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Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad. I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an

• IanDrake 10y ago
  I would love to live in your bubble. Checkouts in my area are either super slow self checkout machines or done by a super slow unmotivated clerk. I could do without either.
• de_Selby 10y ago
  Like it or not, those jobs are on the way out. Every supermarket around here has self service checkouts already, it's just a matter of time before something like this comes in. I don't like it, for the reasons you outline. I think we'll lose something. I'm especially thinking of old people who might be living alone and see their shopping trip as an opportunity for social interaction. Unfortunately that's the way things are going though.
• mememachine 10y ago
  This is neither useless nor bad. This is a convenience and there are literally no downsides to it. If you think the extra human interaction is worth it, do as you please, but i guarentee you are setting yourself apart from at least 80% of the general population. I'll never understand the view that superior technologies mandate removal of the "old" ways of doing things. No one is forcing you to change, but dont be surprised when most people dont share the nostalgia you have.
• kristofferR 10y ago
  You're looking at it from the wrong perspective. What you, as a customer, value doesn't really matter. The store owners don't introduce cashless checkout in order for the customers to save time, they do it so they can save money. Human cashiers will probably exist in the future too, and if you value it you'll be able to pay extra for it.
  • mememachine 10y ago
    Thats absolutely not true. Its a competitive advantage to save your consumers time. They do it for both reasons, which makes it seem like, as an outsider, an incredibly compelling technology.
  • Reason077 10y ago
    What you, as a customer, value doesn't really matter. If this were true, the shopping experience would be very different for all of us! Stores would look like Soviet-era warehouses, with everything done at the least possible cost. In reality, customer experience matters a great deal. That's why you see companies like Amazon creating these sorts of innovations.
• narrator 10y ago
  For me, this is useless because Instacart delivers everything I need with no markup, save tips, for $80/year. Perhaps this is wildly unprofitable for them, but for now it's far better than going to the store parking, shopping and driving back. I save many hours a week for hardly any money. If self driving cars get perfected, they won't even need drivers! Amazon Go might as well be a robot that automatically steers and buggy whips my horse drawn carriage.
  • ryanSrich 10y ago
    Couldn't agree more. My wife and I did the math and Instacart saves us money. I have no idea how long they'll stick around or if they'll continue being so cheap, but it blows my mind how convenient it is. The biggest benefit imo is having them shop at Costco. Every quarter we do a fairly large oder for house hold restocking and Instacart makes this something I don't even have to think about. Before it would have essentially consumed my entire Saturday.
• mikeash 10y ago
  If that's true, then you have nothing to fear. People will pay extra to shop at stores with human cashiers, and the machine-driven stores will not be able to compete. However, I suspect that when presented with the choice, people will take the machine store in exchange for lower prices. And I suspect that you suspect the same thing, otherwise you wouldn't be concerned.
  • mememachine 10y ago
    Yep, this is a case of a minority view being concerned that its the minority view. Taking an authoritarian approach is really a shameful way to handle it.
  • delegate 10y ago
    Yes, I think you're right and that's why I think this is bad. Economically it makes more sense to buy cheaper and faster. But this eats into the fabric of society and offers nothing in exchange. And what are all these people supposed to do then ? Sleep all day ? They will fight back with their votes at first, which they are already doing in the US and Europe.. Then there's the centralisation, control and privacy part - amazon gets to decide what products your area will be supplied with, it gets to know your eating habits, your walking habits, etc. Will pretty much own you and the neighbourhood. But then again, I don't really see an alternative - it seems that we're being 'innovated' by force into the future and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
    • odbol_ 10y ago
      How about those people go teach their local kids about science? Or volunteer to take care of the homeless or the elderly? That seems like it would benefit society much more than talking to a few bored people in a checkout line.
      • TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Except they won't, because nobody will pay for that. It's easy to find an alternative occupation - it's much more difficult to propose one that's reachable when you consider the starting point and economic reality (living costs money; retraining costs money; people low on the ladder usually don't have cash to burn).
• pshc 10y ago
  Yeah, all cashiers love working long hours for peanuts. We should keep them there so we can make small talk while they bag our food. Without checkout lines how will we meet other people? EDIT: Sorry for the snark, I feel bad. This is a real dogpile. You don't deserve this much shit.
• csomar 10y ago
  Well, I can see lots of issues here. Maybe you are being isolated from what is going on here. These guys might have been ordered by management to smile for customers. That doesn't make them happy. Just a bit more miserable, but you don't see any of it. I can't see why anybody will like to finish their life counting stuff and money for other people. I can hardly see them happy even if they smile to me. And here is another guess: They are probably getting a salary that barely covers their basic needs and won't cover urgent ones. How about: Machines do this for us while we work on more interesting thing. Maybe if the bright of us are failing to get married and raise kids, we let these guys handle the task for us. I can see women being much more happier raising kids than processing mail for the post office.
  • DanPitrowiski 10y ago
    As a man I'd be happier raising kids than processing mail for the post office. Or scanning groceries all day.
    • csomar 10y ago
      I put women because they seem to care more about kids. But men are fine too. That's not my point. My point is some very successful people have trouble creating families which is not sustainable for the human race as it is.
  • kcorbitt 10y ago
    (What follows are generalizations that of course have exceptions.) For the record, this is likely less true in Barcelona than in most parts of the US. While a supermarket cashier isn't seen as a good job in Spain, people also care much, much less about having a "good" job, and much more about their quality of life outside of work. Also contributing to this is the fact that the difference in social respect and overall quality of life between, say, a supermarket cashier and an engineer is vastly smaller in Spain than in San Francisco. Anecdote: my wife is from Barcelona, and is currently finishing her PhD in a technical field. We're in the US at the moment and she could likely get a well-compensated job after graduation if she wanted, but is considering applying to be a barista at Starbucks or similar instead. It's not that she particularly dislikes what she studied -- just that she doesn't particularly care about work life one way or the other at all. I've observed this attitude a lot with Spanish friends.
• crazypyro 10y ago
  Trying to save jobs that are no longer the most efficient way of solving a problem is not the way to promote the value of humanity, in my opinion. People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible. They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay extra for something that only the minority get value out of is not a competitive strategy. If humanity were to take your opinion, we'd never evolve as a society, lest we remove a need in society and with it, someones job.
  • CrLf 10y ago
    I am unsure we are evolving. We have evolved in many areas that solve real problems, like healthcare and such, but I'm not sure today's society is any better for all the technology that allows us to save a couple of minutes in a queue. To improve the efficiency of a particular group, we create problems elsewhere. The result may not be net positive. In fact, I think it isn't, since those saved "couple of minutes" will probably be spent browsing Facebook.
    • iNate2000 10y ago
      It's not just time checking out that is saved. This is de facto a cashless store. Having cash on site is a liability.
    • Ph0X 10y ago
      The point isn't that we save 2 minutes, it's that there's now 10 less job we need. And that may seem as a negative at first, but the idea is that as more and more job get automated, prices should go down until the point where people will not have to work full weeks anymore, or rather, focus on learning and reaching higher education, rather than doing dummy work all day (aka just scanning items non stop for 8 hours).
      • mikeash 10y ago
        It might be worthwhile to re-frame it. Rather than say "10 fewer jobs," say "10 people are no longer forced to spend eight hours a day sitting in front of a cash register." That assumes we can find something better for them to do, of course. But man, we have to try! Forcing people to do things a machine can do is inhumane.
• des429 10y ago
  Capitalism says if the majority of people agree with you they will spend their money at the supermarkets w/ the friendly clerks.
  • problems 10y ago
    Not necessarily majority - it's an interesting ability of capitalism over many other systems - multiple solutions to a problem can co-exist. As long as enough people still demand it to make it economically viable. With "just walk out" the friction is extremely low. It might see less pushback than other technological approaches. However I have to think security will be a major issue. If I can rob the store by just leaving my phone in my car or leaving a cheap phone in the store while I walk away with the products. Tap-in/out gates are probably the best bet, but can still be tailgated, so you'll need to have pretty tight security and monitoring ready to beat anyone down who doesn't pass the checks or looks fishy at the gate or in store attempting to fool the system into believing they're another person. Or write those off as losses, I suppose most retailers today already do a lot of that.
    • mememachine 10y ago
      A lot of security concerns are resolved by just hiring a person or two to monitor the entry. Still far cheaper than cashiers and so on
  • barrkel 10y ago
    No, not at all. It's more subtle than that. Suppose the minimal cost solution has a cost of c. Suppose there is an extra "human touch" factor that costs x extra. So the total cost is c+x. Suppose there are n customers, of which m prefer the human touch. In a world with humans everywhere, it costs everyone c+x/n to deliver a product that satisfies everyone. In a world where two solutions are competing, one with humans and one without, it costs c+x/m to deliver a product that satisfies m, and c to satisfy everyone else. The subset m that prefers the human touch has to pay more. But notice there's no magical majority cutoff here; that's not how it maps out. It's a curve that gradually increases the cost the lower the m:n ratio is, until it becomes a very expensive boutique service that only very wealthy people can afford. And the increasing slope makes it hard to fight. It is in fact people with the least sensitivity to price and preference for the human touch that will help maintain the status quo. And those people are usually in the minority.
• Itsdijital 10y ago
  I get where you are coming from, and I stand with what you say, but this is a losing battle. It's cheaper to only have 1 person watching to make sure everyone scans into the the store. Really there is no need to elaborate beyond that point alone. Also it cuts theft because you must scan to get in. I don't think every store is going to change to this model overnight. It will be gradual over years and years. But it will happen.
• billconan 10y ago
  I live in silicon valley. And I have a good friend from Spain who ever told me about the culture difference between his home town and the U.S. One example he mentioned to me was what you said. He said they have grocery stores they routinely go. it's like a family tradition to always shop at a specific place. They know the cashier well. One day they went to a different store, the store owner became mad. he said, here in the U.S., business is business. nobody gets attached to a store.
  • withdavidli 10y ago
    This resembles more of farmer markets here. You build up more of a one on one relationship/bond. My sister even has a cheese and oils guy in one of San Diego's farmer markets. She got an ingredient taken out of her product cause of allergies, they call her when it's ready. This doesn't happen at big box stores unless there's an issue with a product in general.
• iNate2000 10y ago
  I agree with @delegate that human interaction is valuable; sometimes I choose a cashier lane instead of self-checkout because I prefer it. But even then, half of the interaction has been delegated to the screen on the pin pad. And, I'm all for people having careers that are meaningful and fulfilling. But, is supermarket cashier the most valuable thing these people can be doing? Imagine we had all the money we wanted and could pay people to do anything and buy robots to do anything. What would we choose to buy robots to do and what would we choose to pay humans to do?
• loverachelcook 10y ago
  The moment you start trying to keep things the same instead of being open to change is the moment you become the old generation always complaining about how back in your day blah blah blah. The world will change all the same.
• dunham 10y ago
  Heh, I live in Seattle, and I've got two grocery stores 1 km from my house (and a small seafood / poultry place at about 1.1 km). My first thought was why would I drive down to Belltown, when I can just walk to the store. Edit: To be fair, looking at the video, it's mostly prepared food, so I'm probably not even in the target audience for this store. (I tend to buy raw ingredients, like produce and meat.)
• thex10 10y ago
  I don't disagree with you. But many people don't experience this humanity, currently.
• alistproducer2 10y ago
  I can't agree with this. Give people basic income and let technology do what it does.
• AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
  Wouldn't it be better if the cashier were a robot who sang the song you wanted to hear?
• Nacraile 10y ago
  Your situation in Barcelona sounds nice and all, but it is does not describe the typical American's grocery experience at all, and therefore does not really apply to what Amazon is doing in downtown Seattle. The typical grocery store here (i.e. what Go is actually going after) is basically a warehouse, with checkout lanes staffed by apathetic teenagers. The process is already almost entirely devoid of meaningful human contact. It might as well be more convenient. Hopefully, whatever has protected your local stores from the economic forces that have produced the experience I describe will also protect your local stores from this incremental improvement on automated checkout.
  • avar 10y ago
    The parent is putting Barcelona in an unfairly positive light here. Its supermarkets are fantastic, but Spain has a dismal unemployment rate, which is one reason for why you get such good service at their supermarkets. It really drives wages down, so they're overstaffed compared to other countries, and instead of it being an entry-level job for teenagers the norm is to have them staffed by 30-60 year olds with lots of experience, but likely few other options when it comes to employment. So does putting people who work at grocery stores ultimately help things? I'd like to think so, technology advancement is our only hope of getting rid of most menial jobs. Those who rail against it rarely do so with any sensitivity to all the menial jobs we've gotten rid of already, for the good of all.
  • BurningFrog 10y ago
    If Amazon Go can save me from participating in the scripted conversations the cashier must initiate to keep her job, it's already paid for itself.
    • Nition 10y ago
      Amazon can puch those through the app instead. Hey, you don't even have to be at the store!
  • SippinLean 10y ago
    It can be even worse, at the NYC Union Square Trader Joe's, the line wraps the entire inner perimeter of the store and you shop as you wait.
• nkassis 10y ago
  I think what's probably going to happen is those sorts of shops will continue to exist as is. They provide an experience (a bit like local cafes etc...) They may even be able to charge a premium for this. The big bucks stores will end up converting to more automated systems. Stocking shelves probably one of the next things to go. So you get to choose, local more human experience or efficient highly automated experience. Similar reason why Amazon hasn't caused small bookstores to close down.
• joshuawright11 10y ago
  The places I feel where I know the cashiers and employees are not large supermarkets though, but small time specialty shops (the Polish butcher shop near my house, the florist, etc). To me large scale supermarkets (wal mart, target, whole foods, etc) tend to have young or post retirement, disinterested staff that are simply there to make a little extra cash and go home. Besides, there are often 10-15 cashiers on a schedule with ridiculous turnover. I don't see this competing with the specialty shops and thus not erasing that social connection involved in some shopping. Rather, it will reduce the drudgery and annoyance of going to huge grocery stores with no personal connection and a disinterested staff. IMO non-specialty grocery stores with a few staff closely knit in the community have already been mostly eliminated by the larger corporations.
• alvil 10y ago
  Sorry I can upvote your comment only once!
• mrb 10y ago
  I don't mean to be rude, but you are the example of someone who thinks "this tech is useless/bad for me, therefore it must be useless/bad for everyone else". But in reality, many other shoppers in the world don't have your experience. I live in a large American city and my shopping experience is the exact opposite of yours: I have to drive 10-20 minutes to my supermarket; it is gigantic warehouse-sized; I don't know the cashiers on a personal level (I don't even recognize any of them as they always seem to be different); I usually wait a long time in line (10 minutes). So yeah I would gladly prefer shopping at a supermarket powered by Amazon Go technology.
• BjoernKW 10y ago
  A supermarket is a pretty dismal place for social interaction, don't you think? It's like saying that white collar bullshit jobs are necessary because if it wasn't for water cooler talk people wouldn't get any social interaction at all. Social interaction besides the usual benefits also makes otherwise dull or tedious jobs more tolerable. If those people didn't have to work as cashiers anymore (how that could work is an entirely different matter but something like a basic income would be a start) they wouldn't simply disappear but be able to make better use of their time, for example by serving the people in their neighbourhood in more expedient ways. Keeping jobs for the sake of it just leads to stagnation. People working on a job until they retire (or drop dead, whichever happens first ...) because they either have to or don't know otherwise is not something virtuous but actually quite sad in my opinion. It's often required to make a living and support yourself and your family but we shouldn't accept it as the natural state of affairs.
  • politician 10y ago
    Agreed. We shouldn't accept this dehumanizing assumption that our social interactions are or should be a component of a larger commercial interaction. That the majority of comments in this thread seem to imply or at least tolerate this assumption is quite saddening.
• colordrops 10y ago
  I get what you are saying, and I agree emotionally to some degree. But I think there is a fallacy lying in this sort of thinking. This sentiment appeals to the idea that certain life experiences are the natural order of things and are timeless and shouldn't tampered with. In this case though, shopping at a supermarket and checking out in a line is hardly an ancient tradition that has been the same since time immemorial. That being said, there is value in daily ritual and routine, and we need to find a way to replace our current ones with new ones that are just as meaningful if we wish to automate all jobs away.
• HemanHeartYou 10y ago
  Different culture, yadda yadda
• agencytoss1 10y ago
  > These people like their jobs because we respect them for what they do, so they feel useful and they work hard. > The humanity of it has value for us here and that value is greater than the time we'd save by removing the people from the shops. I wish this sentiment existed in other realms and for the countless un/underemployed millennials out there. I wonder how many marketing assistant and assistant media planner jobs have been killed by the use of one janky "online marketing suite" after another.
• deleted 10y ago
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• jasondigitized 10y ago
  This is awesome.....for a city as awesome and patient as Barcelona. In any major metro in the U.S., if the cashier stops scanning and talks to people there will be rage and quite possibly someone telling the cashier to STFU.
• redthrowaway 10y ago
  Yes, and all of the people weaving wool in their house were real people, most decent people, who were negatively affected by mechanized looms. But the Industrial Revolution proceeded apace, and now everyone is much, much wealthier as a result. There is short term pain in automating jobs that no longer need to be performed by humans, but no sane person would look at the long term result of that automation and say it was a bad thing.
• sean_patel 10y ago
  > Where is Amazon Go located? Our store is located at 2131 7th Ave, Seattle, WA, on the corner of 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street. 10px-spacer > When can I visit Amazon Go? Amazon Go is currently open to Amazon employees in our Beta program, and will open to the public in early 2017 I think all the discussion here are very pre-mature. It looks like a controlled beta-test at best.
• russelluresti 10y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but I whole-heartedly disagree. People have bound themselves to employment for too long. The entire idea that you need to contribute to someone else getting wealthy to have any value to society is stupid. People need to remember that they have meaning and purpose and value without having a job. And that's where we're heading. Technology like this will make a lot of jobs obsolete. And, in the short-term, there will be a lot of problems with unemployment or underemployment. But, ultimately, a system of universal basic income (or something like it) will be implemented, allowing people to disassociate their identities with their jobs. It will free up their time to do other things, like help out in their communities, create art, or pursue their other passions. They can still work if they want to, but they won't need to. And they'll be able to choose jobs that they're passionate about instead of the jobs they have to do to pay rent and provide food. Stores like this won't remove the interactions you have with your neighbors - those interactions will just change locations. Instead of seeing the cashier at the supermarket, maybe she'll be giving your daughter singing lessons because she was allowed to focus on something she loved doing instead of something that paid the bills.
  • suresk 10y ago
    The problem is that, everyone responds by saying "people don't HAVE to work now", but whenever you talk about people not being able to earn incomes, there isn't much thought put into how they will live. All of the effort is going into things that will eliminate earning opportunities for people, and little or none going into how to support the people who can no longer find work. I'm not going to argue that we should hold back innovation to preserve jobs, or that we should have people working 40+ hours per week as our goal. The simple fact is, however, that attitudes and government policies are really far away from supporting a 'post-work' society, and are actually getting further and further away. People who control capital in western societies - and are the primary beneficiaries of automation and other techniques that are causing many jobs to disappear - already feel like they pay too many taxes, and are generally good at finding ways to make sure they pay less. Even a level of basic income that would provide a poverty-level standard of living for people feels politically impossible right now. I don't fully disagree with you, but I find a lot of these "post-work" responses to be really hand-wavy.
• deleted 10y ago
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• stewjacks 10y ago
  A store that you appreciate is build around the products and knowledge that the owners and staff provide, but removing the checkout line isn't going to change that. There's no reason this tech can't proliferate and become as cheap as barcode scanners. Having people less focused on scanning the products and more focused on communicating with customers and helping them find the exact product they want makes a whole lot of sense to me.
• IshKebab 10y ago
  You could make the same argument about any job that nobody would really want to do if they had the choice and that machines have taken over. Do you want to bring back elevator operators?
• dazc 10y ago
  I currently live in Spain and completely understand your point of view. But, I am from the UK and the difference is of many orders of magnitude. Supermarkets are not great places to shop or to work. Most employees are working far less hours then they want to on an income that is dependent on welfare top ups in one form or another. Since there is no chance of UK supermarkets adopting a Spanish philosophy I think these people would be happier, and no worse off, if they were put out of a job tommorow. For evidence just look at how many people opt to queue in the self service aisle, even when there is no queue at the human alternative.
  • zwischenzug 10y ago
    'For evidence just look at how many people opt to queue in the self service aisle, even when there is no queue at the human alternative.' I'd noticed that too here in London. TBH I feel I get better and more 'human' interactions from the people that police the self-service checkouts than behind the counters, because generally they're trying to help me when I need it.
  • Reason077 10y ago
    Since there is no chance of UK supermarkets adopting a Spanish philosophy I think these people would be happier, and no worse off, if they were put out of a job tommorow. Well it sort of depends on where you want to shop. Staff at my local M&S and Waitrose are always up for a chat if you want it (certainly the older generation seem to like this, and it probably keeps them coming back). But the guys at the Tesco Express are clearly only interested in keeping the lines moving as fast as possible. In all cases they also have the option of self checkout if you want to save time and avoid the chit-chat!
• pimlottc 10y ago
  Thank you for this valuable counterpoint. It is all too-easy to boil down a system to a single purpose and ignore all the little side effects and externalities. Their influences may be subtle and slight in the short term but in aggregate over time make a large difference. You may be accused of being overly sentimental. And yes, grocery shopping is not always fun. But just by being out in the world and interacting with humans is worth something. Take that away, and at some point, these little brushes with humanity have to be replaced or we starve as social creatures. It is the increasing lack of social contact in many areas of modern life that drives many of us to social media platforms that promise to fulfill these needs. We talk all the time about filter bubbles. What about physical interaction bubbles? Soon you won't have to see or talk to anyone outside your friends and coworkers if you don't want to. What does that do to empathy?
• OOPMan 10y ago
  As someone who has worked behind a checkout till it is not a job I think anyone is dying to do. For you, as the customer, maybe it seems cute and fine as a job but from my time in the job it's basically hours of mindless labour that teaches you little and offers no room for growth. Your opinion on this is actually kind of despicable. You want people to perform robotic menial jobs because you feel like it adds humanity to your shopping experience but you seem content to ignore the fact that the job in question is a boring, tedious slog.
  • wccrawford 10y ago
    I worked a few different jobs in grocery stores, and I agree. It wasn't a job that had a future for me, and at some point during the last job there, I realized that I needed to find something else or I was doomed to a life of barely having enough money to get by each week. Luckily, it wasn't that I didn't have skills, just that I wasn't using them for profit. But I'll never forget my time there and how soul-sucking it can be to do the same things over and over with no real interactions with the people I was helping. Could I have been quirky like the cashiers in the story above? Sure, but that isn't me. And I know a lot of customers would have complained about it, because so many customers love to complain, rather than just enjoy things that are happening around them for what they are.
  • jetako 10y ago
    I hope all of the bleeding-heart armchair economists in this thread see your post. They've clearly never worked these jobs they claim to value so much.
• JimDabell 10y ago
  And textile workers were put out of work in the 19th century because new machines rendered their jobs obsolete. But would you really argue that we should roll back back 200 years of progress in the textile industry just to employ more people? What about the fact that textiles would be vastly more expensive and of limited quantity? Do you choose to have all of your clothes hand-woven or do you let technology take those jobs? The only real difference here is that it's a technology you didn't grow up with that is putting people out of work, so it's seen as unusual to you. We make this choice of technology over manual labour in virtually every industry every single day. But it's normal because we grew up with it. And the kids that grow up with this technology today will see this as normal too. Eliminating cashier jobs in supermarkets isn't fundamentally any different to eliminating textile worker jobs in the 18th century.
• btilly 10y ago
  When supermarkets came into existence a century ago, people were used to neighborhood grocers. You'd walk in, tell the grocer what items you wanted, the grocer would go back, get your bread, eggs, whatever, bring it up, and then ring you up. These people had worked hard, were well known in their towns, and were generally respected. There was therefore a lot of resistance to self-supermarkets. Where people had to go and select their own items off of the shelves. The concerns expressed were the same as yours. We don't miss the neighborhood grocers. People have come to expect and demand a variety and quality of goods that the old grocers could not hope to match, at prices that the grocers again could not match. The descendants of those grocers have new kinds of jobs, and on average a level of wealth that again grocers could not hope to match. It has been the same story with every kind of automation. From the Luddites opposing weaving machines that brought cheap clothing to the loss of telephone operators to the development of self-service kiosks today. I also live walking distance from supermarkets. I also joke with cashiers. But at busy times of day, waiting in line can take me longer than it takes to go to/from the store and select items. You don't mind the wait. I do. Amazon Go seems like a great idea to me.
  • gniv 10y ago
    And yet we are willing to pay 2x for food from farmers markets, artisans etc. That food was made with processes that go against technological progress. Why not apply the same thinking to selling the food in stores? The cashiers can provide added value (socializing, helping with selection, etc) that we are willing to pay for.
    • btilly 10y ago
      Who is "we"? SOME of us are willing to pay 2x. Some aren't. We all get to choose what it is that we want. Choice is good. :-)
      • gniv 10y ago
        My point exactly.
• chongli 10y ago
  Please, please don't ever forget this: the people who work at your grocery store are nice because they would be fired if they were rude to you. You may think they are your friends but they really aren't. They would not be there if they weren't getting paid for it.
  • ceedan 10y ago
    "They would not be there if they weren't getting paid for it." That's not true. There are nice people in the world.
    • chongli 10y ago
      I know what volunteering is: I do it myself. Every week I spend several hours helping kids with their homework at a local school. This is not at all the same thing as spending 8 hours a day working a cash register, dealing with rude customers without being rude in return, being expected to cover coworkers' shifts when they're sick, working during holiday hours instead of spending time with family, etc. etc. etc.
      • ceedan 10y ago
        Your response seems irrelevant to mine. Being nice is not a behavior that is only exibited when paid to do so, as you seem to believe.
        • chongli 10y ago
          as you seem to believe. I didn't say that. I said they would be fired if they were rude. It's a selection process that favours nice people, it does not make people nice (whatever that means).
• stcredzero 10y ago
  I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables. I know all the people who work in these supermarkets. The significant bit is that the walk-ability indicated in the 1st sentence enables the community indicated in the last sentence. I know there was one neighborhood in Cincinnati in the early 2000's, where you could walk to the grocery store, walk to the hair stylist, walk to the library, walk to the bank branch, and have a friend shout from their balcony to invite you up for dinner. Enable people to interact with their world on a village-scale, and you will have village-like interactions. However, if you turn people into paranoid-other-ignoring drones and cargo in metal capsules, then you have dystopian sci-fi city interactions. (This is a spectrum, not a binary bit, of course.)
  • nostromo 10y ago
    I don't think this has anything to do with cars. I live in Seattle. Many neighborhoods are very walkable. I can and do walk to grocery stores all the time. No, I don't know the cashiers personally. I also have to wait in long lines quite often. When I lived in New York, one of the most walkable cities on Earth, it was even worse: long lines and anonymous, interchangeable cashiers. I grew up in a small town where everyone drove to the grocery store, and that's the only time in my life where people knew their cashiers and genuinely cared about their lives.
    • stcredzero 10y ago
      I grew up in a small town where everyone drove to the grocery store, and that's the only time in my life where people knew their cashiers and genuinely cared about their lives. Effectively, you still lived in a village. One neighborhood in Cincinnati functioned like a village for me in the early 2000's.Many neighborhoods in Barcelona function that way. When I lived in New York, one of the most walkable cities on Earth, it was even worse: long lines and anonymous, interchangeable cashiers. I'm not, as you imagine, touting walk-ability as a panacea. My point is that it's the societal structure that gives the humanity perceived by the Barcelonan commenter, not the checkout jobs per se.
• Shivetya 10y ago
  well I think the benefit here is exposing local businesses that make common and specialty food products in a very neutral and open manner. If the products you buy can be looked up later then it might be a worthwhile partnership for some of these businesses.
• ask_hn_54321 10y ago
  The Amazon S team are about building great experiences... their tech is often more "Amazon Turk" than "AI". I trust there are many humans monitoring those cameras for this POC phase.... getting paid a similar hourly rate to a checkout person and giggling and chatting to each other but just not with the customer.
• mceoin 10y ago
  Third Spaces are important for building local communities, but why must they be supermarkets? Time being zero-sum game, the challenge/opportunity isn't how to preserve artifacts of accidental discourse, but to create new fora that enhance the tapestry of social life. Phrased another way, inefficient services sector processes are imposed upon us, and the preferable alternative is "opt-in" (e.g. farmers markets, bars, or what have you). You might also find interesting the pro-feminist discourse around automating "traditional" roles. Preserving long supermarket lines exacerbate social inequities you may not be so fond of.
• anotheryou 10y ago
  Less work would be good if there wasn't capitalism. I already self-checkout in some supermarkets and it's alright. If it where not for capitalism I'd rather self-checkout then have someone serve me and waste 1m of lifetime per visit to the supermarket.
• deleted 10y ago
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• pimlottc 10y ago
  This echoes the sentiments of Kurt Vonnegut in his short 2005 essay about being regarded as a Luddite: https://muenglish111.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/vonnegut-3.pdf https://muenglish111.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/vonnegut-3.... "How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different"
• hota_mazi 10y ago
  I respect your view and how you value human interaction, but I think you're only seeing a part of the picture. Maybe I'll miss out on these interactions with these friendly people who sell me stuff but if it means I can get my groceries done faster so I can go meet my actual friends faster, there's a clear benefit to me. And this is one of the many reasons why automation has always won in the long run.
• hoov 10y ago
  This sounds lovely. I live near Boston, Massachusetts and have a distinctly different experience. > I don't mind waiting in line for 3 minutes. Or 5. It's never longer than that, even if the cashier discusses the latest news with the old lady. If I go to the Stop & Shop, I spend about fifteen minutes in line on average, and the cashier is consistently rude. That being said, when I go to the more "local" stores, I have similar experiences to what you've described.
• mc32 10y ago
  I agree with your sentiment. And I think it's true in a place where we expect growth --but in places like Japan or Italy with decreasing numbers of workers, this makes sense. So, in that world there is a place to automate these jobs away so that we don't need retirees or near retirees making sure you don't trip on a broken sidewalk or a car is reminded to wait for pedestrians as the cars cross a pedestrian way. More of the world will enter into pop stabilization and decline and this is where this will fit in. Where it will not fit in is in places still experiencing pop growth and few prospects for rewarding jobs. On the other hand I'm a bit Orwellian and I do see value in people doing these kids of small quotidian things which are the basis for human fabric since civ --that is, engaging in small transactions which reinforce human connectivity.
• mstodd 10y ago
  Other people don't share your values, nor should they, nor should you expect them to. I would rather have more humans working these jobs, but minimum wage laws prevent that. There's no reason why your human interaction would suffer if you truly value it. With the money and time saved, perhaps people now go to the cafe and talk more often, or perhaps there's now a vendor outside the shop where you can get a conversation and a coffee. More than likely there will be a solution that i can't even think of.
• dkarapetyan 10y ago
  I don't think your view is unpopular. Plenty of people here would agree with you but it's an overly romantic view of the world. The problem isn't that Amazon is doing this and that this will drive out those mom&pop shops. The problem is that people will choose to go to Amazon and willingly destroy the mom&pop shops. The consumers are more culpable for the destruction of those mom&pop shops than Amazon. By placing the blame entirely on Amazon you are taking agency away from people which in my opinion sounds more wrong than a nice neighborhood losing its charm because of Amazon Go. What people don't realize is that economic forces are completely within their control and it's their daily choices that add up to neighborhoods maintaining their charm or turning into Starbucks and Amazon Go automation factories. There is a sustainable way to drive innovation and it requires people to be cognizant of those daily choices. I don't think you can make people come to that realization by stopping or delaying progress.
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
    No, economic forces are not completely in our control, not in any meaningful sense of control. The whole human agency thing is IMO mostly bullshit; faced with a modern economy, we have very little agency. Free will is a cool concept, but drop the prices in your store by 10% and everyone will come to you instead of your competitor - that's how trivial people as a group are to control. And companies are all about exploiting this. So yeah, technically if you, and me, and everyone else agreed not to use Amazon Go and stick to our regular grocery routine, mom&pop shops would survive. But that doesn't take into account the fact that coordination is a super hard problem. One that's essentially impossible to solve for a group larger than a dozen people without creating some strong external incentive structures[0]. On the other hand, a company like Amazon is in a position to unilaterally change the incentive landscape. There's no consumer agency to talk about here, anymore than we talk about agency of sheep being herded. -- [0] - that's also why every society, as it grows, invents structured forms of governance.
    • politician 10y ago
      Advertising is amazing to behold. You slap together some low quality ad unit, dial in your target audience on Facebook, throw a couple hundred K into the coffers... and then watch the machine crank out LPVs and conversions. The upfront effort needed to steer consumer behavior is shockingly minimal.
• homakov 10y ago
  It is fine to be loyal. If you all will ignore Amazon Go then maybe it will not become popular. However if you are the minority, nothing will stop Amazon.
• preordained 10y ago
  Yah, it's the benefit nobody asked for...or at least I didn't. Save me another minute off my grocery trip that's already very reasonable, and remove employment opportunities from people--"drudgery" or not--without replacing them. Oh, that, and I get to be more self-absorbed and isolated from people in my community than I already am...not that I couldn't make a greater effort, but there is something to be said for a world where face to face interaction used to be expected and normal.
• deleted 10y ago
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• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Popular or not, it is a legitimate view and worth discussing. As I see it, there are two separable things in your view and separating them can be good for everyone. One the one hand there are the people who facilitate your shopping experience. They help you with this task that is part of your daily life and they provide a social connection between you and your neighbors as you gather in a common space. On the other hand they are the 'mechanism' behind moving money you've earned back toward the farms and factories that have produced the goods you use. Both functions are important, and through history have been inextricably tied together and the basis for a rich history of the 'merchant' class. But it is important to note that the merchants are not necessarily aligned financially with you their customer. The merchant is in the position of choosing how much money to take out of the flow for themselves. As a process, the merchant tries to get the lowest possible prices from the suppliers for goods and charge the highest possible price to the customers who are buying the goods. The cost sold must remain higher than the cost paid for the merchant to exist, and the merchant incurs costs while being a merchant (from venue maintenance to employee salaries to shoplifting and theft) and so the total cost of the goods has to remain below the price it is sold for in order for the merchant to remain solvent. The cost of goods sold must remain materially lower than the revenue they generate so that the merchant can accumulate some savings in order to offset unforseen expenses as well. Now all of that mechanical operating of a grocery store has nothing to do with the social and service aspects of going to the store, sharing gossip with employees, and meeting and chatting with neighbors. And now we have the set up to understand the actual problem and the cost of the actual solution. You mention that there are 5 medium sized markets within a 5 minute walk. Why do you walk to one or not the other? I don't know for your case but in my case I will go to a market that I know is likely to have something I need, or one that has a good price on something I'm buying, or one that is near my travel route too and from the office because it is then not too far out of the way. Historically, if one market has generally lower prices than nearby markets, people shop at it preferentially and the other markets suffer (sometimes failing completely). Using WalMart as an example, it has gone into regions and decimated the local retail outlets by offering lower overall prices in essentially unlimited quantities. But the mechanism that allows Walmart or Target to do this is that the profits from other stores in the chain can cover the losses of individual stores. So a Walmart in a small town can still offer lower prices than the local grocers and merchants because they do not depend strictly on local profits to keep their store there open. You could legislate that all shops had to be locally profitable rather than depending on outside of market help. However, that has the down side of specialty shops like hardware stores may become impossible to operate because they don't have enough regular customers to stay in business. Then there is the local staff. For the merchant they are technically only necessary for collecting the money and protecting the shop from theft. But for the customers, as you mention, they are an important aspect. We could imagine a scenario (we may not believe it to be possible but can imagine it) that through video surveillance and facial recognition that a computer can ascertain where every piece of stock that has been put into a store has been removed. Further, that surveillance would take care of charging the person acquiring the stock regardless of how surreptitiously they did so. This would be a big improvement in the shops economic model if everything they brought in was "sold" and charged for. Shops today have complained of losses from employee theft and shoplifting reaching 3.23% of sales at grocers[1] and that cuts into their profits significantly. Take that loss away and the grocer gets to keep more money from its revenue. What to do with that extra money? The biggest job category at risk is cashier, but what if those people became roaming store customer assistance agents? For the same amount of pay they would now spend their days helping the customers find the groceries in the store, reaching high shelves for people who are short or disabled, restocking shelves from the larger stock in the storage area. Baggers would still be useful as people with many groceries would still want help going out to their car. Butchers and bakers, and counterstaff for lunch counters would still be needed. But then here is the rub, the prices for the groceries wouldn't change at all. The cost savings of automated checkout are going into the salaries of former cashiers. Now if at another Grocery they instead simply lower their prices. You the consumer get to decide if the former cashier has a place in the store or not. You decide by paying a price for your groceries that lets the merchant pay the former cashier to be there as service personnel. My experience suggests that the bulk of the customers will go to the 'cheap' grocer and end up taking away the cashier's jobs because they are unwilling to pay a bit extra to support that person. People will rationalize it and blame other factors but the bottom line will be that by patronizing the less expensive store with no cashiers, they will cut off revenue to the store that had found alternate employment for their cashiers. And that shift will result in either the re-employed cashiers losing their jobs or that other store going out of business, or both. [1] http://fortune.com/2015/06/24/shoplifting-worker-theft-cost-retailers-32-billion-in-2014/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/24/shoplifting-worker-theft-cost-...
• saint_fiasco 10y ago
  If the only reason those people have jobs is that we feel pity for them and don't want to automate their work, then what they have is not a job. It's just disguised welfare. Why not just give them actual welfare?
  • preordained 10y ago
    But will we...give them actual welfare, training, some transition? Or are we going to bring in the automation and let nature take its course?
    • saint_fiasco 10y ago
      The parent comment men says they are in Barcelona, so maybe it won't be politically impossible to just give them welfare. In the US, it might require some doublespeak to keep people from revolting at the "socialist" implications of paying people for not working.
• jccalhoun 10y ago
  I hate to see anyone's job get replaced but that sounds like my idea of Hell. I purposely wear headphones in stores because I don't want any employees talking to me. If I saw a cashier standing and talking to someone while I was waiting I would be pissed. If it was a regular occurance I would stop going to that store if at all possible. This probably says a lot more about me than it does Amazon Go...
• wvenable 10y ago
  I think this comment fails to recognize that nearly everything any of us do results in less human labor. It might be obvious in the case of supermarket checkouts but I've personally eliminated more than a few office jobs. I think there are plenty of ways humans can improve the world that doesn't involve jobs but it's going to be a rough transition. Where there might be fewer cashiers, I hope there will eventually be more educators, scientists, artists, and caretakers.
• RobinL 10y ago
  I work in central London. There's a supermarket below my old office (Sainsbury's opposite Holborn tube) which is around 1/3rd tills. There are around 30 in total, of which around 20 are self checkout. Nevertheless, at lunchtime and rush hour, you still have to queue. This technology would be extremely valuable to a shop like that. More choice, more customers, better shopping experience. And employing staff for 3 short-lived peak periods must be expensive.
• mrcabada 10y ago
  Something that I've learned is that technology will change everything. If we would've put excuses to all technology that is here today, we'd still be living 30 years in average. We are evolving, and so is the way of living and the definition of humanity. Generations that are being born today won't see a supermarket as a social place at all, and those are the generations that will be accepting and shaping how humanity interacts, so you better adapt to their "normal" life.
• ttcbj 10y ago
  FWIW, we have both automated and machine-based checkout at our grocery store, and I choose the machine-based when I can because its faster, and I usually have a wife and kids waiting at home. So, sometimes the more automated option is also the option that involves more net 'humanity' for me (or at least more time for close/meaningful human relationships). For me, this retail model would be attractive. Separately, I agree that automation may be displacing people who need assistance as a result, but I think the best way to address that is to offer government assistance, not to avoid the valuable automation.
• hodder 10y ago
  It seems you agree with Vonnegut: [When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
  • somberi 10y ago
    My real life experience - met Vonnegut as I was walking to work (Manhattan, NYC). Me: "Sir, are you Mr.Vonnegut?". KV: "Hmph". Me: "It is an honor to meet you. Fan of yours from when I was 16". KV: "OK". Still very fond of him and his works :)
• danielhooper 10y ago
  Ideally, you will connect with your local community because everyone in your community has the financial freedom to pursue physical or creative activities and is not burdened with an 8 hour commitment to do nothing with themselves all day. I believe this is the future we should be working towards.
• edpichler 10y ago
  I agree with you, it's pleasant to go to the local market. You don't mind waiting on a line for 5 minutes, but do you mind paying more for the same product? With automation, supermarket costs will reduce, otherwise there would be no reason to automate. This also happens with books, buying online is not so pleasant as go to a store, but people do, for different reasons.
• Kiro 10y ago
  I feel the complete opposite. I always avoid cashiers I recognize. I hate that unnecessary relationship. I want to buy stuff without another human being involved.
• gdulli 10y ago
  I agree. I do some shopping online but by default stick to brick and mortar. I like keeping excuses to be out in the real world interacting with people, as the need to do so is vanishing. Though appealing to Amazon, of all companies, about humanity where workers are involved is sadly, comically unfitting.
• VLM 10y ago
  "I know all the people who work in these supermarkets." Perhaps not. I worked at a supermarket as a starving student decades ago and the number of non-cashier employees dwarfed the number of cashiers. Most of the people in a store at any given time are stocking a department or cleaning or providing counter service or rather optimistically all three. We had more people employed at 3am stocking shelves and scrubbing floors than employed serving customers during 2nd shift... There is an assumption in the comments, that might come from confusing urban convenience stores with supermarkets, that the only employee in a supermarket is the cashier. You could make something like a quik-trip gas station/convenience store almost staff-less, but an actual supermarket is crawling with non-cash-handling employees.
• mcherm 10y ago
  Here is what I think you might be missing. You point out that there are a good number of employees in your local stores who have a productive job which they enjoy and from which they get personal meaning. You fear losing all of that if we introduce fully automated stores. Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose we already HAD fully automated stores, but we also had this same group of 60 people who (in the actual world) work in those 5 supermarkets. What would we invent for them to do which would pay them, give them something productive to do which they enjoyed and from which they could get personal meaning? Scanning groceries for 8 hours a day just wouldn't be my first pick to address this problem. So I guess what I am trying to get at is that I agree with your sense that there IS a possible problem with eliminating the need for these jobs -- but I don't think it's a problem of "shops need to have people". I think it is a problem of "the benefits of improved automation need to be more widely shared". If all of the benefits go to a few people who happen to own Amazon stock, then what's to happen to the 60 folks in your neighborhood? Personally, I'm in favor of some sort of universal basic income along with a change in our society to create socially acceptable niches for people to do small, simple projects -- but I certainly don't know all the answers.
• mattnewton 10y ago
  Playing devil's advocate here, what if those people didn't have to work these menial jobs and instead could just do art or hang out playing games with each other all day? It's the social structure that says you need to work to survive, that while it's served us really well, will lead to a lot of hardship when the labor of people is not worth what they need to survive.
• plandis 10y ago
  To offer a counter point. In the three cities I've lived in in the US this is not the case. The vast majority of people do not know anyone that works at their local grocery store. From my perspective it's annoying. I need to go in to a crowded market get all my stuff. Once I've done that I either need to wait in line for an automatic check out station (because there are not enough), or wait in line for a cashier which takes forever especially if someone decides to pay with cash. For me this potentially gets me out of the store faster so I can do things I actually want to do. I honestly wish I did know the people but that's not really how it works and so this is exciting for me
• usrusr 10y ago
  'Harmful' might be a more appropriate description than 'useless'. Losing the last of tiny interactions throws is deeper and deeper into filter bubbles and echo chambers. But I am guilty of sacrificing them for convenience myself, e.g. I tend to avoid the cheese counter at the supermarket in favor of prepackaged stuff from self-serve shelves. Removing final checkout is just more of the same. At least Amazon seem to be trying to the robomarket with a permanent all-seeing-AI installation instead of the not too unrecent consensus prediction of RFID on every single bar of gum and on every piece of fruit. Much better to talk about social implications than about technicalities in RFID surveillance.
• coryfklein 10y ago
  I'm sure some old-timers miss chatting up the switchboard operators between phone calls as well, but we're not going back to switchboards anytime soon.
• findjashua 10y ago
  "These people like their jobs" I doubt that sentiment would be shared by most cashiers at Walmart and other retail chains.
• runeks 10y ago
  Here's a curve showing how the proportion of the working force employed in agriculture has dropped from 70% to around 2% over 175 years [1]. So in other words, it went from almost everyone working in agriculture, to almost no one working in agriculture. This has happ So how is this possible? It's possible because the very reason that fewer people work in agriculture is because each human is more productive, resulting in cheaper goods on the shelves, because each salary can produce more of the same good. In other words: when an employee becomes more productive, a company can sell its product at a lower price, and earn more money. It can use this money to hire more employees, to produce more goods, rather than result in a layoff. In a free-ish market (with healthy competition), competitors will force incumbents to lower their prices, in search for profits. This has been seen countless times, in many different areas of industry (from pantyhose to, TVs to phones, cars etc.). All of these products have become significantly cheaper (relative to median income) over the past decades, and this has resulted in more people buying them, such that layoffs have become unnecessary because the increase in productivity is offset by an increase in demand. So, it's relatively simple. 1) If the decrease in price does not cause an increase in demand, employees will have to be laid off. 2) If it causes an increase in demand, then the company can afford to hire, perhaps dramatically more. So, for example, if shoppers buy 5% more items because prices are reduced by 5% (because of automatic checkout), then the cashiers can work at the packaging facility, or the farm, or in transportation, needed to make 5% more goods available to consumers. [1] https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/assets/4565243/Ag_workforce.png https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/assets/4565243/Ag_workforce.png