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Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks
- nickpsecurity 10y agoPeople interested might also enjoy the first, automated store: SmartMart. Made in the Windows NT days. We got one out here. http://www.smartmartinc.com http://www.smartmartinc.com
- nkristoffersen 10y agoHow is Smart Mart? Their website is quite sparse.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoI haven't been there in a long time. The founder struggled to convince people to deploy them as the upfront cost with robotics and tech was many times a regular, convenience store. Basically what it is. The majority of store owners would rather pay less money to exploit people with dead end jobs and deal with the shrink from theft. Definitely not a growth business but he's been opening more and more over time. It was an old interface that wasn't as good as modern self-checkouts at grocery stores. Predated them, though, automating the whole process. You drive up to a fuel pump looking thing, tell it what you want, pay it, the equipment gets the right stuff, and it brings it to you somehow. The only people necessary are those that stock it. Probably just one or two doing a full shift on busy days with a part time one on slower ones. Pretty amazing given big companies were bragging about rolling out self-checkouts that just automated a register when he had people automated a whole store many years before. Note: Guy's name is Michael Rivalto. He's a VC that my brothers told me. Family friend that used to occasionally take them to school in his supercars. Lasting impression there haha.
- Splines 10y agoI'm surprised that Amazon didn't go this route. With their warehouse logistics expertise they could operate everything pretty much the same except that instead of putting a bunch of stuff into a shipping van it goes in a customer's car.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoIt blows my mind, too, that Mike is about the only person I've seen do it. It's the kind of thing I'd think Amazon would find obvious. Dollar General and Aldi each make a fortune with DG having several times the margin of much of the industry. Convenience stores are all over the place with all kinds of personnel-driven issues. I'd have thought they'd prove themselves out serving the low end before aiming for the high. I think maybe it's because they're a technology company aimed at solving big problems for large numbers of consumers at once. They might have not thought of the cumulative effect of a ton of small deployments that their big thinking merely orchestrates and supplies. A weakness, perhaps?
- giarc 10y agohttp://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazons-cashier-less-convenience-store-delayed-to-work-out-technical-glitches-2017-03-27 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazons-cashier-less-conven... Here's a link to a non paywalled site.
- dawnerd 10y agoIn a nutshell: Their tech can't track items if there's a lot of people or fast movement.
- SerLava 10y agoAnd once they hear Amazon can't track a lot of people moving quickly... A lot of people will decide to start moving quickly.
- crooked-v 10y agoI can already foresee a dozen people showing up in zebra-striped hoodies to see what happens when they shop together.
- harryh 10y agoI'm sure that some people will but there will almost certainly be security in the store that will politely ask them to stop.
- notgood 10y agoThey realize that amazon now measures the height of each customer, also has a miniature drone following them around and each floor tile measure the weight of the people for that extra data point, oh and some have employees disguised as customers whom help the system when in doubt.
- Neliquat 10y agoWeight belts, got it.
- victor9000 10y agoand platform shoes.
- throwanem 10y ago
- tribby 10y agoI wonder if these stores will suffer any more from shoplifting than regular stores. I assume they will function roughly the same, i.e. an alarm goes off as an unpaid high ticket item leaves the store, but what's the psychological impact of having a human near the front door? will people feel they are stealing from a robot rather than a person (in fact they are stealing from neither), and will that lower the cognitive barrier to theft? it comes with built-in plausible deniability for the guilty, too -- "sorry, I guess your robo-store is broken, let me try signing in and out of my amazon app"
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- johncolanduoni 10y agoIt doesn't seem to function the same at all. If an item is detected leaving the store, then the person who took the item (or the person the store thinks took the item) is charged. And if they aren't detected, there's no way to have an alarm.
- tribby 10y agohow exactly is someone charged when they don't have an amazon account / connected phone / whatever method of payment is being used here? are you saying you need to swipe your card on the way in?
- dangrossman 10y agoYes. You need to have the Amazon Go app installed on your phone, and you scan your phone at what looks like a turnstile to enter the store, from the store's PR videos. Then the store keeps track of what you pick up using computer vision, your phone and various sensors, and charges everything you walk out with to your account. Unless you can avoid the requirement to load an app and scan it to get into the store, walking out of the store with goods stuffed in your jacket or bag isn't shoplifting, because the store knows you picked those things up and is charging them to your Amazon account.
- taspeotis 10y agoI wish more companies would delay their products due to quality concerns. It shouldn't be viewed as a bad thing.
- johncolanduoni 10y agoTo be fair, this quality concern mostly affects Amazon. I don't imagine too many shoppers would complain about being undercharged. Though it is possible the reverse could be a problem as well (and that would not be something Amazon would highlight).
- beambot 10y agoAll it takes is a loss factor of a few percent, and the entire model breaks down. This is the same reason that long-range RFID (UHF RFID) never worked for cashierless checkout too. You couldn't ensure 100% coverage. Some tags just couldn't be read -- either due to adversarial tactics (eg. shielding with your body) or material properties (eg. metal) -- and the engineering countermeasures to overcome these challenges made the tags too expensive for low-margin goods.
- devoply 10y agoi imagine any such store has a ridiculous amount of surveillance with probably a membership model like costco with scanning so they know who you are when you enter the store. more than do-able these days. i honestly don't want amazon to continue to get bigger it's already big enough as far as i am concerned, but that's not how big business works. consolidation is the way and the government does little to discourage it and allow smaller players and more diversity.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y agoRFID is expensive. Even buying the cheapest transponders in bulk, you're still looking at $0.01-$0.05 per label - that's enough to kill the concept entirely for high-volume, low-value goods such as supermarket/grocery store goods where the profit-margins are thin enough as it is, if not loss-making.
- cobookman 10y agoHow much per item do you pay for cashier staff though. Might be the same as the tag cost. Also in regards to RAIN RFID tags vs dumb print tags yep you are talking about a 5 cent increase. But you also lift inventory accuracy from ~70% to 99.9%.
- gambiting 10y agoYou still need some staff, sometimes items are damaged, the item doesn't scan, the payment won't go through, the customer changed their mind etc etc. You can't get rid of all staff.
- rileymat2 10y agoIt is not the same, but our local Sam's Club has an app that you can scan all items as you go, and pay inside the app. Then as you leave an employee checks the receipt like they do for everyone else anyway. It works great.
- dangrossman 10y agoI've seen that at Sam's Club, and at a couple grocery store chains, but nobody seems to use them at the grocery store. I did once. I wish Costco would do this too. The lines at my Costco are huge no matter what day or time I visit. Sometimes I'd like to go in just for one or two things, but I decide to get it somewhere else at a higher price just to avoid standing in line behind a dozen full carts. Self-scan would fix that.
- zwily 10y agoI'm guessing since they just got rid of self checkout they're not gonna be doing that. (I heard they got rid of it because of too many people sharing cards, and no cashier to check the picture. Seems like an easy thing to fix, but oh well.)
- djhworld 10y agoHow is that any better though? The receipt checking probably takes just as long as scanning the items through the till. Unless they just take a cursory glance and just say "well whatever you're probably trustworthy"
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- josefdlange 10y agoAnecdotally I've heard that the store oftentimes works fine in high-traffic situations. But if my memory of my time at Amazon serves right, the "P99 performance" of this store should be as good as the "mean performance", which is probably where they're being cautious. Funny how high-availability constraints can make for ominous headlines like this.
- notyourwork 10y agoI don't think the headline is ominous. It is not like Amazon is delivering a regulatory project that has real deadlines. They set their own deadline and made a decision to adjust it. They are also creating the first of its kind so kinds are to be expected right? I don't find the headline positive or negative, I find it to the point and succinct.
- josefdlange 10y agoYou're right. I think I was thinking of The Verge's less tactful headline: Headline: "Amazon’s cashier-free store reportedly breaks if more than 20 people are in it" Subtitle: "So it’s being delayed" Lead-in: "Amazon’s first cashier-free convenience store was supposed to open to the public early this year, but apparently some big technology issues have the launch on hold." The Verge's article is a hot-take derivative of the WSJ article. My criticism was misplaced.
- downandout 10y agoNon-Paywalled direct link - https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Famazon-delays-convenience-store-opening-to-work-out-kinks-1490616133 https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Fa...
- throwaway160327 10y agoThis article is fact free. At peak times, on a daily basis, the store handles a far higher volume than this. There is, of course, a constant drive to push accuracy up, that's the Amazon way. The delay is for other reasons - even with a throwaway I'm not going to say what
- DownWithTheWall 10y agoWithout Paywall: http://www.freewsj.com/articles/elon-musk-launches-neuralink-to-connect-brains-with-computers-1490642652?hn http://www.freewsj.com/articles/elon-musk-launches-neuralink...
- throwaway8712 10y agoHas anyone tried fooling the system as an experiment? Considering that computer vision remains relatively non-robust, I imagine this shouldn't be too hard. On the lighter side, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-RXDCEErWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-RXDCEErWQ :D
- muninn_ 10y agoWant that the point of the beta version of the store?
- sand500 10y agoShould beta test this where you can keep what ever you manage to get out of the store without paying.
- revmoo 10y agoDon't post paywalled articles