has-a-problem-... is largely what I mean. I don't blame the tech industry, necessarily. It's society as a whole that seems to have developed such a warped set of values, and I have no idea what to do about it.
What if I walk in with a friend on our way to somewhere else and they don't have an account and I'm just getting something quick, do they not get in and wait outside? Everybody in the video was just one person or all had an account/phone.
Overall, I hope this works and expands. Checkout lines can be a hassle at times.
And they are not technology companies.
I agree with you, a lot of that data would already be available. The question is how much more willing Amazon would be to sell the data, compared to supermarket chains. Probably it's not difference.
I was just extrapolating what the OP meant.
I personally would really love shopping like that.
I have given up on bagging as I check out. It goes crazy every time I open a bag and set it in the bagging area. So now I just pile up my groceries and bag them when I'm done, which wastes everyone's time.
If it's the latter there's no way I'd use something like this. I love Amazon (as a retail customer) and AWS, but no way I'm self registering my face with them.
Don't get me wrong -- this is exciting and impressive -- but needing to swipe in to enter a store is, I think, a very significant change to how we think of stores as public places.
For me: When I am doing my weekly food shopping, I just use plastic. When I am grabbing something I forgot or picking up beer or something during the week, I just leave everything in the area, pay, and then bag with my reusables after the fact.
These days I only need human interaction when I buy booze, and that consists of a cashier eyeballing me and approving it.
1) The inability to pay with cash (or debit, or check, etc..). 2) No need to carry any form of money in the store.
Taken to an extreme where every store runs this way, will people have a need for cash, credit cards, or anything else? Why not just have your bank account attached to your Amazon (and every other account) and have money taken out directly?
They still have the mobile / MC70 version rolled out to the entire chain now, it's very successful from what I hear.
It worked pretty well, but from what I heard the shoplifting rate was a lot higher than the comfort level of the store's executives. There really is no way to check that you've scanned every single thing in a large cart full of goods. They experimented with things like random checks from cashiers, but that just added to the labor and confusion. The project was scrapped a year or two later.
RFID could fix that if we're really close to being able to scan a whole cart full of goods in one sweep (which the Amazon project seems to imply). But then you have an issue where every single vendor to your store needs to be inserting compatible tags into the packaging. That adds cost and logistics.
Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1LykdRWTfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCA8L7v-R8
We don't know the details yet but RFID may solve this issue completely.
edit: Safeway was first, in 1997
The Camden store illustrates the progress Safeway has made in other directions too. As part of its customer friendliness, Safeway was the first of the major food multiples to introduce self-scanning, the system it calls Shop & Go.
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/uk-safeway-follows-leader/a...
I must be really suspicious-looking because I've been subjected to a "random audit" all 5 times I used it. Gave up because with a weekly shop it's quicker to go to an actual checkout than having someone scan all of my items again.
The idea's good, but my experience of the execution has been bad.
If the incentive is reducing the chances of being charged by the system for an item they didn't buy, you bet people will put stuff back where they found it.
>Information about our customers is an important part of our business, and we are not in the business of selling it to others.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
This. Trying to do the following
a) Open one of the cellophane bags that are stuck closely together
b) Put the product I just scanned in it
c) Take my hand away so it reads the weight correctly
...are way too difficult for me to do without the machine locking up and saying "okay, assistance required, let's hold you up until the overworked 1 person for 12 checkout machines gets here". So I do the same thing you do, just throw them in the checkout area and bag later.
It wastes everyone's time, but sometimes allows me to bag more efficiently and use fewer plastic bags.
If you're shopping for a single item, scanning it and dropping it in the bagging area is sufficient to start the flow, then simply wait a second, click finish, then tap your contactless card is all required to complete a transaction, can be done in under 5 seconds
The best machines I've seen in the UK in terms of user flow are probably at Waitrose, they're just supremely faster to use than those at Tesco
However, once I reached the exit where the man was inspecting receipts, things screeched to a halt. I showed him the bar code on my phone, and he looked at it, exclaiming, "Oh no, Scan and Go. You used Scan and Go."
He then turned to find a powered-off scanning device that he couldn't get to start up, as he muttered, "I wish they'd never started that."
I replied, "As a customer, I love it."
He had to call over a manager, who used her scanner to scan my barcode, blindly scroll through my purchased items list to get to the green button, and declared me good to go.
Meanwhile, I had held up all the people trying to exit behind me. It was still faster than checking out, but hopefully they get proper training for their employees implemented.
We in the tech industry would be wise to remember that we live in an incredibly privileged bubble where careers are real things, where it's easy to find new opportunities.
Yeah some of them are just for show and an excuse to sell high end stonewall kitchen stuff but others actually grow their own stuff or sell other farms stuff.
The problem with local food (produce and meat) is that they are often not in plastic containers (which I prefer). It looks like Amazon Go requires very prepackaged stuff.
I really would love to see someway to have more farm+grocery stores (that is grow right in the store or very near by). Figuring out a way (even if it requires some GMO) to grow food right in the store would be an amazing thing for the environment, health, and food quality.
The other things is I know people are in a rush with everything but over the last few years I find grocery shopping rather cathartic and I think people used to enjoy grocery shopping (you know go to the butcher and then to the baker kind of european lifestyle). It is shame we have to make something even more "on the go" that I'm not sure needs to be.
No, you're wrong. If it can be done it will be done. It's just too much reward versus the risk. Stealing this way scales too well. In a normal shop the risk of detection is variable, and therefore higher on average. Sometimes people will be alert, sometimes not, sometimes there will be guards sometimes not. Now this is different, it's all down to following the correct number of steps to get the desired results.
If you replace these two stickers, now scan this then switch this...
It'll be down to a few bits in some chip somewhere that decides how much you need to be billed. I'm sure it won't hurt adoption or even lead to a significant increase in lost merchandise, but I'm equally sure it will happen.
I used to work in a grocery store many years ago though, so it's possible that I have some skills kicking around in my brain that make it easier for me to use them.
The big danger is external factors that remove those first rungs of work that allow people to climb up.
One reason I think the retailers took a step back from EPC was the general fear mongering and misinformation. In addition to the crazies calling them out as "the mark of the beast", there were numerous reports in the media about how walmart was going to start "putting computer tracking chips in all the pants they sold so they could track you wherever you went." I'm pretty sure they were also supposed to give you cancer and kill baby seals, too!
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/silicon-valley-ha...
My mother makes uses of it every week and gloats that we don't have the tech available here in Boulder (a tech hub).
But I'd also have been more impressed with the video if they showed stressed-out parents with crying kids and their hands full as they've got their cell phones tucked between their heads and shoulders, rather than young people quietly grabbing a single item and leaving.
This can actually HELP with those problems because a lot of those problems happen while in a line. Maybe they expect their customers to be like the ones in this video, but certainly my store was a little more chaotic. They should design for that chaos -- and maybe they did, but the video doesn't show it, is all. Presumably because they wanted to stress how easy it was, but to me that comes off as alien to the real world, based on my experience.
You can call them lazy or stupid but they still exist and a lot of them won't get a new job (again, doesn't matter if they can't or just don't want to find one).
Actually the ratio of staff:active-self-checkout machines is planned to reduce in each new deployment as customers become accustomed to the machines. Starts around 1:2 and usually sits around 1:4 with a target of 1:8 or even 1:12 at quiet times.
That's definitely a reduction in cashiers since the machines displace existing check-out lines & registers.
Source: an acquaintance is a manager in a Tesco Superstore.
I was using one of these just this morning: got all my shopping onto the scale/shelf and was getting ready to pay. The machine asks how many 5p bags I used. So I start packing the stuff into my backpack to find out whether I need a bag. The machine pipes up: "Did you remove something from the scale?" The screen has a full screen modal warning that I have to put the shopping back.
I put the things back on the scale and guess that I won't need a bag and I pay using contactless but what if my shopping won't fit in my bag?
I understand why we have to "pack" things onto a scale (it makes it much harder to take things without scanning them) but it has to trust you at some point.
Places I can see this working are with low footprints such as cafes at hospitals etc.
Amazon Go, please Go away.
Updated: Grammar correction.
I know a lot about the various retail companies and how effective they are with technology. Anyone that thinks Target is going to do anything effective in this space doesn't understand how god-awful their entire logistics/supply chain is. It's legendarily bad.
Amazon is another story. And this particular technology is something that can destroy Walmart, eventually. I'll be watching this very closely, because if I see enough headway being made I'll be selling my house before the disaster hits the market there.
Honestly though, groceries and CPG are HARD. I suspect that Amazon has simply thought about cost-savings from having minimal staffing in a store and used it to justify the insane capital costs of an RFID tag on every item and the scanners/camera/compute needed to operate the Go store.
What's always so funny to me is how the millennial generation in general has a hugely negative view of Walmart for paying poorly and destroying small businesses, while having a positive view of Amazon. In this case, Amazon will continue to do what it's been doing (destroying businesses) while paying nothing, because it's automating away a huge segment of work. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it's definitely going to happen, and like self-driving vehicles, this is going to disrupt society big time.
So, I highly doubt that attracting the tech crowd will work if they don't explain the damn thing about how they are using it.
This is brilliant as-in how no one else thought about it. Lot of small shops have limit on their open schedule because of staffing issues. I am assuming Amazon will set up few experimental shops and then sell technology to other stores. This can certainly revolutionize retail if they persist on executing right.
I'm not that thrilled, somehow I'm not in love with todays tech and progress (that's on me). Moreover I wonder what people living on cashier jobs (it's an easy target for unqualified and hurried people) will feel.
Goodbye profession.
[1] http://newsexaminer.net/food/mcdonalds-to-open-25000-robot-r...
Retail, fast food, stock pickers, truck drivers, etc.. etc.. Sure you could say "don't make menial jobs your career" all you want, but this is still going to be a huge freaking issue sooner than later.
This is from just last week: https://www.ft.com/content/dec677c0-b7e6-11e6-ba85-95d1533d9...
Generally "beta" implies that non-employees are using it. This is more of a dogfooding program (though maybe they wanted to avoid that term since they're selling human food this way!).
Using these as EAN barcode replacement also has the problem that the system can't tell if you bought the product from Amazon GO or if you just happen to be carrying it with you when you enter the store.
Also, it already seemed more convenient to not go to the store in the first place (ordering online), especially for the kinds of items in packages that would work well at this type of store. The missing convenience was one that store employees could give you: let you pick out the fresh things you want (like produce and baked goods) and have someone box those up for you and even ship them to your house.
The number of people that never learned "put stuff back where you got it" from their parents is astounding.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-Professional-ma...
1984 anyone?I am sure that amazon/walmart/tesco/whoever will need more than 1000 at a time and so obviously get a larger discount. Probably down to well under a penny or two - starts to make a lot of sense when you factor in the other benefits (lower staff, easier stock-tracking/taking etc)
CostCo rule #6: Your membership card must be shown on entering the warehouse and at the tills.
I don't think it's really that much of a change, this is already par for the course when it comes to bulk-purchase stores.
Another one of CostCo's rules:
> Parents are responsible for their children. They must be kept with them at all times.
And one last one:
> Members will be required to purchase any packages opened or damaged by them or their guests.
These are all pretty ubiquitous rules for this kind of store and I can't imagine people will really notice the difference. You'll use your card to swipe in you and your guests, when you leave as a group, your card will be charged.
If you come with someone who also wants to buy things, you jut enter one after the other instead of as a group.
Right now, if you see a random perishable item sitting on a shelf, you HAVE to throw it away because it could have been there for a long time. On the other hand, if you can see that some Frozen Peas were only taken off the shelf 2 minutes ago, you can just put them back and they’ll be fine.
Although, what I’d really want is not only the time stamp but the customer. I’m sorry but if you cost the store $25 by leaving a damned ROAST in the cereal aisle, I would be perfectly happy to never let you in the store again.
In essence, RFID tag technology already exists, and there's a reason why it hasn't taken off in grocery stores.
Other than that I really like self-checkouts, usually much quicker and they're excellent for coin disposal (dump all your coins in it and pay the rest by card).
An option is to label all the items with a unique identifier, but that is typically seen as too costly, which is also the reason Amazon hasn't fully fixed the FBA counterfeit problem.
Perhaps this could be similar, but instead of printing the barcode, it automatically adds the item to your Amazon cart.
Or, if they decide to side with the consumer and give you your money back, then that opens them up to theft - go in, buy stuff, "oh I didn't buy $expensive_item!", get money.
I find it really annoying when people put words into somebody's mouth.
Misplaced perishable goods are certainly a problem, but not the one they're discussing right now.
To this day (20-odd years later), I always put grocery items back where I found them (and bag my own groceries). Don't be a dick.
I remember seeing this working when I was in university [0]. They just couldn't focus on supermarkets because the tags were too expensive (10-15 cents per tag).
Wouldn't a better solution be to charge the customer for the roast and if they complain, you explain: "sorry, you didn't put it on the proper shelf, the technology considers that as a purchase", and possibly eat the cost in the form of some incentive to come back to try to keep them. The ones that don't complain either didn't notice, or they don't care enough to stop shopping, or they won't come back like you suggest.
The ones that complain get it taken care of, the ones that don't don't cost you anything. Win-win-break even?
The difference is that while both may offer low prices while destroying small businesses, the customer experience on Amazon is great while the customer experience at Walmart sucks.
That's already handled in grocery -- people can mess with regular barcodes if they want. it's a known cost of business
Even if they "acknowledge" it, so what? It's not their job to create extra jobs to replace the ones that they've automated out of existence. It's never been the jobs of the companies creating disruptive technology, like farm equipment or cars or computers, to do this.
It wasn't Ford's job to find new jobs for everyone who had a horse-related career; same deal here.
>If my friend and I walk out side by side, how does it know (if it does) which items are mine and which are hers?
Looks like the entry/exit is the same type of set-up you find at most large office buildings with the tap in/out gates (see screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/e7fDglY.jpg). I assume it only lets one person out at a time which also suggests your friend could only enter the store if they had an amazon go account and tapped in themselves.
>What happens when someone picks up an item and leaves without first doing whatever check-in/registration/setup is necessary?
Again, based on those gates, I'd assume you can't actually access the store without going through the necessary set-up first.
Personally, I'd like to know what happens if/when my phone battery dies in-store.
Like I heard from HEB Central Market employee, that they had a hard time with their bulk self-portion coffee beans, where the price range is quite large yet the beans look pretty identical.
Like most bigger shops, I think amazon will just tolerate the loss without enforcing it too much, if it stays manageable and under enforcement costs, which includes a too negative impact on the general shopping experience.
It's an 1,800 square foot convenience store in a yuppie area stocked with what appears Whole Foods like take and go food, not a Wal Mart Supercenter. It will be quite a bit different if they open a large store out in the suburbs.
[1] http://digest.dx3canada.com/2015/05/12/retrofuture-ibms-1999...
Assume that having a single cashier costs $15 per hour. Assume that an RFID tag costs $0.05. Assume that in average a cashier handles 1 item for only 5 seconds (including payment).
That means that a cashier can handle 720 items per hour, and that costs the supermarket $15. Having RFID tags for 720 items would cost $36. That's still a ~$20 dollar difference, which still amounts to ~$0.028 per item.
I would be willing to pay that if that means i can forgo the checkout lines.
So, it would require a $10 item to break even on a €0.10 tag.
Even if all of the video was monitored by a human I can still envision several pitfalls to this where it's hard to know who to bill for what without interacting with the customer.
I even catch myself doing it. If you are smart you can notice the error, take it out of the bag and rescan and the machine will keep going.
Most people just freeze and wait for help.
Retail is far too accommodating already. Some people figure that being a “valued customer” means they can be an unending source of sunken costs in time, effort and stress, among other things. And those costs can be multiplied across the other customers waiting in line, too.
If a “customer” is destroying your inventory, annoying other customers, or commanding far more of your time than warranted, there is no reason to put up with them. Protect the larger investment, which is: all your other customers, your store, and your employees.
But the video clearly shows the items being recognized as someone takes them from a shelf (and puts them back). The items don't need to be recognized at the time you walk out, the store just needs to know that you've walked out.
This is cool tech and I'd want to try it, but I hate shopping anything Amazon. They had sd cards at their brick and mortar store, but I decided to buy one at Office Depot instead, even though it was $10 more.
You say that like if it's a bad thing, you might want to better inform yourself on GMOs as there are A LOT of myths and misconceptions out there.
I'm not going to argue that this sort of technology isn't going to have a decimating effect on employment, small business etc. It will. It will very likely have a huge socioeconomic impact for one simple reason: Most of us aren't planning for the next industrial revolution.
That fact that you're freaking out now tells me you really haven't been thinking deeply about the impact that automation is going to have on our society, nor have you been considering realistic solutions to these potential problems.
Automation will decimate jobs as it allows us to create lot more with less. It might give people more leisure time, or it might widen the income gap. We could send people back to school to learn relevant skills, and we might be able to do it cheaply if we maximized MOOCs and vocational training more and relied less on expensive universities with lavish facilities and football coaches with million dollar salaries.
We could also fuck up our opportunity to move forward by focusing our energy on preserving jobs that we know are going away. It's not if, it's when.
Not moving forward is not a realistic option. Even if had all the political power to get your way in this country, other countries will simply take the lead in automation. The countries that focus on their energy on educating their people to take on the next generation of jobs will be the economic leaders of tomorrow.
It's not a small problem and it's not going to magically work itself out like some laissez faire dipshits would like to tell you. This is going to be tough and painful. Now is the time to start planning for our future.
What is really needed is a way to talk to multiple RFID tags quickly without any crosstalk. Think of a handbag with a dozen candy bars in it. How do you scan them all quickly without missing any?
The goal has always been to scan something large in one pass, say a shrink-wrapped pallet of items that could number in the hundreds or thousands. Obviously this is technology that Amazon could benefit from as well, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of technology overlap here.
Probably need some human labor for the produce section.
This is interesting but the checkout line is nothing compared to the time in the aisles.
in many rural areas of the United States, it is literally impossible to shop anywhere but Wal-Mart. Nebraska and Kansas had a rather large economic dive in the early 2000's due to the expansion of the Waltons. Their business plan is essentially:
1) Announce intention to move into area
2) woo politicians for financial kickbacks to subsidize expansion
3) launch with prices _far_ lower than all the competing grocery stores and harware stores.
4) Wait as other businesses run out of money due to not being able to compete on price.
5) raise prices once monopoly is established.
I moved from one of these places. Now I have 5 wal-marts in my city. I have zero issues with sabotaging their expansion into another country (Canada).
Heck I've dropped jars or similar things during bagging after paying for them several times and every time I was offered a replacement.
Mistakes happen, it's often considerably more expensive to deal with customer complaints especially in the age of social media than it is to replace an item.
It's also important to note that this is baked into the cost of doing business all along the supply chain, if items are not sold they will be often returned by the store to the distributor which would chuck them as a loss, or more often than not sell them for other uses other than human consumption.
Some perishables are thrown away others are then sold to other industries e.g. the roast that was left over might end up as dog food...
For a dog food company it's cheaper to buy discarded meat produce the dog food take samples and while it's being shipped do the cultures to ensure that there are no contaminants or bacteria and if something fishy is found just do a recall upstream for specific batch than it is to buy "fresh" meat and ingredients which are fit for human consumption.
Supply chains are huge and complex and all these little annoyances don't really count for much, it only really bothered very small stores that have to buy everything almost up front and they aren't leasing effectively shelf space for distributors.
That'd constitute a massive retooling of consumer behavior and logic and would require quite a bit of conditioning over many years, no?
I think that's just visually giving you an idea of what's happening. Like I said earlier, I'm giving a simple naive presentation of how the system might work. Or, at the least, how I would design it without dealing with finicky shelf sensors. Ask anyone that has ever worked in a hotel with in-room minibars how well those things pan out in real life.
Unless that store is just a mockup and not how it really looks and works, I see nothing on those shelves or in the sky above it that is watching you put that cupcake back on the shelf.
The real way to find out is if someone in the demo video can pull their phone out of their pocket mid-trip and see their current inventory and total price. But I didn't see that in the video.
The girl in the video at 1:26 looks at her list and total, but after she's been through the exit turnstyle.
And you might not want to assume what I know and don't :)
I say it because GMOs are not open source. Local farms don't get access to GMOs and it can create an unfair advantage to big farms.
As for health reasons I don't believe that GMOs are bad for you but they may have lower nutrients since you can now grow on the same plot of land over and over (and soil depletion of nutrients is a real thing) [1].
I'll assume you didn't know about soil depletion... as there are lot of people that don't and you know its better to inform yourself :)
That being said I do agree that GMOs get mostly unfair sentiment.
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...
This is also a perennial concern at any tradition grocery store as well. Presumably, in a system that operates primary off of computer vision, you would:
A) Be able to quickly detect an unrecognized person in the store and alert security, and
B) Have very good video evidence of the person committing the shop-lifting to provide to police.
It sounds like they actually end up in a better position relative to a tradition grocery store from a security perspective.
It's also really easy to take the RFID tag out of a product. Machine vision is likely the cheaper/more secure approach.
I was for the test but I find the self checkout annoying. It's less efficient than the usual kind. You have less space to unload you stuff; less space to rebag them, and the cashier is lighting fast at scanning and grabbing the money because of 7h/day of doing so. I'm not pro human cashier, I don't think lots of cashier really like it either. But self checkout is not as good as I thought.
I'd assume trying to forcibly enter the store without registration will set off an alarm. I can't wait to show up with 15 of my friends and run amok in the store - it'll present an interesting legal experiment (unless they just get us for trespassing).
That would be fine in the ages before social media. Now everyone "takes to twitter" and tries to organize a social pitchfork campaign. The victimhood mentality is real. People get off on the celebrity from being wronged by a big bad corporation. It wouldn't be long before some jerk posts a video of himself leaving a roast on the cereal aisle and being '86'ed from the store, then post it straight to Youtube for all the delicious karma points. Corporate image is a big deal.
Organic farming can also use pesticides (and most do), some of these pesticides are as bad or even worse than the ones used in modern agriculture.
And in regards to nutrients https://gmoanswers.com/studies/how-do-gm-crops-impact-soil-h...
It might be legal federally, and in red states, but this sounds like a class action lawsuit in a liberal state with strong consumer protection laws just waiting for hungry lawyers.
I'm guessing the Amazon Go app generates a one-time-use QR code that gets scanned on entry and then security/tracking cameras follow you all over the store. If the cameras see you in front of an item when its RFID sensor detects it was picked up, they make an educated guess that you picked it up. Then they can re-scan all the RFIDs as you exit for extra confirmation.
I've used the Apple Store feature to buy a charger and iPhone case in the past. I admit it did feel strange as I waltzed out the front door past the genius bar guys just holding an item in my hands. If I had a bag I could put the item into (I imagine I could've asked a worker for one) then I would probably just look like every customer who paid at the till.
This leads me to think that the reason I felt weird is because I was the only one walking out of the store (to my knowledge) that paid in this manner. If I know everyone is doing it, again my mind would probably be at ease.
Profits earned from Amazon Go are not going to get reinvested in cities. A small portion of it would be divided as payrolls among engineers and people who would manage these Go stores but a large chunk would go in deep pockets of Bezos' and Amazon investors'.
I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement)..
I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables.
I know all the people who work in these supermarkets. The cashier in the supermarket downstairs always sings a quiet song while she scans my products, she knows my daughter and she's always nice and friendly.
The cashier in the other store talks to the customers. She stops scanning and starts talking while the line waits. Some customers might join the conversation. I know she has an old cat that eats an unlimited amount of food if allowed to do so...
There are similar stories about other shops in the neighbourhood - they come to work, they serve the people in the neighbourhood, they go home. They do this until they retire.
These people like their jobs because we respect them for what they do, so they feel useful and they work hard.
I don't mind waiting in line for 3 minutes. Or 5. It's never longer than that, even if the cashier discusses the latest news with the old lady.
The humanity of it has value for us here and that value is greater than the time we'd save by removing the people from the shops.
In retail, especially low-end, employee theft is the main thing loss prevention deals with.
EDIT: Multiple lawsuits for predatory pricing: https://ilsr.org/walmart-charged-predatory-pricing/
http://www.academia.edu/1511858/The_Effect_of_Wal-Mart_on_Sm...
http://business.time.com/2014/02/24/walmarts-big-push-to-go-...
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/study-proves-wa...
here's a few directly related to wage fraud:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/18/walmart_n_4466850.h...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-low-wage-employers-cost-taxp...
I guess it's not that big of an issue though, since this is a single store and not a chain. The employees need stuff to do.
Who can go in to the store? If only people that have phone + app then technically I can't go in with my wife, allow her to pick and choose her yogurt while I'm looking for a coffee, put our groceries in to one bag and pay for it from my account.
I will admit this strategy won't work for everyone. Most corporations are not willing to respond to a complaint by using social media to (accurately) call the complainer an obnoxious asshole.
For example (not saying this is how it actually works): "Scanning your phone when you enter lets us know who you are. Then, our advanced vision tracking system follows you around the store and lets us see what you're choosing. Finally, scanners in our turnstiles verify your purchases as you're leaving the store."
> 5) raise prices once monopoly is established.
Do you have any evidence of this?
I'm originally from northern Arkansas and my town has store #0002. It opened in the 60s, but it was converted to one of the first Supercenters in the early 90s. As far as I know none of the local grocery stores there have closed - both of them are still there to this day.
I live in Charlottesville, VA today, and there are three WalMarts within ~25 miles of me - yet there are also many other regional and national chains operating in the area, the most notable of which is probably Wegman's which just expanded here.
Every supermarket around here has self service checkouts already, it's just a matter of time before something like this comes in.
I don't like it, for the reasons you outline. I think we'll lose something. I'm especially thinking of old people who might be living alone and see their shopping trip as an opportunity for social interaction. Unfortunately that's the way things are going though.
I'll never understand the view that superior technologies mandate removal of the "old" ways of doing things. No one is forcing you to change, but dont be surprised when most people dont share the nostalgia you have.
From the SA article:
“Efforts to breed new varieties of crops that provide greater yield, pest resistance and climate adaptability have allowed crops to grow bigger and more rapidly,” reported Davis, “but their ability to manufacture or uptake nutrients has not kept pace with their rapid growth.” There have likely been declines in other nutrients, too, he said, such as magnesium, zinc and vitamins B-6 and E, but they were not studied in 1950 and more research is needed to find out how much less we are getting of these key vitamins and minerals.
That doesn't mean GMOs are bad but it might mean people will abuse the fact they will grow easily on just about anything (I'm exaggerating for emphasis).
As for the unfair advantage it is in large part because of ignorance of the consumers. I admit it is a weak argument but sadly the local farmers often have to grow non-gmo because that is what sells and they will get lower crop yield if there are other nearby GMOs (bugs and cross pollination). It is not enough to be locally grown... you have to be GMO free. I met a farmer in Hawaii Kauai that shared this issue with me and the seemed fairly passionate about it.
The moment you start kicking people out over subjective "rule-violations", you are eating into your own profits, pissing off people, and projecting your own morality onto strangers. Aunt Minny may have set down that roast because it hurts her hip to walk across the store, and she realizes she already bought a roast yesterday. But over the last 10 years she's spent $25,000 shopping there. Some guy with Crohn's disease may literally shit on your floor if he doesn't drop his perishable item and run home/to the rest room. If both of those people are regular shoppers, sure the lost perishable item eats into your bottom line, but in the long run you are making a profit off them.
Waging an unnecessary morality war can only impede your ability to run a profitable business.
Edit: why not just give employees handheld IR thermometers, and if the temperature of the product is < $MEAT_MAX or $VEGGIE_MAX degrees then allow them to restock it.
Human cashiers will probably exist in the future too, and if you value it you'll be able to pay extra for it.
Most RAIN Rfid readers have a read rate of 800+ tags/second. Door portals are a solved solution and now phased arrays are on the market which scan all items in realtime. Take a look at the impinj marketing material for more information. For example the RS2000 chip: http://www.impinj.com/products/reader-chips/indy-rs2000/
However, I suspect that when presented with the choice, people will take the machine store in exchange for lower prices. And I suspect that you suspect the same thing, otherwise you wouldn't be concerned.
EDIT: Sorry for the snark, I feel bad. This is a real dogpile. You don't deserve this much shit.
These guys might have been ordered by management to smile for customers. That doesn't make them happy. Just a bit more miserable, but you don't see any of it.
I can't see why anybody will like to finish their life counting stuff and money for other people. I can hardly see them happy even if they smile to me.
And here is another guess: They are probably getting a salary that barely covers their basic needs and won't cover urgent ones.
How about: Machines do this for us while we work on more interesting thing. Maybe if the bright of us are failing to get married and raise kids, we let these guys handle the task for us. I can see women being much more happier raising kids than processing mail for the post office.
Taking an authoritarian approach is really a shameful way to handle it.
If humanity were to take your opinion, we'd never evolve as a society, lest we remove a need in society and with it, someones job.
It's cheaper to only have 1 person watching to make sure everyone scans into the the store. Really there is no need to elaborate beyond that point alone. Also it cuts theft because you must scan to get in.
I don't think every store is going to change to this model overnight. It will be gradual over years and years. But it will happen.
What happens if I don't replace an item in the exact same place I picked it up? I'm charged for it I assume.
How do you purchase produce or vegetables, all these thing need to be packaged individually I assume. So much for concern for the environment...
Is the occasional line in a store really worth having your every movement tracked by Amazon and your image taken throughout your time at this store? Sounds like a store straight out of 1984.
Are you poor or without "a supported smartphone"? Forget about it.
Amazon is a company that tries new things and that's good, but here we have yet another example of tech nerds "solving" a problem that doesn't exist.
One could simply retrain the customer by literally charging them the moment they take it off the shelf, refunding them if they put it back. It would look crazy on your bank/credit bill but i think a legion of micropayments maybe the future anyways. There might be an opportunity there to turn a stream of 100s of micropayments into meaningful data for the end user.
With "just walk out" the friction is extremely low. It might see less pushback than other technological approaches. However I have to think security will be a major issue. If I can rob the store by just leaving my phone in my car or leaving a cheap phone in the store while I walk away with the products. Tap-in/out gates are probably the best bet, but can still be tailgated, so you'll need to have pretty tight security and monitoring ready to beat anyone down who doesn't pass the checks or looks fishy at the gate or in store attempting to fool the system into believing they're another person. Or write those off as losses, I suppose most retailers today already do a lot of that.
he said, here in the U.S., business is business. nobody gets attached to a store.
And, I'm all for people having careers that are meaningful and fulfilling. But, is supermarket cashier the most valuable thing these people can be doing?
Imagine we had all the money we wanted and could pay people to do anything and buy robots to do anything. What would we choose to buy robots to do and what would we choose to pay humans to do?
To improve the efficiency of a particular group, we create problems elsewhere. The result may not be net positive. In fact, I think it isn't, since those saved "couple of minutes" will probably be spent browsing Facebook.
This is literally someone's homework.
> http://business.time.com/2014/02/24/walmarts-big-push-to-go-....
This offers no evidence of any harm at all.
> http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/study-proves-wa....
This talks about a study (but doesn't link to it) that says:
"The payroll results indicate that Wal-Mart store openings lead to declines in county-level retail earnings of about $1.4 million, or 1.5 percent. Of course, these effects occurred against a backdrop of rising retail employment, and only imply lower retail employment growth than would have occurred absent the effects of Wal-Mart."
If anything, that's evidence to counter your assertion that WalMart raises prices after eliminating its competition - retail in the counties is more efficient, and people are spending less money.
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/18/walmart_n_4466850.h....
> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-low-wage-employers-cost-taxp....
"Wage fraud" isn't what you asserted before, but even that isn't supported by these links. These links talk about the fact that WalMart employees low-income workers.
Interesting. I don't believe I want us to evolve in that direction.
Amazon, and many other companies, do plenty of things that don't "make sense".
The big problem is: Most people are not willing to pay for that :) Depending on the product, 1-2 cents might be your whole margin.
Edit: To be fair, looking at the video, it's mostly prepared food, so I'm probably not even in the target audience for this store. (I tend to buy raw ingredients, like produce and meat.)
1) Does Wal-Mart force their employees to do overtime? How is this legal?
2) Are Wal-Mart employees paid well enough to take pride in the appearance of their store?
3) Do Wal-Mart employees have a bad day because they have to fish an open bag of sliced ham out of a box in the Shoe Department?
my personal experience is "no" on all three, but I'd be interested to see other experiences from current or former Wal-Mart employees.
EDIT: I read the 1st, after registering, but the only reference is to another article by the same author[1]. In that, there's seems to be a single statement: "In Dawson Creek, BC the reports have come in that after winning over local shoppers and forcing small business nearly into extinction, Wal-Mart raised prices to extra-ordinary levels". There doesn't seem to be any sources for that claim and I can't find anything in Google.
The typical grocery store here (i.e. what Go is actually going after) is basically a warehouse, with checkout lanes staffed by apathetic teenagers. The process is already almost entirely devoid of meaningful human contact. It might as well be more convenient.
Hopefully, whatever has protected your local stores from the economic forces that have produced the experience I describe will also protect your local stores from this incremental improvement on automated checkout.
Similar reason why Amazon hasn't caused small bookstores to close down.
IMO non-specialty grocery stores with a few staff closely knit in the community have already been mostly eliminated by the larger corporations.
Not true for my grandmother and many other elderly people. Maybe it's loneliness. But maybe it's a generation thing, not sure. We need to question if it's best to not interact with people who sell us stuff.
If you say that the scale does find honest mistakes (which I doubt, I think you just have dumb shoplifters) and I say the scales are strictly harmful to user experience then it seems these things must have a bad UI until some advance comes along.
e.g. which society is better to live in:
(low inequality, less wealth)
10th percentile average wealth: 100
99th percentile average wealth: 1000
(high inequality, more wealth)
10th percentile average wealth: 1000
99th percentile average wealth: 1000000
Not true. The giant store I work at has so many regulars that it's family. Often the store is one of only a few places customer's pasts are unknown or forgiven.
It's not all about increased producivity.
I've had nothing but trouble with the self-checkouts I've used in the UK. I'm quite slow and methodical about it, but the machines always manage to inexplicably fuck up halfway through.
Of course, all the really pricey stuff like watches, phones, and computers is kept in a back room.
That assumes we can find something better for them to do, of course. But man, we have to try! Forcing people to do things a machine can do is inhumane.
Economically it makes more sense to buy cheaper and faster. But this eats into the fabric of society and offers nothing in exchange.
And what are all these people supposed to do then ? Sleep all day ? They will fight back with their votes at first, which they are already doing in the US and Europe..
Then there's the centralisation, control and privacy part - amazon gets to decide what products your area will be supplied with, it gets to know your eating habits, your walking habits, etc. Will pretty much own you and the neighbourhood.
But then again, I don't really see an alternative - it seems that we're being 'innovated' by force into the future and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
I've been to restaurants where you order from a terminal and your only human contact is someone who delivers your food without a word. There were a bunch of them at one point and they all closed down, and I don't remember thinking they were cheaper or more expensive at the time. I just remember feeling like the experience of going out with friends to a restaurant felt diminished.
Also at one point, Home Depot and Lowes switched to a majority of self checkout lines, but all that did was move everyone over to the "old fashioned" lines that ended up taking 3x as long to check out, but people continue to do this.
I don't need Deep Learning[tm] when I go to a supermarket. Also, they should really have integrated The Blockchain[tm] in the buzzwords.
Nevertheless, this is good for Bitcoin.
Most people want to get their shopping done quickly and efficiently.
However, I could easily see niches keeping people around. The first thing that comes to mind is a higher end sort of place where customers want some knowledgeable help in selecting what they're buying. Spend some money on a few people who know their products well and give good advice, and maybe have time for some chit chat.
The unstated assumption is that the people using the stores have sufficient capital to value interaction with people over lower prices.
You can imagine that if the shoppers also worked in jobs where their humanity was valued, they might have this capital, but that's not the case for most of us because we work in systems that trade humanity for efficiency and the value extracted is captured by a tiny elite.
If you look at what that elite spends money on, it is exactly more personalized human interaction.
The problem is an artifact of people making choices in a system that concentrates wealth in the hands of a tiny few, and nothing to do with what people in general prefer.
It's utopian to think job losses mean everybody gets their workload reduced, as this has never happened before. Automation has never reduced anybody's workloads. In fact, every reduction has happened to either eliminate de-facto slaves (industrial revolution) or because excessive workloads actually reduce productivity.
Anecdote: my wife is from Barcelona, and is currently finishing her PhD in a technical field. We're in the US at the moment and she could likely get a well-compensated job after graduation if she wanted, but is considering applying to be a barista at Starbucks or similar instead. It's not that she particularly dislikes what she studied -- just that she doesn't particularly care about work life one way or the other at all. I've observed this attitude a lot with Spanish friends.
unlikely - can think of a bunch of reasons why this wouldn't happen.
> people will not have to work full weeks anymore, or rather, focus on learning and reaching higher education
too idealistic - why aren't the people who "aren't working full weeks" today focusing on learning and reaching higher education? The logic doesn't work for the people already in this target group, today.
For me, the far more time consuming part are:
1. Finding where something is (yes, after months you'll slowly memorize it all, but when you're new to a grocery shop, this easily takes 3-4 minute per item you need.
2. Choosing between the dozens of options.
The other day I went in this new store just to buy a shampoo and a mouthwash. For each there were over 30 near identical products and I spent way longer than necessary deciding which to go for.
With amazon fresh, I can at least search for a specific product, and also read reviews and specifics right there on the page. Amazon Go doesn't solve any of those problems...
It feels silly to me to create a whole store just to solve a tiny little problem that is grocery lines.
But in reality, many other shoppers in the world don't have your experience. I live in a large American city and my shopping experience is the exact opposite of yours: I have to drive 10-20 minutes to my supermarket; it is gigantic warehouse-sized; I don't know the cashiers on a personal level (I don't even recognize any of them as they always seem to be different); I usually wait a long time in line (10 minutes). So yeah I would gladly prefer shopping at a supermarket powered by Amazon Go technology.
> People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible.
> They don't go to the grocery store for social
> interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay
> extra for something that only the minority get value out
> of is not a competitive strategy.
(... or some other big American city, but it's more impressive if that's right.)
The parent commenter describes something I immediately recognise as "very European"; there's room for both of you.
This pretty much sums up _everything_. So, why do we even try to have societies?
Edit: You use an example of going to a bar. You realize "... not everyone may want ..." to socialize at a bar? Some just go to drink.
My best guess at the risks is that we may lose something valuable as a society or damage mental health if we push people away from social interaction. Many people will remain healthy, but those who are in difficult circumstances may find themselves on a downward spiral as they are further isolated from their communities. What if your community doesn't have a large supermarket? We talk about food deserts in the US right now, what if we have social deserts?
A simple example of short-term v long-term, look at soda and sugar-sweetened carbonated beverages. They're extremely cheap. Often less expensive than bottles of water in the US. This encourages many people to buy them as they are a cheap source of calories and sweetness. However, it's only many decades later that we've discovered the damage they can do when consumed for long periods of time. Many people consuming them don't have better food options. A few cities are starting to tax them to make the costs more evident.
Gasoline is another good example. The US is addicted to cheap gasoline and doesn't know how to stop even though we are now aware of the potentially catastrophic consequences.
- that automating all jobs will cause all prices to go down. (It seems just as plausible that if everything were automated, then the relatively small class of people who work building and maintaining the machines wield monopoly-like power and charge accordingly, concentrating wealth even more than it's concentrated today.)
- that with lower prices, people will want less money. (It seems just as plausible that people will expect to be able to keep working and buy more to raise their standard of living.)
- that the intermediate state, where many jobs are automated, but people still need to work for a living, is tenable for society
- that there are no significant social problems resulting from a society where nobody has to work
I don't know whether these are true or not, but if they're not, the result will greatly impact the lives of millions (billions?) of people. Obviously, banning automation isn't a solution either, but it seems flippant to bet the lives of so many people on what we think might happen in a system as complex as the global economy.
[edited formatting]
Instead, those with the means of production have hoarded the benefits. Despite all of our technological progress after the American industrial revolution, we are working more hours and earning less as a whole. Despite record profits, companies are not increasing wages and prices are not decreasing for anything except cheap, low-quality, mass-market consumer goods.
See: trickle down economics.
Social interaction besides the usual benefits also makes otherwise dull or tedious jobs more tolerable. If those people didn't have to work as cashiers anymore (how that could work is an entirely different matter but something like a basic income would be a start) they wouldn't simply disappear but be able to make better use of their time, for example by serving the people in their neighbourhood in more expedient ways.
Keeping jobs for the sake of it just leads to stagnation. People working on a job until they retire (or drop dead, whichever happens first ...) because they either have to or don't know otherwise is not something virtuous but actually quite sad in my opinion. It's often required to make a living and support yourself and your family but we shouldn't accept it as the natural state of affairs.
That being said, there is value in daily ritual and routine, and we need to find a way to replace our current ones with new ones that are just as meaningful if we wish to automate all jobs away.
I'm saying that I asked for evidence and got opinion. Grading an assignment is not my responsibility.
> There are few things more amusing than when people ask for evidence for the sole purpose of discounting it at any cost. Thanks for being that person.
My purpose in asking for evidence was to examine it. I didn't "discredit" it, most of it wasn't relevant, while some of it made assertions that were counter to the ones you were asked to support. I read the links you posted, and even tracked down the paper that one of them referenced and verified the authenticity of the academic publisher that printed it. I quoted it in my comment, which you failed to address.
To be honest, I'm not convinced that you read the links you posted.
> Do you think Wal-Mart will pay you for your downvotes?
I didn't downvote you - I'm not sure I've ever downvoted a comment on HN.
> I know CTR paid $0.10 per comment, but that was for an election. What is the going rate for defending megacorporations on social media?
Where is my defense? You assertions struck me as improbable on their face, so I asked for evidence of them.
> This makes sense from a suburban, car-based perspective.
> From a walking, city-based lens, ...
Someone else points out the security benefit of a cashless store, which again I'd have thought is more of an advantage to the high street shop than the suburban warehouse-like supermarket.
I really don't think that's why. Vending machines can't compete with humans still for freshly produced goods. There have been a few shots across the bow, but producing food that requires adjustment is still beyond the range of our sensors.
I can't imagine a robot "dialing in" an espresso machine based on taste like a barista would, at least for another decade.
Maybe you could use it to make some guesses about a person. An older guy buying frozen dinners, beer, and not much else is probably single or divorced. A woman buying prenatal vitamins is probably pregnant. Someone buying both Special K and Fruit Loops might have a family. But someone can already make these determinations from using their eyes. RFIDs might make it a bit easier but don't really add any new infosec facet to this grocery store experience.
The in person shopping primarily happens in specialty grocery stores like Italian delis and the like. They won't be going away.
> The humanity of it has value for us here and that value is greater than the time we'd save by removing the people from the shops.
I wish this sentiment existed in other realms and for the countless un/underemployed millennials out there. I wonder how many marketing assistant and assistant media planner jobs have been killed by the use of one janky "online marketing suite" after another.
This feels like a natural evolution. It's a outcome product of the environment.
Suppose the minimal cost solution has a cost of c.
Suppose there is an extra "human touch" factor that costs x extra. So the total cost is c+x.
Suppose there are n customers, of which m prefer the human touch.
In a world with humans everywhere, it costs everyone c+x/n to deliver a product that satisfies everyone.
In a world where two solutions are competing, one with humans and one without, it costs c+x/m to deliver a product that satisfies m, and c to satisfy everyone else.
The subset m that prefers the human touch has to pay more. But notice there's no magical majority cutoff here; that's not how it maps out. It's a curve that gradually increases the cost the lower the m:n ratio is, until it becomes a very expensive boutique service that only very wealthy people can afford. And the increasing slope makes it hard to fight.
It is in fact people with the least sensitivity to price and preference for the human touch that will help maintain the status quo. And those people are usually in the minority.
It seems to me that there must be better ways to give people social interaction besides making some people sit at a cash register for eight hours a day and making a bunch of other people wait in lines to be served. But that's a tougher argument to make.
Retail organized theft is already a major problem here and this is with stores that have F/T security. There is no shortage of drug addicts willing to jack items for $0.10 per $1 retail value, the goods are then exported and sold in China for things like toothpaste, babyfood, ect.
There is short term pain in automating jobs that no longer need to be performed by humans, but no sane person would look at the long term result of that automation and say it was a bad thing.
I don't think that is a fair comparison at all. Somethings are inherently social, like going to a bar, where as others are much more of a grey area. I would argue that many of these have historically been social experiences out of necessity (no automated machines, no online shopping, etc.), not out of the need for social interaction.
> When can I visit Amazon Go? Amazon Go is currently open to Amazon employees in our Beta program, and will open to the public in early 2017
I think all the discussion here are very pre-mature. It looks like a controlled beta-test at best.
Technology like this will make a lot of jobs obsolete. And, in the short-term, there will be a lot of problems with unemployment or underemployment. But, ultimately, a system of universal basic income (or something like it) will be implemented, allowing people to disassociate their identities with their jobs. It will free up their time to do other things, like help out in their communities, create art, or pursue their other passions. They can still work if they want to, but they won't need to. And they'll be able to choose jobs that they're passionate about instead of the jobs they have to do to pay rent and provide food.
Stores like this won't remove the interactions you have with your neighbors - those interactions will just change locations. Instead of seeing the cashier at the supermarket, maybe she'll be giving your daughter singing lessons because she was allowed to focus on something she loved doing instead of something that paid the bills.
At least I hope they did. I assume they are going into this expecting a loss while they work out the kinks.
Regarding (1): http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=87844&page=1
But how can we be sure that enough meaningful jobs will exist for all people who want to work? It would be kind of surprising if there was a meaningful full job for everyone.
This feels like former communist countries where everyone was employed, although many jobs were pointless.
It really drives wages down, so they're overstaffed compared to other countries, and instead of it being an entry-level job for teenagers the norm is to have them staffed by 30-60 year olds with lots of experience, but likely few other options when it comes to employment.
So does putting people who work at grocery stores ultimately help things? I'd like to think so, technology advancement is our only hope of getting rid of most menial jobs. Those who rail against it rarely do so with any sensitivity to all the menial jobs we've gotten rid of already, for the good of all.
And yet they're not first doing this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3465767/Now-s...
There will still remain room for shops with cashiers in the market just as there is still room for restaurants with waiters, tables and chairs despite the innovation of drive throughs and fast food.
As long as you are part of a large enough group who is willing to pay for traditional style shops then they will continue to exist.
What if you have mobility issues and need someone to grab items for you? What if you have vision issues and need someone to read an ingredient list?
Supermarkets are not great places to shop or to work. Most employees are working far less hours then they want to on an income that is dependent on welfare top ups in one form or another.
Since there is no chance of UK supermarkets adopting a Spanish philosophy I think these people would be happier, and no worse off, if they were put out of a job tommorow.
For evidence just look at how many people opt to queue in the self service aisle, even when there is no queue at the human alternative.
Economically it makes more sense to buy cheaper and faster. But this eats into the fabric of society and offers nothing in exchange.
Then there's the centralisation, control and privacy part - amazon gets to decide what products your area will be supplied with, it gets to know your eating habits, your walking habits, etc. Will pretty much own you and the neighbourhood.
And, behold, we see someone rediscovering the central tenet of Marxist economic theory.
(Entirely serious; not an insult. HN readers could really do with a more balanced economic diet – reading more Marxist theory and less Chicago School...)
If your goal is to create a society where relaxed human interaction is prioritized, then it would be deeply inefficient to accrue the majority of surplus resources to a tiny few.
If on the other hand, you are a member of elite whose interest is in competing with other members over resources, you would define efficiency in a way that minimizes the value captured lower down the hierarchy.
So yes, I am essentially saying that, but I don't want us to fall into the trap of using a single definition of 'efficiency' based on the assumptions of a particular system, but recognize that it depends on what is being optimized for.
I don't think that relaxed human interactions work against the elite's goals per-se - they just don't contribute directly to their goal and so are optimized away wherever possible.
But do they really need to know when you pull out an item and then give up buying it?
* Research and decide, based on evidence you find.
* Ridicule and discredit the evidence you asked for.
It seems you picked Door Number Two.
You mentioned you're from the heart of Walton-ville (You lived by Store #002? how interesting!). Have you spent any time in the midwest ghost towns surrounding their local Supercentre?
You may be accused of being overly sentimental. And yes, grocery shopping is not always fun. But just by being out in the world and interacting with humans is worth something. Take that away, and at some point, these little brushes with humanity have to be replaced or we starve as social creatures. It is the increasing lack of social contact in many areas of modern life that drives many of us to social media platforms that promise to fulfill these needs.
We talk all the time about filter bubbles. What about physical interaction bubbles? Soon you won't have to see or talk to anyone outside your friends and coworkers if you don't want to. What does that do to empathy?
1. Automation wasn't a major political issue behind Trump's success.
2. I can still think someone is wrong even if they hold the majority opinion (although in this case it was a minority opinion since Trump lost the popular vote).
3. I do think something should be done to help people who lose their jobs due to automation. I just think that's the government's domain, not that of private companies.
Fallacy; apart from a short break thanks to syndicalist wins, we're just working more and more since the industrial revolution.
Reading suggestions: "A People's History Of The United States" by Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky.
For you, as the customer, maybe it seems cute and fine as a job but from my time in the job it's basically hours of mindless labour that teaches you little and offers no room for growth.
Your opinion on this is actually kind of despicable. You want people to perform robotic menial jobs because you feel like it adds humanity to your shopping experience but you seem content to ignore the fact that the job in question is a boring, tedious slog.
Seems like the maximized value could be somewhere in the middle, maybe without trying to sneak in replacement costs for items left on other shelves..
If we have the technology to replace those people and we don't do it, then we as a society are already supporting them just to survive. You're talking about artificially maintaining inefficiency. If we're going to go down that road, we might as well start paying people to dig holes and fill them back up again.
https://ilsr.org/walmart-charged-predatory-pricing/
Admittedly, I'm only taking 30 seconds to search for these things, so the quality might not be 100% accurate. I've held these opinions of wal-mart for over 20 years now, and it's difficult finding old corroborating links via the google bubble. They did exist, but 30 points of karma lost is not worth going through six pages of google search results to find that perfect article to satiate the person from Arkansas.
I don't see a huge difference between valuing interactions vs. having workplace safety standards or requiring that employers provide health insurance. Both of them raise transaction costs and eliminate at least some economic models because we as a society have decided we don't like the outcome. The sticking point is usually how to do it fairly.
Edit: clarification of point
The only real difference here is that it's a technology you didn't grow up with that is putting people out of work, so it's seen as unusual to you. We make this choice of technology over manual labour in virtually every industry every single day. But it's normal because we grew up with it. And the kids that grow up with this technology today will see this as normal too. Eliminating cashier jobs in supermarkets isn't fundamentally any different to eliminating textile worker jobs in the 18th century.
A friend at Amazon said he tried to trick it by taking two items at a time and it got it right every time, so yeah it does appear to track when you take the items.
Technological unemployment is far from a settled matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment#21s...
There was therefore a lot of resistance to self-supermarkets. Where people had to go and select their own items off of the shelves. The concerns expressed were the same as yours.
We don't miss the neighborhood grocers. People have come to expect and demand a variety and quality of goods that the old grocers could not hope to match, at prices that the grocers again could not match. The descendants of those grocers have new kinds of jobs, and on average a level of wealth that again grocers could not hope to match.
It has been the same story with every kind of automation. From the Luddites opposing weaving machines that brought cheap clothing to the loss of telephone operators to the development of self-service kiosks today.
I also live walking distance from supermarkets. I also joke with cashiers. But at busy times of day, waiting in line can take me longer than it takes to go to/from the store and select items. You don't mind the wait. I do. Amazon Go seems like a great idea to me.
In practice what [is and] is going to happen is that the jobs of the poor are removed, because they are more easily automated and the capitalists will retain much of the revenue that would formerly have been spent on wages.
Nothing is going to be done politically until there is either civil unrest or until there is so much impact to those with lowest wealth in society that the capitalists start getting poorer returns because too few people can afford to purchase the goods produced. In either case the situation is going to be very dire IMO before we get there.
This on top of the apparent existing inequalities and the increasing pay gap that the gig economy is creating (the efficiencies don't appear to be improving pay for the workers nor reducing costs as much as they could), and things like zero-hours contracts are pushing [in the UK] makes for a bleak outlook for those who are not already rich IMO.
I know all the people who work in these supermarkets.
The significant bit is that the walk-ability indicated in the 1st sentence enables the community indicated in the last sentence. I know there was one neighborhood in Cincinnati in the early 2000's, where you could walk to the grocery store, walk to the hair stylist, walk to the library, walk to the bank branch, and have a friend shout from their balcony to invite you up for dinner. Enable people to interact with their world on a village-scale, and you will have village-like interactions. However, if you turn people into paranoid-other-ignoring drones and cargo in metal capsules, then you have dystopian sci-fi city interactions. (This is a spectrum, not a binary bit, of course.)
When you exit it needs to match the items scanned (with RFID) to your account (using phone proximity/computer vision)
The value of labour will continue to decline. While your labour has value, saving up as much money as possible and putting it in index funds seems like a really good idea.
Don't they already have pretty widespread grocery deliveries?
I'd noticed that too here in London. TBH I feel I get better and more 'human' interactions from the people that police the self-service checkouts than behind the counters, because generally they're trying to help me when I need it.
I'm not going to argue that we should hold back innovation to preserve jobs, or that we should have people working 40+ hours per week as our goal. The simple fact is, however, that attitudes and government policies are really far away from supporting a 'post-work' society, and are actually getting further and further away.
People who control capital in western societies - and are the primary beneficiaries of automation and other techniques that are causing many jobs to disappear - already feel like they pay too many taxes, and are generally good at finding ways to make sure they pay less. Even a level of basic income that would provide a poverty-level standard of living for people feels politically impossible right now.
I don't fully disagree with you, but I find a lot of these "post-work" responses to be really hand-wavy.
- Elimination of low-level jobs
- Elimination of cash
- Deep surveillance (cameras everywhere, online tracking)
- Assuming it works, it will seem pretty magical!
(edit: formatting)
BUT what if their goal isn't to make razor thin margins at grocery stores, but to test out their tech on human tracking. You've got to believe that they have a more long term plan than making a better self-checkout.
They can now tie in your Amazon Go app with you as a person. Most likely all the sensors and cameras in the store will be both tracking you via your app with Bluetooth, but also perhaps body heat sensors and the like that track you based on your unique body pattern.
Then they can tie this in with your Amazon Prime account to better improve recommended purchases to you, they can tie this in with your Prime Now account and your home address and more immediate delivery needs. Drones, Kindle, Echo as well.
The goal is deeper analytics and tracking on individual humans. That's how Facebook makes their money, and Amazon can perhaps have deeper data on individuals than any other company tracking browser cookies.
What evidence do you have for this claim? A study of some sort?
It is also obvious from reading the news that some people do not want this.
"They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay extra for something that only the minority get value out of is not a competitive strategy."
Again, this sounds like hearsay or a personal opinion.
It can, that's clear, the problem is convincing the people who didn't lose their jobs that they should take a take hike to support the others; that's not an easy sell in Western Capitalism at least.
The part that kills me is checking out. I have always wondered why the cart can't scan your items and when you push it through a reader at checkout it just has everything totaled and charges you. The cashier can now bag your groceries. You could even have the cart recheck your purchase amount when the items are removed to be packed.
Someone out there hurry up and figure out the details :)
Phrased another way, inefficient services sector processes are imposed upon us, and the preferable alternative is "opt-in" (e.g. farmers markets, bars, or what have you).
You might also find interesting the pro-feminist discourse around automating "traditional" roles. Preserving long supermarket lines exacerbate social inequities you may not be so fond of.
If it where not for capitalism I'd rather self-checkout then have someone serve me and waste 1m of lifetime per visit to the supermarket.
That's accurate. Ask me how many times I wish I could find the guy that carelessly tossed a cart out in the parking lot (given easily accessible corrals) which subsequently bashed into the side of my car. Or found a packet of hamburger (with accompanying drippy juices) in with the toys. Or...
The moment you start kicking people out over subjective "rule-violations", you are eating into your own profits, pissing off people, and projecting your own morality onto strangers.
Leaving aside the misuse of the word subjective, this is why we avoid the "kicking out" part altogether and use financial incentives instead. It's no different than, say, ALDI charging you a quarter to get a cart (that you get back if, and only if, you put the cart away). Put stuff back where you found it like a civilized person, and there's never a problem.
"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."
You didn't provide evidence, you linked to irrelevant popular articles and someone's homework assignment. Not only did I not ridicule your post, I was careful to follow HN's guideline of assuming good faith even though that seems to not be the case here.
> You mentioned you're from the heart of Walton-ville (You lived by Store #002? how interesting!). Have you spent any time in the midwest ghost towns surrounding their local Supercentre?
I grew up near Harrison, AR. Most of those "ghost towns" were dependent upon a single business that has either closed up or moved away, usually in the manufacturing or petroleum industries.
I've heard many people say WalMart has killed all of these towns, but I've never seen any evidence for it.
I think that, per the grandparent, current initiatives are not grasping nor addressing the entire scope of the existing... "paradigm" -- sigh, to try to find a word for it.
To reduce it severely but pertinently, in the news recently, "studies show" that people who feel valued and that they have a roll in society, family -- in life -- they live longer.
And what happens when we stop interacting with each other? When that daily communication between work domains and social classes ends? Again, reduction to the almost absurd -- but we're living it -- we get President Trump.
Trump may end up doing ok -- we'll see. But the shock on many maybe liberal, Amazon Prime shopping upper middle class faces? Try actually talking to, with, and not at, the people around you, serving you.
When people stop to think about it, I think most find value in the people around them, much more than the things.
Not all value is encompassed in the fastest delivery for the cheapest price. (Which Amazon seems to be increasingly falling down on, anyway, per my recent experiences.)
You're probably right.
"Weight removed from vegetable bin, vegetables are $x/lb"
This already happens at... most stores.
I think Bluetooth enrollment would be good enough or they'll send you a barcode on a PVC card stock maybe even with RFID, but sure poor people can't shop at the nice grocery store, that's always been true right?
I sort of agree, but I also think there is a real market for it. Blah blah capitalism blah. "The market will show whether the problem was real." I'm pretty sure it's going to work out and be profitable for Amazon like always.
If the majority of people get 10x the money they used to, they're not getting 10x the purchasing power, because everyone needs a higher salary.
This is also an oversimplification. You can read more about the phenomenon here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
https://muenglish111.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/vonnegut-3....
"How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different"
The economy often gives us good solutions, but it also often gives us bad ones. The economy doesn't care either way.
C.f. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
Here's the evidence, because I'm sure you'll have difficulty scrolling up:
https://ilsr.org/walmart-charged-predatory-pricing/
I look forward to the creative way you will dismiss this as well.
1. Social interactions at commercial centres are valuable and Amazon and others who follow will be unable to offer such value.
2. Social interactions at commercial centres are more valuable than the beneficiaries are conscious of.
#1 I think we all agree on. #2 is the critical point and the degree of which is arguable and would swing Amazon's innovations between good and bad.
Let's imagine that on average, whenever someone goes into a shop and interacts with another human they are gaining 50% of their social wellbeing (i.e. a lot). Let's also imagine that on average whenever someone goes into a shop and interacts with a human they leave believing they have gained only 1% of their social wellbeing (i.e. not much). Such a person is likely to stop shopping at a shop with tills and cashiers in favour of a humanless shop such as Amazon Go. However that would likely be a mistake because they would lose half of their social wellbeing without even realising. This in my opinion would put automated shops into the category of a socially 'bad' thing.
Now imagine the actual social benefit of traditional shops is 5% (not huge but not insignificant) and the perceived social benefit is also 5% (i.e. we're fully aware of this benefit). In that case, people should be able to make the choice of which kind of shop is best for them based on a complete set of information. This in my opinion would put automated shops into the category of a socially 'good' thing. They offer more choice coupled with the relevant information to make that choice.
The discrepancy of perceived vs actual benefits can explain why we make the wrong choices with regards to a lot of market decisions from driving a gasoline car to eating at a restaurant. The best way to determine whether a market option is socially good or bad is to try to measure this discrepancy, see if it exists and if so, is it significantly large?
Yes, they do. It's a human need. Many people satisfy it that way.
(This is why I've read a solid chunk of the Austrians. I generally laugh at them. But I've read their stuff and I can think in it once I get into the mindset.)
The world has enough money to do these things, it's just a question of priorities and replacing greed with compassion.
People said the same thing about DVD stores -- yet the numbers didn't back it up. People stopped going.
If this were true, the shopping experience would be very different for all of us! Stores would look like Soviet-era warehouses, with everything done at the least possible cost.
In reality, customer experience matters a great deal. That's why you see companies like Amazon creating these sorts of innovations.
I live in Seattle. Many neighborhoods are very walkable. I can and do walk to grocery stores all the time. No, I don't know the cashiers personally. I also have to wait in long lines quite often.
When I lived in New York, one of the most walkable cities on Earth, it was even worse: long lines and anonymous, interchangeable cashiers.
I grew up in a small town where everyone drove to the grocery store, and that's the only time in my life where people knew their cashiers and genuinely cared about their lives.
My first thought was: wow, and they made it much harder to shoplift. In a regular store you can just tuck an item in your jacket. With this tech, they know when the item left the shelf, that you were standing there, and that it left the store with you.
Sure, it's hackable. Everything is hackable. But this actually seems like an anti-shoplifting measure to me.
Heck, I could imagine them installing this system in a normally staffed store just to detect shoplifting!
There are many reasons. "Not working full weeks" doesn't always mean "not busy". Some of the reasons are:
- they're taking care of children / sick parents
- they're themselves sick or disabled (including various psychological conditions that can make you unable to perform effectively as a worker in this economy)
- they don't have a way to find a job that would let them earn more than they get from benefits (going to work in such circumstances is stupidity from economic POV)
- higher education they need costs money they can't get due to reasons listed above
It wasn't a job that had a future for me, and at some point during the last job there, I realized that I needed to find something else or I was doomed to a life of barely having enough money to get by each week.
Luckily, it wasn't that I didn't have skills, just that I wasn't using them for profit. But I'll never forget my time there and how soul-sucking it can be to do the same things over and over with no real interactions with the people I was helping.
Could I have been quirky like the cashiers in the story above? Sure, but that isn't me. And I know a lot of customers would have complained about it, because so many customers love to complain, rather than just enjoy things that are happening around them for what they are.
Maybe I'll miss out on these interactions with these friendly people who sell me stuff but if it means I can get my groceries done faster so I can go meet my actual friends faster, there's a clear benefit to me.
And this is one of the many reasons why automation has always won in the long run.
Skip the whole stocked shelf thing entirely. Have a website setup that customers can build a shopping cart, then just show up and pickup their "pre-bagged" groceries. The benefits to this are obvious.
1) No shop lifting. 2) Car friendly (you could have multiple drive-thru pickup lines) 3) Convenience for the shopper (saved lists, common items, don't have to walk around the store) 4) The store, could just effectively be a warehouse. 5) Possible to automate almost all of the work.
And before you say "what about produce?". Well, you could have a automated "imaging" station upon goods receipt that customers could use when building their cart. Or, offer really good return policies. Either way, the convenience would far outweigh the produce problem.
10x more food, land, or whatever.
I grew up in a country (Finland) where people bag their own groceries. The table behind the cashier just has a bit more room and some dividers, so even 3 customers have room to bag their own groceries simultaneously.
So an utopia without the "grocery-bagging class" is certainly possible.
What if I have a large shopping run, like for Thanksgiving? I have a ~$400 cart worth of loot. Where will I sort and bag my goods?
They should make Amazon Go like a 7-11 rather than a Whole Foods.
Are the item prices any less?
Well it sort of depends on where you want to shop. Staff at my local M&S and Waitrose are always up for a chat if you want it (certainly the older generation seem to like this, and it probably keeps them coming back). But the guys at the Tesco Express are clearly only interested in keeping the lines moving as fast as possible.
In all cases they also have the option of self checkout if you want to save time and avoid the chit-chat!
But I think they are watching the shelves and visually identifying when a product leaves, what it was and who took it. And if they put it back on a different shelf, a different camera sees that and it is removed from the person's "shopping cart".
They are using their internal employees to train the AI or AI's (maybe one per section of shelf).
Imagine a Kellogg's employee assigned to watch each of their cereal boxes and make a list when someone takes one.
That's how I think they are using AI here. Hundreds of them in the store.
I've not seen anyone so far suggest that people will still work at the store. There will still be people who help customers do what they need, but instead of mindlessly scanning groceries, they'll be there for the things people actually need help with. Returns, price problems, finding things, lifting heavy items, etc.
> I don't mind waiting in line for 3 minutes. Or 5. It's never longer than that, even if the cashier discusses the latest news with the old lady.
If I go to the Stop & Shop, I spend about fifteen minutes in line on average, and the cashier is consistently rude.
That being said, when I go to the more "local" stores, I have similar experiences to what you've described.
More of the world will enter into pop stabilization and decline and this is where this will fit in. Where it will not fit in is in places still experiencing pop growth and few prospects for rewarding jobs.
On the other hand I'm a bit Orwellian and I do see value in people doing these kids of small quotidian things which are the basis for human fabric since civ --that is, engaging in small transactions which reinforce human connectivity.
Tracking. A lot of tracking.
You don't need deep learning and car sensor technology to do simple rfid tag pick up/drop offs to detect what you have in your cart.
No, this technology probably fully tracking your every movement in the store. It may use rfid tags to detect what you have, but that is not the main tech.
When you walk in and scan your phone, a camera array will scan you to create a footprint on who you are and link it to your ID. Then your every movement will be tracked by various cameras throughout the store.
You walked 3 steps, took a step back and looked at the advertising on the right? We recorded it.
You went to the cereal aisle first? Picked up a box of cereal and then put it back in favor of another one? Yup, we recorded it too.
If this is indeed the case, then the correctness of what is in your shopping cart is going to be very, very high and there will be no need for an honor system, randomized checks, or other mechanisms to prevent inaccuracies.
Shoplifters will probably get away with the first shoplifting but will probably get profiled immediately and unable to do it multiple times.
Honestly, I think this is never going to actually be the case. Why would a grocery store lower prices just because their costs went down a bit? Neither the demand nor the supply has changed, nor has the price people are willing to pay for their groceries.
If nothing has changed but your costs, why lower the prices when you can simply report increased revenue to your shareholders? If competition comes along, a quick "we're premium, they are cheap" marketing campaign (or buying them out) would probably cost less than lowering the prices to match.
There's no reason why your human interaction would suffer if you truly value it. With the money and time saved, perhaps people now go to the cafe and talk more often, or perhaps there's now a vendor outside the shop where you can get a conversation and a coffee. More than likely there will be a solution that i can't even think of.
Another useless job: A door-man.
While it's possible that some people "want groceries as cheap and fast as possible," I don't think either of those is true of the hundreds of people I join at my local market every week.
I go there mainly because I like buying directly from the producers. I want there to be independent farmers in the future too, for reasons of taste, culture, ecology, and food safety.
But I also enjoy my interactions with some of the sellers. Some people probably go mainly for that reason. The market is full, despite a big ugly multinational supermarket 100m away that has cheaper (and worse) versions of just about everything on offer. That supermarket is also full, though I think the reasons why are not as simple as market efficiency.
A lot of us will continue to share the parent poster's opinion, and hopefully in sufficient numbers to keep all the little bodegas going. Because we care about food, and we care about living among humans.
The problem isn't that Amazon is doing this and that this will drive out those mom&pop shops. The problem is that people will choose to go to Amazon and willingly destroy the mom&pop shops. The consumers are more culpable for the destruction of those mom&pop shops than Amazon. By placing the blame entirely on Amazon you are taking agency away from people which in my opinion sounds more wrong than a nice neighborhood losing its charm because of Amazon Go.
What people don't realize is that economic forces are completely within their control and it's their daily choices that add up to neighborhoods maintaining their charm or turning into Starbucks and Amazon Go automation factories. There is a sustainable way to drive innovation and it requires people to be cognizant of those daily choices. I don't think you can make people come to that realization by stopping or delaying progress.
Besides, if most people lose their jobs to automation in the near future, there won't be enough people who can afford to buy stuff at these stores anyway, so won't it become uneconomical to run these stores?
From the look of the video the phone isn't required for checkout. The flow looks like you scan in then camera's and other sensors track you through the store then you just walk out and the items are scanned and totaled.
> What happens if I don't replace an item in the exact same place I picked it up? I'm charged for it I assume.
Then just put stuff back where you got it. You shouldn't just leave items randomly strewn throughout the store already.
> How do you purchase produce or vegetables, all these thing need to be packaged individually I assume. So much for concern for the environment...
It's not a full grocery store, it looks like it's all packaged foods and fresh daily kind of prepared foods.
> Are your poor or without "a supported smartphone"? Forget about it.
Judging from the video, any Android or iOS device should be able to function, all it needs to do is display a QR code and a receipt no RFID or even a decent camera.
> Amazon is a company that tries new things and that's good, but here we have yet another example of tech nerds "solving" a problem that doesn't exist.
Why does everything have the address some deep underlying problem. Some things just make life a little easier or more convenient and that's ok.
May be the stigma of drinking alone, where one is sometimes considered a drunk if one drinks alone.
They will, one day, when companies stop with the vendor lock-in bullshit. An app - a siloed, sandboxed program that cannot meaningfully interact or seamlessly share information with any other program on the device - is a very crappy interface for doing anything. But we're stuck with it, because it's easier for companies to make money off apps, and cooperation is hard.
Funny; want to know how Amazon CS became so popular with people? They gave complainers what they wanted, and only shut down repeat abusers. You want to exchange or return this TV for no reason at all? Go ahead. You bought this a year ago and want to return it now? Get a rep on the phone and it's done.
It was fascinating to watch from the inside. CS reps became easier to hire (no need for independent thought when 95% of the calls can be answered with binary flags determined by a "follow the prompts" wizard), Amazon's CS approval rating skyrocketed, and they're still making money to this day.
So, yeah, they have proven that there is a really good reason to keep all but the most abusive individual customers.
Oh, that, and I get to be more self-absorbed and isolated from people in my community than I already am...not that I couldn't make a greater effort, but there is something to be said for a world where face to face interaction used to be expected and normal.
> I look forward to the creative way you will dismiss this as well.
Please cease the personal attacks. I've been nothing but professional in tis conversation.
> https://ilsr.org/walmart-charged-predatory-pricing/
The case in Wisconsin was settled out of court, with no admission of wrongdoing. The case in Germany was about pricing products too low to be legal, not about doing so to eliminate competition or to raise prices afterward.
The case in Oklahoma is interesting, but I never heard how it concluded and couldn't find reference to it in a brief search just now. I remember being especially interested in that when it came out because Crest Foods had alleged that David Glass, then CEO of WalMart, went to their stores with a scanner.
At any rate, none of these cases are any different from the original one in the 90s where the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that WalMart had used "loss leaders" but that there was no evidence that they had done so for the purpose of bankrupting competitors not that they had raised prices afterward.
Your assertion was that WalMart lowers prices until competitors are bankrupted then raises prices to take advantage of its now-monopoly status. I have never seen evidence for that - and I've looked quite a bit throughout the years.
My point is that if you look at this from an economic point of view, you should be able to figure out whether or not it is good or bad (or at least know what information you need to figure out if it's good or bad). See my other comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108119
However "I am unsure we are evolving" sounds like paradox. Isn't a version 2 of anything always "evolving" by definition? Otherwise, what's "better"?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=Fr_Gr_Sft_Nv1_learnmore?ie=UTF8...
At the profit levels usually seen in retail supermarkets, you can't stop paying all those people minimum wage and suddenly start paying them software dev salaries without an enormous hit to the income statement.
"won't it become uneconomical to run these stores?"
Essentially these stores are already smart vending machines stocked by humans occasionally at night. In the long run that might be where fresh food comes from. "Go to the vending machine and pick up a head of lettuce".
So yeah, technically if you, and me, and everyone else agreed not to use Amazon Go and stick to our regular grocery routine, mom&pop shops would survive. But that doesn't take into account the fact that coordination is a super hard problem. One that's essentially impossible to solve for a group larger than a dozen people without creating some strong external incentive structures[0]. On the other hand, a company like Amazon is in a position to unilaterally change the incentive landscape. There's no consumer agency to talk about here, anymore than we talk about agency of sheep being herded.
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[0] - that's also why every society, as it grows, invents structured forms of governance.
As I see it, there are two separable things in your view and separating them can be good for everyone.
One the one hand there are the people who facilitate your shopping experience. They help you with this task that is part of your daily life and they provide a social connection between you and your neighbors as you gather in a common space.
On the other hand they are the 'mechanism' behind moving money you've earned back toward the farms and factories that have produced the goods you use.
Both functions are important, and through history have been inextricably tied together and the basis for a rich history of the 'merchant' class. But it is important to note that the merchants are not necessarily aligned financially with you their customer. The merchant is in the position of choosing how much money to take out of the flow for themselves.
As a process, the merchant tries to get the lowest possible prices from the suppliers for goods and charge the highest possible price to the customers who are buying the goods. The cost sold must remain higher than the cost paid for the merchant to exist, and the merchant incurs costs while being a merchant (from venue maintenance to employee salaries to shoplifting and theft) and so the total cost of the goods has to remain below the price it is sold for in order for the merchant to remain solvent. The cost of goods sold must remain materially lower than the revenue they generate so that the merchant can accumulate some savings in order to offset unforseen expenses as well.
Now all of that mechanical operating of a grocery store has nothing to do with the social and service aspects of going to the store, sharing gossip with employees, and meeting and chatting with neighbors.
And now we have the set up to understand the actual problem and the cost of the actual solution.
You mention that there are 5 medium sized markets within a 5 minute walk. Why do you walk to one or not the other? I don't know for your case but in my case I will go to a market that I know is likely to have something I need, or one that has a good price on something I'm buying, or one that is near my travel route too and from the office because it is then not too far out of the way.
Historically, if one market has generally lower prices than nearby markets, people shop at it preferentially and the other markets suffer (sometimes failing completely). Using WalMart as an example, it has gone into regions and decimated the local retail outlets by offering lower overall prices in essentially unlimited quantities.
But the mechanism that allows Walmart or Target to do this is that the profits from other stores in the chain can cover the losses of individual stores. So a Walmart in a small town can still offer lower prices than the local grocers and merchants because they do not depend strictly on local profits to keep their store there open.
You could legislate that all shops had to be locally profitable rather than depending on outside of market help. However, that has the down side of specialty shops like hardware stores may become impossible to operate because they don't have enough regular customers to stay in business.
Then there is the local staff. For the merchant they are technically only necessary for collecting the money and protecting the shop from theft. But for the customers, as you mention, they are an important aspect.
We could imagine a scenario (we may not believe it to be possible but can imagine it) that through video surveillance and facial recognition that a computer can ascertain where every piece of stock that has been put into a store has been removed. Further, that surveillance would take care of charging the person acquiring the stock regardless of how surreptitiously they did so. This would be a big improvement in the shops economic model if everything they brought in was "sold" and charged for. Shops today have complained of losses from employee theft and shoplifting reaching 3.23% of sales at grocers[1] and that cuts into their profits significantly. Take that loss away and the grocer gets to keep more money from its revenue.
What to do with that extra money? The biggest job category at risk is cashier, but what if those people became roaming store customer assistance agents? For the same amount of pay they would now spend their days helping the customers find the groceries in the store, reaching high shelves for people who are short or disabled, restocking shelves from the larger stock in the storage area. Baggers would still be useful as people with many groceries would still want help going out to their car. Butchers and bakers, and counterstaff for lunch counters would still be needed.
But then here is the rub, the prices for the groceries wouldn't change at all. The cost savings of automated checkout are going into the salaries of former cashiers.
Now if at another Grocery they instead simply lower their prices. You the consumer get to decide if the former cashier has a place in the store or not. You decide by paying a price for your groceries that lets the merchant pay the former cashier to be there as service personnel.
My experience suggests that the bulk of the customers will go to the 'cheap' grocer and end up taking away the cashier's jobs because they are unwilling to pay a bit extra to support that person. People will rationalize it and blame other factors but the bottom line will be that by patronizing the less expensive store with no cashiers, they will cut off revenue to the store that had found alternate employment for their cashiers. And that shift will result in either the re-employed cashiers losing their jobs or that other store going out of business, or both.
[1] http://fortune.com/2015/06/24/shoplifting-worker-theft-cost-...
Why not just give them actual welfare?
Religious institutions provide avenues for nominally non-commercial social interactions. Mutiple variants are available to account for taste (e.g. Christianity, some forms of yoga).
Personal opinion: Amazon is not interested in creating supermarkets/wal-marts. Instead it wants to sell an ML solution to other brick & mortar stores, and this current effort is to prove plausibility. Selling an ML solution, with cameras and software, is harder to compete with than a tagging solution (especially if based on open and accessible hardware).
So what is new? We have been automating jobs out of existence for a long time. Every era has had a lot of people that are redundant, every era has had useless governments get to grips with it.
Recently I automated three jobs out of existence, making the computer do the data entry work with the customer filling in forms. This is great for the customer as they now get what they want done instantly instead of having to wait a week for the human to do what the computer can do. It is great for the company as 3 people don't have to be managed, provided office space and paid. But as for my colleagues?
I obviously have had thoughts about automating my friends on the next desk out of existence, how I see it is that there are actually plenty of vacancies in the company, there are plenty of vacancies outside the company and the writing has been on the wall for the last year regarding the changes we put through. 2 of my 3 former colleagues are now working elsewhere, having moved on fine, but there is the one that did not step up and go for other interviews within the company or look elsewhere. Now I am sure that government handouts are available, however, if someone does not look out for their own job and assumes it will always be there for them, what can you do? Is it always the government's fault in this situation?
My above sentiment is a tad Thatcherite, it was Norman Tebbit who said 'on your bike', i.e. if there isn't a job for you in your home town then you have got to move, the government isn't going to magically create a job for you. The 'on your bike' remark didn't go down too well in the 1980's, but 'on your bike' it has been since then.
My favorite part of your post is how you acknowledge that you knew about court cases related to predatory pricing (Arkansas Supreme Court), while simultaneously pretending you didn't know about Wal-Mart being accused of it, and demanding evidence to prove it anyway.
Combined with your clearly detailed knowledge of the history of Wal-Mart, you can't even properly accuse me of throwing out an ad-hominem without contradicting yourself.
Thanks for the laughs. I had karma to burn. :)
The problem is the civil unrest seems to be moving in the direction of ethnic nationalism and isolationism, which may not turn out to be the best long term solution to this problem.
not to mention you'd be arrested for hacking
If you have the choice to buy or not to buy at the shop, that's fine, it is your decision. But let's imagine that in the not so far future, all shops in your neighborhood are like this. No way to go shopping whithout given exact trace of you, your location, the stuff you buy, the time you buy, the amount of food etc.
We all know that too much data is not good for us (yes, I am looking at you, my government).
While I like the idea of not standing in a line and wait, I really wish that these shops offer a prepaid anonymous card for those who don't want to be totally tracked.
You're spot-on in splitting the problem into two in your other comment.
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[0] - especially if you frown at one of its most powerful form in a large society - government regulations.
It's not a 'natural' evolution, but organized fight from labour.
The same with the general conditions of work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_and_Collieries_Act_1842
So, in my opinion, reducing the workweek or, an alternative that I think is more practical, stop working younger it's against powerful interests and can't be done without a fight.
If the store is falsely accused its simple to hold the receipt up against the paper label.
There are digital price labels but they're unidirectional protocol so every time a product comes off sale the store risks substantial trouble if the digital update protocol is merely 99.9% successful.
You'd need a successful bidirectional verifiable digital price tag system. It could be as simple as sweeping a very high resolution camera up and down the aisles.
amazon go swim - just dive right in!
amazon go kennels - just drop and drive!
amazon go restoration hardware - good luck!
amazon go lite - just grab and checkout and go!
amazon go guns - just grab and go!
i assume they will eventually open this up to other retailers / service providers?
False. Sometime I go to the grocery store for social interaction. You know, to get out. I generally go to a particular wine shop cause I like chatting with the guy at the counter. The idea that we do all this "stuff" ("processes") to get "stuff" done, and then separately we go somewhere for the express and sole purpose of socializing, is just clearly wrong. It's all mixed in. We're social creatures. We socialize while at the barber shop. We socialize at the grocery store. We socialize at work. At church. At football or soccer games. If we attempt to "refactor" out the "process" to make it more efficient, fine. But, don't pretend like whatever we replace that effort with we're not going to be socializing while we do that new thing.
It's frankly really sad that we have all these people that used to be persons we knew and visited with at the checkout counter, now they're in some warehouse being super efficient having no time to visit with coworkers while they work, meanwhile, we pretend that stuff magically shows up at grocery stores and we can walk in and walk out and magic and future wow.
But what about this: What is to stop someone from pulling items out of other people carts?
Software can be write once, run everywhere. You could replace thousands of cashiers with software written by a team of 10 software engineers.
Maintenance of hardware/software could be taken care of by a few people running to multiple stores throughout the day. Example would be Starbucks in San Francisco. There is a Starbucks nearly every block in the inner-city. You could just have two guys walk from store to store to perform checks/maintenance.
So yes, I see big possibility of thousands of service workers being out a of a job due to automation. Which is why a lot of people are saying we need to seriously consider something like universal basic income for the near future ..
This probably says a lot more about me than it does Amazon Go...
I think there are plenty of ways humans can improve the world that doesn't involve jobs but it's going to be a rough transition. Where there might be fewer cashiers, I hope there will eventually be more educators, scientists, artists, and caretakers.
Decathlon, the world largest sport goods retailer already use that technology.
They still have checkout lines but technically speaking they would be able to charge you when you leave the store.
Last time I spoke with them they were using Embisphere hardware, but any vendor, Checkpoint for instance, could be used to similar effects.
If all products are rfid tagged (which is entirely possible given the current price of metallic ink) then this store is at most state of the art.
If they actually use vision techniques then it is actually quite a feat. Current vision techniques used in retail are either too crude (when based on the store cctv cameras) or too costly (another French company, IVS, has demonstrated a self service buffet style automated checkout but AFAIK it is still prototype).
Disclaimer: I have links with investors in both Embisphere and IVS.
This adage only works when marginal value of a customer is high, and monetary preferences aren't utterly dominating customer's thought process. Business dealing with necessities, or ones where demand outweights supply, aren't like that - that's why in a grocery store, customer is trash. There's plenty more where he/she came from.
> You claim it's a personal attack, and then you do exactly what I said you would; take the evidence, and do your best to dismiss it.
I claimed your specific statements were personal attacks, because they were.
> My favorite part of your post is how you acknowledge that you knew about court cases related to predatory pricing (Arkansas Supreme Court), while simultaneously pretending you didn't know about Wal-Mart being accused of it, and demanding evidence to prove it anyway.
There's a big difference between an accusation and a proven fact.
> Combined with your clearly detailed knowledge of the history of Wal-Mart, you can't even properly accuse me of throwing out an ad-hominem without contradicting yourself.
My father-in-law retired from WalMart after working there for thirty years - as a sales clerk, basically. My knowledge of the history stems from my being close to it and having been interested in the topic for a long time. In fact, my interest in the topic is why I asked if you had evidence of their driving competitors out of business and raising prices, because that's something I'd love to have.
I also seriously considered suing WalMart a few years ago. I worked there as a freight unloader in 2002. They had a policy of not allowing employees to wear steel-toe boots and I was injured on the job as a result of it when a furniture box was dropped on my foot. The nail on my right big toe is permanently disfigured as a result. I went as far as paying an attorney for a few hours' time to prepare a case, but in the end it became clear that pursuing it would have been a bad financial decision.
> Thanks for the laughs. I had karma to burn. :)
Again, I didn't downvote you.
It looks like they have a row of cameras along the top of each shelf that will be used to detect when you pick up and place items back down.
The RFID tags are mostly useful at the gates to confirm the visual data and feed back into the machine learning algorithm.
Yes! It's a useful lens – just as Hayek is. No-one has a monopoly on absolute truth in the social sciences, so understanding (and empathizing with) all the framing narratives, most all of which have some kind of a point, is crucial to being able to navigate these kinds of discussion.)
Understanding Marxist (and Hayekian) thought has been very helpful to me in framing my own politics – which, ironically enough, wind up being moderate market/social liberalism in the European tradition.
That the majority of comments in this thread seem to imply or at least tolerate this assumption is quite saddening.
This technology would be extremely valuable to a shop like that. More choice, more customers, better shopping experience. And employing staff for 3 short-lived peak periods must be expensive.
Generations that are being born today won't see a supermarket as a social place at all, and those are the generations that will be accepting and shaping how humanity interacts, so you better adapt to their "normal" life.
The transition will be difficult (they usually are) but the end result (more free time for everyone) sounds good to me.
People are inefficient sacks of meat with finite potential. When we have designed a black box that solves all problems, answers all answerable questions, maximizing all efficiencies for us, and protects us from any possible threat, what do we do next? What is left?
The value of humanity isn't a universal purpose, that's just how we fool ourselves into believing that there is a point to our lives. That's how we reason about pain, suffering, and hardship.
Human existence, our experience is existentially pointless. It is down to the individual to create a purpose. Perhaps you view the purpose as being something tangible and 'out there' to be had. Others see the purpose as simply just being, enjoying the small things, finding pleasure in the pointlessness.
No one can say what the value for another is. There is ultimately no value except that in which you find in yourself.
So let's not kid ourselves that we as a race are working toward some kind of ultimate design because that design is in our minds only and as such can't be 'ultimate' or significant to the 'other' in any way. Indeed it is likely to be a folly of our mind, a foolish solution to the non-problem of being.
a) You track every person from multiple camera angles, it should be "relatively easy" to track the position of every customer at all times. I'm not sure if it can handle people in very close proximity (or e.g. after hugging in store) - maybe Amazon actually uses facial recognition to resolve the identities afterwards
b) Only one person can enter the gate at once, and it's easy to authenticate the person at the starting point
c) Leaving is also a one-way gate, and at that point the system can simply mark the shopping as complete and mail the receipt
d) The shelves are specially designed and can sense (maybe with RFIDs) when an item is removed from the shelf, and match that with the person closest to the item. A possible difficulty is handling people who take an item from the back of the shelf (e.g. to get a fresh item).
So, sometimes the more automated option is also the option that involves more net 'humanity' for me (or at least more time for close/meaningful human relationships).
For me, this retail model would be attractive.
Separately, I agree that automation may be displacing people who need assistance as a result, but I think the best way to address that is to offer government assistance, not to avoid the valuable automation.
http://www.inews880.com/syn/112/172511/mom-and-pop-bust-reco...
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/11/17/bc-man-arrest...
At the end of the end of the episode he was asked what his "dream" supermarket would be, and he said one where people don't have to check items out. They walk in, grab something, walk out, and are automatically charged.
This seems to be exactly what Amazon has done. Pretty amazing to see the realization of his dream be announced only two months after his interview.
[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
1. Not everyone has a smartphone.
2. Not everyone has an electronic account with which to pay (or for practical reasons, they can't use it frequently).
And the people that fall into those categories aren't just fringe. Parents give dollar bills to their kids & send them to the store to fetch food. People without established credit might have to use cash for purchases, etc.
Where is your three-year, peer-reviewed study into the emotional motives of shoppers? After all, you flatly stated that "The overwhelming majority of people do not go to the grocery store as a social exercise."
Since you seem to be a very serious, data-minded person: CITATION PLEASE.
As for plain old physical theft:
Oh here is an interesting exploit. Buy or steal a $20 "VISA gift card" register an account with that as the payment option, walk into the store, grab $500 worth of steaks/liquor, walk out.
I worked at a food store as a starving student and we had interesting problems with people loading up carts and shoving them out the fire safety doors into a waiting pickup truck and driving off. If you allow people with false ID into the building, you will get ripped off. I can assure you police are completely uninterested in video footage of shoplifters, probably due to the near infinite volume. If you can physically get away, unless you achieve felony levels of theft value, you're simply free. This might have interesting long term implications for whats for sale as fewer and fewer people have higher and higher paying jobs and everyone else is perma-poor, such as this tech might scale for 80 pound bags of rice and flour even when almost everyone is poor, but not jars of caviar and $300 bottles of liquor and rare wines and jewelry stores. Salt and pepper, sure, saffron threads probably not.
Wait, where's your evidence for this claim? I live in a small town in Croatia and, no, the overwhelming majority of the people in my neighborhood are not in a hurry to get their shopping over with. The speed at which groceries are acquired is just one metric out of many influencing their experience.
This is not to say that progress is necessarily bad or that checkout lines are great, merely that reducing every transaction down to its economic value risks overlooking other, less quantifiable aspects of the transaction.
You're biased by your experience, because you live in a world that's starkly segmented between work and play. I lived there, too, so I understand your perspective. But your values -- and Silicon Valley values in general -- are not necessarily universal.
What if I go with someone that doesn't have an Amazon Go account grabs some stuff for me and throw it to me?
Or how about I go with someone that has an Amazon Go account too and we divide in two, he goes for the milks I go for the cereals. We meet just before the "check-out" and he gives me my milk I give him his cereal.
I'd need to know more about the technical stuff to know how it could be confused, or to know if it's even possible to.
In France and many European countries to open a supermarket you need approval from a local and national administration. They check if your supermarket will endanger local commerce or existing big box retailers.
This is one of the reasons why Costco has delayed it's opening in Paris suburbs. All major european retailers fought (openly or covertly) against the permit and won several times.
Fear of the "big American Wolf" aside, it is a well known fact that letting a big box store or a retail park open near a busy city center will cause damages to the city center: some mom and pop shops will move onto the retail park, national clothing chains will do the same. Once almost everything a consumer needs has left for a nearby retail park, the city center economy collapses. Once the city center starts to collapse, it drives even more consumers to the retail park in a cascading effect.
I'm on mobile atm so I can only offer anecdotal evidence but I know several economic studies have been made on that subject.
A side effect of this regulated model is the prevalence of drive through supermarkets in France. All chains have opened an enormous amount of these. The reason is quite simple: the regulation is enforced for surfaces larger than 400 square metres. Drives have at most 10 square metres open to the public so were free to set shop anywhere. It took a few years to close that loophole...and the meantime carrefour, auchan, le clerc, casino, cora all opened dozens to hundreds of locations.
With automation, supermarket costs will reduce, otherwise there would be no reason to automate.
This also happens with books, buying online is not so pleasant as go to a store, but people do, for different reasons.
Though appealing to Amazon, of all companies, about humanity where workers are involved is sadly, comically unfitting.
Most large stores take out nearly everything off the shelves at night even if it's still within it's "use before" date which on it's own is utterly nonsensical to begin with as most items don't expire for days, if not weeks, months and even years from the "use/best before" date.
People drop stuff, people mishandle goods, how many people squeeze a vegetable or a fruit to check if it's ripe damaging it? how many apples get a mushy spot because they banged around in the crate?
You are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel of inventory attrition when you are talking about perishable misplaced items, compared to everything else they are a rounding error.
There is a lot of loss baked into every supply chain, unless you are going to change it in it's entirety really don't bother with the end, the loss at the point of sale is minimal compared to everything else.
> We socialize at the grocery store.
I never go to the grocery store for socializing. When I was still in England, I constantly ordered online. Now it's a chore and I miss england.
> We socialize while at the barber shop.
I shave my head to avoid having to go to the barber shop.
> We socialize at work.
I work remotely to avoid having to deal with that.
> At church.
Not religious. Probably because I'd have to go to church if I were.
> At football or soccer games.
I play tennis just so I don't have to deal with a team.
I can't wait for this technology to make its way here. The grocery lines on saturdays are insane. Also maybe that means the shops will be open longer hours and I can go in the middle of the night so I can avoid meeting people even more.
The upfront effort needed to steer consumer behavior is shockingly minimal.
Effectively, you still lived in a village. One neighborhood in Cincinnati functioned like a village for me in the early 2000's.Many neighborhoods in Barcelona function that way.
When I lived in New York, one of the most walkable cities on Earth, it was even worse: long lines and anonymous, interchangeable cashiers.
I'm not, as you imagine, touting walk-ability as a panacea. My point is that it's the societal structure that gives the humanity perceived by the Barcelonan commenter, not the checkout jobs per se.
The problem is assuming that total wealth means anything for anyone but the capitalist class that owns said wealth.
And you admit that Wal-mart as a topic is something that held your interest for years, so you're not exactly unbiased when you're asking for evidence, which explains why you were so quick to discount all evidence provided with such hand-wavey statements as "it was settled out of court without admission of fault", as if that meant something.
And despite your own personal injuries caused by their policies, you like the company enough to not bother with financial recompensation you are entitled to.
Keep pretending that your "debunking" posts didn't lead to the burning of my karma, and people downvoting my posting history. I'm now curious about how far it can go!
All I have to do is pown someone's phone and use an app on my phone to make my phone look like its their phone, regardless of where they actually are. I can't imagine the facial recognition would be that good.
Its a simple extension of physically stealing phones or cloning like people did in the 80s/90s on analog AMPS. cloning is interesting to think about, steal their amazon auth info, remotely brick their phone for good luck, walk in with a burner phone claiming to be their new phone, its all good.
I shop fast too. I get in and out as fast as I can, because - after all - the attendants in the store where I go to would not know a leaf of spinach from a leaf of kale...
The same applies to my electronics shopping...
...at least I can justify the guys there not knowing kale!
Jokes aside: not all stores are like that, and not all people shop like that.
I can think of many elderly people using shopping as a main daily source of social interaction.
Diversity means choice and choice is generally good.
I think the interesting point here is that when you remove social interaction and product advice from physical stores, then really you might as well only buy online... and Amazon is the king of online.
So this looks like a fantastic move by Amazon.
To this day I'm so thankful that I got a B.A. that let me actually leave the CS cage during college instead of just taking more math.
What sort of prices are you seeing?
Perhaps not. I worked at a supermarket as a starving student decades ago and the number of non-cashier employees dwarfed the number of cashiers. Most of the people in a store at any given time are stocking a department or cleaning or providing counter service or rather optimistically all three. We had more people employed at 3am stocking shelves and scrubbing floors than employed serving customers during 2nd shift...
There is an assumption in the comments, that might come from confusing urban convenience stores with supermarkets, that the only employee in a supermarket is the cashier.
You could make something like a quik-trip gas station/convenience store almost staff-less, but an actual supermarket is crawling with non-cash-handling employees.
But we're far from that point now. Anything machines can currently do is, pretty much by definition, drudgery. I'd be happy to reevaluate that statement if and when this changes.
I have no idea what the ultimate answer to that question would be. Lots of SF authors have tried to address it, coming up with answers varying from humans always having something they can do better, to humans existing to have fun, to humans having no point at all and therefore get wiped out by the machines.
There comes a point where flexibility and gumption don't get you far enough. When the pool of good quality jobs shrinks so much that the ecosystem cannot support the species.
I'm not calling for a halt to progress. If you hadn't automated away those jobs someone else would have. There are very strong economic incentives to do so. I just wish governments would see the writing on the wall and start planning for the future where the status quo leaves most people out in the cold.
You point out that there are a good number of employees in your local stores who have a productive job which they enjoy and from which they get personal meaning. You fear losing all of that if we introduce fully automated stores.
Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose we already HAD fully automated stores, but we also had this same group of 60 people who (in the actual world) work in those 5 supermarkets. What would we invent for them to do which would pay them, give them something productive to do which they enjoyed and from which they could get personal meaning? Scanning groceries for 8 hours a day just wouldn't be my first pick to address this problem.
So I guess what I am trying to get at is that I agree with your sense that there IS a possible problem with eliminating the need for these jobs -- but I don't think it's a problem of "shops need to have people". I think it is a problem of "the benefits of improved automation need to be more widely shared". If all of the benefits go to a few people who happen to own Amazon stock, then what's to happen to the 60 folks in your neighborhood?
Personally, I'm in favor of some sort of universal basic income along with a change in our society to create socially acceptable niches for people to do small, simple projects -- but I certainly don't know all the answers.
I suspect that Amazon has RFID tags on everything in addition to the vision systems. There are existing backup vision systems for retail checkouts, such as LaneHawk. Most of the components for this already exist. Now it's here.
I have reasons to believe several ink manufacturers/printers are working on an order of magnitude less per tag.
But are you so sure that 10 cents is too much?
What do you think the gross margin on that can is ? ;-) What do you think the net margin on that can, once the checkout lines (and their personnel) are removed, would be?
If a stitched RFID chip on a 2€ thsirt is currently cost-effective for Decathlon, I see no reason why printed RFID tags would not be cost effective in the very near future, if it is not yet the case (and once again, I have reasons to believe it is almost already the case).
As for loose weighed items it doesn't look like they're selling those. /Everything/ in the promo shot of the store is already packaged and they look like they're going for more of a convenience store food source than a traditional grocery store.
You would be surprised how many EBT/WIC folks have smart phones since they are often part of educational plans and back-to-work initiatives. It was often easier to order product off Amazon than locally (gift cards, debit cards).
I think the mistaken comparison people make, is that when farmers and such lost jobs in the industrial revolution, new opportunities that didn't require total re-education were popping up as fast as old ones disappeared...this is not the case today. The shrinking range of opportunities are to be found in increasingly exclusive, high-skill white collar positions. People are being left behind, and the fuck-you-I-got-my-STEM degree crowd, their attitude isn't making anything better.
Also any online shop (Amazon included) has a complete history of everything you've ever bought.
For brick&mortar shops you would be a fool to assume they don't mine your shopping history based on your credit card (or some sort of hash that's computed from your CC#).
I certainly hope the poor folks who toil at Aldi or Safeway might find a better thing to do with their lives, and if those stores are displaced I won't be too sad.
What worse shortly after some stores in London got those there was less cashiers working at eventide. So you had to choose between unpleasant expirience or long queue.
So to get around needing to tag everything you can throw computer vision and machine learning at the problem to determine where the person is grabbing an item from and combined with well organized shelves you now know what they just grabbed off the shelves.
From my perspective it's annoying. I need to go in to a crowded market get all my stuff. Once I've done that I either need to wait in line for an automatic check out station (because there are not enough), or wait in line for a cashier which takes forever especially if someone decides to pay with cash.
For me this potentially gets me out of the store faster so I can do things I actually want to do. I honestly wish I did know the people but that's not really how it works and so this is exciting for me
"I know all the people who work in these gas stations. The attendant at the pump always whistles a quiet song while he pumps my gas. He knows my son and is always nice and friendly."
Yet, besides the completely weird laws in New Jersey and Oregon, society has moved on and people now pump their own gas.
I understand the parent's post point to some degree. I don't want a cold a sterile society where no one never interacts with anyone any longer. However, I also get stuck in grocery store lines all the time. It would be a net win for me to skip these lines all together even if the places I shop at become a little more impersonal.
At least in the United States, places have continued to staff less and less cashiers and have relied more and more on self-checkout. So, for many of these stores, it isn't like I'm missing out on any real connection. This just seems like a way less stressful self-checkout.
Apple lets you check yourself out using their app at the Apple Store but I rarely do this because I feel like I'm shoplifting or that people are watching me suspiciously. I'm curious if I would have that same reaction to these stores or not. I'm guessing not, because it is the only way to pay.
The machines are good enough now that I almost never get stuck, although some people are a lot more prone to needing staff assistance to complete checkout.
But I am guilty of sacrificing them for convenience myself, e.g. I tend to avoid the cheese counter at the supermarket in favor of prepackaged stuff from self-serve shelves. Removing final checkout is just more of the same.
At least Amazon seem to be trying to the robomarket with a permanent all-seeing-AI installation instead of the not too unrecent consensus prediction of RFID on every single bar of gum and on every piece of fruit. Much better to talk about social implications than about technicalities in RFID surveillance.
There are all kinds of reasons why that is unreasonable:
* different stores might have systems with different rules and policies, causing confusion;
* people may not remember where to return the item;
* the magic machine-learning system might glitch and not recognize the item was replaced, and you probably won't notice since there's little feedback from the "virtual cart" since you're not interacting with it directly;
* another glitch could put another customer's item in your "virtual cart", so you have nothing to return;
* etc.
Systems like this should fail in customer-friendly ways, and "item returned to the wrong place" is a kind of failure.
crazypyro, you may want to do as Brian Regan said (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8kThoZpF_U ) and pick up some Montana brochures. If you don't have 3-5 minutes in the day to talk to your neighbors, you either need new neighbors or a career change. Life is a lot of things, but it ain't all GSD all the time either.
But still I generally pay with cc/debit cards so the banks still know where, not necessarily what, but how much I spent.
In the US, it might require some doublespeak to keep people from revolting at the "socialist" implications of paying people for not working.
I wonder how it would react to a family shopping, is it tracking people or the bag? Hopefully it'd bill who ever has the bag in case your kid puts in a bunch of junk food. Supporting carts for larger purchases seems like somthing is missing.
But yeah I love this. I hope we move towards the future when repetitive jobs are all automated and we have some sort of basic income. So the human race can be more innovative and everyone can unlock their true potential instead of being a corporate drones for a job they never liked and can't figure out how to get out of it.
Edit: Wanted to add real quick - as things do get more automated. I do hope there's a easy way to get ahold of human in case of things acting up or if you just need some help. I know tons of sites seem to not even provide support or make it super hard to even find a contact. Amazon itself seems to have good support from what I've heard, never really had to use it but in general companies should focus on support also, with or without automation. Just seems like somthing generally lacking to me in the tech industry.
If you take a slice of cake, hold it for 12 second, frown, put it back, spin clockwise three times and buy a lowfat plain yogurt, you will get a discount for sugar-free pastry on your next visit... if you did it just right.
Retailers are definitely pushing in that direction with things like Bluetooth LE beacons that talk to your phone. Plus store loyalty cards and the like, which have been around for decades. But those schemes have mostly been opt-out, apart from those weird stores that require membership cards.
I don't think the "productive atmosphere" concept is fully realized yet. Imagine how happy starbucks would be if they could reclaim all of that bar area for more seating (and more customers ordering more drinks!) or less area and less rent.
I doubt that sentiment would be shared by most cashiers at Walmart and other retail chains.
I'm not installing Amazon Go on devices for each my children, so does Amazon Go let them in, or not?
I think it's fair to say that even if Walmart could half their operating costs with technology, those savings would not find their way into the pockets of consumers.
> Part of what makes life awesome is meeting random people standing in lines.
By all means go search for lines to meet random people. But spare me because for me that time is wasted, and I rather recover all of it to spend it with my friends, or doing sport, or even watching TV with my wife. This thing won't make lines disappear altogether, so you'll be fine: you'll be able to find them in the post office for example.
Also, employees trying to break the system are not likely to bringing young kids shopping with them.
The only question I have is who's liable when things are fuzzy: right now, the store bears the liability for things eaten within the store, destroyed while in the store, snuck out, etc. It's easy to see that this technology leads to the liability being pushed onto the shopper for all of those cases, but that will definitely lead to some serious customer-service arguments.
Really this whole thread is all just rank speculation that'll be mostly confirmed or denied once a store actually opens and people can look around and see what's going on.
Also as for scaling it's a fixed cost to cover a larger area compared with a variable cost if they're using RFID to scan when you pass through the turnstiles so really a camera based system probably scales better than a tag based system.
The fact that people go to supermarkets, to get their groceries faster and cheaper, instead of going to half a dozen small stores where the potential for fulfilling social interaction is much bigger.
However, I don't think that end game is the first use case for an RFID solution - inventory monitoring/LP/loyalty can demonstrate ROI long before the checkout lines are removed. For those use cases, the unit price needs to be much cheaper, but an order of magnitude improvement might be right.
A): None (catastrophic). People die out, or are wiped out, as advanced machines outcompete them for all resources.
B): The boundary (hopeful). AI capable of creating new ideas is either impossible or just too difficult to invent (hard to prove which way it goes), so people keep pushing it farther.
C): None (utopic). Machines do anything people would have done for society, including the creation of new things to have and/or do. However, machines don't reach the level of autonomy required for them to actively eliminate people, or decide against it because there's plenty of resources for everyone, so people have 100% leisure time (which may happen to resemble what used to be work, if the people in question enjoy the process, but is no longer necessary to society).
D): The boundary (dystopic). Machines end up being more complex than people - to the degree that people are valued less than sufficiently advanced machines, and are put to work rather than manufacturing robots to do the jobs.
A note on D: Generally relatively soft sci-fi that does this, because the stories generally put humanity's role as hard labor, which doesn't make sense. However, I could see a story in "The Thinking Machine of the Future has become so Incredibly Advanced that the Absolute Pinnacle of Human Thought is to them what Plowing Fields is to Us." Humanity as the intellectual equivalent of the plow ox (or the tractor), doing the jobs that the machines (with their much higher potential for more complex thought) find to be beneath them and refuse to subject each other to. Possibly with the assistance of basic nonintelligent machines, the way we wouldn't try to make an ox plow a field without first affixing a plow to it.
Last time I heard Amazon is struggling with net positive cash flow because it keeps on re-investing profits into various other side projects with eventual goal of dominating retail space e.g. Amazon Go.
The customers tend to be brand loyal, and the lifetime value of a customer is very high (family with 2.4 kids and a dog is minimum $10k/year in gross sales), so when you start banishing customers for doing things that they may not even realize that they did, they will loudly tell everyone they know what a bunch of assholes you are! The $25 roast will cost you $500.
If I stop shopping at a local grocery that uses a loyalty card for two weeks, they will immediately begin sending coupons worth 10-20% of my average transaction value to get me back. The ROI of giving away $20 at a pretty low margin implies a high value.
I have skin in the game on the loyalty part so I will abstain from speaking on that.
Coming back on your thoughts about inventory, the birth of Embisphere, the RFID company I spoke about earlier (and the reason why Decathlon started to use them), was solely the invention of a "racket" for fast instore inventory
http://www.embisphere.com/en/rfid-products/embiventory-power
Other uses (checkout, LP) were almost an afterthought. The sole gain on speed and accuracy of in-store inventory was enough to decide Decathlon to add RFID chips on all its inventory and Decathlon inventory is massive ! They are in the range of 30-70k active SKUs, with sometimes hundreds of thousands units of stock. Sell that in hundreds of stores worldwide, add the warehouses in every country and the manufacturing facilities in China, and you end up with millions of euros of investment just for that damn inventory ;-)
(I can't help but think that half the attraction of Starbucks is having chipper college students hand-write a personalized drink order...)
I'm not privy to my father-in-law's financial details, and if I was, I wouldn't share them with strangers online.
This is exactly what I mean by "personal attack". You're attempting to discredit me instead of addressing my argument.
> And you admit that Wal-mart as a topic is something that held your interest for years, so you're not exactly unbiased when you're asking for evidence, which explains why you were so quick to discount all evidence provided with such hand-wavey statements as "it was settled out of court without admission of fault", as if that meant something.
I never claimed to be unbiased, I asked you to provide sources for claims.
The fact that "it was settled out of court without admission of fault" doesn't mean anything is exactly my point. It does not support your position.
> And despite your own personal injuries caused by their policies, you like the company enough to not bother with financial recompensation you are entitled to.
Who said I liked WalMart? I have several issues with them, mostly around how they treat their suppliers. I didn't sue them because it would have cost me a lot of money with very little chance of success.
> Keep pretending that your "debunking" posts didn't lead to the burning of my karma, and people downvoting my posting history. I'm now curious about how far it can go!
My posts have nothing to do with people downvoting you. Your attitude and refusal to support your claims are responsible for that.
Where I was seeking evidence was for the claim that WalMart (1) lowers prices below their cost for the specific purpose of eliminating competition and that they (2) raise prices in compensation after those competitors fold.
Also, I can walk downstairs and say "Alexa, turn on the living room lights" and my Amazon Echo turns them on. Same thing to turn them off again. That's extremely convenient...way, way more convenient than walking around and turning 4-5 lamps on and off.
They have come way down in price to the point to where you can either pay $20 for a smart bulb versus $10-12 for a standard LED.
Will be interesting to see what happens though...I do agree that life isn't just all about efficiency. But people certainly do enjoy convenience.
Maybe I'm underestimating what other companies are already doing, but it seems like Amazon is pushing the envelope here.
I guess governments are increasingly doing this kind of thing too, and that's also very troubling, but the silver lining is that at least they aren't doing it so they can bombard me with targeted ads.
Have a nice week!
It would be lovely if you developed an in-store navigation capability. It's so frustrating to run into a store to pickup something, and not be able to immediately find it.
The results of periodic scans should provide a decent point cloud that could be used to determine shelf/aisle geometry without a blueprint. Foursquare uses this sort of approach for its interior mapping process, but they can't tell me where to find the bean dip. There are multiple obvious ways to monetize that dataset including simply selling it to Foursquare.
If that notion is correct, moving towards an educational model focused around creating the components needed for general entertainment (video/AR/VR/Music etc) might alleviate the problems we'll face.
If one day all the stores are like this, I guess you may argue I can still grow my own food, and everything is fine.
Maybe this is different, but my experience with recent tech innovations in brick-and-mortar payment systems haven't been positive overall. More trouble than they're worth.
This could very well be different, but the minute the store starts valuing the AI over the customer, I think the store is in for some trouble public relations-wise.
"Because it works by watching actual items come off the shelves — instead of reading a tag or RFID chip, for example — you won’t be able to steal items by removing or altering tags."
It's incorrect and misleading to talk like that malicious use case is the only one at play here.
First, you kill competition, second you jack up the prices once you have established a defacto monopoly (or oligopoly)? See Uber lowering prices last year and "suddenly" rising them this month, now that they are the defacto standard in many cities?
Whethever or not laws & regulations should be in place to protect the consumer against that kind of behaviour is another debate :-)
Some variation of the prisoner dilemma could be raised as a counter argument to my comment, though...
Self-checkout works well for half a dozen items in a hand basket. If you have a trolley full of a week's shopping, you're going to use a cashier. In fact, in this supermarket, you can't even get a trolley into the self-checkout area.
My local M&S store has three different checkout areas. (1) traditional, for people with trolleys. (2) Self-checkout area for people with baskets. (3) Really fast (but very narrow) lane for people just holding a few items in their hands. You almost never see people using the "wrong" area.
What's interesting is that I usually pick the one with the longest queue, ie line 3. The cashiers are really fast so you don't have to wait long.
One other factor is that a lot of us in line 3 are using contactless (Wave & Pay) cards, so the payment process doesn't slow things down. People who don't usually use the waiting time to get their cash ready.
Now my experience is of course limited to shops in urban Europe, servicing low- and middle-income populations. Maybe high-income people can afford to vote with their wallets, but with all the people I know, the ability to save $100+ / month by just going to the cheaper store of the few nearby is enough to make them not mind grumpy cashiers.
> they will loudly tell everyone they know what a bunch of assholes you are!
I have never in my entire life seen this behaviour impact a single company. Even though I'm first to badmouth asshole businesses and praise the nice ones. Even in tech, I'm yet to see a single company seriously impacted by people's reaction to bad behaviour. I mean, how is Uber still around? Or how is Lenovo still selling laptops?
In-store location of products is deeply linked with very complicated discussions between retailers and product manufacturers.
Moreover, facing is a very strategic part of retail and I doubt retailers would be happy to release their facing strategies to outsiders or competitors.
Even inside a retailer's organization, several opposing views exist, between maximizing breadth of product range, giving prime exposure to the private label, etc....the equation they have to solve is very complicated and I don't think there's an ideal solution to this. A retailer facing strategy is linked to its core values. It has a direct impact on its bottom line and an indirect one: the consumer's unconscious perception of facing "strategies" is probably very significant.
So how is this possible? It's possible because the very reason that fewer people work in agriculture is because each human is more productive, resulting in cheaper goods on the shelves, because each salary can produce more of the same good. In other words: when an employee becomes more productive, a company can sell its product at a lower price, and earn more money. It can use this money to hire more employees, to produce more goods, rather than result in a layoff. In a free-ish market (with healthy competition), competitors will force incumbents to lower their prices, in search for profits.
This has been seen countless times, in many different areas of industry (from pantyhose to, TVs to phones, cars etc.). All of these products have become significantly cheaper (relative to median income) over the past decades, and this has resulted in more people buying them, such that layoffs have become unnecessary because the increase in productivity is offset by an increase in demand.
So, it's relatively simple. 1) If the decrease in price does not cause an increase in demand, employees will have to be laid off. 2) If it causes an increase in demand, then the company can afford to hire, perhaps dramatically more. So, for example, if shoppers buy 5% more items because prices are reduced by 5% (because of automatic checkout), then the cashiers can work at the packaging facility, or the farm, or in transportation, needed to make 5% more goods available to consumers.
[1] https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/assets/4565243/Ag_workforce.png
If someone buys 45 items, but 3 dont ring up, as long as the 3 were relatively cheap items like a can of beans, as opposed to a $15 jar of spices, does it really matter ? Over time, the system will learn which items "go missing" most often and focus on them specifically for better inventory mgmt.
You can't charge your customer for an item they didn't buy. Trying to make the computer "dumb" doesn't change this. You're going to get angry customers on twitter, chargebacks, and possibly sued.
And David Fincher? Wow. No idea.
If I understand well, in Amazon Go, every customer has an account linked to a credit card. I guess that this will work as a deterrent. I a customer does something wrong, they can get a warning. Next time, the account is canceled. Problem solved.
This is awesome, as it's incredibly time-saving. At Woolworths I generally have to look like a doofus holding my next item to scan in front of the scanner for at least 2 seconds while the machine is frozen as it slowly weight-checks the item I just bagged...
At Coles the bottleneck is the speed at which I can bag things. Usually I just cram as many things into one bag as possible (I always repack later) and checking out takes under a minute.
NB: The Coles where I live is toward the back of the mall and reasonably far away from the center's exits. I think this has had an impact on the number of items that go walkies, which is why they were able to disable it. (The Woolworths on the other hand is practically outside - leaving there is like going through airport security, they physically rummage through your bags!)
This could change from day to day (e.g. fruits, veggies), vary based on quantity ordered, etc.
Then you get into private label (store brand) products, where the "cost" was usually either $0 or some ridiculously low number.
This was a national chain. At the store level at least, we wouldn't have been able to find the value of an item "at cost" with any confidence.
> Stores bake that into the cost of doing business
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37711091
> "I return half of what I buy," says 30-year-old Alex Demetri, who spends £500 to £700 on clothes each month.
> She also admits to wearing some of her clothes first before returning them.
> It is customers like Ms Demetri who are causing problems for shops, which are "struggling to cope" with the number of items returned, new research suggests.
> So-called "serial returners" are bringing back items which have been used, are marked or have parts missing, making a quarter of it unfit to resell.
Occasional mistakes happen, but some people deliberately do this kind of stuff.
The job-saving technology will live forever, long after the people who are temporarily displaced die. You're doing an immense amount of good for the untold number of people who aren't even born yet.
Technology is also global, but the political problems associated with eliminating jobs are problems on a state-by-state basis. Is it immoral to develop a technology just because some political systems are incapable of handling the gains in productivity, while other states are?
You know the King in the Little Price? He ruled over the whole universe - provided he just made reasonable demands, like ordering the sun to rise at dawn.
Likewise, some monopolies are only kept as long as the monopolist doesn't actually abuse it, because as soon as they do, it starts to make sense for competitors to open up.
Then the question becomes: if Walmart raised its prices so much, why didn't one of the other large chains move in to the same area?
Personally, I started asking anonbanker about it because I find most claims of long-term abuse of monopolies won without State help (Standard Oil being the typical example) to be flimsy at best, so I'm interested in finding good cases. Usually either the monopoly doesn't last very long or it's actually not being abused.
Where are these people getting the money to spend on entertainment if they aren't working? I don't think this will happen.
What I do see happening, however, is that people have less free time between juggling more than 1 job and a side gig with Uber/their ilk.
Amazon is in the business of creating a marketplace that efficiently matches buyers and sellers. It provides a distribution infrastructure for sellers and provides a high level of service for buyers.
Why is Japan different? For one thing, they use a checkout system that is designed to move lines quickly. Two employees can work concurrently, one ringing up a customer and the other handling money exchange with another customer. Customers do their own bagging in a seperate area. The POS system takes cash in and spits out the correct change, and also handles IC cards, credit cards, Apple Pay, etc seamlessly and usually without requiring anything more than a PIN at most. And of course, customers can prepare exact change or get their cards out and place it on the tray while the cashier is still ringing them up. And the final, most important element is the people--polite, attentive, careful, and professional. Cashiers are trained to call out every item and price, and offer extras such as ice packs for cold items, dry ice for ice cream, utensils for ready to eat items, and so on. A quick, efficient, pleasant interaction that ends with a bow and a gracious thank you goes a long way toward encouraging everyone to treat each other well. And, by the way, the money that would be sunk into Amazon's infrastructure and inevitable support services goes to keeping people in jobs.
But in most countries, it's not that the shops can't make it faster, it's that they don't want to. They make the biggest margins on the impulse buy merchandise along the queue and people won't stop going there just because they have to wait 3 minutes.
>And of course, customers can prepare exact change or get their cards out and place it on the tray while the cashier is still ringing them up.
Good luck putting your card on the tray in poorer countries :D :D, good way to get it stolen.
>And, by the way, the money that would be sunk into Amazon's infrastructure and inevitable support services goes to keeping people in jobs.
Keeping people in jobs is of dubious value, especially since Amazon's infrastructure would create jobs too, it's not just money disappearing and things materializing out of thin air.
>"The Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice, state governments and private parties who are sufficiently affected may all bring actions in the courts to enforce the antitrust laws."[1]
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
They don't have to give up the core data asset to be useful to insurance companies in this case. They just have to do something like give people a health score or something similar.
And I can guarantee that there are zero businesses designed to create jobs. Businesses are designed to create value, jobs are a byproduct.
There are going to be fewer and fewer jobs in the future, and the sooner societies adjusts, the better. Keeping people in unsustainable jobs will only slow this transformation.
I'm biased, by the way, because I'm from a post-communist country - we've had the "jobs for everyone" thing, and it wasn't working very well.
Me: "Sir, are you Mr.Vonnegut?".
KV: "Hmph". Me: "It is an honor to meet you. Fan of yours from when I was 16".
KV: "OK".
Still very fond of him and his works :)
I'm specifically asking about the assumption that "if we remove cashiers, supermarkets will obviously bring the prices down" (as a counter-example, I remember reading somewhere that Seattle's minimum wage didn't affect inflation in any meaningful way)
https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/shopping/refunds-and-returns...
I don't have a source for that.
By "personal data", if you mean the video footage of your shopping, then it will probably be deleted after a few days/weeks. It will just be used to train (reinforce) the machine learning model, and will be discarded eventually. But your shopping history will always be there, as it is now in online shopping sites...
Just wanted to note that we're really not doing too badly with advancing technology. And if you measure actual poverty as compared to relative poverty, which makes more sense to me, we are doing even better. Have a nice day.
"sir, you ate 4 grapes in store. Our grapes average 2seeds/grape, so we've calculated lost sales in the range of $800.
You see, those seeds could each grow into a vine that will produce an estimated $100 worth of grapes over the lifetime of the plant. You're basically stealing that money from us!"
All you're saying is "If your offer is far more attractive than anything else on the market, people will flock to your store and buy. What a bunch of fools acting like lemmings, Lol."
How are people supposed to react when faced with more interesting alternatives? NOT choose them to demonstrate their free will? That doesn't make much sense.
The problem with electronic surveillance is never the surveillance part. It's the part where we can surveil billions of people at once without the need for billions of spies.
Tell that to all the people who are doing badly? Jesus, it's like people look at some statistics that say the world is ok, and then continue in their totally ignorant life. The world is literally full of people who say it's not good enough.
What about the presence of self checkouts makes theft more likely?
The better question is if Amazon will "trust" or be able to secure areas that are traditionally food desserts so that these poor people will be able to have better and cheaper food access.
It's a nice innovation, but it does almost nothing with regards to competing on price with Walmart. And with the self checkouts, checking out isn't even that big of a deal. So i don't see how it's going to affect Walmart.
Also, the chipperness is a lot less likable when you're friends with some of them and all they can talk about is how much they hate customers :( The unspoken secret of retail is that it's soul crushing to work in.
Technology is advancing, and we're seeing lots of benefits from that -- I think everyone would agree. But advances in technology don't inherently translate into better quality of life. A $500 4K TV screen is amazing, but doesn't make up for the fact that a basic 2-bed apartment now costs $25,000/year. A $650 iPhone super-computer-in-your-pocket is fantastic, but doesn't make up for the fact that a 4-year degree now routinely runs $60,000 or higher.
Extending debt to cover up societies inequality doesn't actually solve inequality, it just hides from view how big of a problem the inequality has become.
Because that's the store's policy. If you don't like it, nobody is forcing you to shop there.
