Is any retailer going to actually be willing to trust amazon though? And what if it doesn't work and the customer ends up not paying - is amazon also taking on the liability for that?
Yeah, this is essentially outsourcing the part that's hard for Amazon to do -- operating a retail store -- but allows Amazon to benefit from all that sweet, sweet data.
And as you point out, any time Amazon strikes up a "partnership" with outside parties, its ultimate goal is to conquer or cannibalize them.
Businesses should approach partnerships with Amazon with the same level of skepticism/trepidation as Native Americans signing a treaty with the U.S. government 150-200 years ago.
It might be slow for larger retailers, but I could imagine small independent "hipster" type shops opening up using this (people with the same mentality as the "no cash" bars/restaurants)
Retailers already rely on the trust of dozens if not hundreds of vendors for operations. Trust is established through contractual obligations, pilot programs, etc.
Shrinkage in the US is about 1.38% on average currently. Any competent retailer would run a pilot and evaluate its effect on shrinkage rates.
I'm also referring to trusting amazon specifically. They're a competitor, and not one known for playing nice. I've heard that retailers are hesitant to even use AWS (I don't have a source for that and would love to hear otherwise if that's the case?) - because of competitive concerns- so will people want to work with amazon for something so core to their business?
Oh wow so that's worse than I had heard - not just avoid AWS but also force suppliers off of AWS.
Yeah, I wonder how retailers are going to feel about amazon having a direct pipeline of purchase data at all their competitors fed directly to a division of the company that I'm sure they'll claim is sealed off from the rest of operations. Even if amazon is playing totally fairly here, I don't see why it makes sense for people to trust them with so much at risk
But Amazon is a completely different beast - they've already shown they want to horizontally expand into the grocery market everywhere, so stores using their technology is just a stopgap on the journey to Amazon cutting into the profits of said stores via competition. When that happens, they better hope removing Amazon's system is as easy as it is to integrate it.
> In Just Walk Out-enabled stores, shoppers enter the store using a credit card. They don't need to download an app or create an Amazon account.
But you may as well. By giving them a CC# you're allowing Amazon to spy on you anyway -- and that's not even mentioning the copious surveillance in such stores in the form of cameras and behavior detection.
> If shoppers need a receipt, they can visit a kiosk in the store and enter their email address.
Oh, and if you want a receipt, you'll have to give Amazon your email address, too, which allows them to more easily tie your real-world identity and activity to the profile they already have on you.
This sort of thing is a privacy disaster. I wouldn't set foot inside a store that does this.
> This sort of thing is a privacy disaster. I wouldn't set foot inside a store that does this.
If they make it accessible enough, all stores may. Even if they don't, I imagine all stores will have something similar in some timeframe. So.. what will you do then?
> If they make it accessible enough, all stores may.
I think that's unlikely. There is likely to be a large enough percentage of shoppers who avoid this sort of thing to support at least a couple of stores who make it a selling point that they don't do this.
But, if there is no option then I'll have to figure out what my response will be. It would likely have to be a compromise position between buying as much as I can without involving a store at all (buy produce directly from farmers, do a lot more bartering with neighbors, etc.) and employing single-use credit cards when I can't avoid the store.
I really don't think there is. I think this is going to be more like the loyalty cards - at first people oppose it on principle, but it becomes so commonplace that opposing it seems absurd
> I think this is going to be more like the loyalty cards
That would be OK, actually -- there are still plenty of stores that don't use loyalty cards.
The difference between the two things, though, are that you can shop at a store that has loyalty cards without having to use them yourself. You couldn't shop at a store that uses this program without using the program yourself.
> the copious surveillance in such stores in the form of cameras and behavior detection.
this already exists in nearly every retail store already. full of cameras and for advertising purposes they have been building profiles on people for decades
Not in most (all?) online shopping scenarios, and I don't really see any uproar about privacy concerns with those.
AFAIK many retailers (Target, for example) use an identifier derived from your CC number and don't even need your email or phone number to build a profile on you.
I totally agree with being concerned about your privacy, but I don't understand the increased harshness on this service specifically as opposed to the already-pervasive services that already collect your data on a daily basis. Is it just because this one is Amazon and it's fun to hate on them?
>But this is real-life shopping, not online. Online shopping is 100% optional. Real-life shopping is not.
What? Is someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to go shopping? I don't understand this statement. "Real-life shopping" is just as optional as online shopping is. Hell, "real-life shopping" is more optional in this regard because you can always pay with cash and escape the aforementioned privacy concerns. You can't do that online.
I would guess even in these amazon stores you'll have the option to print a paper receipt right away.
There are probably laws requiring it in some places round the world, there are probably customers who want it, it speeds up the process by not requiring an email address to be typed in, and the total cost of a receipt printer is tiny.
No, but it removes the choice of paying via cash as part of your privacy defense strategy. Some of us don't pay with credit cards and never have receipts emailed, because of the obvious privacy issues involved.
Not sure why you're harping so hard on the privacy front in regards to those statements. The quotes you've chosen (and the linked website) make no attempt to say that they are privacy related at all. The purpose of mentioning that they don't need to download an app or create an account are about mentioning the level of effort that patrons have to go through to sign up (as compared to current Amazon Go stores that do require an app and account).
If you want to talk about privacy, it's always a valid concern in this day and age, but your comment feels like you're building a strawman.
> The quotes you've chosen (and the linked website) make no attempt to say that they are privacy related at all.
I was pointing those out because of their obvious privacy implications, not because I thought that the article was presenting them as privacy-related.
> your comment feels like you're building a strawman.
How so? I was merely pointing out two of the several things the article said that got my spidey-senses tingling. I don't see how what I said is anything remotely like a strawman argument.
In your original comment, the statement "But you may as well" misses the entire point of the quote from the article. You only "may as well" if the only point of that quote is privacy related, but it is not. The benefit of not providing an account or downloading an app is that it provides less friction for the shopper, so you shouldn't "may as well" do it just because of an unrelated privacy side-note.
I was not commenting on the thing that the quote was intending to talk about. I was commenting on the privacy implications of what it actually said. From a privacy point of view, you may as well sign up for an account or install an app -- that's a problem for those of us who wouldn't sign up for an account or install an app due to security concerns.
It absolutely is not the definition of a strawman.
Reading between the lines of marketing (or any text, really) is an important element of critical thinking. There's no rule that says I have to only talk about what your commercial wants me to talk about.
Are you really suggesting we should just uncritically nod along with whatever facile ideas are fed to us by an advert? <-- (Psst...this is actually a strawman)
"A straw man (or strawman) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent."
Saying "but you may as well" gives the impression that you refuted the point the quote was making, but in reality you were refuting a point that, by your own admission, the quote was not making. That is a strawman.
Reading between the lines of a commercial is fine, and encouraged. Dismissing the point of the commercial entirely because of a semi-related tangent is not.
If you meant it differently (perhaps not to dismiss the quote's "argument" but instead to just bring up the privacy implications separately) that's great and I'll take your word for it (and even agree with it), I just found your original quote to be saying something different.
edit: I see that you are not the original poster of the comment. This comment was meant for that person, not you. Apologies.
> Exactly, and that's the definition of a strawman.
No, it's not. A strawman is when you are asserting that someone is making an argument they aren't making, so that you can knock down that argument rather than what they are really postulating.
I am not doing that. I haven't asserted that Amazon was making any sort of privacy argument here. I am the one making the privacy argument.
If I say that one way to improve early hand-eye coordination is to give all preschoolers loaded guns, and you tell me that the implications of giving all preschoolers loaded guns is that they will kill each other, that's not a strawman. You're just pointing out that my solution has problems.
I can't come back at you and say, "but I wasn't talking about mortality rates, I was just talking about hand-eye coordination. Your objection is irrelevant to my point."
Similarly, when Amazon makes a statement that using credit cards linked to email is a good way to get around making an Amazon account, and JohnFen correctly asserts that this does nothing for privacy whatsoever, and that Amazon will still make ghost tracking accounts for every shopper, that's not a strawman. They're just pointing out that Amazon's solution doesn't solve the problem.
The reason we don't want accounts isn't because making them is too hard or because we don't own smartphones -- it's explicitly because of the tracking. It's not a convenience problem; using a credit card and a smartphone are both equally convenient for most people.
Amazon is saying, "tell the people who are worried about making accounts that they don't need to, so it's fine." JohnFen is replying, "that doesn't address the reason people like me are worried about making an account."
Agreed; it's hard to execute trade in a society without abiding by the norms of the society regarding information exchange. I could also try walking into the 7-11 with a full face mask on (in my state at least, that's not illegal in general), but the owner and register operator really wouldn't appreciate me being that anti-social.
Privacy is a sliding scale and different people set the slider at different sensitivity levels.
And even if one's sensitivity level is high enough to cause personal problems, they're solvable. People that deeply concerned about their privacy have had proxy shoppers buy things on their behalf.
Is it really spying if you are entering the store with full knowledge that your every move is being watched by a system in order to automatically track your selections?
If anything it's full disclosure high level surveillance. I imagine big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart already have sophisticated surveillance systems that attach your card info to visual surveillance systems for Loss Prevention. I've heard of people who were repeat shoplifters at Wal-Mart that eventually got caught; and when they did, Wal-Mart had essentially a running tab of all the things they had ever shoplifted and slammed them with a grand theft charge despite the fact the time they got caught they were only attempting to shoplift a $5 bottle of shampoo or something.
I'm not denying the privacy disaster you're worried about, but honestly I think we're already too far gone down this road to be able to do anything about it.
> Is it really spying if you are entering the store with full knowledge that your every move is being watched by a system in order to automatically track your selections?
True, I was being a touch aggressive in calling it "spying". However, if this sort of thing becomes so ubiquitous that its impossible to avoid, then it is 100% spying even if fully disclosed.
The difference between data collection being "spying" or not is one of voluntary, informed consent. If every store uses something like this, voluntary consent is no longer possible, and this would absolutely qualify as spying.
> Is it really spying if you are entering the store with full knowledge that your every move is being watched by a system in order to automatically track your selections?
Very few people going into retail stores understand the extent of the tracking going on. So yes, to the average person, this seems like creepy stalking and/or spying.
> But you may as well. By giving them a CC# you're allowing Amazon to spy on you anyway -- and that's not even mentioning the copious surveillance in such stores in the form of cameras and behavior detection.
Ha! They already have a decade of my purchase history from being a Prime customer and I shop using an Amazon Credit Card. They've got everything they need and I don't mind.
Few people would be bothered by something like this. If they would be bothered, we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases.
Ah, something that tracks you based on appearance, and can later do so outside stores, is very different from a keychain fob that you can register with 555-867-5309.
I, for one, won’t ever go in an Amazon Go store. If other stores implement this tech without an opt-out, I will either start shopping in a ski mask or go without.
Just FYI, the local area code and Jenny's number (867-5309) is a default that exists for most loyalty programs. So if you don't want to be tracked you can use that. I've heard that this was implemented for military folks who tend to be a lot more transient than regular locals.
> So if you don't want to be tracked you can use that.
Or just not use anything at all. Or do what I do, and prefer shopping at stores that don't have a loyalty program. In my area, stores that have loyalty programs also have higher prices so that the "discount" from the loyalty card makes the price roughly the same as at similar stores that don't have a loyalty program.
So I go to the stores that don't have one. That's not only better for privacy, but is more frictionless and comes with no price penalty.
> Ah, something that tracks you based on appearance, and can later do so outside stores, is very different from a keychain fob that you can register with 555-867-5309.
That's a fair argument, but I think Amazon has enough about me that what you're suggesting is a minor concern relative to what they already have.
I'm much more concerned about my Amazon search history getting leaked as a .txt file than I am about Amazon using imagery of me to train their ML models.
> we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases.
In my area, anyway, a huge outcry happened when these programs began to be adopted. Even now, eyeballing people checking out at the local shops, I'd say that only half of people (at most) are using loyalty cards. And many people I personally know who use loyalty cards do so in a manner to subvert the data collection (usually by having one loyalty card that is used by many people).
So it seems to me a substantial percentage of people really are bothered by them.
Really you only have to use a (loyalty card, credit card) pair once for them to correlate all your purchases. But even then, I bet (store ID, name from credit card) is sufficiently unique in many cases to identify you.
I don't use a loyalty card at any of the stores I shop at, and anecdotally, there's about a 50% chance that if I say "no" when the cashier asks if I have a card or want to create an account, I will later on discover that they've used a store code to give me the same discount.
This is without any prompting on my end, I never ask a cashier to do this for me.
So apparently it's common enough that some cashiers on-instinct just stick a store card in whenever someone says "no". It's common enough that none of them look at me surprised when I refuse.
> we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases
You'd be surprised how few people actually ever think about the motivations behind such loyalty programs. If you asked, they'd probably say it's good for the shop as it keeps us going to the place where we get discounts though these cards instead of the competitors (hence, "loyalty"). Most of them most definitely don't know how valuable that data is and how it can be used and for what purposes.
It depends on what I'm buying. I do pay by card sometimes if the amount exceeds a certain level, or if it's an urgent situation. Otherwise, it's cash. It doesn't take that much dedication -- cash is not that inconvenient.
What it gets me is a few less entries in the databases of the store, credit card companies, and the marketers who buy credit card information. Every little bit helps!
Privacy is thrown out the window, but for the most part it already is. I shop on Amazon regularly. What interesting new information are they gleaning about me that they don't already have?
Seeing a few negative comments here; I think these are short-sighted in the extreme.
Labor is a major cost for retail; anything that massively reduces labor costs is going to be hugely game changing. Combined with amazon promises that it takes only a few weeks to integrate (seriously??) if this works at all, this is going to be a super fast growth group at Amazon.
For reference think back to how many stories you’ve read about say managers short changing employees a few minutes at the end of work shifts.
This really could change retail permanently; the only question is if it works.
If only manual laborers in 1850s England didn't rely on jobs that were replaced by machines (England went on to be far wealthier and provide far more opportunities to its people after the industrial revolution).
The information revolution appears to be having the opposite effect, with massive productivity gains resulting in fewer employees needed.
One of the outcomes of this is that parts of the country have been 'left behind' economically. This isn't only in England, but happening in other countries too (e.g. the USA). The surge in 'nostalgic'[0] voting (Brexit and MAGA spring to mind, respectively) is one of the outcomes of that occurring.
I'm hoping I'm wrong, and I'm hoping there's something around the corner that changes the situation specific to the information revolution, rather than an outside force (like say, a virus causing a massive shift in demographics), but the way things look right now, that's not a given.
[0] I'm deliberately ignoring the more controversial and/or negative aspects to those voting choices, as that would derail the conversation
>One of the outcomes of this is that parts of the country have been 'left behind' economically.
That's the whole point of the comment you're replying to. This isn't new or unique to recent technological advancements. This is always the case when new technology displaces existing structures.
I think in the short term, the information revolution appears similar to the industrial revolution: a category of jobs become obsolete, but long term, the economy grows, and adds many more categories of jobs.
The possibility that it won't merits consideration. It's entirely possible that new industries will spring up, but it would be dangerous to rely on that and plan as if it were certain. Even the "long tail" that people predicted for artists to make a living in a widely-connected economy has thus far largely failed to materialize.
The fact that I can't imagine it is no proof that it won't happen, of course. But I feel that we've gotten lucky in the past, and I hate depending on my luck.
i guess if you take this idea to its logical conclusion, we will end up in a post-scarcity economy where nobody "needs" to work, yet all their needs are met. So far, it's unclear whether this outcome will occur, and I do agree it's unclear what the outcomes of the information revolution will be, in terms of overall economic comfort of individuals.
This doesn't seem to be guaranteed by any law of economics, though. Despite the massive economic growth since the 19th century, the absolute number of job openings for horses has decreased substantially.
The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place. Lots of people got very wealthy though, that's for sure.
This view of history as immutable, with the ends always meeting the means is the sort of thinking that I believe is holding us back as a society. Researchers are still studying the impact that the industrial revolution had on not just the environment, but also the mental health of the descendants of the working class in Europe: https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-the-industrial-revolution-l....
Compared to what? Sure, it was awful compared to working at Google with unlimited snacks and all of that. Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad.
it was literally misery on scales that hadn't been seen before. children were expected to work in horrible and abusive conditions. everyone was working very long and gruelling days for next to nothing and had no way to protect themselves from exploitation.
In the UK industrial accidents were commonplace until the passing of The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The very many maimings and deaths it has (belatedly) prevented are less common in subsidence farming.
Of course farmers get sick, but they don't get the diseases created by industry. There are a great many respiratory conditions and cancers that don't occur naturally.
Not sure if you're talking about industrial revolution or present day labor conditions...? Okay, we have child labor outsourced to poorer countries, but still confusing.
Not being Nicolas Cage, I was not. However, there are many, many countries today who are similar to 19th century UK/US. Would you like to go to rural China and compare the peasant subsistence farming still happening there with urban China and its sweatshops?
> suffering is suffering.
Sure. People suffered. They suffered horribly as peasant farmers living on less than $2/day, or they suffered as laborers making possibly a bit more. Work was universally hard.
It's possible (likely) that future people will see what we went through - disease, hunger, unemployment, bad management, personal suffering/alienation and a host of other problems - and say literally the same thing about us. But although I think all of us can think of a few tweaks at the margins, we'd all utterly fail fully to replace the status quo most people accept, many try to change, a few succeed at changing and a precious few improve.
We should give the past the same courtesy we expect from future generations. And we should be willing to make some of the sacrifices today to ensure that future generations will endure. (And this includes things like ensuring the effects of climate change or nuclear weapons don't wipe us out.) The past is and forever shall be a foreign country.
>Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad.
the life expectancy in Liverpool and some other parts of England during the peak of industrialisation fell to 25 years, the average height fell by almost 10cm, so actually it was pretty bad and it took decades for the situation to improve. I would have very much preferred to be a self-sufficient farmer during that time. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens goes through a pretty big amount of data that shows that traditional communities and even hunter-gatherers lived much better and longer lifes than people that had to endure the human meatgrinder that was industrialisation.
> The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place.
Yes, and that's why the labor movement is important (I'd like it to be much stronger than it is still today). Is your view that neither the Industrial Revolution nor the labor movement should have happened?
Those seemingly horrible jobs were better than what they had before. You can tell because people voted with their feet. They left their farms to take those jobs, and didn't go back.
Something similar plays out with "sweatshop labor" these days. People talk about the abuses, but there's often the same flow of people from the countryside lining up for the openings.
That's not to say that stopping stupid abuses and unsafe conditions isn't important, it's just important to keep in mind how bad things often were. Simply having a job with a salary that guaranteed you wouldn't starve was a huge improvement for some people.
I see this all the time as the response to the argument that people rely on these jobs. The difference will be if, like England, the replacement jobs are more valuable by having greater leverage and impact. Or, as I suspect, the replacement jobs are fewer with similar or less value. I suspect we will see the latter pushing our lower classes into a tighter and lower band of incomes.
As far as I can see many of the jobs we do these days don't provide any real value. In this case cashier doesn't provide real value so good riddance. But I'm not confident we'll find ourselves in a better place in the future.
Also, somehow we undervalue manual labor with some skill and unions don't seem to work as well for non-factory/hospital/plant jobs.
I think the one difference is that despite the 1850s UK having (some) protectionism and (loads of) imperialism, they didn't have massive bureaucracies forbidding everyone from doing everything without permission.
This is not actually a problem of technology but of governance. And we should keep in mind that this kind of improvement would make retail workers much more productive as well as the industry more sustainable.
> England went on to be far wealthier and provide far more opportunities to its people after the industrial revolution
To compare this to the Industrial Revolution is just wrong. Period. Just as comparing today to the Gilded Age is wrong. Those were period of massive productivity growth (and also wage growth) despite being periods of high inequality.
On the contrary, we are in an age of tiny productivity growth and almost no wage growth. We have been through a decade with basically zero interest rates (or negative interest rates in parts of the world). To say, we've been through this before and we are all going to be better off for it, is just not true.
A lot of business strategy these days tend to forget that their labor are often their customers in a somewhat symbiotic relationship. This was part of the realization Henry Ford had when developing Ford motors and during the heydays of labor rights.
Cut your labor and you strangle your customer base. Now we're seeing a tendency of businesses focusing on more wealthy clients, luxury goods, etc. Some modern mall strategies are gearing at primarily targeting luxury stores vs appealing to the masses because the mass labor force purses are growing ever tighter (mainly because they're emptying).
Seems like a natural progression as the "wealth trickle" progresses more and more to a drought and pools up at the top in guarded reservoirs away from the majority: the labor force.
It's one thing to automate away tasks people don't want to do and replace those tasks with tasks people do want to do (and get paid for). It's an entirely different story when you eliminate work and provide no alternatives, displacing large segments of the population, then simply accumulate the labor cost savings for your business and chief investors while stagnating growth.
Most counter arguments to this trend point at historic technological shifts where new industry popped up to supply alternative means of living for the labor force. This makes an assumption that the change is the same and ignores the trends, hand waving it away in ambiguous complexity and proposing we play the experiment out. Most wanting to play the experiment out have little to lose and much to gain. The other side have a lot to lose and relatively little to gain.
We're seeing a lot more of businesses pooling cash and asset reserves and not reinvesting them back into society and people are starting to get a bit cranky about it.
Yes but it's a tragedy of the commons / prisoner's dilemma issue. If your store employs 1% of the people in a given area, and therefore also 1% of your customers, you can't prevent the other 99% from laying off their own workforce and affecting you, unless you collude with them somehow. On the other hand, increasing your workers' pay will give you no meaningful sales benefit as it can at most affect that 1%.
I agree with your point and it seems (to me) to be a natural progression/emergent behavior of the current implementation of capitalism we subscribe to.
It could potentially be even more axiomatic than that and an unavoidable result of core/firmly held beliefs with trade systems that there will always be those to exploit the weaker (in an economic system) to the point where the system becomes unsustainable.
It often reminds me of agent based models of predator/prey systems where ultimately, the incorrect balance of predators, their efficiencies and successes result in a systematic collapse where the predators starve themselves to death by not allowing the prey to procreate and gather resources necessary that predators ultimately survive on.
In this case, if the wealthy (predators) don't allow the labor force (prey) to collect resources, create value, etc. before snatching added value up ('eating' if you'll humor the idea), they ultimately end up with no future value added from labor force (prey) because the labor doesn't have resources anymore to add value.
From your example following the same basic model, if some of the predators allow themselves to refrain from eating too much and allow the prey to better maintain stable set resources through self control, nothing stops their competitors (other prey) from focusing on their short term gains with no control (yum, more dinner). Ultimately, those predators looking at maintaining a long term stable system will starve if his/her competitors don't share the same views and are allowed to follow the more basic rules. It seems to me, you have to introduce artificial rules into the system to maintain the system (e.g., government regulation or new fundamental underlying rules to the dynamics).
Obviously, the real relationship is far more complex than this view and this model has many shortcomings, but it seems to provide at least some potentially valuable insight to the situation, IMHO.
It could also drive up competition for good labor and increase turnover at other locations as more try to "move up" to a better paying location.
When I was in my late teens, I worked tech support at a given location... A new call center for another company opened up paying about 25% more. This had a lot of people switching jobs and pay overall for the area for that type of work went up. Other companies relaxed or offered other benefits (subsidized vending machines and food trucks, for example).
If 1% of the market for employees moves, that can have sweeping impacts overall. Take WinCo vs Walmart as another example. The shear impact of the appearance of a better workplace will often drive foot traffic, especially combined with competitive pricing. Brand image is a thing, and how a company treats it's labor is part of a brand's image.
>Now we're seeing a tendency of businesses focusing on more wealthy clients, luxury goods, etc.
I saw this at the bakery I worked at before. The manager I worked under talked about how he wanted to target wealthier clients or at least people willing to pay a lot more for their products, which means eventually pricing out the current customer base that makes up the low income community that this business serves that were a lot more tight with their money. It's so sad and shortsighted. They are more than happy to sell out the customers they currently have in pursuit of the customers who don't/won't come in the first place. I think businesses like that deserve to die. It's a tragedy when good food becomes gated and the poor are left with options like McDonalds or other fast food chains.
In the UK, many shop floor staff in supermarkets work part-time and it's been designed that way to exploit the benefit system. Very few traditional 40 hour week jobs are actually available but lots at 16 hours or so with lots of unfilled vacancies.
This reminds me of the Aberhart quote recommending airports be built with spoons and forks, not modern machines, if a jobs program is what's required. Perhaps we could add more jobs by having people hand total receipts and the computers could just check them for accuracy :)
My own perspective is that it is basic reality that a large number of low-skill jobs will be automated over the next 10 to 20 years. Rather than complain, I prefer to think about what society can and should do about it.
In my case, I don't believe that we should create makework low skills jobs to 'solve' this 'problem' of humans no longer being needed to run cash registers though; I have a hard time imagining most people preferring to run a cash register as their ideal day job.
I don't understand the notion of moving backward in order to keep jobs for people. I get why people say they want that (fear of losing their jobs), but I don't really understand the logical progression to getting there and I believe its influenced by:
a) Practically, this imposes a big problem to future society if low-skill jobs are gone.
b) I'm definitely privileged to have a "high-skill" job so my fear factor here is irrelevant.
That said - if this were really a concern people were serious about, I don't see why we don't just ban cars/trains/airplanes/etc. and have caravans to do all trading once again. It would create tons of jobs all in the name of regress.
Another major cost in retail is "loss" ... I can see this being pretty effective at loss prevention and coupon fraud (even my small town grocery store require an associate to visit the self-check kiosks if a customer has a coupon).
I bet. Places like Kroger already apply coupons just by having them on your account and scanning your member barcode/QR at checkout, so that's most likely how couponing will work with this (if the store decides to have the 'scan your ID when you walk in' system for regular customers).
I was actually just thinking about coupons and how this would change that landscape. Physical coupons would be pretty useless I could imagine, everything would have to shift to digital, unless you could scan them on your way out, which would then just defeat the purpose of "just walking out". I think my mailman would appreciate it regardless, due to the large amount of unwanted coupons that get put in my mail almost daily.
Seems like you'd want screens to help people with stuff, so they could double for scanning coupons. The problem with checkouts isn't the scanning, it's that they have to create a physical chokepoint.
Exactly, consider Apple Retail employees, who need to be searched [1] every time their shift ends due to suspected theft. Having automated cameras that can better track products could significantly alter this check.
They get searched because Apple devices cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.
If all the store sold was usb charging cables, there wouldn't be any searches.
Unless the grocery store is selling tins of caviar, the problem is simply not at the same magnitude.
Any other concerns about cheating the system for thefts are as ludicrous as people worrying about people shooting drones out of skies with shotguns or hijacking self-driving trucks.
It is a rebuttal against calling this the "upside." It is a downside of automation in general too, one that many people have spent a lot more time than either of us thinking about.
Do these actually reduce labor costs though? I frequently use the Amazon Go store in Seattle right next to the Spheres, and there seem to be as many if not more employees there than at an ordinary convenience store: there's always one person by the liquor area to check IDs, one or two people walking around the store restocking the shelves and helping the clueless tourists download the app, and several people in the kitchen making sandwiches and whatnot. I don't see any labor savings over a regular 7-11.
This sounds like the kind of thing that works better at scale. Against a regular 7-11, probably not. But what stops the model in question from being applied to a warehouse-style store with still only four employees needed?
Don’t forget “loss prevention officers” (i.e. security.) In the bad parts of my city, and especially at night, convenience store staffing is 50% security (= one clerk at the counter; one guard at the door.) And that staffing, unlike the clerks, can’t be done on minimum wage.
At my neighborhood 7-11, there are often 5-10 people waiting in line with one clerk at checkout. One person buying lottery tickets brings things to a complete halt.
There is always someone buying multiple lottery tickets/scratch cards in UK local stores and, yes, it does bring everything to a standstill.
Other regular delays seem to come from staff being perplexed by the complexity of the checkout system.
Also, mostly middle aged women being taken by complete surprise they are being asked to pay for stuff which leads to much fumbling around looking for purses and wallets and then they'll insist on counting out the exact change.
Then the constant 'Do you need a bag?', 'Do you want a receipt?' 'Do you have a stupid loyalty card?' routine.
Bring on automation please and make the world a much more happier place!
Id checking can probably be done through the app. Most online bank accounts simply require a 30 second video call with a person showing their face and their passport and the account becomes 'verified'. You only ever have to do that once, so very cheap.
Restocking is already a cost stores have to do. Restocking is also something which isn't too time sensitive - you can do more restocking at night if needed. It's also possible to design the shop to require less restocking, by for example having deeper shelving units where products slide towards the front.
Helping people use the app won't be needed as soon as it becomes universal.
The only remaining cost becomes store security, but if everyone has an attached account which has been verified by a passport, even security might no longer be needed. Just bill people for the items they take, ban them if they don't pay the bill, and call the police and ban anyone who is violent.
Having visited the Amazon Go stores in Seattle at-least 30 times over the last couple of years, including the newly opened Amazon Go Grocery store, I can confidently say that the technology works quite well for the typical shopper.
I agree, the question of, can this technology be integrated into existing retail spaces and still work well enough to be economically viable is important. But considering that there hasn't been any other retailer who's come up with a competing product over the last two years, tells me that Amazon could be way ahead of the competition on "Just Walk Out", and possibly dominate this space of retail automation for a while.
Theft doesn’t happen in an ideal world. They’ll discover the flaws at some point. Id say theft and hacking scheemes could make this unfeasible or a big pain in their rearend
It seems to me that this technology may actually deal with theft better than what's there now, because it can retroactively charge the thief once he's caught, and it has more eyes than any amount of human guards at a supermarket can possibly have.
At least it used to be true that self checkout systems are not primarily sold with the promise of reducing labor costs, but primarily that they take up so much less space. If I remember correctly, six self checkouts take up as much floor space as one manual given the longer queues of the latter. That's why they first were sold in the cities where space is at a premium.
You still need some employees around the check out area anyway, and even if one employee can serve several you also suddently have many more of them. The manned check out was never the most labour intensive part of running a store anyway so it wasn't the best selling point anyway.
This walk-out concept has to compete with the various self scanning schemes that already exist, not with the manned check outs of old. It will be interesting to see if they can offer a cheaper and more reliable experience to shoppers.
> For reference think back to how many stories you’ve read about say managers short changing employees a few minutes at the end of work shifts.
Curious what you're talking about here. I've never heard of that, and in all the time sheets I've ever done 15 minutes is the smallest unit of time - not possible to bill 55 minutes, only 45 or 60.
Amazon has a history for being awful with making web pages. I had to peruse the Amazon HTML code once for a research project not long ago, and their code was littered with issues, including duplicate id.
Their UX and even UI is rotten beyond belief.
Really? I've been consistently amazed with Amazon's web UI. It works perfectly no matter if you have javascript on or off, no matter what browser. I bet I could order in lynx if I wanted to. Almost no other large site does it as well.
Somewhat related: Initially, I thought this was about the walk out protests happening (over politics and environmental concerns) at some big tech companies. I had some pretty big questions on why Amazon wanted a piece of that market.
In terms of cost-convenience trade-off, can someone tell me how is this better for a store when compared to self-checkout counters or scan-as-you-go apps (as suggested below) ?
I use these frequently at Walmart and Sams without any problems. Rarely have to deal with an actual checkout person unless I have to get a gift card.
IMO you can get very far simply addressing annoying latency and UX issues with self checkout counters.
Edit: There is also the advantage of seeing what you're exactly being billed for
It's way nicer than self-checkout in my opinion. A big one is there's never any line -- you just get your stuff and walk-out. Here in SF, lots of store frequently have long lines.
We went in on Black Friday because we needed normal groceries. There was a 10+ minute wait to check out, even at the self-checkouts. This would mitigate that by allowing some customers to check themselves out.
And then with scan-as-you-shop (some shops even have apps, I know Asda does) latency is reduced further, it's only the time to transfer you're already scanned basket and to pay
yeah exactly. I guess I don't understand the marginal improvement in adding so many cameras and advanced processing, all so that you can "just walk out", with the possibility of having to deal with billing related customer service issues.
I wonder if it would be possible to integrate payment into the mobile apps they've already got in place, thereby meaning that the only time you'd need to go to the checkout at all would be if you were buying restricted goods (e.g. age limited, or items with security tags) - the risks would seem then to be tracking whether someone had paid. Maybe have a QR code shown on screen which security staff can scan if they're suspicious, giving a list of what items were purchased?
I see a version of the QR code check already in Sams Club. A person at the exit scans your bill and it tells them what to check for. Otherwise they will randomly scan an item and it will cross-check with the bill.
I love self-checkout and use it when available and reasonable. However, I have seen lines. It feels the same as ATMs for me. Occasionally I am waiting behind someone who just takes forever. I always wonder what they are doing, how it can take what feels like 10 minutes to do what I attempt to get done in 1 minute.
Self-checkout is a bottleneck since there are a limited number of available machines. I can see efficiency gains by removing that bottleneck.
I'm surprised many people here mention lines at the self-checkout. I shop in a fairly busy Walmart and I never had to stand in line, even on Saturdays and Sundays. They have like 15 of those counters on each side.
It is literally a supply and demand thing. You happen to have experienced high-supply/low-demand. Why are you surprised people mention low-supply/high-demand scenarios?
In fact, just follow the logic down that road. Consider highly-volatile demand purchase scenarios. A company might over-spend on self-checkout stations to cover high-demand scenarios that go unused on more typical days. A more efficient approach is to avoid requiring additional stations to cover changes in demand. Just create a single system (walk out purchasing) that handles all scenarios and be done with it.
I guess I'm just wondering if there's data on how often you these self-checkout bottlenecks. The way other commenters describe it makes it seem like it's fairly often. Hence the surprise.
Although I agree just-walk-out scales well with demand.
> The way other commenters describe it makes it seem like it's fairly often.
There's almost always a line at them when I walk by in the stores in my area. Usually, the line there is about as long as the lines at the manned checkouts.
In shops I frequent, there is usually a single line for all 3-8 self-checkout machines,
but separate lines for each individual cashier.
I've noticed that the line for self-checkout is usually roughly
the same length as the lines for individual cash registers, regardless
of how many machines there are.
I'm not sure if people just don't like self-checkout or if they have failed
to notice that the "go to the shortest line" heuristic doesn't work anymore
when one of the lines moves much faster than the others.
I think just having an employee explaining "just leave, we'll send you a bill" would be pretty fast, and wouldn't hold up the queue for people who know what's going on.
As a student I frequently will end up putting items in my backpack. It is way more convinient to just stuff stuff into my backpack than it is to get a cart and go through the grueling check out line that takes forever because someone has to scan every item, and a lot of people still don't use contactless payment. I hate this process so much now that I only get my groceries delivered now, but if there were a local convinience store with this technology then I would totally go there.
I've had too many issues with self scan, I absolutely avoid them, and if a company eliminates all their non-self checkout, I'll go elsewhere. If I literally have 5 or so items, I'll use self checkout, anything more, nope.
The first time I brought a full cart through self checkout, that's when I understood road rage, so to speak. I was never so annoyed and angry and wanted to just walk out and leave it behind so much. "Please place item in the bag... please remove item from the bag... please place..." It may well be better, or getting better, but I'm out of the experiment.
-- edit:
Since then, there have been two times, I did walk out and leave my cart behind... one of those times about half a dozen others did the same. It was a Walmart, and the Friday before a holiday (Christmas was Sunday that year iirc). It was 6pm, and they had literally closed half their registers with an average of 11 carts in each line left. I had a full cart including a lot of refrigerated and frozen items. The other time was similar but less extreme at another store (not walmart).
In the end, some of us will pay a little more for actual people doing actual customer service and interaction. I tried the scan and go a couple times, and frankly it wasn't really any better. It seems that Millenials and Z are so averse to interaction, I just don't get it.
Perhaps. You could also interpret this in non-positive ways:
* The technology investment isn't going to pay off unless they scale up to thousands of stores very quickly.
* Running a small convenience store is boring and not very profitable. The technology is cool though, so lets see if someone else is will to do all the boring stuff while we focus on the interesting things.
IDK what happened to it, but for a while the Mountain View Walmart had a system where your cart had a pricing gun thing and you'd scan stuff as you put it in your cart. Then when you got to self checkout you paid in the Walmart app and left with no other steps. I thought it was pretty convenient.
Its no longer there and I've not seen it anywhere else so I guess maybe it was a failed pilot program or something.
As long as there's still an option for human people to pay using their own money it's fine. But if these stores only allow for corporate people to purchase items (on behalf of their customer humans (credit cards)) then it is a very unethical system and probably should be made illegal.
I agree, at least generally. However, something I've learned is that privacy always has a cost. I wouldn't count on retailers to pay it when most of their customers won't notice or care, and I wouldn't count on governments to deliberately avoid reducing friction in their economies either.
Either made illegal or made to comply with government intervention to issue all citizens an identification that can be used universally for this purpose.
Oh they will, but it'll be the minimum number of checkout lanes and you'll have to wait 15 minutes in line.
That's my experience at my local Walmart. There are maybe 2-4 lanes with human cashiers (2 when it's slow, 4 when it's busier, but I've never been there at peak) and 10-15 stations for self-checkout.
In France all our Decathlon (generic sport gear) stores already have RFID chips and checking out (at a free outlet to self checkout or at a cashier who'll basically do the same thing as you) consist of only putting the goods in a basket, the recognition / scanning of the RFID chip is very good and fast. If you walk out with goods you didn't buy the guard will have a notification on his smartphone with the list of unpaid items.
They're already very close getting to "Just Walk Out" from Amazon situation but I'm not sure how expensive putting an RFID chip in every product is.. ?
UK ones have baskets you put stuff in, but they appear to be using multiple barcode scanners, at least for low value items. I'm guessing there is a cost-benefit trade-off at some point, as well as a potential functional impact problem (hard to put an RFID tag in a solid lump of plastic!). The combination seems to work well though, and is certainly faster than most supermarkets.
I went to a Decathlon in the UK to buy a bag and it was a weird experience. There was something a bit unnerving about interacting with a system with not enough feedback.
A reassuring 'beep' from the system would have helped me know it had scanned and was happy rather than waiting for it to show up on a screen.
Overall I find self-checkouts with barcodes quicker and easier. A scan and beep is a quick action. Putting something in a basket and waiting an unspecified amount of time was weird but no doubt would be something I'd get used to if it was a regular thing.
Having used it a few times, it is really cool. I noticed my local Amazon Go locations never really had items worth stealing out on the shelves though, which make me wonder if they're not actually confident in its performance yet. I'd be curious to see if they're willing to give retailers some kind of loss prevention SLA.
Good or bad, this just tickles me because it reminds me of that ibm rfid commercial from the 90's (I think?) where it looks like a shoplifter is blatantly robbing a supermarket and the security guard stops them and says they forgot their receipt. They also had a bunch of other commercials that got super close like kids watching on demand streaming movies.
As I recall WalMart spent millions on it, and only gave up because if you buy a cart of razor blades the rfid would miss one. (razor blades because of the metal at weird angles is apparently the worse case)
My biggest problem with this is that from what I can tell, the only way to know how much you're going to be automatically charged (as well as what items the tech thinks you're purchasing), is to go to a kiosk in the store and get a receipt. Which seems to completely defeat the convenience of just walking out in the first place.
I wouldn't feel comfortable just walking out without knowing how much I'm going to be charged, so this tech is essentially useless to me.
When I've used to Amazon Go store, it has usually taken a while for the app to update with a receipt. Last time I went to the new, bigger store it was about an hour before they had the receipt available.
My receipt was in the app shortly after (I walked about two blocks and checked). I think it took longer for an email to show up, but can't recall exactly
More likely, there's a work queue and sometimes it gets a bit backed up or falls a little behind while autoscaling resources kick in. Having fully dedicated capacity for something that's handled asynchronously, fluctuates with time, and can tolerate many minutes of processing delay would be a waste of money.
It's Amazon, to me it seems more likely they are tuning their ML with human input than they somehow need an hour to spin up AWS for their shiny new baby.
Yes. Amazon will know every item you buy, how much, and when. But not much different than grocery store discount cards already used by most everyone for decades. I'm sure that info is sold, traded around, and aggregated.
They will have data on how people walk around the stores, in what order, what shelves they look at, what items they take off and put back. What they put back and rather take as an alternative instead. How long they ponder before picking an item. Etc. etc. so much data to mine for advertisers and marketers to manipulate people into spending more.
Grocery stores also use cameras to see how customers behave. I have not heard of them connecting them to face recognition systems, but I would not be surprised if they do.
I agree that this is another increase in the invasion of privacy that will probably end in a bad place. We need laws to prevent these systems, not just a few people holding on to scraps of privacy with desperate measures, like not buying a new car.
In the United States taxes are not included on the sticker price. As a result adding up the total price of a purchase can be tricky.
However, I don't think this technology will be used extensively by people who purchase a large quantity of products at a time. Instead, this will be catered to the times when someone needs to pick up 5 or less things at a store. In this instance, these customers are not typically price-sensitive about what they need.
In certain places, tax is not added for certain goods. For example, in Seattle food is not taxed, unless it is prepared, like fast food or deli counters.
This is also routine in Europe where tax is included in the advertised price. Here for example the price shown for your hilarious Xmas sweater is inclusive of tax, the price shown for your toddler's equally hilarious sweater is not, because it's tax exempt (clothing for kids isn't taxed) and so in both cases the displayed price is the price you'll pay.
We added a sugar tax, so the sticker price for beverages like original Coke went up, but similar zero sugar products (Coke Zero, Pepsi Max) did not. Of course some stores just raised the before-tax price to capture the difference as profit, and others just eliminated sugary drinks. So... a mixed result.
The EU's focus is that consumers always pay what the sticker price says. So, no "plus tax", no "shipping fees not included" on items that unavoidably have to be shipped to you, no "service fees" no "card fees" nothing like that. I think even if you don't actively like this, you can see the point of this approach.
Would it be easier to get consumers angry about taxes if the tax wasn't "baked in" ? Maybe. But it's not as though it has proved impossible to campaign against, for example, tax on tampons or even toilet paper.
$2.99 at 6.5% tax is $3.18 (after rounding). Buy two and your total cost is $3.37. The government don't not want to be cheated out of that penny. (it adds up over all the people buying stuff)
I genuinely can't tell if you are being serious. If you are being serious, then how do you account for the behaviour of the customer possibly changing based on how the price is displayed (i.e including or excluding taxes etc.)
Since in the US tax is traditionally never included in any state (exception: gasoline is always advertised with all tax), consumers are not changing behavior. I suspect there are a few who split purchases knowing the above, but for the most part few people do.
Also, you seem to be putting more thought into this than our government has.
The cash registers at a normal store has to calculate the tax on items, so I don't see why this would be very hard for other computer systems to do. It will know where you are.
I don't think it's a lot to ask that I'm informed how much I'm going to be charged before I pay for something, which is the process for every sale I make currently works.
What if the item is marked as on sale but the database hasn't been updated so I don't get the sale price?
What if the price on the item is correct but someone fat fingered the price in the database?
What if a different customer moved an item from one shelf to another so the price on the shelf is for a different product?
What if I want to know the total with tax?
What if a camera sees me pick up a $500 item to look at but doesn't see me put it back on the shelf?
I don't want to go home, wait an hour+, see I've been mischarged, and then have to spend a week waiting for a refund to process.
I have to imagine that all of those will be rare enough situations that you don't really need to worry about it.
Many of them happen when you're checking out in person too.
You can simply go to the receipt kiosk every time if you're worried about being charged incorrectly.
I bet people said the same thing about credit cards — “how do I know there won’t be an error that causes my credit card bill to be wrong at the end of the month? I’ll stick with cash thank you very much”
I mean, until the technology had been proven, I think that's a valid question to ask.
Plus, when credit cards were introduced, you were still given the opportunity to agree upon the total on which you'd be charged, before you were charged. That's all I'm asking for with this.
If there are enough kiosks to avoid a line, always getting the receipt is still a huge improvement over scanning, even if it falsifies the "just walk out" bit.
Another potential alternative for the anxious (and I definitely include myself) is an app showing up-to-the-second billing state on the smartphone screen. At a glance, usability issues seem hard but doable.
> Another potential alternative for the anxious (and I definitely include myself) is an app showing up-to-the-second billing state on the smartphone screen.
That sounds like an awesome idea!
You just load up your cart, peek at your (account-linked) smartphone, and see what your total will before heading to your car.
Unfortunately the current system doesn’t exactly work in real time (sometimes it can take a while for a receipt to appear in the app) but I don’t think that’s a fundamental limitation. I also don’t think this is a major concern though; so long as there’s still price tags (which there are) and it’s easy to dispute mistakes in the app I don’t think most people will really have a problem with it.
If my experience with Amazon hubs is anything to go by, the store employees will not be empowered to make any decisions or help you with anything and will direct you to call the customer-service number, and the customer-service people will not be empowered to fix any pricing errors on the spot.
I think the price tag only makes sense when tax is included on them. Things are taxed differently in different places, and sometimes people are tax exempt (in the US). But without the tax on the price tag, it’s literally impossible to know how much you’re going to pay (this is why I love living in the EU).
The closest I have to this today is the grocery store nearest me - I walk in, I pick up a scanner (you can use an app on your phone but I use their scanner because my phone locks immediately with a passphrase when unused so it's ghastly for this purpose) and I just wander about scanning items and putting them into bags. The scanner shows its estimate of the price paid, which in my experience is always 100% accurate but I guess "estimate" is needed because legally the shop is not promising to sell at this price yet. I walk to the exit and scan the exit and give back the scanner, it tells me the final price which is the same as that estimate and then I pay with my card and walk out.
This is still extra steps compared to "Just walk out" but it's close. There is no interaction with store employees (which suits some friends who struggle to do human interaction on "bad" days) for example, this store would seem to work just fine without any employees although of course it's a huge grocery store so it has dozens doing various things and couldn't in fact function without some.
The really nice optimisation of course is to get rid of the money. If you stop caring about trying to make the numbers add up and just rely on people going "Huh, I only need two cabbages, why would I take sixty cabbages? What am I going to do with sixty cabbages?" then this is all much simpler. But I think even Amazon doesn't expect to deploy this to a culture where that's realistic.
When I last used one of those systems, I found it to be reliable, as you said. And to keep people honest, they'd randomly pick shoppers to go through a regular checkout, which is both understandable and annoying.
I used something like this deployed to Coop stores in Denmark. It's a nightmare to use and the random check pissed me off enough so I deleted the app and decided never to use it again.
Try shopping with a little kid and using one hand on your phone and being randomly checked when there are 20 people waiting before you. This is not working in the current version of the technology.
We used to have that in some of our supermarkets years ago, but they've all disappeared over the years. It's all a mix of self-help checkouts/human checkouts now. Not sure why.
One of my local grocery stores has these mobile scanners and I strongly prefer it. I’ll go slightly out of my way to hit this store instead. While I am loathe to give Amazon more data/consumer insight and see this as massive consolidation play, I suspect people will, once accustomed to it, totally normalize this and not look back.
No way does that completely defeat the convenience. To just walk up and put your email in, is even much easier than ordering at kiosks at something like mcdonalds
As long as the process for getting refunds is frictionless and well-implemented (perhaps similar to Prime Now), then if you can afford holding the charge on your credit card for a few days, this doesn't really seem like a problem. The process becomes: go to the store, pick up what you want, and then at some later point take a quick look at the "receipt" for verification, quickly flagging anything that seems off.
With Prime Now, you get your groceries delivered and pay for them in advance. Once in a while, you don't get an item, get the wrong item, a rotten piece of fruit, or an expired bottle of milk. When this happens, you simply go to the app where every item is listed, and follow the quick prompts to get a refund. You can optionally give a reason for asking, but in my experience they don't actually seem to care; in fact, whenever I've left a comment that, for example, one of the ten oranges I ordered was bad, they've always refunded me for _all_ the oranges on my order. I assume this is because the number of refunds is low enough relative to the number of purchases that they can afford to just always refund, keeping the customer happy enough.
If this is how it ends up working, then I'd gladly trade standing in long lines at the store for just walking out and reviewing my purchases later. The tracking part is still a bit creepy, though.
Do you memorize all the time whether you grabbed two or three bags of chips or exactly how many cans of beer etc?
How do you prove you didn't buy something? Or will they just accept your word? If anyone can just say whatever, then people will just ask for refunds of stuff. Will they check the footage in each case? But maybe it can work in the US. It sure as hell won't work in many other countries, where people look for loopholes all the time.
> How do you prove you didn't buy something? Or will they just accept your word? I
I'd imagine it's similar to the heuristic Amazon uses today with their A-Z Customer Guarantee.
If you request a lot of refunds for a single trip, or have a history of requesting refunds, your individual risk score goes up, and the hoops you jump through to get a refund increase.
Also for retail grocery stores now, loss prevention is already an issue.
Right now, a person can take an item off the shelve and hide it, leaving only security cameras and human personnel to watch for theft.
Adding in amazon's technology would be additional layers of defense.
How does amazons tech add defense? You still need human personnel to do anything about theft. People shoplifting don't care if the door is beeping while they walk out and disappear.
Without amazon tech, you take an item off the shelf, hide it, and leave. There are cameras with loss prevention staff monitoring the feeds, and in some stores, sensors that trigger an alarm upon leaving.
With amazon tech, in addition to manually monitored cameras, you add AI monitored cameras, and sensors on shelves to detect an item has been taken.
Without Amazon's tech stores rely on staff members witnessing the item being hidden.
With Amazon's tech, the item is taken and marked for payment as soon as it's removed.
They'll extend you a varying degree of trust based on your burgeoning Amazon social credit score (taking into account your actual credit score as well I'm sure)
>Do you memorize all the time whether you grabbed two or three bags of chips or exactly how many cans of beer etc?
Honestly, yes. What I worry more about is how well the names of items on the receipt actually match up to the products. From the summer I worked as a grocery cashier, I can tell you that people often end up confused at items on the receipt that they actually bought.
Combine that with mistaken items on the receipt and some number of more trusting people will just assume it's just a weird labeling of something they did buy and move on.
This is the "lame - no wireless, less space than a nomad" take.
Are the prices not listed on the individual items?
Purchasers make decisions on a product by product basis, not based on the total.
How often are you at the checkout and say "Wait, HOW MUCH is my bill? never mind then, going to go put some things back."
Sure, it happens, but it's a 0.0001% use case.
edit: OK, fair play to everyone who responded and said this is a common use case if you're poor. Not sure how relevant the food stamps argument is here, since this is an automatic pay and checkout system.
But, remember - this requires a credit card and an app. As you put things in your basket, your app shopping cart is also updated, and you can track your running tally.
I'm more concerned about whether the store system gets my order right than whether I do. What if it, e.g., mistakes a can of soda for a 12-pack? Three hundred times on the order?
Given that the exact timestamp of when the system thinks an item is picked up is known, it should be trivial to review a 5-second clip and flag it as correct or not, training the ML model at the same time.
FWIW, I've been using Amazon Go stores regularly for a while and have never had any issues.
There's a link to dispute the receipt should something happen, right on the receipt itself. Now this is specifically Amazon Go app, but I would expect it to be same for other retailers.
Edit: I see that this is a little bit different than Go stores. It's far less convenient, but you can still get the receipt in your email by visiting a kiosk it seems.
Agreed. I feel like the point of this is to separate the buyer from the notion of total price. They may as well change the unit from dollars to "credits".
And how often do you stop your checkout clerk and tell them to stop scanning because you've exceeded N number of dollars? Once you've pulled your cart up to the checkout line, I'm betting you've most likely settled on what you want to buy.
I've seen people do just that often enough. They'll sometimes sort their items in order of descending importance, and ask to stop when the total exceeds some amount.
I don't want to say the "p" word and spark a huge social justice flame war, but a lot of comments in this thread are so obviously speaking from a place of financial advantage.
In response to your comment in particular, yes, I have done that. Not often, but it has happened often enough, and only a few dollars each time. Do you think people whip out Excel and keep a running tally of every item in their carts?
I was a cashier in college for several years. Your scenario happens far more than 0.0001% of the case. It's fairly common amongst poor people. Then there are items that aren't acceptable for use by food stamps and must be paid for separately. Then there is WIK and trying return WIK items for cash refunds. You also have people who misread the labels. Then there are items that aren't in the right place and the label says a price different than what the register says. For instance, "Cambell's Tomato Soup" can is misplaced in the "Cambell's Healthy Alternative Tomato Soup" location. Most people don't carefully read labels of the items on the shelf. They just assume that the label under the item is correct.
Hopefully the same tech used to measure when someone takes or replaces something on the shelf can be used to monitor when stuff is in the wrong spot, making stocking easier.
Amazon wants to spread this to more than just their stores. It's a mild problem now but most things are when new tech is introduced. Accessibility doesn't matter when only a few sites are on the web but becomes critical when the web is the default way to access information.
The Amazon Go I used to visit was maybe 200 square feet in size but had 4-5 people stocking and moving things around. And apparently there are others in the back assisting the cameras and making sandwiches and whatnot.
To add. When I was poor and in college I definitely had a few instances where I had to put something back because the total was more than I could afford.
Then this solution sounds like a huge improvement. Instead of getting to the register and finding out you grabbed the wrong thing or overspent, which is a huge inconvenience to you and the other people in line, you can now track everything as you go.
Put a can of soup in your basket. Oops! The alert I set up for items that aren't covered by Food Stamps just fired. Let me see what the issue is. Oh! I just got an alert because I went over my budget, let me review my items and figure it right away.
And even if you don't have a smartphone/app, the process of going to a kiosk to review your order will be much faster than at a register. Walk up to the kiosk and it instantly shows what's in your basket, with a total and flags for non-Food Stamp items. Now you can go swap things out or put things back and the whole interaction only took a second and was must less of a commitment than going through a checkout lane.
What you say seems plausible and I agree with it. I was responding only to the belief that not having enough money at checkout is 0.0001% of the cases.
Stores have problem with pricing all the time. If you don't look at your receipt when buying things at the grocery store, you are going to be overcharged sometimes. Especially at stores that don't have a "Over charged and you get it free" policy. Pricing problems are even more common when a new store opens. This tech is going to make mistakes all the time for quite awhile. I would definitely want to see a list of the items and prices the system charged me for before I left the store.
>How often are you at the checkout and say "Wait, HOW MUCH is my bill? never mind then, going to go put some things back."
That's a pretty common occurence for poor people. If you only have $70 and your bill comes to $72 because you did the mental math wrong you're gonna have to put something back.
Are you in the US? Because in the US it happens more often than elsewhere because you can't actually know the full price until you check out due to taxes not being included in the price on the box/shelf. Plus, especially with groceries, some items are taxed and some aren't in some states.
Yeah - actually, it does happen often enough... I'd say it's much higher.
I know a lot of HN is full of people who don't pay attention to prices (for whatever reason - probably the inordinate amount of obscenely high incomes) - but it's really common outside of this crowd.
When I was poor - I thoroughly examined prices and only bought things that were on sale. If it rang up and wasn't the price that it said it was - I put it back. An example in my mind would be something like a block of cheese being $12 instead of $10. It's only $2 but it's also $2 that I was not willing to pay. Sometimes the staff at the store were not removing the old sale tags - thus it looked like it was on sale but it wasn't.
In MA it's even better: if a grocery store item was labeled as $10 and rang up as $12, you'd just pay $2. The rule is that the item is free if it's less than $10 and $10 off if it's more than $10 (although this only applies to one item; you can't just go grab 20 of them).
You've gotta be kidding me. The vast majority of Americans are constantly managing a battle between their means and their desires. The total bill matters immensely.
>Are the prices not listed on the individual items?
This is not aimed at deanCommie, but I just want to comment on the massive cognitive dissonance in effect when the issue of listing tax-included prices on individual items in America is raised.
Do none of those arguments hold anymore? Why? Because it isn't European tourists asking the question?
Absolutely, large swaths of the population can't do simple mental arithmetic like this at all.
The US system discriminates against those people, no denying it. That said, I'm sure our European friends are absolutely drooling at the thought of a 7% VAT...
It's just part of the price, you don't really notice.
Like I do sometimes, but then I consider VAT policy somewhat interesting, in that it specifies the "essentials" (VAT is not charged on these) of what a tax authority thinks one should have.
But most Europeans tend not to think about it on a daily basis, because it's baked into the price.
Legally VAT isn't about essentials, although luxury taxes which pre-dated VAT were often specified this way.
VAT is just a tax on Value Added like it says, and the exclusions targeting items you see as essential aren't focused on somebody's idea of what's essential but are the result of various lobbying. That is, it was not the goal of the tax system to encourage petite women to buy clothes intended for children nor to punish the largest children (or their parents) with more expensive clothes that's just the consequence of a lobbied-for exemption for kid sizes.
So "But it's an essential" is a useful emotional tactic but has no legal implications for VAT.
If you live in the San Francisco Bay area, sales taxes in SF are 8.5% Tax rates in Oakland are 9.25%. South San Francisco: 9.75% Mountain View: 9% Humboldt County: 7.75% Sonoma: 8.75%
The mental effort is not in the calculation but in figuring out what the tax rate is where you are. There really is no excuse for retailers not listing "tax-included" prices.
European VATs are routinely much higher than any state sales tax in the US.
I can't prove it, but I suspect this is directly related to the fact that in the US system, we see the tax on every purchase.
I admit it's annoying to not have a single number to work with, having to juggle sticker price and real price sucks (the same argument applies to tipping).
But sales taxes are regressive and I don't want them to creep upwards indefinitely. A compromise would be to always display both prices, and make the price-at-register larger.
just an observation, but it is pretty obvious you have never been poor or interact with poor people. That situation is a lot more common than you would think.
> Not sure how relevant the food stamps argument is here, since this is an automatic pay and checkout system.
Not sure why you feel the need to say that anyone who is conscious of their grocery budget is irrelevant to an automatic system? You don't say this, but that basically implies that anyone who does so is 'beneath' this tech/convenience.
Having used Amazon Go once as a tourist, it was frictionless only because of the Amazon app. You can scan the app instead of a credit card (your card is already linked to Amazon for payment), and when you leave the app tells you what you bought. In my case it thought I bought a drink when all I did was browse the options, so when I saw this in the app, I deleted the drink from the receipt by saying I didn’t get one, and it corrected the receipt without any human interaction that I could see. The app was essential for me to go back, otherwise I’d assume the system was inaccurate and not worth the trouble.
But, and I know I'm apparently in a minority here...
I don't want an app for my grocery store.
I do my shopping spread between 4 different grocery stores depending where in the area I'm closest to, what specifically I need, etc.. and I don't want an app for any of them. I already get pestered about loyalty cards, now I'm going to get pestered about installing my local Rite-Aid's mobile app?
It doesn't even need to be a special app, it could just be another Apple Wallet/Android Wallet card. If you tried the Amazon Go app, it is literally just an app that displays a QR code that you use to scan when entering the store. That's literally it, no notifications, no other extra functionality, nothing. As soon as Apple Wallet/Android Wallet integrate it, it will become even more seamless.
A good example for people familiar with electric car charing is the ChargePoint integration. I have the app, but I never open it, and I don't even really need it (as I only use it for rare circumstances where I am in an unknown area and need to find a charging spot asap). Whenever I want to charge my car at a ChargePoint station, I just open up the ChargePoint card in Apple Wallet, NFC scan it, and that's it. It already knows that the ChargePoint card is associated with my account, so I can later open the app and see how charged my car is, what's the charging rate at the moment, my billing history, etc. If I don't have the app, I can check it on the web just as well.
A QR code can be displayed as a saved image. The Amazon Go app on Android requires the following permissions:
Identity
find accounts on the device
add or remove accounts
Contacts
find accounts on the device
Location
approximate location (network-based)
precise location (GPS and network-based)
Wi-Fi connection information
view Wi-Fi connections
Other
receive data from Internet
view network connections
create accounts and set passwords
full network access
run at startup
use accounts on the device
control vibration
prevent device from sleeping
That's actually not as bad as some other apps, but horribly insecure from my perspective. I avoid all such apps myself, and will do so as long as I can. I'll never know what an app like that is doing, and that is unacceptable on MY phone.
I notice it's also labeled as displaying ads. And this is Amazon's debut offering. It's not going to get better from here as they get more adoption. I do not want this app on my phone.
Everything I know about about the mobile ecosystem tells me that if an app/card/integration is required for an unrelated service, it's going to go downhill over time. Everything I know about Amazon means that they are definitely going to eventually be advertising to me and pushing notifications and 'reminders' and whatever -- because they already do with the online store.
Even the charging example getting brought up as proof of this working: I can't imagine signing up for a special credit card that was required to fill up my car at a gas station. That's not innovative. The current system is I can use any credit card, or cash, or (increasingly) mobile pay at any gas station without any account with no decrease in quality of service. And with the current system, someone else can borrow my car without also needing to borrow my credit card or phone.
I'll stick my neck out and predict that over the next 3-5 years, ChargePoint's app and web interface are going to get progressively worse, and progressively more invasive. This is based purely on the knowledge that they require an online account and special credit card just to refill a car. I don't think there's any reason to have that business model other than a plan to eventually leverage the card/account in invasive ways.
They require a special credit card? I connected my usual credit card from my bank to the account half a year ago and have been using it successfully with Apple Wallet just fine.
I'm just going off of their FAQ[0]. I'll trust you as someone who actually uses the service.
Regardless, even linking my own cards, this is still kind of a crazy concept, isn't it? It's still strictly worse on nearly every single axis than a normal charge/gas station, where I can still just as easily pay with platforms like Apple/Google Wallet, but also with a spare twenty if I've left my phone at home or if I'm loaning my car to someone else.
It's very difficult to come up with a business model that says, "you must only pay us or interact with us in a special, tracker-friendly way" that isn't going to eventually become profitable by selling a lot of data or targeting you with ads. There are some exceptions to this rule, but they are very few and far between, and Amazon (and I suspect ChargePoint as well) are not among them.
In fact, you can already look at ChargePoint's privacy policy[1] and see that they're carving out terms that allow them to share your personal/location/purchase data with affiliates and partners, as well as to use your information to deliver tailored ads.
I just checked the iOS version, and it requires none of those permissions. The only ones I have noticed were access to use cellular data + background app refresh. No contacts access, no location access, nothing. I guess the devs must have just went all out on the Android version.
I’d expect amazon to email you a receipt with an easy way to dispute payments. I realize this is not the same as seeing the aggregate cost at the time of purchase but I’m skeptical this alone will create lots of friction in ppl adopting this.
To me, the biggest thing that has kept me from trying it is that I need to open my app and scan a QR code. Looks like they’re addressing this by left you swipe your card.
That's the point of this technology - to increase impulse buying.
Credit cards purpose is that it hides from you how much money you have left. If you were paying in cash and see how much money you have left in your wallet, you're more likely end up not purchasing a given item.
This is one step further, since you now don't know how much you're paying (unless you calculating the cost in your head, which most people don't do) and typically you'll know once you get a CC statement.
Note that the kiosk doesn't print the receipt, it e-mails it, which makes it even harder to instantly see what you've paid.
You won't have to pay for cashiers but you will have to still pay for people stocking, security when people inevitably try and beat this system, customer service for when old people without cellphones get confused, etc. Maybe you shave off one minimum wage worker off your payroll, for the cost of however much amazon licenses this tech to you.
I mean, you do it a single time and your email is registered. Just like square. This is standard practice at this point and the inconvenience factor is eliminated pretty much immediately.
> My biggest problem with this is that from what I can tell, the only way to know how much you're going to be automatically charged (as well as what items the tech thinks you're purchasing), is to go to a kiosk in the store and get a receipt.
You only need to use the kiosk once per credit card (to enter your e-mail address). From the page:
> If shoppers need a receipt, they can visit a kiosk in the store and enter their email address. A receipt will be emailed to them for this trip. If they use the same credit card to enter this or any other Just Walk Out-enabled store in the future, a receipt will be emailed to them automatically.
If I was the owner of the Store I would put a security guy to validate that it was paíd, if not then don’t let them put of the Store. I’m a tech guy but if it was my store I would like to double check somehow. From a security perspective it’s great to only let people in with credit and also I would be able to somehow track who was trying to do something wrong.
You'll do that the first 5 times, then start to feel OK with it, and not do it any more. I felt the same about ordering fruit & veg for home delivery. Nowadays I don't even think about it any more, except when people who don't get groceries delivered say they don't trust they won't get the wilted ones.
I hate the no people future, therefore, I hate this service. Unfortunately for me, that means nothing.
I see this service taking over, at the very least, a large percentage of the 7/11 bodega type of stores. I see a future where the corner store will return. Over the last few years, companies have gone large so they can take advantage of the economy of scale. This service will reduce labor costs and have costs fall relative to similar stores previously.
Pundits were talking about Amazon opening stores with this tech. Why bother when you can get someone else to do it while expanding your core business. Imagine this, a one-man store where I order my inventory from Amazon and have it delivered daily or close to that. They brought their multivendor Amazon model where anyone can sell online using their online tech to the real world. This is a case of most retailers playing checkers while Amazon is playing chess. Yikes.
I buy my ham from the guy who slices it for me. I don't like thin shaved ham that all the pre-sliced it, instead I want the thick slices that the guy provides for me.
Sure, there's downers everywhere but there are also positive people that affect your day positively! There's a great lady at the local supermarket where I live who has such high energy and good spirits that just seeing her manage her team is uplifting.
Absolutely, and I hope there will continue to be artisan shops providing that experience for those who want it. But I'm optimistic there will be, just as farmers' markets haven't been entirely eliminated by your local supermarket.
I actually like this idea[0]. I have a couple of tweaks I'd like to see.
I'd like to walk in, swipe my CC and get a QR code printout. At any point, I should be able to scan the QR code with my phone and see a receipt showing what I have in my cart and how much it will cost me as well as my status (in/out of the store). Once I leave the store, I should be able to scan the QR and get my final receipt. If there's an issue, I can turn right around and get it resolved.
I don't want to have to deal with going to a kiosk unless I need help.
Also, I don't like that this is an Amazon thing.
[0] As an option. I don't want this to be the way of the future.
Amazon will have some record of all the transactions, at least initially to help in the transition, and that means it can figure out what’s selling best where, then undercut the stores online. Allowing Amazon inside your transactions is not a strategy for long term survival. Having said that it’s hard to see what other options retailers have when their competitors start using this tech and improving margins. High end retailers can differentiate by saying “we have actual people”.
What data does Just Walk Out technology collect from my shoppers?
We only collect the data needed to provide shoppers with an accurate receipt. Shoppers can think of this as similar to typical security camera footage.
A rather (wide) open door for Amazon to collect valuable data on customers. And is this really comparable to "a typical security camera footage"?
I would bet that the money maker isn't the actual technology. The data they could collect on consumer shopping habits, tied automatically to a cross-store profile + an expanded Amazon SSP/DSP would create huge value to Amazon and brands. Added onto their already fast growing advertising business.
If this is in fact their revenue play they could even sell this at a loss just to build up the ecosystem, get a unmovable majority monopoly on the tech -> and data.
Maybe even add on top something like Good RX where retailers pay amazon on top to drive traffic to their stores. And even combine with Brands who want to offer discounts. Double dip.
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[ 9.5 ms ] story [ 602 ms ] threadAnd as you point out, any time Amazon strikes up a "partnership" with outside parties, its ultimate goal is to conquer or cannibalize them.
Businesses should approach partnerships with Amazon with the same level of skepticism/trepidation as Native Americans signing a treaty with the U.S. government 150-200 years ago.
Retailers already rely on the trust of dozens if not hundreds of vendors for operations. Trust is established through contractual obligations, pilot programs, etc.
Shrinkage in the US is about 1.38% on average currently. Any competent retailer would run a pilot and evaluate its effect on shrinkage rates.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wal-mart-to-vendors-get-off-ama...
Yeah, I wonder how retailers are going to feel about amazon having a direct pipeline of purchase data at all their competitors fed directly to a division of the company that I'm sure they'll claim is sealed off from the rest of operations. Even if amazon is playing totally fairly here, I don't see why it makes sense for people to trust them with so much at risk
But you may as well. By giving them a CC# you're allowing Amazon to spy on you anyway -- and that's not even mentioning the copious surveillance in such stores in the form of cameras and behavior detection.
> If shoppers need a receipt, they can visit a kiosk in the store and enter their email address.
Oh, and if you want a receipt, you'll have to give Amazon your email address, too, which allows them to more easily tie your real-world identity and activity to the profile they already have on you.
This sort of thing is a privacy disaster. I wouldn't set foot inside a store that does this.
If they make it accessible enough, all stores may. Even if they don't, I imagine all stores will have something similar in some timeframe. So.. what will you do then?
I think that's unlikely. There is likely to be a large enough percentage of shoppers who avoid this sort of thing to support at least a couple of stores who make it a selling point that they don't do this.
But, if there is no option then I'll have to figure out what my response will be. It would likely have to be a compromise position between buying as much as I can without involving a store at all (buy produce directly from farmers, do a lot more bartering with neighbors, etc.) and employing single-use credit cards when I can't avoid the store.
That would be OK, actually -- there are still plenty of stores that don't use loyalty cards.
The difference between the two things, though, are that you can shop at a store that has loyalty cards without having to use them yourself. You couldn't shop at a store that uses this program without using the program yourself.
this already exists in nearly every retail store already. full of cameras and for advertising purposes they have been building profiles on people for decades
AFAIK many retailers (Target, for example) use an identifier derived from your CC number and don't even need your email or phone number to build a profile on you.
I totally agree with being concerned about your privacy, but I don't understand the increased harshness on this service specifically as opposed to the already-pervasive services that already collect your data on a daily basis. Is it just because this one is Amazon and it's fun to hate on them?
But this is real-life shopping, not online. Online shopping is 100% optional. Real-life shopping is not.
> Is it just because this one is Amazon and it's fun to hate on them?
No, my criticisms and concerns about this would be no different regardless of what company was doing it.
What? Is someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to go shopping? I don't understand this statement. "Real-life shopping" is just as optional as online shopping is. Hell, "real-life shopping" is more optional in this regard because you can always pay with cash and escape the aforementioned privacy concerns. You can't do that online.
Really? And how do you get your food if you don't go shopping? Most people can't run a self-sufficient farm.
And using cash isn’t opting out of real-life shopping, it’s just opting out of one payment method.
There are probably laws requiring it in some places round the world, there are probably customers who want it, it speeds up the process by not requiring an email address to be typed in, and the total cost of a receipt printer is tiny.
That's not a complete deterrent, but it's something.
How does the system deter shoplifting? You can just do it.
... approximately once. ;)
If you want to talk about privacy, it's always a valid concern in this day and age, but your comment feels like you're building a strawman.
I was pointing those out because of their obvious privacy implications, not because I thought that the article was presenting them as privacy-related.
> your comment feels like you're building a strawman.
How so? I was merely pointing out two of the several things the article said that got my spidey-senses tingling. I don't see how what I said is anything remotely like a strawman argument.
Exactly, and that's the definition of a strawman.
Again, I do agree with your larger points about privacy, but the presentation of your argument rubbed me the wrong way.
Reading between the lines of marketing (or any text, really) is an important element of critical thinking. There's no rule that says I have to only talk about what your commercial wants me to talk about.
Are you really suggesting we should just uncritically nod along with whatever facile ideas are fed to us by an advert? <-- (Psst...this is actually a strawman)
Saying "but you may as well" gives the impression that you refuted the point the quote was making, but in reality you were refuting a point that, by your own admission, the quote was not making. That is a strawman.
Reading between the lines of a commercial is fine, and encouraged. Dismissing the point of the commercial entirely because of a semi-related tangent is not.
If you meant it differently (perhaps not to dismiss the quote's "argument" but instead to just bring up the privacy implications separately) that's great and I'll take your word for it (and even agree with it), I just found your original quote to be saying something different.
edit: I see that you are not the original poster of the comment. This comment was meant for that person, not you. Apologies.
No, it's not. A strawman is when you are asserting that someone is making an argument they aren't making, so that you can knock down that argument rather than what they are really postulating.
I am not doing that. I haven't asserted that Amazon was making any sort of privacy argument here. I am the one making the privacy argument.
I can't come back at you and say, "but I wasn't talking about mortality rates, I was just talking about hand-eye coordination. Your objection is irrelevant to my point."
Similarly, when Amazon makes a statement that using credit cards linked to email is a good way to get around making an Amazon account, and JohnFen correctly asserts that this does nothing for privacy whatsoever, and that Amazon will still make ghost tracking accounts for every shopper, that's not a strawman. They're just pointing out that Amazon's solution doesn't solve the problem.
The reason we don't want accounts isn't because making them is too hard or because we don't own smartphones -- it's explicitly because of the tracking. It's not a convenience problem; using a credit card and a smartphone are both equally convenient for most people.
Amazon is saying, "tell the people who are worried about making accounts that they don't need to, so it's fine." JohnFen is replying, "that doesn't address the reason people like me are worried about making an account."
That rule applies in general. Even 7-11 has security cameras capturing faces of people entering and leaving the store.
Easy to say, hard to do. It's pretty hard to live without having to enter a retail establishment. Particularly one that sells you your food.
Privacy is a sliding scale and different people set the slider at different sensitivity levels.
And even if one's sensitivity level is high enough to cause personal problems, they're solvable. People that deeply concerned about their privacy have had proxy shoppers buy things on their behalf.
If anything it's full disclosure high level surveillance. I imagine big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart already have sophisticated surveillance systems that attach your card info to visual surveillance systems for Loss Prevention. I've heard of people who were repeat shoplifters at Wal-Mart that eventually got caught; and when they did, Wal-Mart had essentially a running tab of all the things they had ever shoplifted and slammed them with a grand theft charge despite the fact the time they got caught they were only attempting to shoplift a $5 bottle of shampoo or something.
I'm not denying the privacy disaster you're worried about, but honestly I think we're already too far gone down this road to be able to do anything about it.
True, I was being a touch aggressive in calling it "spying". However, if this sort of thing becomes so ubiquitous that its impossible to avoid, then it is 100% spying even if fully disclosed.
The difference between data collection being "spying" or not is one of voluntary, informed consent. If every store uses something like this, voluntary consent is no longer possible, and this would absolutely qualify as spying.
Very few people going into retail stores understand the extent of the tracking going on. So yes, to the average person, this seems like creepy stalking and/or spying.
Ha! They already have a decade of my purchase history from being a Prime customer and I shop using an Amazon Credit Card. They've got everything they need and I don't mind.
Few people would be bothered by something like this. If they would be bothered, we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases.
I, for one, won’t ever go in an Amazon Go store. If other stores implement this tech without an opt-out, I will either start shopping in a ski mask or go without.
Just FYI, the local area code and Jenny's number (867-5309) is a default that exists for most loyalty programs. So if you don't want to be tracked you can use that. I've heard that this was implemented for military folks who tend to be a lot more transient than regular locals.
Or just not use anything at all. Or do what I do, and prefer shopping at stores that don't have a loyalty program. In my area, stores that have loyalty programs also have higher prices so that the "discount" from the loyalty card makes the price roughly the same as at similar stores that don't have a loyalty program.
So I go to the stores that don't have one. That's not only better for privacy, but is more frictionless and comes with no price penalty.
That's a fair argument, but I think Amazon has enough about me that what you're suggesting is a minor concern relative to what they already have.
I'm much more concerned about my Amazon search history getting leaked as a .txt file than I am about Amazon using imagery of me to train their ML models.
In my area, anyway, a huge outcry happened when these programs began to be adopted. Even now, eyeballing people checking out at the local shops, I'd say that only half of people (at most) are using loyalty cards. And many people I personally know who use loyalty cards do so in a manner to subvert the data collection (usually by having one loyalty card that is used by many people).
So it seems to me a substantial percentage of people really are bothered by them.
This is without any prompting on my end, I never ask a cashier to do this for me.
So apparently it's common enough that some cashiers on-instinct just stick a store card in whenever someone says "no". It's common enough that none of them look at me surprised when I refuse.
You'd be surprised how few people actually ever think about the motivations behind such loyalty programs. If you asked, they'd probably say it's good for the shop as it keeps us going to the place where we get discounts though these cards instead of the competitors (hence, "loyalty"). Most of them most definitely don't know how valuable that data is and how it can be used and for what purposes.
What it gets me is a few less entries in the databases of the store, credit card companies, and the marketers who buy credit card information. Every little bit helps!
Labor is a major cost for retail; anything that massively reduces labor costs is going to be hugely game changing. Combined with amazon promises that it takes only a few weeks to integrate (seriously??) if this works at all, this is going to be a super fast growth group at Amazon.
For reference think back to how many stories you’ve read about say managers short changing employees a few minutes at the end of work shifts.
This really could change retail permanently; the only question is if it works.
One of the outcomes of this is that parts of the country have been 'left behind' economically. This isn't only in England, but happening in other countries too (e.g. the USA). The surge in 'nostalgic'[0] voting (Brexit and MAGA spring to mind, respectively) is one of the outcomes of that occurring.
I'm hoping I'm wrong, and I'm hoping there's something around the corner that changes the situation specific to the information revolution, rather than an outside force (like say, a virus causing a massive shift in demographics), but the way things look right now, that's not a given.
[0] I'm deliberately ignoring the more controversial and/or negative aspects to those voting choices, as that would derail the conversation
That's the whole point of the comment you're replying to. This isn't new or unique to recent technological advancements. This is always the case when new technology displaces existing structures.
The fact that I can't imagine it is no proof that it won't happen, of course. But I feel that we've gotten lucky in the past, and I hate depending on my luck.
B followed A once before, therefore B always follows A.
Perhaps, but if history is any guide, that "long term" will span over multiple generations. That is of no help to those being hurt now.
This view of history as immutable, with the ends always meeting the means is the sort of thinking that I believe is holding us back as a society. Researchers are still studying the impact that the industrial revolution had on not just the environment, but also the mental health of the descendants of the working class in Europe: https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-the-industrial-revolution-l....
We can and should do better.
Of course farmers get sick, but they don't get the diseases created by industry. There are a great many respiratory conditions and cancers that don't occur naturally.
Not being Nicolas Cage, I was not. However, there are many, many countries today who are similar to 19th century UK/US. Would you like to go to rural China and compare the peasant subsistence farming still happening there with urban China and its sweatshops?
> suffering is suffering.
Sure. People suffered. They suffered horribly as peasant farmers living on less than $2/day, or they suffered as laborers making possibly a bit more. Work was universally hard.
It's possible (likely) that future people will see what we went through - disease, hunger, unemployment, bad management, personal suffering/alienation and a host of other problems - and say literally the same thing about us. But although I think all of us can think of a few tweaks at the margins, we'd all utterly fail fully to replace the status quo most people accept, many try to change, a few succeed at changing and a precious few improve.
We should give the past the same courtesy we expect from future generations. And we should be willing to make some of the sacrifices today to ensure that future generations will endure. (And this includes things like ensuring the effects of climate change or nuclear weapons don't wipe us out.) The past is and forever shall be a foreign country.
the life expectancy in Liverpool and some other parts of England during the peak of industrialisation fell to 25 years, the average height fell by almost 10cm, so actually it was pretty bad and it took decades for the situation to improve. I would have very much preferred to be a self-sufficient farmer during that time. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens goes through a pretty big amount of data that shows that traditional communities and even hunter-gatherers lived much better and longer lifes than people that had to endure the human meatgrinder that was industrialisation.
https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin...
Yes, and that's why the labor movement is important (I'd like it to be much stronger than it is still today). Is your view that neither the Industrial Revolution nor the labor movement should have happened?
Something similar plays out with "sweatshop labor" these days. People talk about the abuses, but there's often the same flow of people from the countryside lining up for the openings.
That's not to say that stopping stupid abuses and unsafe conditions isn't important, it's just important to keep in mind how bad things often were. Simply having a job with a salary that guaranteed you wouldn't starve was a huge improvement for some people.
As far as I can see many of the jobs we do these days don't provide any real value. In this case cashier doesn't provide real value so good riddance. But I'm not confident we'll find ourselves in a better place in the future.
Also, somehow we undervalue manual labor with some skill and unions don't seem to work as well for non-factory/hospital/plant jobs.
I think the one difference is that despite the 1850s UK having (some) protectionism and (loads of) imperialism, they didn't have massive bureaucracies forbidding everyone from doing everything without permission.
This is not actually a problem of technology but of governance. And we should keep in mind that this kind of improvement would make retail workers much more productive as well as the industry more sustainable.
To compare this to the Industrial Revolution is just wrong. Period. Just as comparing today to the Gilded Age is wrong. Those were period of massive productivity growth (and also wage growth) despite being periods of high inequality.
On the contrary, we are in an age of tiny productivity growth and almost no wage growth. We have been through a decade with basically zero interest rates (or negative interest rates in parts of the world). To say, we've been through this before and we are all going to be better off for it, is just not true.
Cut your labor and you strangle your customer base. Now we're seeing a tendency of businesses focusing on more wealthy clients, luxury goods, etc. Some modern mall strategies are gearing at primarily targeting luxury stores vs appealing to the masses because the mass labor force purses are growing ever tighter (mainly because they're emptying).
Seems like a natural progression as the "wealth trickle" progresses more and more to a drought and pools up at the top in guarded reservoirs away from the majority: the labor force.
It's one thing to automate away tasks people don't want to do and replace those tasks with tasks people do want to do (and get paid for). It's an entirely different story when you eliminate work and provide no alternatives, displacing large segments of the population, then simply accumulate the labor cost savings for your business and chief investors while stagnating growth.
Most counter arguments to this trend point at historic technological shifts where new industry popped up to supply alternative means of living for the labor force. This makes an assumption that the change is the same and ignores the trends, hand waving it away in ambiguous complexity and proposing we play the experiment out. Most wanting to play the experiment out have little to lose and much to gain. The other side have a lot to lose and relatively little to gain.
We're seeing a lot more of businesses pooling cash and asset reserves and not reinvesting them back into society and people are starting to get a bit cranky about it.
It could potentially be even more axiomatic than that and an unavoidable result of core/firmly held beliefs with trade systems that there will always be those to exploit the weaker (in an economic system) to the point where the system becomes unsustainable.
It often reminds me of agent based models of predator/prey systems where ultimately, the incorrect balance of predators, their efficiencies and successes result in a systematic collapse where the predators starve themselves to death by not allowing the prey to procreate and gather resources necessary that predators ultimately survive on.
In this case, if the wealthy (predators) don't allow the labor force (prey) to collect resources, create value, etc. before snatching added value up ('eating' if you'll humor the idea), they ultimately end up with no future value added from labor force (prey) because the labor doesn't have resources anymore to add value.
From your example following the same basic model, if some of the predators allow themselves to refrain from eating too much and allow the prey to better maintain stable set resources through self control, nothing stops their competitors (other prey) from focusing on their short term gains with no control (yum, more dinner). Ultimately, those predators looking at maintaining a long term stable system will starve if his/her competitors don't share the same views and are allowed to follow the more basic rules. It seems to me, you have to introduce artificial rules into the system to maintain the system (e.g., government regulation or new fundamental underlying rules to the dynamics).
Obviously, the real relationship is far more complex than this view and this model has many shortcomings, but it seems to provide at least some potentially valuable insight to the situation, IMHO.
When I was in my late teens, I worked tech support at a given location... A new call center for another company opened up paying about 25% more. This had a lot of people switching jobs and pay overall for the area for that type of work went up. Other companies relaxed or offered other benefits (subsidized vending machines and food trucks, for example).
If 1% of the market for employees moves, that can have sweeping impacts overall. Take WinCo vs Walmart as another example. The shear impact of the appearance of a better workplace will often drive foot traffic, especially combined with competitive pricing. Brand image is a thing, and how a company treats it's labor is part of a brand's image.
I saw this at the bakery I worked at before. The manager I worked under talked about how he wanted to target wealthier clients or at least people willing to pay a lot more for their products, which means eventually pricing out the current customer base that makes up the low income community that this business serves that were a lot more tight with their money. It's so sad and shortsighted. They are more than happy to sell out the customers they currently have in pursuit of the customers who don't/won't come in the first place. I think businesses like that deserve to die. It's a tragedy when good food becomes gated and the poor are left with options like McDonalds or other fast food chains.
My own perspective is that it is basic reality that a large number of low-skill jobs will be automated over the next 10 to 20 years. Rather than complain, I prefer to think about what society can and should do about it.
In my case, I don't believe that we should create makework low skills jobs to 'solve' this 'problem' of humans no longer being needed to run cash registers though; I have a hard time imagining most people preferring to run a cash register as their ideal day job.
a) Practically, this imposes a big problem to future society if low-skill jobs are gone. b) I'm definitely privileged to have a "high-skill" job so my fear factor here is irrelevant.
That said - if this were really a concern people were serious about, I don't see why we don't just ban cars/trains/airplanes/etc. and have caravans to do all trading once again. It would create tons of jobs all in the name of regress.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/14/21137580/apple-store-reta...
If all the store sold was usb charging cables, there wouldn't be any searches.
Unless the grocery store is selling tins of caviar, the problem is simply not at the same magnitude.
Any other concerns about cheating the system for thefts are as ludicrous as people worrying about people shooting drones out of skies with shotguns or hijacking self-driving trucks.
Other regular delays seem to come from staff being perplexed by the complexity of the checkout system.
Also, mostly middle aged women being taken by complete surprise they are being asked to pay for stuff which leads to much fumbling around looking for purses and wallets and then they'll insist on counting out the exact change.
Then the constant 'Do you need a bag?', 'Do you want a receipt?' 'Do you have a stupid loyalty card?' routine.
Bring on automation please and make the world a much more happier place!
Restocking is already a cost stores have to do. Restocking is also something which isn't too time sensitive - you can do more restocking at night if needed. It's also possible to design the shop to require less restocking, by for example having deeper shelving units where products slide towards the front.
Helping people use the app won't be needed as soon as it becomes universal.
The only remaining cost becomes store security, but if everyone has an attached account which has been verified by a passport, even security might no longer be needed. Just bill people for the items they take, ban them if they don't pay the bill, and call the police and ban anyone who is violent.
I agree, the question of, can this technology be integrated into existing retail spaces and still work well enough to be economically viable is important. But considering that there hasn't been any other retailer who's come up with a competing product over the last two years, tells me that Amazon could be way ahead of the competition on "Just Walk Out", and possibly dominate this space of retail automation for a while.
I believe it. Their new grocery was really quick to fill in (I walk by it every day, and was able to see progress while it was being built)
At least it used to be true that self checkout systems are not primarily sold with the promise of reducing labor costs, but primarily that they take up so much less space. If I remember correctly, six self checkouts take up as much floor space as one manual given the longer queues of the latter. That's why they first were sold in the cities where space is at a premium.
You still need some employees around the check out area anyway, and even if one employee can serve several you also suddently have many more of them. The manned check out was never the most labour intensive part of running a store anyway so it wasn't the best selling point anyway.
This walk-out concept has to compete with the various self scanning schemes that already exist, not with the manned check outs of old. It will be interesting to see if they can offer a cheaper and more reliable experience to shoppers.
Curious what you're talking about here. I've never heard of that, and in all the time sheets I've ever done 15 minutes is the smallest unit of time - not possible to bill 55 minutes, only 45 or 60.
Is this someone's pet project to state that our landing page captured XX,000 hits in 24 hours?
I use these frequently at Walmart and Sams without any problems. Rarely have to deal with an actual checkout person unless I have to get a gift card.
IMO you can get very far simply addressing annoying latency and UX issues with self checkout counters.
Edit: There is also the advantage of seeing what you're exactly being billed for
I can't wait until full supermarkets have this.
Self-checkout is a bottleneck since there are a limited number of available machines. I can see efficiency gains by removing that bottleneck.
In fact, just follow the logic down that road. Consider highly-volatile demand purchase scenarios. A company might over-spend on self-checkout stations to cover high-demand scenarios that go unused on more typical days. A more efficient approach is to avoid requiring additional stations to cover changes in demand. Just create a single system (walk out purchasing) that handles all scenarios and be done with it.
Although I agree just-walk-out scales well with demand.
There's almost always a line at them when I walk by in the stores in my area. Usually, the line there is about as long as the lines at the manned checkouts.
I've noticed that the line for self-checkout is usually roughly the same length as the lines for individual cash registers, regardless of how many machines there are.
I'm not sure if people just don't like self-checkout or if they have failed to notice that the "go to the shortest line" heuristic doesn't work anymore when one of the lines moves much faster than the others.
1. A customer born before 1968 or so shows up
2. The scale's state machine gets corrupted ("UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA")
Both of which end up needing more retail labor than a traditional checkout line.
The first time I brought a full cart through self checkout, that's when I understood road rage, so to speak. I was never so annoyed and angry and wanted to just walk out and leave it behind so much. "Please place item in the bag... please remove item from the bag... please place..." It may well be better, or getting better, but I'm out of the experiment.
-- edit:
Since then, there have been two times, I did walk out and leave my cart behind... one of those times about half a dozen others did the same. It was a Walmart, and the Friday before a holiday (Christmas was Sunday that year iirc). It was 6pm, and they had literally closed half their registers with an average of 11 carts in each line left. I had a full cart including a lot of refrigerated and frozen items. The other time was similar but less extreme at another store (not walmart).
In the end, some of us will pay a little more for actual people doing actual customer service and interaction. I tried the scan and go a couple times, and frankly it wasn't really any better. It seems that Millenials and Z are so averse to interaction, I just don't get it.
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/05/14/shoplifting-cal...
* The technology investment isn't going to pay off unless they scale up to thousands of stores very quickly.
* Running a small convenience store is boring and not very profitable. The technology is cool though, so lets see if someone else is will to do all the boring stuff while we focus on the interesting things.
Its no longer there and I've not seen it anywhere else so I guess maybe it was a failed pilot program or something.
Edit: it's called 'Scan as You Shop' and is offered in about 500 stores.
I expect to see similar legislature to roll out elsewhere; these are interesting times.
That's my experience at my local Walmart. There are maybe 2-4 lanes with human cashiers (2 when it's slow, 4 when it's busier, but I've never been there at peak) and 10-15 stations for self-checkout.
They're already very close getting to "Just Walk Out" from Amazon situation but I'm not sure how expensive putting an RFID chip in every product is.. ?
Thats still to much for groceries where items are typically only ~$2.50, and the staff time to scan a barcode is ~$0.01
A reassuring 'beep' from the system would have helped me know it had scanned and was happy rather than waiting for it to show up on a screen.
Overall I find self-checkouts with barcodes quicker and easier. A scan and beep is a quick action. Putting something in a basket and waiting an unspecified amount of time was weird but no doubt would be something I'd get used to if it was a regular thing.
I wouldn't feel comfortable just walking out without knowing how much I'm going to be charged, so this tech is essentially useless to me.
My receipt was in the app shortly after (I walked about two blocks and checked). I think it took longer for an email to show up, but can't recall exactly
My main problem with this is how invasively creepy it all is.
I agree that this is another increase in the invasion of privacy that will probably end in a bad place. We need laws to prevent these systems, not just a few people holding on to scraps of privacy with desperate measures, like not buying a new car.
However, I don't think this technology will be used extensively by people who purchase a large quantity of products at a time. Instead, this will be catered to the times when someone needs to pick up 5 or less things at a store. In this instance, these customers are not typically price-sensitive about what they need.
We added a sugar tax, so the sticker price for beverages like original Coke went up, but similar zero sugar products (Coke Zero, Pepsi Max) did not. Of course some stores just raised the before-tax price to capture the difference as profit, and others just eliminated sugary drinks. So... a mixed result.
The EU's focus is that consumers always pay what the sticker price says. So, no "plus tax", no "shipping fees not included" on items that unavoidably have to be shipped to you, no "service fees" no "card fees" nothing like that. I think even if you don't actively like this, you can see the point of this approach.
Would it be easier to get consumers angry about taxes if the tax wasn't "baked in" ? Maybe. But it's not as though it has proved impossible to campaign against, for example, tax on tampons or even toilet paper.
Also, you seem to be putting more thought into this than our government has.
What if the item is marked as on sale but the database hasn't been updated so I don't get the sale price?
What if the price on the item is correct but someone fat fingered the price in the database?
What if a different customer moved an item from one shelf to another so the price on the shelf is for a different product?
What if I want to know the total with tax?
What if a camera sees me pick up a $500 item to look at but doesn't see me put it back on the shelf?
I don't want to go home, wait an hour+, see I've been mischarged, and then have to spend a week waiting for a refund to process.
Many of them happen when you're checking out in person too. You can simply go to the receipt kiosk every time if you're worried about being charged incorrectly.
Plus, when credit cards were introduced, you were still given the opportunity to agree upon the total on which you'd be charged, before you were charged. That's all I'm asking for with this.
Another potential alternative for the anxious (and I definitely include myself) is an app showing up-to-the-second billing state on the smartphone screen. At a glance, usability issues seem hard but doable.
That sounds like an awesome idea!
You just load up your cart, peek at your (account-linked) smartphone, and see what your total will before heading to your car.
This is still extra steps compared to "Just walk out" but it's close. There is no interaction with store employees (which suits some friends who struggle to do human interaction on "bad" days) for example, this store would seem to work just fine without any employees although of course it's a huge grocery store so it has dozens doing various things and couldn't in fact function without some.
The really nice optimisation of course is to get rid of the money. If you stop caring about trying to make the numbers add up and just rely on people going "Huh, I only need two cabbages, why would I take sixty cabbages? What am I going to do with sixty cabbages?" then this is all much simpler. But I think even Amazon doesn't expect to deploy this to a culture where that's realistic.
It also made it super easy to bag groceries.
Try shopping with a little kid and using one hand on your phone and being randomly checked when there are 20 people waiting before you. This is not working in the current version of the technology.
I'm sure they can make an app for that.
For one, there's usually a delay before you get your receipt.
With Prime Now, you get your groceries delivered and pay for them in advance. Once in a while, you don't get an item, get the wrong item, a rotten piece of fruit, or an expired bottle of milk. When this happens, you simply go to the app where every item is listed, and follow the quick prompts to get a refund. You can optionally give a reason for asking, but in my experience they don't actually seem to care; in fact, whenever I've left a comment that, for example, one of the ten oranges I ordered was bad, they've always refunded me for _all_ the oranges on my order. I assume this is because the number of refunds is low enough relative to the number of purchases that they can afford to just always refund, keeping the customer happy enough.
If this is how it ends up working, then I'd gladly trade standing in long lines at the store for just walking out and reviewing my purchases later. The tracking part is still a bit creepy, though.
Do you memorize all the time whether you grabbed two or three bags of chips or exactly how many cans of beer etc?
How do you prove you didn't buy something? Or will they just accept your word? If anyone can just say whatever, then people will just ask for refunds of stuff. Will they check the footage in each case? But maybe it can work in the US. It sure as hell won't work in many other countries, where people look for loopholes all the time.
I'd imagine it's similar to the heuristic Amazon uses today with their A-Z Customer Guarantee.
If you request a lot of refunds for a single trip, or have a history of requesting refunds, your individual risk score goes up, and the hoops you jump through to get a refund increase.
Also for retail grocery stores now, loss prevention is already an issue.
Right now, a person can take an item off the shelve and hide it, leaving only security cameras and human personnel to watch for theft.
Adding in amazon's technology would be additional layers of defense.
With amazon tech, in addition to manually monitored cameras, you add AI monitored cameras, and sensors on shelves to detect an item has been taken.
Without Amazon's tech stores rely on staff members witnessing the item being hidden.
With Amazon's tech, the item is taken and marked for payment as soon as it's removed.
Honestly, yes. What I worry more about is how well the names of items on the receipt actually match up to the products. From the summer I worked as a grocery cashier, I can tell you that people often end up confused at items on the receipt that they actually bought.
Combine that with mistaken items on the receipt and some number of more trusting people will just assume it's just a weird labeling of something they did buy and move on.
Are the prices not listed on the individual items?
Purchasers make decisions on a product by product basis, not based on the total.
How often are you at the checkout and say "Wait, HOW MUCH is my bill? never mind then, going to go put some things back."
Sure, it happens, but it's a 0.0001% use case.
edit: OK, fair play to everyone who responded and said this is a common use case if you're poor. Not sure how relevant the food stamps argument is here, since this is an automatic pay and checkout system.
But, remember - this requires a credit card and an app. As you put things in your basket, your app shopping cart is also updated, and you can track your running tally.
Would it?
>easily reversed based on video data
That suggests a level of effort from multiple parties well in excess of the typical "look at item; look at receipt"
There's a link to dispute the receipt should something happen, right on the receipt itself. Now this is specifically Amazon Go app, but I would expect it to be same for other retailers.
Edit: I see that this is a little bit different than Go stores. It's far less convenient, but you can still get the receipt in your email by visiting a kiosk it seems.
Not often, because I can look at the prices of things as I buy them. Unlike here.
In response to your comment in particular, yes, I have done that. Not often, but it has happened often enough, and only a few dollars each time. Do you think people whip out Excel and keep a running tally of every item in their carts?
Are these people shopping at Amazon boutiques?
Put a can of soup in your basket. Oops! The alert I set up for items that aren't covered by Food Stamps just fired. Let me see what the issue is. Oh! I just got an alert because I went over my budget, let me review my items and figure it right away.
And even if you don't have a smartphone/app, the process of going to a kiosk to review your order will be much faster than at a register. Walk up to the kiosk and it instantly shows what's in your basket, with a total and flags for non-Food Stamp items. Now you can go swap things out or put things back and the whole interaction only took a second and was must less of a commitment than going through a checkout lane.
That's a pretty common occurence for poor people. If you only have $70 and your bill comes to $72 because you did the mental math wrong you're gonna have to put something back.
I know a lot of HN is full of people who don't pay attention to prices (for whatever reason - probably the inordinate amount of obscenely high incomes) - but it's really common outside of this crowd.
When I was poor - I thoroughly examined prices and only bought things that were on sale. If it rang up and wasn't the price that it said it was - I put it back. An example in my mind would be something like a block of cheese being $12 instead of $10. It's only $2 but it's also $2 that I was not willing to pay. Sometimes the staff at the store were not removing the old sale tags - thus it looked like it was on sale but it wasn't.
This is not aimed at deanCommie, but I just want to comment on the massive cognitive dissonance in effect when the issue of listing tax-included prices on individual items in America is raised.
Do none of those arguments hold anymore? Why? Because it isn't European tourists asking the question?
The US system discriminates against those people, no denying it. That said, I'm sure our European friends are absolutely drooling at the thought of a 7% VAT...
Like I do sometimes, but then I consider VAT policy somewhat interesting, in that it specifies the "essentials" (VAT is not charged on these) of what a tax authority thinks one should have.
But most Europeans tend not to think about it on a daily basis, because it's baked into the price.
VAT is just a tax on Value Added like it says, and the exclusions targeting items you see as essential aren't focused on somebody's idea of what's essential but are the result of various lobbying. That is, it was not the goal of the tax system to encourage petite women to buy clothes intended for children nor to punish the largest children (or their parents) with more expensive clothes that's just the consequence of a lobbied-for exemption for kid sizes.
So "But it's an essential" is a useful emotional tactic but has no legal implications for VAT.
If they willfully forget/ignore something as basic at that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The mental effort is not in the calculation but in figuring out what the tax rate is where you are. There really is no excuse for retailers not listing "tax-included" prices.
I can't prove it, but I suspect this is directly related to the fact that in the US system, we see the tax on every purchase.
I admit it's annoying to not have a single number to work with, having to juggle sticker price and real price sucks (the same argument applies to tipping).
But sales taxes are regressive and I don't want them to creep upwards indefinitely. A compromise would be to always display both prices, and make the price-at-register larger.
Can you elaborate? What does this mean exactly?
Apparently I can guess an awful lot about how you grow up based on your estimate of how infrequently that happens.
I'm betting you can guess something about how I grow up that I know you're off by quite a few orders of magnitude.
Not sure why you feel the need to say that anyone who is conscious of their grocery budget is irrelevant to an automatic system? You don't say this, but that basically implies that anyone who does so is 'beneath' this tech/convenience.
I don't want an app for my grocery store.
I do my shopping spread between 4 different grocery stores depending where in the area I'm closest to, what specifically I need, etc.. and I don't want an app for any of them. I already get pestered about loyalty cards, now I'm going to get pestered about installing my local Rite-Aid's mobile app?
A good example for people familiar with electric car charing is the ChargePoint integration. I have the app, but I never open it, and I don't even really need it (as I only use it for rare circumstances where I am in an unknown area and need to find a charging spot asap). Whenever I want to charge my car at a ChargePoint station, I just open up the ChargePoint card in Apple Wallet, NFC scan it, and that's it. It already knows that the ChargePoint card is associated with my account, so I can later open the app and see how charged my car is, what's the charging rate at the moment, my billing history, etc. If I don't have the app, I can check it on the web just as well.
Everything I know about about the mobile ecosystem tells me that if an app/card/integration is required for an unrelated service, it's going to go downhill over time. Everything I know about Amazon means that they are definitely going to eventually be advertising to me and pushing notifications and 'reminders' and whatever -- because they already do with the online store.
Even the charging example getting brought up as proof of this working: I can't imagine signing up for a special credit card that was required to fill up my car at a gas station. That's not innovative. The current system is I can use any credit card, or cash, or (increasingly) mobile pay at any gas station without any account with no decrease in quality of service. And with the current system, someone else can borrow my car without also needing to borrow my credit card or phone.
I'll stick my neck out and predict that over the next 3-5 years, ChargePoint's app and web interface are going to get progressively worse, and progressively more invasive. This is based purely on the knowledge that they require an online account and special credit card just to refill a car. I don't think there's any reason to have that business model other than a plan to eventually leverage the card/account in invasive ways.
Regardless, even linking my own cards, this is still kind of a crazy concept, isn't it? It's still strictly worse on nearly every single axis than a normal charge/gas station, where I can still just as easily pay with platforms like Apple/Google Wallet, but also with a spare twenty if I've left my phone at home or if I'm loaning my car to someone else.
It's very difficult to come up with a business model that says, "you must only pay us or interact with us in a special, tracker-friendly way" that isn't going to eventually become profitable by selling a lot of data or targeting you with ads. There are some exceptions to this rule, but they are very few and far between, and Amazon (and I suspect ChargePoint as well) are not among them.
In fact, you can already look at ChargePoint's privacy policy[1] and see that they're carving out terms that allow them to share your personal/location/purchase data with affiliates and partners, as well as to use your information to deliver tailored ads.
[0]: https://na.chargepoint.com/faqs#F8
[1]: https://na.chargepoint.com/privacy_policy
To me, the biggest thing that has kept me from trying it is that I need to open my app and scan a QR code. Looks like they’re addressing this by left you swipe your card.
I’m sure they have a ‘you charged me incorrectly’ resolution service as well.
Credit cards purpose is that it hides from you how much money you have left. If you were paying in cash and see how much money you have left in your wallet, you're more likely end up not purchasing a given item.
This is one step further, since you now don't know how much you're paying (unless you calculating the cost in your head, which most people don't do) and typically you'll know once you get a CC statement.
Note that the kiosk doesn't print the receipt, it e-mails it, which makes it even harder to instantly see what you've paid.
You only need to use the kiosk once per credit card (to enter your e-mail address). From the page:
> If shoppers need a receipt, they can visit a kiosk in the store and enter their email address. A receipt will be emailed to them for this trip. If they use the same credit card to enter this or any other Just Walk Out-enabled store in the future, a receipt will be emailed to them automatically.
I see this service taking over, at the very least, a large percentage of the 7/11 bodega type of stores. I see a future where the corner store will return. Over the last few years, companies have gone large so they can take advantage of the economy of scale. This service will reduce labor costs and have costs fall relative to similar stores previously.
Pundits were talking about Amazon opening stores with this tech. Why bother when you can get someone else to do it while expanding your core business. Imagine this, a one-man store where I order my inventory from Amazon and have it delivered daily or close to that. They brought their multivendor Amazon model where anyone can sell online using their online tech to the real world. This is a case of most retailers playing checkers while Amazon is playing chess. Yikes.
I'd like to walk in, swipe my CC and get a QR code printout. At any point, I should be able to scan the QR code with my phone and see a receipt showing what I have in my cart and how much it will cost me as well as my status (in/out of the store). Once I leave the store, I should be able to scan the QR and get my final receipt. If there's an issue, I can turn right around and get it resolved.
I don't want to have to deal with going to a kiosk unless I need help.
Also, I don't like that this is an Amazon thing.
[0] As an option. I don't want this to be the way of the future.
What data does Just Walk Out technology collect from my shoppers?
We only collect the data needed to provide shoppers with an accurate receipt. Shoppers can think of this as similar to typical security camera footage.
A rather (wide) open door for Amazon to collect valuable data on customers. And is this really comparable to "a typical security camera footage"?
edit: formatting
If this is in fact their revenue play they could even sell this at a loss just to build up the ecosystem, get a unmovable majority monopoly on the tech -> and data.
Maybe even add on top something like Good RX where retailers pay amazon on top to drive traffic to their stores. And even combine with Brands who want to offer discounts. Double dip.
(They’ll never say no if you ask to put on the store card though...)
-Attorney defending future shoplifting case.