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I worked at a grocery store for several years, and one thing I recall is customers CONSTANTLY putting items back in a random aisle, rather than where they found
by elicash 10y ago
I worked at a grocery store for several years, and one thing I recall is customers CONSTANTLY putting items back in a random aisle, rather than where they found it.
I wonder how this tech deals with that? Maybe they figured that out, too. But I was amused in the video when I saw the customer putting it back where it belonged, because that's not how I remember that going...
All that said, this is fantastic and exciting.
Edit: I also hope they're already thinking about EBT cards and WIC.
- golergka 10y agoI guess tech like this could collect this information and then create an optimized "garbage collection" path for a single employee to put all the stuff back on the shelves once in a while.
- sqeaky 10y agoKnowing Amazon they will charge the first few customers for the products, claim it was a glitch the do something panicky to either fix or prevent the problem.
- Cthulhu_ 10y agoI really wouldn't trust 'picked up off the shelf' detection, not without the whole thing looking like a giant vending machine. RFID tags on products probably works better.
- jpalomaki 10y agoRFID has some privacy concerns, since the tags continue work when you are outside the store and somebody can scan what you are carrying. Using these as EAN barcode replacement also has the problem that the system can't tell if you bought the product from Amazon GO or if you just happen to be carrying it with you when you enter the store.
- Natanael_L 10y agoBring a Faraday's cage, or rather Faraday's bag. Use it once you've paid to store your goods.
- moftz 10y agoSomeone can already walk around a grocery store and see what's in my cart or they can just watch me checkout. Buying groceries isn't exactly a private experience unless you buy your stuff online. Securing tags in things like a passport or credit card is important since identity theft is real and hardware to read the tags is cheap. Knowing what things I buy in the grocery store might help some marketers know what sells but I can't really think of any nefarious use of that kind of data. Maybe you could use it to make some guesses about a person. An older guy buying frozen dinners, beer, and not much else is probably single or divorced. A woman buying prenatal vitamins is probably pregnant. Someone buying both Special K and Fruit Loops might have a family. But someone can already make these determinations from using their eyes. RFIDs might make it a bit easier but don't really add any new infosec facet to this grocery store experience.
- majewsky 10y ago> Someone can already walk around a grocery store and see what's in my cart or they can just watch me checkout. The problem with electronic surveillance is never the surveillance part. It's the part where we can surveil billions of people at once without the need for billions of spies.
- Sami_Lehtinen 10y agoOf course it's trivial to tell. When individual items are tracked, it's exceptionally clear if the item is from the store or not.
- joezydeco 10y agoI don't think the system works like that. From my first quick take of the video, the app+turnstyle is used to identify you to the store. The video system then tracks your position as you walk around. When you walk out, the items are recognized and tallied by a large RFID sweep. Funneling you back out through a turnstyle makes sure the vision system knows it's you. Notice that you don't need to barcode yourself on the way out, and the exit system is phone agnostic (it's not checking for an NFC or Apple Pay tag or anything). The whole "tracking individual items as they come on and off the shelves" task is a very complex thing. But tracking bodies as they walk around a 1,500 square foot room isn't that hard.
- cobookman 10y agoNot as crazy as it sounds. With RAIN Rfid you can get the xyz location of a tag from ~30ft away accurate to 6" in realtime. Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1LykdRWTfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1LykdRWTfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCA8L7v-R8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCA8L7v-R8
- benmcnelly 10y agoAlso, since the app is still on your phone there is no reason they can't be using it to gather data as well.
- tedmiston 10y agoThey did say sensor fusion. I'm not sure if they have indoor location tracking in the app but it seems reasonable.
- joezydeco 10y agoI don't think that helps in the use case presented here. What is really needed is a way to talk to multiple RFID tags quickly without any crosstalk. Think of a handbag with a dozen candy bars in it. How do you scan them all quickly without missing any? The goal has always been to scan something large in one pass, say a shrink-wrapped pallet of items that could number in the hundreds or thousands. Obviously this is technology that Amazon could benefit from as well, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of technology overlap here.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago"Spend $99 or more and get a cancer absolutely FREE!"
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- geekamongus 10y agoI can't help but picture Indiana Jones swiping the golden idol from the pedestal with one hand, and quickly replacing it with a bag of sand using the other hand.
- stevenmays 10y agoI think RFID tags are too expensive to put on every product. I may be wrong on this.
- iainmerrick 10y agoI have a feeling you're wrong -- I see RFID tags on almost everything these days, even tiny cheap products.
- mattlondon 10y agoYep, in smallish bulk (low 1000s), you can get them for about 10-20c a tag (and these are "self printed" ones you can print in-store as needed via dedicated RFID printers) (e.g. https://www.atlasrfidstore.com/rfid-label-4x2-for-the-zebra-r110xi4-zt410-420-rz400-rfid-printers-roll-of-1-000/ https://www.atlasrfidstore.com/rfid-label-4x2-for-the-zebra-...) I am sure that amazon/walmart/tesco/whoever will need more than 1000 at a time and so obviously get a larger discount. Probably down to well under a penny or two - starts to make a lot of sense when you factor in the other benefits (lower staff, easier stock-tracking/taking etc)
- jpalomaki 10y agoQuick search on Alibaba shows that on volume these are just $0.01 each (and probably lower when you buy larger volumes). Of course sticking these to each product is inconvenient and I would assume the tags are not yet built in in most grocery product packaging. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-Professional-manufacturer-providing-low-price_60513577468.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-Professional-ma...
- solatic 10y agoRFID probably works better if you control the packaging, for instance, for deli counter products. But for packaging that you don't control, you either have to slap an RFID tag on when the items get to the store, negotiate with suppliers to start to include RFID tags in their packaging for items shipped to your store, or arbitrarily limit yourself in terms of which products your store may sell. Not to mention that, if your store slaps on RFID tags itself, it raises the OpEx of running the store as well as needing to come up with tamper-resistant tags, because somebody would be able to steal a product by discreetly removing a tag and then walking out of the store. In essence, RFID tag technology already exists, and there's a reason why it hasn't taken off in grocery stores.
- gohrt 10y ago> because somebody would be able to steal a product by discreetly removing a tag and then walking out of the store. That's already handled in grocery -- people can mess with regular barcodes if they want. it's a known cost of business
- altcognito 10y agoAnd if they know who you are because of your phone, and they are doing inventory on a really regular basis (every 6 hours, maybe even less), they might actually be able to track down who it was.
- maerF0x0 10y agoGiven the turnstiles that the users entered/exited from I'd have guessed there is RFID in play too.
- josephjrobison 10y agoI would assume RFID would be more accurate to begin with. Seems like there's a lot of room for errors with their proposed technology. BUT what if their goal isn't to make razor thin margins at grocery stores, but to test out their tech on human tracking. You've got to believe that they have a more long term plan than making a better self-checkout. They can now tie in your Amazon Go app with you as a person. Most likely all the sensors and cameras in the store will be both tracking you via your app with Bluetooth, but also perhaps body heat sensors and the like that track you based on your unique body pattern. Then they can tie this in with your Amazon Prime account to better improve recommended purchases to you, they can tie this in with your Prime Now account and your home address and more immediate delivery needs. Drones, Kindle, Echo as well. The goal is deeper analytics and tracking on individual humans. That's how Facebook makes their money, and Amazon can perhaps have deeper data on individuals than any other company tracking browser cookies.
- kirykl 10y agoAvoiding getting charged is an incentive to put it back in the right place that doesn't exist currently. Maybe not even where you picked up just a discard area
- waqf 10y agoYeah, or it's an incentive to not shop there at all. You can't just use "incentive" as a reason why you expect to succeed with a UX that punishes your users for small mistakes.
- kirykl 10y agoincentives can be positive or negative
- DashRattlesnake 10y agoHonestly, that's an "incentive" that should be illegal. You should only get charged for something if you actually take it home or use it. Anything else is a cop out to push the costs of a deficient system onto the user/customer.
- Karunamon 10y agoIt's the store's fault when you selfishly and silently put perishable goods in non-refrigerated areas so they can spoil? IMO the store would have the right to charge you with destruction of property, if not the cost of the goods they're now out entirely due to your actions. The number of people that never learned "put stuff back where you got it" from their parents is astounding.
- monsieurbanana 10y ago> It's the store's fault when you selfishly and silently put perishable goods in non-refrigerated areas so they can spoil? I find it really annoying when people put words into somebody's mouth. Misplaced perishable goods are certainly a problem, but not the one they're discussing right now.
- valine 10y agoI imagine having people put items in their original position when they change their mind won't be an issue. I know that if it were me I wouldn't risk being accidentally charged for something simply because I couldn’t be bothered to put it back in the right spot.
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- hodgesrm 10y agoHow does this handle produce? The assumption seems to be that everything is packaged.
- xeroaura 10y agoIt seems like everything is already prepackaged in the store according to what they have for sale. I know my local grocery store has certain things prepackaged into bundles instead of allowing people to bag them.
- Guest98123 10y agoAt a lot of grocery stores in Europe, you weigh and tag your own produce. Basically you put your bananas in a plastic bag, set them on the scale in the produce section, and push the number for bananas or select them on the touch screen. It prints out a barcode and price, you stick it on the bag, and the cashier scans it. Perhaps this could be similar, but instead of printing the barcode, it automatically adds the item to your Amazon cart.
- jonknee 10y agoIt's an 1,800 square foot store, I doubt it has a produce section other than for individual fruits and the like.
- devy 10y agoIf all merchandise in the Amazon Go store have been RFID tagged, this is a non-issue for checkout, as the turnstile tag scanner should be able to sense the items you take out of the store. As far as randomly put back at a different place of the items, the staff can use the tag scanner to detect that and fix it up even easier as oppose to physically locate the item by human vision which is arguably harder and less efficiently. We don't know the details yet but RFID may solve this issue completely.
- simonvc 10y agoFaraday cage bags are already a thing.. I can see them being a lot more popular..
- devy 10y agoRFID along cannot solve it - it's Computer vision + RFID. Don't forget cams are everywhere in the store that will capture the moment you pick something up...
- Natanael_L 10y agoIf the system detects tags disappearing while inside the store, it can trigger an alarm and tell approximately where they were (to be combined with surveillance footage).
- stale2002 10y agoEhh, there'd probably just be a "don't buy" bin that you out the items you don't want in.
- mulletboy 10y ago> I worked at a grocery store for several years, and one thing I recall is customers CONSTANTLY putting items back in a random aisle, rather than where they found it. If the incentive is reducing the chances of being charged by the system for an item they didn't buy, you bet people will put stuff back where they found it.
- elicash 10y agoTrue. And maybe they also figured out a technical solution, too. If not, I'm sure they will eventually. But I'd also have been more impressed with the video if they showed stressed-out parents with crying kids and their hands full as they've got their cell phones tucked between their heads and shoulders, rather than young people quietly grabbing a single item and leaving. This can actually HELP with those problems because a lot of those problems happen while in a line. Maybe they expect their customers to be like the ones in this video, but certainly my store was a little more chaotic. They should design for that chaos -- and maybe they did, but the video doesn't show it, is all. Presumably because they wanted to stress how easy it was, but to me that comes off as alien to the real world, based on my experience.
- jonknee 10y ago> But I'd also have been more impressed with the video if they showed stressed-out parents with crying kids and their hands full as they've got their cell phones tucked between their heads and shoulders, rather than young people quietly grabbing a single item and leaving. It's an 1,800 square foot convenience store in a yuppie area stocked with what appears Whole Foods like take and go food, not a Wal Mart Supercenter. It will be quite a bit different if they open a large store out in the suburbs.
- Blue3Wheeler 10y agoIn the video they said they use deep learning algorithms. Perhaps each product has a unique number and even if it is not put in the right place the algorithm saves its new position.
- neves 10y agoThe big store chains nowadays doesn't even have someone to put products in their place. Their product provider personal that put the product in the correct place. Now they will have a way to make their own customers to work for them. This is a store owner dream.
- s_kilk 10y agoWay back when I worked retail we had a cohort of particularly ignorant customers who would get fresh meats from the deli counter, wander about the shop then decide they didn't want said meats and stash it behind random products in whichever aisle they happened to be in at the time.
- agumonkey 10y agoMeh, cheap rfid, or funny barcode positionning to ensure their sensors can always track stuff. I'm not that thrilled, somehow I'm not in love with todays tech and progress (that's on me). Moreover I wonder what people living on cashier jobs (it's an easy target for unqualified and hurried people) will feel. Goodbye profession.
- scholia 10y agoAll the supermarkets I use already push you to self check-out stations....
- agumonkey 10y agoTrue, but these often require one or two hosts to unlock issues. I was for the test but I find the self checkout annoying. It's less efficient than the usual kind. You have less space to unload you stuff; less space to rebag them, and the cashier is lighting fast at scanning and grabbing the money because of 7h/day of doing so. I'm not pro human cashier, I don't think lots of cashier really like it either. But self checkout is not as good as I thought.
- scholia 10y agoYes. My main supermarket (a former Safeway in the UK) has one person looking after 20 self-checkout stations. I guess most of us have learned the system by now..... Self-checkout works well for half a dozen items in a hand basket. If you have a trolley full of a week's shopping, you're going to use a cashier. In fact, in this supermarket, you can't even get a trolley into the self-checkout area. My local M&S store has three different checkout areas. (1) traditional, for people with trolleys. (2) Self-checkout area for people with baskets. (3) Really fast (but very narrow) lane for people just holding a few items in their hands. You almost never see people using the "wrong" area. What's interesting is that I usually pick the one with the longest queue, ie line 3. The cashiers are really fast so you don't have to wait long. One other factor is that a lot of us in line 3 are using contactless (Wave & Pay) cards, so the payment process doesn't slow things down. People who don't usually use the waiting time to get their cash ready.
- makecheck 10y agoOne interesting benefit of the “detect removal from shelf” concept is that there might finally be a time stamp associated with the removal of the item. Right now, if you see a random perishable item sitting on a shelf, you HAVE to throw it away because it could have been there for a long time. On the other hand, if you can see that some Frozen Peas were only taken off the shelf 2 minutes ago, you can just put them back and they’ll be fine. Although, what I’d really want is not only the time stamp but the customer. I’m sorry but if you cost the store $25 by leaving a damned ROAST in the cereal aisle, I would be perfectly happy to never let you in the store again.
- saosebastiao 10y agoUPC codes are not uniquely identifiable to the unit, only to the product. You could narrow it down to all of the people who took that item off the shelf, but you'd probably be into surveillance reviews after that. An option is to label all the items with a unique identifier, but that is typically seen as too costly, which is also the reason Amazon hasn't fully fixed the FBA counterfeit problem.
- jonknee 10y agoAmazon is boasting it involves "computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning" so there is definitely quite a bit more going on than the UPC code. It also doesn't appear any UPCs are actually being scanned in the first place.
- mpclark 10y agoIt's certainly buzzword compliant...
- karambahh 10y agoI think it might be purely rfid based. All major rfid vendors have theft prevention devices which can detect in real-time products crossing a given line. Decathlon, the world largest sport goods retailer already use that technology. They still have checkout lines but technically speaking they would be able to charge you when you leave the store. Last time I spoke with them they were using Embisphere hardware, but any vendor, Checkpoint for instance, could be used to similar effects. If all products are rfid tagged (which is entirely possible given the current price of metallic ink) then this store is at most state of the art. If they actually use vision techniques then it is actually quite a feat. Current vision techniques used in retail are either too crude (when based on the store cctv cameras) or too costly (another French company, IVS, has demonstrated a self service buffet style automated checkout but AFAIK it is still prototype). Disclaimer: I have links with investors in both Embisphere and IVS.
- pmarreck 10y agoIt could be flagged as "must restock"... one cool thing is it could then tell you exactly where it needs to go back to, finding that was always a pain (source: I was a cashier in a large grocery store, once upon a time) To this day (20-odd years later), I always put grocery items back where I found them (and bag my own groceries). Don't be a dick.
- rhino369 10y agoThis made me think of a possible exploit. If these sensors are using weight sensors and cameras, it might be possible to pick up similar items and then put back the much cheaper version.
- remarkEon 10y agoAnother thought I had was how it will handle multiple people filling the same "cart". Often I'm shopping with my girlfriend and, being the time-strapped millennials that we are, we'll split up the grocery list to divide and conquer and meet back up at the checkout aisle. How does this reconcile that? Would both of us have to scan in when we enter the store, or link our accounts in some fashion?
- 8draco8 10y agoExactly that. Or what if you go to shop with a child and he puts candy bar to the "cart"?
- mikeash 10y agoThe emphasis on machine learning and computer version makes me think that they're recognizing the products based on what they look like, not just where they are.
- flinty 10y agoyou are forgetting by the time this becomes a reality we would have all become perfect human beings with perfect ethics and morals and social responsibility just the way silicon valley has always intended and designed every product for
- samstave 10y agoIf youre on EBT/WIC, what % of those folks have both a smartphone, Amazon Go installed AND an amazon account?
- protomyth 10y agoSo Amazon Go is a defacto rich peoples store? Sadly, this will probably be a selling point for some. You would be surprised how many EBT/WIC folks have smart phones since they are often part of educational plans and back-to-work initiatives. It was often easier to order product off Amazon than locally (gift cards, debit cards).
- samstave 10y agoI wasn't meaning it as a class-based statement... just that I don't expect one of these to pop-up in either oakland or the tenderloin in the next few decades...
- wccrawford 10y agoI'm assuming that the position on the shelf has very little to do with adding the item to the cart. I'm guessing that taking the item out of range of a scanner and into range of your phone is what does it. I've not seen anyone so far suggest that people will still work at the store. There will still be people who help customers do what they need, but instead of mindlessly scanning groceries, they'll be there for the things people actually need help with. Returns, price problems, finding things, lifting heavy items, etc.
- elicash 10y agoIf that's the case, that this is a solved problem, they should have showed that off!
- spuz 10y agoFor what it's worth, some customers DO put unwanted items back where they found them. I'm guessing you wouldn't necessarily notice those cases so you might perceive a higher proportion of those bad actor customers than there are in reality.
- rezashirazian 10y agoI would argue the fact that you are automatically charged for an item when it is removed from shelf is incentive enough for people to ensure they put it back in its right place if they decide not to purchase it.
- curried_haskell 10y agoAre people forgetting the legal perspective? You can't charge your customer for an item they didn't buy. Trying to make the computer "dumb" doesn't change this. You're going to get angry customers on twitter, chargebacks, and possibly sued.
- 6t6t6t6 10y agoIn a regular store, customers are anonymous, so they can be jerks without fear of consequences. If I understand well, in Amazon Go, every customer has an account linked to a credit card. I guess that this will work as a deterrent. I a customer does something wrong, they can get a warning. Next time, the account is canceled. Problem solved.
- blazespin 10y agoThey will detect it and have people in the store replacing it.