> Employees have tried to fool the technology. One day, three enterprising Amazonians donned bright yellow Pikachu costumes and cruised around grabbing sandwiches, drinks and snacks. The algorithms nailed it, according to a person familiar with the situation, correctly identifying the employees and charging their Amazon accounts, even though they were obscured behind yellow polyester.
Okay, so 3 employees tested it? This tech is going to be "tested" in the real world by tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the first few months/year. Something tells me things will go far from smoothly.
I've only had an experience with a "semi-cashierless" store, sort of speak, where the cashier would scan your stuff, and then it would give you a ticket, and you'd go to pay with it at a not-so-intuitive machine. Oh, and you also had to scan it again before you left the area at the designated exit-gate.
Let me tell you, it felt like both a more frustrating experience than just paying the cashier and it took longer time. The only thing this did is save the cashier 15 seconds per person, while the store paid for a dozen of those machines who knows what.
So we'll see if this is indeed a better experience, or it's just meant to save Amazon money on not having to pay for cashiers, while giving customers a more frustrating experience and making them spend more time in the store to register every item (for the same number of purchased items).
Apple's Face ID can't even identify your own face 100% of the time. How is Amazon's tech going to identify (from a distance) millions of people that pass through the store and every item they got with 100% accuracy??
You need to have an app on your phone and scan a code from the app/phone to enter. My guess is that it is based on location tracking of the phone (via either Bluetooth or WiFi) rather than facial recognition.
No mention of people wearing masks or putting them on after the fact or better yet, completely changing clothing? That's the easiest, simplest and cheapest way to beat this.
How do you figure? Identification isn't only based on your face.
From the article:
"Employees have tried to fool the technology. One day, three enterprising Amazonians donned bright yellow Pikachu costumes and cruised around grabbing sandwiches, drinks and snacks. The algorithms nailed it, according to a person familiar with the situation, correctly identifying the employees and charging their Amazon accounts, even though they were obscured behind yellow polyester. "
It links to an account on your phone. You're under full surveillance while in the store.
To go any further down the premise you're suggesting, you're already getting to traditional methods of walking into a store, stealing merchandise, and then running for it.
I'm aware you're under surveillance. I'm skeptical that it would be able to maintain the connection the entire time you're in the store. For example, what if you changed clothing?
The Pikachu example, I'd argue is even easier than people wearing regular clothing due to the fact that it's unusual.
Pfff. If I could get a waiver of legal liability in advance I can think of multiple ways to get around that. Since there aren't any cashiers whose safety could be threatened I'm heartily in favor of people developing creative hacks for the brief duration that remains before we turn the whole damn world into a capitalist panopticon.
I dunno. If the store has bathrooms will those be watched too? What's stopping someone from entering the bathroom and changing?
It's true that human surveillance can help a lot, but if that's the case you might as well just get cashiers , who double as stockers who are necessary anyways.
I'm less concerned about stealing and more interested whether this would be cheaper or a better experience than just having cashiers. Is EBT accepted for example? Can a grocery store not accept EBT? Can EBT even be accepted online? Etc.
What should happen if you change clothes in the bathroom? You would not allowed to enter with any goods not already purchased. So, you have to pick up your items after leaving the bathroom in your "new" clothes in a designated storage area (think: Ikea, Frys or Borders restrooms). Either, your smartphone would identify you against the system afterwards and the picked up items are attached to your account or the system would itendify a stranger without smartphone/check-in picking up items from the storage area. In both situations, I don't see how you could game the system.
> What should happen if you change clothes in the bathroom?
Nothing. Just like in a regular store.
If it ends up working how you describe it sounds like a terrible experience in cold areas where people regularly take off multiple layers of clothing, including but not limited to face masks, gloves, sweaters, coats, etc.
Also, in terms of gaming the system, it doesn't need to be "gamed", it just needs to allow you to walk out with items easily. People already shoplift easily, the question is whether it will be easier with this new system. Presumably the purpose of this is to be both easier for the customer and cheaper for Amazon compared to have cashiers.
Nice! It sort of looks like they’re deliberately exaggerating their hand motions when they pick up an item to maybe ensure the camera gets a good look?
There's probably a nice little waiting area where you can eat cucumber sandwiches while your DNA sample is processed for entry. You probably still have to install the app though.
So they've spent an extra year with people who fit the demographics of an Amazon employee trying to trick their systems. That should protect them from people who fit the demographics of an Amazon employee.
There still seem to be many of the issues people brought up a year ago, such as how this depends on the presence of a phone with the appropriate app installed, or what happens with groups of people in which only one person has the app (such as with kids).
More to the point, I can see how this would be better for Amazon, but I'm not sure it's better for most shoppers. Amazon gets to charge people who graze on produce while in the store, and kids who consume snacks in the store, and can presumably produce video evidence when customers throw a fit. But they can also overcharge me for things and how am I supposed to know that? Check the app in the parking lot to make sure I have everything it charged me for? What recourse do I have if not? What if something wasn't charged as marked on the shelf? I've already paid at that point. I've gone through this enough times with stores high-end and low-end to know it's inevitable for Amazon.
The leverage is all Amazon's, and the convenience doesn't offset that for me. I know I'm not alone, but maybe there aren't enough like me to dent their ambitions.
I presume you can check your cart via the app before checking out... in terms of overcharging, how do you know when you’re overcharged at the store when the cashier checks you out if you have more than 10 or so items? Do you remember all the prices of each item?
I often try to predict the value of the items in the shopping cart when waiting in the cashier queue. Most of the time shopping in a supermarket, I can predict the total sum in a range of +/- 2 Euros. My girlfriend? Perhaps in a range of +/- 5 Euros. My mother? She would only be irritated if the sum is at least 10 Euros above what she expected. And that is for 15-25 items and a total sum in the range of 40-60 Euros. But there is no way my mother, my girlfriend or even I would detect small over- or undercharging most of the time.
It's not about the total, but the prices of individual items as they show up on the checkout screen, which are pretty easy to remember (they're mostly the same week to week).
My local supermarket has some specials which are loyalty card only, so when the item is scanned the full price shows up. I use this to determine when to use the loyalty card for minimum tracking, minimum time, and minimum price (it doesn't have my personal info associated with it, but still connects purchases and it's faster to skip).
To be fair... you don't have to remember it as some tough game of memory at the end. Just keep a running sum as you go. Rounding items as you add them to your cart can get you pretty close to expected costs and isn't tough to do. At most any time, you are only dealing with two numbers, and only one that you have to "remember."
Pretty sure you get notifications each time the app charges you, like to your smart watch if you have one.
This is hugely beneficial to individual shoppers. Lining up is such a PITA. Walk in / walk out would be awesome.
They should just have a rule that kids aren't allowed to come along. I can tell you that rule alone will have a zillion mothers crying out in gratitude.
When I was a military brat, my mom would shop at the base PX. Children without military ID were not allowed in the PX unless they stayed in the baby seat in the grocery cart.
Children could get a military ID at age 10.
So up until 10 I sat outside the PX waiting for her to finish shopping.
(Getting the ID was great, we could get on the base by ourselves with them. We'd ride our bikes out to the Air Force base and hang out near the runway, watching the F-104's take off. Seeing (and hearing) a squadron of them lift off was incredible. Sadly, I had to surrender the ID at 21.)
You know what I find convenient? Cash. You just take it out of your wallet and hand it over in exchange for goods. No tracking, no receipt emails, no machine learning of my behavior to figure out when my partner is pregnant or whatever, no extra apps, no facial recognition, no 2-4% charge for businesses that only doesn't apply if you're an international monopoly.
Oh, my phone is out of batteries. Guess I'll just give up and head home.
Oops, looks like a hurricane/forest fire/proletarian uprising has knocked out local infrastructure. (Luckily, this almost never happens anymore!) Man, it would be great if we had a medium of exchange that would work under these adverse conditions. Guess I'll just barter my Harry's razors and other hipster goods to get some formula for my baby!
My grandparents always got cash out of the ATM machine then bought stuff with their cash. I always thought this was weird, but as an adult I wish I could be bothered to do this.
Cash is somewhat ok until you buy something. It's fine to carry around say £100 in a few notes, but then you buy something and you get back £5 and £10 notes and a handful of change and now it's a big jingly mess of shrapnel. I think contactless credit cards are the best right now. You don't need to hand anything over, get anything back, or enter anything, just wave the card.
I personally love $5 and $10 bills. I frequently do exact change when I have a bunch of those. Buying a BLT at the bodega? That's $5.75 with a coke. Here's $6. At the end of the day, I fire my change in a bucket and bring it to a machine once a year to get exchanged.
Also, taking out $100 in 2017 is silly, at least if you spend more than $200 a week, which is most non-students here. I just get out the max that the ATM will let me have and I never regret it.
"But what if I get mugged?" This is silly. If you actually do get mugged, you want to have a big load of money on you, not $3.29. Happy muggers mean fewer dead programmers.
If you're working with euros your largest denomination coin is 2€ . In Yen it's 500 yen! This is not chump change and just throwing those coins into the charity box can leave you with effectively increasing your lunch pricing by 50% if you have a "give all coins to charity" policy.
If you have the cash for it more power to you, of course.
Ignoring the coin jar/charity box confusion, I've tended to keep the bigger coins around and just spend them - a few £1-2 coins don't weigh that much, aren't taking up a great deal of room and will buy your lunch entirely. Then they're not your problem any more.
500 yen's over £3, so I'm guessing you don't get many of those in your lunch change? The top result for "how much is lunch in Japan" [1] suggests that your 500 yen coin would just about cover the next day's lunch and is lighter (barely; 7 grams versus 8.75g) than a British one pound coin [2,3].
The coin sorting machines that you might tip a coin jar into take a decent chunk of your money for the privilege of counting it (e.g. CoinStar charge 9.9% [4]).
I like the idea of cash but I barely need it now, I took some out last week but before that it was about six weeks since I went to an ATM. Even my daily croissant at 78p goes through via contactless, with automated checkouts I'm in and out in nigh on 60 seconds.
> No tracking, no receipt emails, no machine learning of my behavior to figure out when my partner is pregnant or whatever, no extra apps, no facial recognition, no 2-4% charge for businesses that only doesn't apply if you're an international monopoly.
Sounds awfully inconvenient. I'm constantly having to travel to the bank to get more cash, it's easy to lose, steal and destroy, the money I get in change might be counterfeit, it takes a lot more effort to track my cash purchases, and it turns out banks charge merchants a fee for handling cash too! (a local example of a fee schedule: https://www.oregonstatecu.com/business#/tab/fees)
Perhaps this all is a cost some feel is worth paying in exchange for privacy, but a cost nonetheless.
How often do you lose cash? I never do. Not sure what your workflow for losing cash would be. If I lose my wallet, the cash in it is the last thing I'm worried about. It's the plastic.
Also, you go to the bank to get cash? This may vary by geographic region, but where I live (NYC) there's I'm rarely near a place that doesn't have an ATM within a hundred feet or so.
Guess money could be counterfeit. But I've never encountered counterfeit bills, at least that I know of or that has inconvenienced me, and I haven't heard of it as a problem among the people I know who run cash-heavy businesses (mostly restaurants). Identity theft, however, is an epidemic, and has happened to literally everyone I know, except for (some) of the kids below the age of 14. Some of these cases can take years to clean up, and they often start with using plastic at a big chain, like Target or Home Depot.
Cards are nice for big purchases, like appliances or a large dinner out, or when shopping online . But cash is the thing.
Your phone likely has a value of $600. Your cash at any time might range between $0 and $200 (or more if you're me). Considering that losing your cash has no inconvenience or replacement overhead, I don't really mind losing it in the rare event that I'm mugged. I would mind losing my phone or laptop, which I pretty much carry all over. The way I see it, cash is pretty incidental to muggings.
> Engineers are also figuring out which person to charge when a couple goes shopping together.
This made me giggle. I've tried to figure out the same thing myself when shopping with a significant other or close friend. I'm having a hard time imagining how this would be cast as an engineering problem.
> Shoppers visiting an Amazon Go store will scan their smartphones upon entering. Cameras and shelf sensors will then work together to figure out which items have been removed and who removed them, the person says; there will be no need for tracking devices, such as radio frequency chips, embedded in the merchandise.
Hold on - "shelf sensors"? Wasn't Amazon originally advertising this as being purely camera-based, and that was why everyone was so skeptical it could ever work sufficiently well? 'Shelf sensors' could cover a heck of a lot short of embedding individual RFID sensors...
I wonder if it still is camera based, and just a disconnect with the press' understanding of Amazon's technology/terminology. I consider a camera to still be a sensor, in this fashion. So, a camera pointed at a shelf could still be a "shelf sensor."
I still dont see anyone in Amazon Bookstores. Expecting them to close soon. Why is there so much fascination to reinvent physical stores when we are perfectly happy to get stuff delivered to our homes.
My pain point isn't checkout, it's wandering around a store and dodging large carts in narrow aisles. Maybe they'll tackle that next.
I really wish Amazon would let me put dry and frozen goods in an app, then have kiva robots fetch those while I just browse produce. Like, you could leave the produce section normal, people freak about produce, but make the rest of the store a robot filled warehouse that customers don't even enter.
Yeah, planet money had a good episode debating whether that's why they put milk way in the back of the store.
But people also spend more money when it's easy to do so, and when they aren't frustrated by the process. How many trips to the store aren't even happening because it's an ordeal?
Malls are playing the strategy of keeping people in store, while the internet is lowering barriers to the experience.
Malls are dying and the internet is winning. There are a lot of reasons, but 'make it easier for customers to give you money' is probably not an awful business model.
78 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 96.9 ms ] threadOkay, so 3 employees tested it? This tech is going to be "tested" in the real world by tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the first few months/year. Something tells me things will go far from smoothly.
I've only had an experience with a "semi-cashierless" store, sort of speak, where the cashier would scan your stuff, and then it would give you a ticket, and you'd go to pay with it at a not-so-intuitive machine. Oh, and you also had to scan it again before you left the area at the designated exit-gate.
Let me tell you, it felt like both a more frustrating experience than just paying the cashier and it took longer time. The only thing this did is save the cashier 15 seconds per person, while the store paid for a dozen of those machines who knows what.
So we'll see if this is indeed a better experience, or it's just meant to save Amazon money on not having to pay for cashiers, while giving customers a more frustrating experience and making them spend more time in the store to register every item (for the same number of purchased items).
Apple's Face ID can't even identify your own face 100% of the time. How is Amazon's tech going to identify (from a distance) millions of people that pass through the store and every item they got with 100% accuracy??
From the article:
"Employees have tried to fool the technology. One day, three enterprising Amazonians donned bright yellow Pikachu costumes and cruised around grabbing sandwiches, drinks and snacks. The algorithms nailed it, according to a person familiar with the situation, correctly identifying the employees and charging their Amazon accounts, even though they were obscured behind yellow polyester. "
It links to an account on your phone. You're under full surveillance while in the store.
To go any further down the premise you're suggesting, you're already getting to traditional methods of walking into a store, stealing merchandise, and then running for it.
The Pikachu example, I'd argue is even easier than people wearing regular clothing due to the fact that it's unusual.
It's true that human surveillance can help a lot, but if that's the case you might as well just get cashiers , who double as stockers who are necessary anyways.
I'm less concerned about stealing and more interested whether this would be cheaper or a better experience than just having cashiers. Is EBT accepted for example? Can a grocery store not accept EBT? Can EBT even be accepted online? Etc.
If it ends up working how you describe it sounds like a terrible experience in cold areas where people regularly take off multiple layers of clothing, including but not limited to face masks, gloves, sweaters, coats, etc.
Also, in terms of gaming the system, it doesn't need to be "gamed", it just needs to allow you to walk out with items easily. People already shoplift easily, the question is whether it will be easier with this new system. Presumably the purpose of this is to be both easier for the customer and cheaper for Amazon compared to have cashiers.
https://www.standardcognition.com/
I wonder if I would be allowed to grocery shop as I do now, with my adult daughter who doesn't have an Amazon account of her own.
There still seem to be many of the issues people brought up a year ago, such as how this depends on the presence of a phone with the appropriate app installed, or what happens with groups of people in which only one person has the app (such as with kids).
More to the point, I can see how this would be better for Amazon, but I'm not sure it's better for most shoppers. Amazon gets to charge people who graze on produce while in the store, and kids who consume snacks in the store, and can presumably produce video evidence when customers throw a fit. But they can also overcharge me for things and how am I supposed to know that? Check the app in the parking lot to make sure I have everything it charged me for? What recourse do I have if not? What if something wasn't charged as marked on the shelf? I've already paid at that point. I've gone through this enough times with stores high-end and low-end to know it's inevitable for Amazon.
The leverage is all Amazon's, and the convenience doesn't offset that for me. I know I'm not alone, but maybe there aren't enough like me to dent their ambitions.
I often try to predict the value of the items in the shopping cart when waiting in the cashier queue. Most of the time shopping in a supermarket, I can predict the total sum in a range of +/- 2 Euros. My girlfriend? Perhaps in a range of +/- 5 Euros. My mother? She would only be irritated if the sum is at least 10 Euros above what she expected. And that is for 15-25 items and a total sum in the range of 40-60 Euros. But there is no way my mother, my girlfriend or even I would detect small over- or undercharging most of the time.
My local supermarket has some specials which are loyalty card only, so when the item is scanned the full price shows up. I use this to determine when to use the loyalty card for minimum tracking, minimum time, and minimum price (it doesn't have my personal info associated with it, but still connects purchases and it's faster to skip).
This is hugely beneficial to individual shoppers. Lining up is such a PITA. Walk in / walk out would be awesome.
They should just have a rule that kids aren't allowed to come along. I can tell you that rule alone will have a zillion mothers crying out in gratitude.
Children could get a military ID at age 10.
So up until 10 I sat outside the PX waiting for her to finish shopping.
(Getting the ID was great, we could get on the base by ourselves with them. We'd ride our bikes out to the Air Force base and hang out near the runway, watching the F-104's take off. Seeing (and hearing) a squadron of them lift off was incredible. Sadly, I had to surrender the ID at 21.)
Oh, my phone is out of batteries. Guess I'll just give up and head home.
Oops, looks like a hurricane/forest fire/proletarian uprising has knocked out local infrastructure. (Luckily, this almost never happens anymore!) Man, it would be great if we had a medium of exchange that would work under these adverse conditions. Guess I'll just barter my Harry's razors and other hipster goods to get some formula for my baby!
Also, taking out $100 in 2017 is silly, at least if you spend more than $200 a week, which is most non-students here. I just get out the max that the ATM will let me have and I never regret it.
"But what if I get mugged?" This is silly. If you actually do get mugged, you want to have a big load of money on you, not $3.29. Happy muggers mean fewer dead programmers.
If you're working with euros your largest denomination coin is 2€ . In Yen it's 500 yen! This is not chump change and just throwing those coins into the charity box can leave you with effectively increasing your lunch pricing by 50% if you have a "give all coins to charity" policy.
If you have the cash for it more power to you, of course.
That works even when coins have non-trivial value.
500 yen's over £3, so I'm guessing you don't get many of those in your lunch change? The top result for "how much is lunch in Japan" [1] suggests that your 500 yen coin would just about cover the next day's lunch and is lighter (barely; 7 grams versus 8.75g) than a British one pound coin [2,3].
The coin sorting machines that you might tip a coin jar into take a decent chunk of your money for the privilege of counting it (e.g. CoinStar charge 9.9% [4]).
1: https://www.withhusbandintow.com/costs-to-eat-in-japan/
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_pound_(British_coin)
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_yen_coin
4: http://www.coinstar.co.uk/FAQ
Most of the rest of the world seems to have lighter coins and more smaller note denominations, which is way more convenient.
Sounds awfully inconvenient. I'm constantly having to travel to the bank to get more cash, it's easy to lose, steal and destroy, the money I get in change might be counterfeit, it takes a lot more effort to track my cash purchases, and it turns out banks charge merchants a fee for handling cash too! (a local example of a fee schedule: https://www.oregonstatecu.com/business#/tab/fees)
Perhaps this all is a cost some feel is worth paying in exchange for privacy, but a cost nonetheless.
Also, you go to the bank to get cash? This may vary by geographic region, but where I live (NYC) there's I'm rarely near a place that doesn't have an ATM within a hundred feet or so.
Guess money could be counterfeit. But I've never encountered counterfeit bills, at least that I know of or that has inconvenienced me, and I haven't heard of it as a problem among the people I know who run cash-heavy businesses (mostly restaurants). Identity theft, however, is an epidemic, and has happened to literally everyone I know, except for (some) of the kids below the age of 14. Some of these cases can take years to clean up, and they often start with using plastic at a big chain, like Target or Home Depot.
Cards are nice for big purchases, like appliances or a large dinner out, or when shopping online . But cash is the thing.
Have any of these ever happened in your adult life? If so, how often?
This made me giggle. I've tried to figure out the same thing myself when shopping with a significant other or close friend. I'm having a hard time imagining how this would be cast as an engineering problem.
Hold on - "shelf sensors"? Wasn't Amazon originally advertising this as being purely camera-based, and that was why everyone was so skeptical it could ever work sufficiently well? 'Shelf sensors' could cover a heck of a lot short of embedding individual RFID sensors...
For e-commerce, the total for the entire three-month quarter was $115.3 billion.
[0] https://www.census.gov/retail/
I really wish Amazon would let me put dry and frozen goods in an app, then have kiva robots fetch those while I just browse produce. Like, you could leave the produce section normal, people freak about produce, but make the rest of the store a robot filled warehouse that customers don't even enter.
But people also spend more money when it's easy to do so, and when they aren't frustrated by the process. How many trips to the store aren't even happening because it's an ordeal?
Malls are playing the strategy of keeping people in store, while the internet is lowering barriers to the experience.
Malls are dying and the internet is winning. There are a lot of reasons, but 'make it easier for customers to give you money' is probably not an awful business model.