13 ms·

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

One interesting benefit of the “detect removal from shelf” concept is that there might finally be a time stamp associated with the removal of the item. Right now, if you see a random perishable item sitting on a shelf, you HAVE to throw it away because it could have been there for a long time. On the other hand, if you can see that some Frozen Peas were only taken off the shelf 2 minutes ago, you can just put them back and they’ll be fine. Although, what I’d really want is not only the time stamp but the customer. I’m sorry but if you cost the store $25 by leaving a damned ROAST in the cereal aisle, I would be perfectly happy to never let you in the store again.

saosebastiao 10y ago
UPC 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 ago
  Amazon 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 ago
    It's certainly buzzword compliant...
  - karambahh 10y ago
    I 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.
    - politician 10y ago
      The last time I checked, the price of a printable RFID tag was around 10 cents. That's far too expensive for a 15oz can of beans. What sort of prices are you seeing?
      - karambahh 10y ago
        The ballpark of 10 cents per printed RFID is right. I have reasons to believe several ink manufacturers/printers are working on an order of magnitude less per tag. But are you so sure that 10 cents is too much? What do you think the gross margin on that can is ? ;-) What do you think the net margin on that can, once the checkout lines (and their personnel) are removed, would be? If a stitched RFID chip on a 2€ thsirt is currently cost-effective for Decathlon, I see no reason why printed RFID tags would not be cost effective in the very near future, if it is not yet the case (and once again, I have reasons to believe it is almost already the case).
        politician 10y ago
        I share your optimism - the future of retail belongs to self-service with the checkout process integrated into the shopping cart. Grab and Go. However, I don't think that end game is the first use case for an RFID solution - inventory monitoring/LP/loyalty can demonstrate ROI long before the checkout lines are removed. For those use cases, the unit price needs to be much cheaper, but an order of magnitude improvement might be right.
        karambahh 10y ago
        You are absolutely correct. Inventory monitoring and LP are where money is to be made (or rather "not lost" :-) ). I have skin in the game on the loyalty part so I will abstain from speaking on that. Coming back on your thoughts about inventory, the birth of Embisphere, the RFID company I spoke about earlier (and the reason why Decathlon started to use them), was solely the invention of a "racket" for fast instore inventory http://www.embisphere.com/en/rfid-products/embiventory-power http://www.embisphere.com/en/rfid-products/embiventory-power Other uses (checkout, LP) were almost an afterthought. The sole gain on speed and accuracy of in-store inventory was enough to decide Decathlon to add RFID chips on all its inventory and Decathlon inventory is massive ! They are in the range of 30-70k active SKUs, with sometimes hundreds of thousands units of stock. Sell that in hundreds of stores worldwide, add the warehouses in every country and the manufacturing facilities in China, and you end up with millions of euros of investment just for that damn inventory ;-)
0xfeba 10y ago
> I'm sorry but if you cost the store $25 by leaving a damned ROAST in the cereal aisle, I would be perfectly happy to never let you in the store again. Wouldn't a better solution be to charge the customer for the roast and if they complain, you explain: "sorry, you didn't put it on the proper shelf, the technology considers that as a purchase", and possibly eat the cost in the form of some incentive to come back to try to keep them. The ones that don't complain either didn't notice, or they don't care enough to stop shopping, or they won't come back like you suggest. The ones that complain get it taken care of, the ones that don't don't cost you anything. Win-win-break even?
- cpmsmith 10y ago
  IMO, any messaging in the format "sorry, $thingYouDid, the technology considers that as $notWhatYouDid" is a recipe for customer loss.
  - johnwheeler 10y ago
    Not at all in this case. The benefits of this technology and the disincentives for bad behavior are strong enough that this would work.
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    I agree with your point, but at the same time, you should be charged the price of the food if you grab perishable food and place it in an area that renders it unsafe. I worked in retail and at theme parks, and I'm personally of the opinion that it's better for everyone in the long run if you fire entitled customers.
    - iamdave 10y ago
      , you should be charged the price of the food if you grab perishable food and place it in an area that renders it unsafe That'd constitute a massive retooling of consumer behavior and logic and would require quite a bit of conditioning over many years, no?
Spooky23 10y ago
Good luck with that. The customer is always right. You start doing stuff like that it will bite you back 10x.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > The customer is always right. This adage only works when marginal value of a customer is high, and monetary preferences aren't utterly dominating customer's thought process. Business dealing with necessities, or ones where demand outweights supply, aren't like that - that's why in a grocery store, customer is trash. There's plenty more where he/she came from.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Have you ever worked in grocery? The customers tend to be brand loyal, and the lifetime value of a customer is very high (family with 2.4 kids and a dog is minimum $10k/year in gross sales), so when you start banishing customers for doing things that they may not even realize that they did, they will loudly tell everyone they know what a bunch of assholes you are! The $25 roast will cost you $500. If I stop shopping at a local grocery that uses a loyalty card for two weeks, they will immediately begin sending coupons worth 10-20% of my average transaction value to get me back. The ROI of giving away $20 at a pretty low margin implies a high value.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Only briefly, helping with inventory. But my SO did, and well... I eat food, and so does my family. And so I learned that with grocery, the one consideration that literally trumps all others is... price. Other significant factors are geography - people tend to shop closest to home or their commute path, and assortment - the more you can buy in one place, the better. There's very little a grocery store can do to chase away customers living in the area except having prices higher than the shop next door. Now my experience is of course limited to shops in urban Europe, servicing low- and middle-income populations. Maybe high-income people can afford to vote with their wallets, but with all the people I know, the ability to save $100+ / month by just going to the cheaper store of the few nearby is enough to make them not mind grumpy cashiers. > they will loudly tell everyone they know what a bunch of assholes you are! I have never in my entire life seen this behaviour impact a single company. Even though I'm first to badmouth asshole businesses and praise the nice ones. Even in tech, I'm yet to see a single company seriously impacted by people's reaction to bad behaviour. I mean, how is Uber still around? Or how is Lenovo still selling laptops?
stevarino 10y ago
No plan survives first contact with the customer's kids.
AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
Instead of cashiers, they can have people in the store helping folks with "gobacks", etc.

saosebastiao 10y ago

UPC 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 ago
Amazon 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 ago
  It's certainly buzzword compliant...
- karambahh 10y ago
  I 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.
  - politician 10y ago
    The last time I checked, the price of a printable RFID tag was around 10 cents. That's far too expensive for a 15oz can of beans. What sort of prices are you seeing?
    - karambahh 10y ago
      The ballpark of 10 cents per printed RFID is right. I have reasons to believe several ink manufacturers/printers are working on an order of magnitude less per tag. But are you so sure that 10 cents is too much? What do you think the gross margin on that can is ? ;-) What do you think the net margin on that can, once the checkout lines (and their personnel) are removed, would be? If a stitched RFID chip on a 2€ thsirt is currently cost-effective for Decathlon, I see no reason why printed RFID tags would not be cost effective in the very near future, if it is not yet the case (and once again, I have reasons to believe it is almost already the case).
      - politician 10y ago
        I share your optimism - the future of retail belongs to self-service with the checkout process integrated into the shopping cart. Grab and Go. However, I don't think that end game is the first use case for an RFID solution - inventory monitoring/LP/loyalty can demonstrate ROI long before the checkout lines are removed. For those use cases, the unit price needs to be much cheaper, but an order of magnitude improvement might be right.
        karambahh 10y ago
        You are absolutely correct. Inventory monitoring and LP are where money is to be made (or rather "not lost" :-) ). I have skin in the game on the loyalty part so I will abstain from speaking on that. Coming back on your thoughts about inventory, the birth of Embisphere, the RFID company I spoke about earlier (and the reason why Decathlon started to use them), was solely the invention of a "racket" for fast instore inventory http://www.embisphere.com/en/rfid-products/embiventory-power http://www.embisphere.com/en/rfid-products/embiventory-power Other uses (checkout, LP) were almost an afterthought. The sole gain on speed and accuracy of in-store inventory was enough to decide Decathlon to add RFID chips on all its inventory and Decathlon inventory is massive ! They are in the range of 30-70k active SKUs, with sometimes hundreds of thousands units of stock. Sell that in hundreds of stores worldwide, add the warehouses in every country and the manufacturing facilities in China, and you end up with millions of euros of investment just for that damn inventory ;-)

0xfeba 10y ago

> I'm sorry but if you cost the store $25 by leaving a damned ROAST in the cereal aisle, I would be perfectly happy to never let you in the store again. Wouldn't a better solution be to charge the customer for the roast and if they complain, you explain: "sorry, you didn't put it on the proper shelf, the technology considers that as a purchase", and possibly eat the cost in the form of some incentive to come back to try to keep them. The ones that don't complain either didn't notice, or they don't care enough to stop shopping, or they won't come back like you suggest. The ones that complain get it taken care of, the ones that don't don't cost you anything. Win-win-break even?

cpmsmith 10y ago
IMO, any messaging in the format "sorry, $thingYouDid, the technology considers that as $notWhatYouDid" is a recipe for customer loss.
- johnwheeler 10y ago
  Not at all in this case. The benefits of this technology and the disincentives for bad behavior are strong enough that this would work.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  I agree with your point, but at the same time, you should be charged the price of the food if you grab perishable food and place it in an area that renders it unsafe. I worked in retail and at theme parks, and I'm personally of the opinion that it's better for everyone in the long run if you fire entitled customers.
  - iamdave 10y ago
    , you should be charged the price of the food if you grab perishable food and place it in an area that renders it unsafe That'd constitute a massive retooling of consumer behavior and logic and would require quite a bit of conditioning over many years, no?

Spooky23 10y ago

Good luck with that. The customer is always right. You start doing stuff like that it will bite you back 10x.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> The customer is always right. This adage only works when marginal value of a customer is high, and monetary preferences aren't utterly dominating customer's thought process. Business dealing with necessities, or ones where demand outweights supply, aren't like that - that's why in a grocery store, customer is trash. There's plenty more where he/she came from.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Have you ever worked in grocery? The customers tend to be brand loyal, and the lifetime value of a customer is very high (family with 2.4 kids and a dog is minimum $10k/year in gross sales), so when you start banishing customers for doing things that they may not even realize that they did, they will loudly tell everyone they know what a bunch of assholes you are! The $25 roast will cost you $500. If I stop shopping at a local grocery that uses a loyalty card for two weeks, they will immediately begin sending coupons worth 10-20% of my average transaction value to get me back. The ROI of giving away $20 at a pretty low margin implies a high value.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Only briefly, helping with inventory. But my SO did, and well... I eat food, and so does my family. And so I learned that with grocery, the one consideration that literally trumps all others is... price. Other significant factors are geography - people tend to shop closest to home or their commute path, and assortment - the more you can buy in one place, the better. There's very little a grocery store can do to chase away customers living in the area except having prices higher than the shop next door. Now my experience is of course limited to shops in urban Europe, servicing low- and middle-income populations. Maybe high-income people can afford to vote with their wallets, but with all the people I know, the ability to save $100+ / month by just going to the cheaper store of the few nearby is enough to make them not mind grumpy cashiers. > they will loudly tell everyone they know what a bunch of assholes you are! I have never in my entire life seen this behaviour impact a single company. Even though I'm first to badmouth asshole businesses and praise the nice ones. Even in tech, I'm yet to see a single company seriously impacted by people's reaction to bad behaviour. I mean, how is Uber still around? Or how is Lenovo still selling laptops?

stevarino 10y ago

No plan survives first contact with the customer's kids.

AWildDHHAppears 10y ago

Instead of cashiers, they can have people in the store helping folks with "gobacks", etc.