Amazon Go

I worked at a grocery store for several years, and one thing I recall is customers CONSTANTLY putting items back in a random aisle, rather than where they found it.

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.

One interesting benefit of the “detect removal from shelf” concept is that there might finally be a time stamp associated with the removal of the item.

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.

> 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.

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?

Aside from putting up the odd sign to discourage certain behavior, no, I do not think that stores have any good reason to bend over backwards to keep individual customers.

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.

Stores bake that into the cost of doing business, it's like dropping something and breaking it, in the vast vast majority of cases you won't be charged for it, just be clean up on aisle 3...

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.

It'd be nice, for the stores, if they didn't have to bake so much "attrition" into their accounting.

The attrition is going to be high anyhow, tons of stuff gets damaged during shipping, handling and stocking, tons more is never sold.

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.