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I tried out Amazon Go in SF and I have to say that I'm very impressed. It doesn't even require a standalone app if you already have the Amazon app downloaded. I
by tschwimmer 7y ago
I tried out Amazon Go in SF and I have to say that I'm very impressed. It doesn't even require a standalone app if you already have the Amazon app downloaded. I walked in, scanned my phone, grabbed a sandwich and walked out. It took 2 minutes and felt a lot less friction-y then buying something at a convenience store, which admittedly was low friction to begin with.
- perl4ever 7y agoDoes the app show you what you're buying and what it costs before you exit?
- tschwimmer 7y agoNo, it does not. There was a lot of latency (~2 hours) before I saw what I was charged for.
- ForHackernews 7y agoI wonder if they're using Mechanical Turkers to review the video footage.
- Nextgrid 7y agoI wonder if the system couldn't reliably identify what you bought and queued the footage for human review.
- travbrack 7y agoAnother datapoint: about 5 minutes for the one in Seattle last month
- perl4ever 7y agoIn that case I would be unwilling to use it. A normal checkout provides a point in time and space when what you are buying is reviewed and you become aware of the total and any errors. If someone says there will be no errors, I just roll my eyes.
- farnsworth 7y agoI know a couple people who have reported mistakes, and they were refunded with no questions asked. I have used it dozens of times with 100% accuracy so far
- colejohnson66 7y agoLinusTechTips, when Amazon’s store first opened, visited and “returned” something they grabbed, and they just refunded them. They called Amazon and were told there’s no way to process returns outside of a refund (for the store)
- chrisseaton 7y agoPeople have been buying things and only getting an invoice at a later time for millennia, and managed fine.
- masonic 7y agoNot when payment is extracted in real time.
- chrisseaton 7y agoIsn’t payment by credit card in almost all cases? You can view a statement before paying it a month later. How’s that in real time?
- masonic 7y agoThe vendor payment commitment is immediate. The cardholder is a borrower from the issuer standpoint.
- masonic 7y agoIf items aren't priced, that should be illegal in CA.
- pbreit 7y agoOf course the items are priced.
- masonic 7y agovisibly priced, as in marked on the item, the location, or both. Of course they are "priced" in the sense of the vendor assigning a price to deduct, but transparency to the purchaser is legally required.
- grandmczeb 7y agoI’ve been to multiple locations in person and can confirm there’s a very visible price tag below each product on the shelf. Search Google images and you’ll see plenty of examples.
- pbreit 7y agoYes, folks, the prices for items are indeed on display to shoppers! https://learn.g2.com/hs-fs/hubfs/IMG_20181101_131335763.jpg https://learn.g2.com/hs-fs/hubfs/IMG_20181101_131335763.jpg
- btgeekboy 7y agoThere’s shelf tags just like every other store you’re used to.
- adrusi 7y agoI've heard that the process for contesting charges is simple and high-trust.
- perl4ever 7y agoPerhaps, perhaps. The issue I have is that once you add the friction in, it prevents errors from being corrected, and that reduces the incentive to prevent them. It's not about whether I can get a problem fixed when I notice it. It's that the number of problems will be higher because on average fewer will be noticed and fixed. Furthermore, whenever the rate of problems seems a little too high, the easy "fix" is to add a little more friction.
- didibus 7y agoYou get a receipt after you exit. And from the receipt there's an option to notify of a mistake. I've never had to use it yet, and I haven't had a mistake happen yet so I can't comment on how smooth that would be.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoThe obvious question now is what it tracks. Presumably if you pick up a sandwich and then put it down somewhere else in the store you shouldn't be charged for it. What happens if you walk in, pick up a sandwich, eat the sandwich, and leave?
- yazaddaruvala 7y agoMoving stuff is seamless. You are not charged. Passing items between friends that used the same phone to get in is also seamless (I’ve never tried passing an item between two amazon accounts). I believe there are weight sensors to counteract stuff like taking out half a sandwich and putting the rest back, but I’m not sure about this one. There are definitely ways to cheat the system. But the tech is at a point where it is similar hassle/consequences to other petty shoplifting that happens across the world (the cameras can always be checked by a human in a post-mortem). The reality is convenience store shopping is at a point where it is almost always better for the company and the customer with Amazon Go tech. The bigger problems with the Amazon Go tech is, how do you scale it to a supermarket size, how do you get around or change regulations that a human needs to validate ID for alcohol, how do you auto-stock the place, how do you get away from needing a human for security guard / first aid reasons? Also I imagine it costs a lot to set up. How do you make this cheap enough to be financially worth the ROI?
- alexgmcm 7y agoYou can still have a security guard or two - that just means you need two guards instead of two guards and half a dozen cashiers. I agree with you - the stores will save more money by switching to this tech and it will be better for the customers. I really hate having to queue for 10 minutes in a busy supermarket to buy groceries - it's probably the worst UX I experience on a regular basis.
- btgeekboy 7y agoI think having the shop staffed isn’t necessarily a problem or failure. The original Go store in Seattle has alcohol (ID is checked by a person that permits entry into that section) and the store is otherwise staffed for restocking and general customer service. But I walk in, grab what I want for lunch, and walk out. I don’t wait in line behind 5 other people while waiting for the awkward chip card delay or that guy that wants to pay with pocket change that hogs the register. Consequently, I go there far more often than the 7-11 down the street.
- elwell 7y agoYesterday I had a similar experience with a cafe in a smallish town (Malvern, PA). However, instead of using an app system, they relied on the "honor system". I would be curious as to their annual losses, and how that would vary when in a metropolitan area such as SF.
- dontbenebby 7y agoEspecially if they save enough in personnel costs to cover the shrink. Maybe throw in some CCTV to catch egregious offenders.
- chongli 7y agoCCTV seems like a bad move. It creates an adversarial relationship to the customers. For a small business, it would be better to cultivate goodwill and rely on community norms to police offenders. People aren't likely to repeatedly steal from an honours system cafe if there are regular customers witnessing them.
- tylerhou 7y agoBut how do you distinguish between someone stealing versus someone leaving and paying through the app in their car?
- chongli 7y agoThat no longer falls under the purview of the small, independent cafe on the honours system. I'd say, in a cafe, besides cash you could have a touchscreen to key in your order and tap your phone to pay. The walk in walk out Amazon model is not an honours system, it's a technological policing model.
- morpheuskafka 7y agoThat's cool, but that would be a hassle for groceries if you had to manually add up all your purchases. The app allows you to combine security with customer convenience.
- Waterluvian 7y agoDo you guys have RFID credit cards? I'm not sure how much more convenient it needs to be than an item scan and a tap of a card.
- austhrow743 7y agoItem scanning can take a while, as well as queuing for it. Tapping card vs chip and pin is a tiny time saving compared to the whole checking out process.
- throwaway9d0291 7y agoI live in Switzerland and for a small number of items I can usually be in and out of my regular snack supermarket (a regular supermarket, I just use it for snacks) within 120 seconds. It's just walk in, pick up a drink and a snack, walk to the self check kiosk and scan both barcodes, tap a few times rapidly (you can just hammer a button in the same place a few times) and wave my card. If I had to guess I'd say the entire checkout process takes ~10s, most of which is getting my card out of my wallet. This differs from a US self checkout in a few ways: - I nearly always had to queue in the US. I nearly never have to queue in Switzerland, at least at this store. This may be because: - Swiss self checkout kiosks don't weigh the bagging area like US ones do. In the US there's always a small delay between scanning items while you bag the item and wait for the checkout to detect it. In Switzerland you just scan it and the kiosk doesn't care what you do with it afterwards. - Payment is extremely fast, like sub-second end-to-end fast. You literally just wave your card at the terminal. - There are usually 15-20 self checkout terminals in the larger supermarkets you find in the city so unless you're there at a really busy time, they usually have more than enough throughput to deal with traffic. In the US I'm used to seeing <10 self checkout terminals.
- tjr225 7y agoUgh. I will _always_ prefer friction to my own convenience if it means some person can have a job. I could care less about efficiency and I could care less about some shareholder's bottom line. Maybe I would feel differently if we lived in a country that would actually take care of people who didn't have money or opportunity.
- mazesc 7y agoDo you send email?
- darkpuma 7y agoIn for the penny, in for the pound? Nobody is a saint so you may as well double down on sin? Interesting philosophy. I'd rather people be morally inconsistent and do less harm than do more harm in the pursuit of moral consistency.
- drawnwren 7y agoPretty sure the point was that almost everything was an optimization that used humans at some point. A weird moral compass that had you not using technology that replaced menial labor would be actually impossible in any (even ancient) society.
- mazesc 7y agoIt's a bit ridiculous making such a non-differentiating statement claiming to be against automation when that is a lot of what the digital revolution is about in the first place. No less on hacker news, which is one of the hubs to talk about the digital revolution.
- mypalmike 7y agoYou're mistaking the argument being made, which is really about recognizing ones own moral inconsistencies instead of claiming moral high ground over others where there is none to be had. A tech worker who claims to value a cashier's job over their own convenience is basically gorging on two large deluxe pizzas while criticizing others for eating an olive. Just look around you. Pick just about anything. A wall. A refrigerator. Your shoes. A spice jar. They all have stories to tell about automation and job loss.