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Aaaand there’s the play. Amazon wasn’t trying to compete with other retails stores by leveraging their tech edge, they were positioning themselves to becoming t

Aaaand there’s the play. Amazon wasn’t trying to compete with other retails stores by leveraging their tech edge, they were positioning themselves to becoming the single provider of retail checkout solutions for the future. You either opt-in to giving Amazon all your retail data, or you become the only old fashioned “wait in line to get served” store on the street. And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this?

MattDamonSpace 7y ago
Yep. I've been sitting here thinking Amazon was going to spool up tons of retail locations that leveraged their tech to create a massive moat that other Brick & Mortars couldn't possibly compete with. In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world.
- altec3 7y ago
  And they didn't just do that with AWS. They did it with ecommerce as well. Become the biggest online retailer, nail the implementation, then get everyone else to jump on your platform.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    They are only good because Ebay is pathetically bad.
    - turc1656 7y ago
      They're only good because they were repeatedly given an infinite amount of money for 2 decades by investors while their retail operations lost money so that they could nail the implementation and the promise that they would figure out how to make it profitable.
      - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
        Did they really nail the implementation? I still refuse to buy anything that would go on or inside my body from amazon because I'm worried about getting counterfeits.
      - adenverd 7y ago
        Amazon effectively leveraged investment capital to do exactly what they said they would do - innovate, learn into the market, and improve iteratively. From investors' perspectives (and probably consumers' perspectives as well), Amazon has succeeded brilliantly.
      - thu2111 7y ago
        You talk as if Amazon was like an Uber or WeWork. That's really far from the truth. Amazon were slightly profitable or break-even since 2003. There's a convenient chart of their profits since day one here: https://qz.com/1196256/it-took-amazon-amzn-14-years-to-make-as-much-net-profit-as-it-did-in-the-fourth-quarter-of-2017/ https://qz.com/1196256/it-took-amazon-amzn-14-years-to-make-... Starting in 1997 they bled money with mounting losses until about 1999, when they began to turn things around. The dotcom pop is clearly visible but they recovered almost immediately and their losses continued to shrink until about 2001-2002 when they became break even. From 2002-2011 they either made small profits or nothing, but that was obviously because they were growing at a rapid pace and putting all the money back into the business. Once AWS launches in 2006 (so about 10 years after day 1 in retail) profits start growing but then are back into the red around the time of the GFC+recession, and again in the 2012-2013 European recession. After that it's stratospheric profits. How much investor money is "infinite money"? Somewhere between $8-$9 million before they floated on the stock market. https://www.quora.com/Who-were-the-original-investors-in-Amazon-and-how-much-pre-IPO-investment-did-Amazon-receive-in-total?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Who-were-the-original-investors-in-Ama... Obviously, investors who put money into their IPO have done extremely well and cannot claim they were shovelling money into a furnace, far from it. The inflation in investment round sizes over the past 20 years has been staggering. I see nothing that suggests Amazon was unusual in raising so little money (comparatively speaking) before they went public.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
    - athenot 7y ago
      That was true 5 years ago but with the quality issues on Amazon, I've found myself buying more on eBay.
      - paulmd 7y ago
        Yeah, ebay has much better buyer protections unless the item is Fulfilled By Amazon (which carries a cost premium). eBay prices also tend to be better. If you're going to buy cheap chinese crap anyway, just cut out the middleman. Finally, Amazon's marketplace is just not navigable. Their search is pathetically bad, and this is nothing new, it's been a common complaint for years. Some fairly massive amount of their traffic is inbound from Google searches like "some product amazon" just because of how pathetically bad it is. The only other reasonable way to navigate their site is if their similar product suggestions or "commonly bought together" happens to nail the item you were looking for. I've had searches where adding an additional keyword that is in the product title will actually cause the product to disappear from the search. What in the actual fuck.
        popinman322 7y ago
        I personally find eBay to be much better for items that I can't buy from the manufacturer already. Individual sellers have reputations & reviews separate from product reviews, and those ratings are among the first things you're exposed to when interacting with a seller.
        aficiomaquinas 7y ago
        > Yeah, ebay has much better buyer protections unless the item is Fulfilled By Amazon (which carries a cost premium). eBay prices also tend to be better. If you're going to buy cheap chinese crap anyway, just cut out the middleman. That's what I thought until I was scammed by a Chinese on eBay... after countless emails, calls, even police reports, eBay did not return the 800 dollars I lost... not sure if it's an isolated case but it was pretty frustrating.
        athenot 7y ago
        Yes! Amazon's search has been driving me crazy but it went from bad (loose interpretation of what I typed with a whole bunch of irrelevant stuff) to worse (adding more sponsored results, i.e. even less what I want). Their recommendation engine for related prducts used to be nice but that's been replaced by sponsored products which lowers the quality. Now, the only way I use Amazon's search is when I have a SKU or part number and type it in directly. But I also do that in Google and often find the same thing elsewhere at similar or less cost (including shipping, though to be fair it may take a day or 2 longer). eBay's search is still one of the best for me, in that it respects the keywords I put in and allows for extended query syntax to really hunt something down (which then can be turned into a saved search). One of the most creative things I found on eBay was tool rental. I needed a tool to replace the bearings on my washing machine, and a seller was selling one explicitely as a rental: tool was charged about $120, with $35 shipping. When done, sent it back for a refund. The "shipping" included the rental fee and shipping both ways.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Amazon has become my "last resort" place. These days, I check eBay before Amazon.
  - morganvachon 7y ago
    They are following it up with shipping and logistics. Amazon has been pushing us hard to switch from FedEx/UPS/USPS to using them for most of our packages, and it's working. Our defect rate is less with Amazon despite all of the anecdotal evidence of lazy/incompetent last mile Amazon personnel, and our rep bends over backwards to make sure she can fix any issues and get us what we need. She's sending us free label printers even though ours are generic enough to work with all carriers including Amazon, just because the labels for them are less expensive. After shipping with Amazon for our non-Amazon orders for six months, we've moved about 80% of our shipments to them because they save us that much time, hassle, and money. FedEx picks up almost all the rest, with a handful of packages going out UPS and Postal due to address requirements, or customer preference on phone orders (all online orders are Amazon/eBay/website where we limit shipping choices; we are about 60% Amazon, 30% eBay, 8% website, and 2% phone orders on a typical day).
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      > Amazon has been pushing us hard to switch from FedEx/UPS/USPS to using them for most of our packages I hope that there's always a USPS option. My apartment complex has package lockers that can only be used by the USPS, so that's the only safe way to get packages delivered when I'm not home.
- sarah180 7y ago
  It's hard to imagine Amazon actually starting a bunch of retail locations. They'd probably buy Whole Foods or something…
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - vl 7y ago
    Or Borders...
  - derefr 7y ago
    Surprising to me that Whole Foods still doesn't have this tech integrated. You'd think that'd be the "beta" step after the Amazon Store's "alpha" step.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - mkolodny 7y ago
      Maybe they don't want to draw attention to how many people are going to lose their jobs because of this yet. Cashier is the #2 job in the US (by number of people employed) [0]. If they released this at Whole Foods, I'd guess they'd fire all the cashiers there. That would make this rollout a lot less exciting for a lot of people. I hope Amazon comes up with an awesome way to help the cashiers this technology replaces. Then if self-driving cars end up working out, that industry can learn from what Amazon did. [0] https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/rudy-takala/top-2-us-jobs-number-employed-salespersons-and-cashiers https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/rudy-takala/top-2-us-jo...
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > If they released this at Whole Foods, I'd guess they'd fire all the cashiers there Since Whole Foods sells alcohol, I doubt that. There are things that lots of governments won't let you have customers “just walk out” with.
- hammock 7y ago
  >In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world. It's not just about "AWS"-ing the thing. It's about gaining access to all of the transaction data and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you. A retailer like Walmart would NEVER use this tech, they know their data is one of the most valuable things they have (in fact they don't share their data with anyone, while all the other FDM retailers do), but boutique retailers like J Crew or whoever would happily.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    > and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you. Amazon is always putting up ads for me based on my purchase history, but they're never what I wind up buying. I have no explanation for what is wrong with their algorithm.
    - xapata 7y ago
      Turns out that math is hard and people are difficult to predict.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        I suspect Amazon would have better success with me (i.e. better than 0%) if they simply showed me a random ad.
    - larzang 7y ago
      But you just bought a toilet seat, surely you want five more toilet seats, you toilet seat enthusiast you.
      - Godel_unicode 7y ago
        I've always assumed that was an artifact of free returns; if you bought one thing, maybe you're actually still shopping and want to know other options. I've noticed when I get these they're frequently more expensive than the one I already bought.
dosethree 7y ago
Where’s the evidence anyone will actually use this thing? Maybe eventually. You can already do this at apple, but does anyone do it? Perhaps, they will get used to it in time, but i don’t know.
- iNate2000 7y ago
  But at apple it's a much more standard checkout flow, right? Scan an item, press "buy" and done, right?
- hamandcheese 7y ago
  I do it at Apple, but afaik Apples system is based mostly on trust? You just scan and pay with your device, then walk out. Granted, I haven’t tried to steal so there could be more tech than I realize.
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    I know someone who worked at an apple store a few years ago and they told me that they really had no way to know and lots of products were stolen.
    - sib 7y ago
      And that's also why you can't do it with small, high-demand products such as AirPods (at least in the stores I've been in).
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I do. I think in my last ten purchases from an Apple Store I've only not had a zero-interactivity experience once. And that was because a Genius had get a Thunderbolt 2 to USB-C cable from the back. Even then, once she handed it to me, I still checked out on my phone with the Apple Store app.
- obmelvin 7y ago
  > Where’s the evidence anyone will actually use this thing? Well, who knows how much interest will truly materialize, particularly given the data leaked to amazon, but the post claims/implies that retailers reached out to Amazon and were interested in licensing the technology.
tomjakubowski 7y ago
No idea about the quality of their competition, but a startup called Standard Cognition has been in this market. https://standard.ai/ https://standard.ai/
- TheEzEzz 7y ago
  Jordan from Standard here. We absolutely believe that retailers will prefer to get this new technology from providers like us as opposed to Amazon, their biggest competitor. So far Amazon has also not shown their technology deployed in an existing store, rather than an Amazon Go. We're actively working on being the first to demonstrate this. Stay tuned over the next couple of months.
  - UweSchmidt 7y ago
    I truly believe that you are "actively working" right now lol. But, sincerely, good luck. New technology should shake up the existing players, not be an occasion for oligopolies to become even more powerful.
  - anon102010 7y ago
    I've used amazon go - the tech worked very well for me. They have at least 4 or 5 stores in San Francisco alone - I'd guess 20+ at least if you include Seattle or wherever else they are operating. I haven't see the go grocery store yet. Can you give us a sense of how many transactions standard is doing every day with it's tech that's further along / more deployed than Amazon? At least the SF location I visited had steady traffic so Amazon is collecting some real data (selection a bit limited so go grocery interesting to me)
    - TheEzEzz 7y ago
      Amazon is certainly in the lead in terms of total locations. All of their locations are stores they own, however. The race right now is to show this tech working in existing stores, with a fairly light (aka scalable) install process. We have multiple installs in existing stores at the moment, running in "shadow mode" to confirm the accuracy is the system. These sites are predicting the carts of hundreds of people a day, and seeing good results.
aguyfromnb 7y ago
>And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this? Isn't the better question, "where is the product"? Is it a gimmick? This looks awesome, but until I see it in action, working flawlessly, outside of the Seattle/Silicon Valley nexus, I'm not sure there will be (or needs to be) any competition.
- npo9 7y ago
  I moved from Seattle to the midwest. I’ve seen a lot of very intolerable lines in the suburbs. It’s not unusual for me to wait 15 minutes to checkout at Target or Costco and last December I remember a 25 minute line. I think this is a product. There’s about six different grocery store within a fifteen minute drive from my house. I’ll switch to the first one to implement this system.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    What about self checkout or just adding more lanes ? This really doens't sound like a problem that needs amazon and "technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning"
mdturnerphys 7y ago
Skip [0] lets you scan and pay for items with your phone, so it doesn't require any infrastructure be installed but isn't as simple for the customer. [0] https://getskip.com/ https://getskip.com/
milofeynman 7y ago
It's interesting that they rolled this out as a thing, but didn't start retrofitting all of their Whole Foods with it. Does it have problems with grocery stores? How does it handle fruits by weight, etc.
- CreepGin 7y ago
  I'm wondering the same thing. Seems like the typical problem with AI in general: dealing with all edge cases in real world scenarios.
- filoleg 7y ago
  Amazon probably doesn't want to radically rock the boat when it comes to Whole Foods at the moment. It is an established well-working business, and they don't want another wave of "WF went to shit after Amazon bought it out, just look at all those changes they've implemented!", given that Amazon's reputation has already been kinda questionable in the public eye recently.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Last Thanksgiving, I visited my parents in the town where I lived before college, and we went to the Whole Foods where we used to shop at all the time. It looked basically the same, except that there were these huge, bright blue Amazon Prime ads everywhere. It felt vaguely dystopian—a store of my youth invaded by the giant tech monolith. If Amazon is trying to not noticeably change Whole Foods, they're doing a pretty lousy job.
    - goatlover 7y ago
      Just need giant holograms from Blade Runner to complete the look.
    - filoleg 7y ago
      Well, i didn't say they weren't changing anything at all. Given how perturbed you are by those Prime ads that don't functionally affect anything, imagine the magnitude of the public outcry if Amazon implemented something as radical as "just walk out" tech at Whole Foods.
kryogen1c 7y ago
Fear not! Yesterday I shopped at a big box grocery store where all I did was scan my cart with my phone, pay with the attached card, and walk out the door.
- smeyer 7y ago
  What brand grocery store was that?
  - monk_e_boy 7y ago
    Most UK supermarkets offer this service. You need a store scanner that you pick up with the trolly. Scan everything, then pay and leave. You'll get stopped very occasionally for staff to check you aren't stealing. But they don't do much other than make you pay for things you haven't scanned. "Oh the kids put it in there without me noticing."
    - zimpenfish 7y ago
      ASDA, at least, offer an iOS app that lets you scan as you go. Which is handy because the scanners are at the wrong* end of the store for me. (I believe M&S has something similar?)
  - asdff 7y ago
    I've seen this at giant eagle a couple of years ago
reaperducer 7y ago
And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this? One of the big tech companies in the 80's demonstrated this. I think it was either IBM or AT&T/Bellcore. Essentially, it was just a scanner at the door that read RFID tags in each item, and your credit card. This was back when RFID was still oh-holy-shit technology. The reason I think AT&T might have been involved is that the video demonstration was very similar to AT&T "You will" series of commercials that aired around the same time.
- paulmd 7y ago
  IBM was playing with this for sure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-1F71Wa_zo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-1F71Wa_zo
- thu2111 7y ago
  That's not the same thing at all. Doing it with RFID is trivial. The hard part here is the backwards compatibility with a retail ecosystem that uses UPC barcodes rather than (expensive) RFID tags.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Well it goes to show you that this isn’t really solving a burning issue at all. If it was, they would have thrown the cheap RFID tags on everything 30 years ago.
  - dfox 7y ago
    Doing it with RFID is surprisingly non-trivial even in the physical sense. That is the error rate of RFID bulk reads is small enough for opportunistic tracking of stuff, but mostly unacceptable for basing any kind of financial transaction on that.
    - derefr 7y ago
      Don't do a bulk read, then. Build RFID readers—and an RFID-blocking envelope, and a 3G or WiMAX radio—into shopping carts/baskets. Detect each item as it enters/exits the cart using the RFID reader inside the cart, and then use the radio to report it to the store, to sync the physical state of the cart/basket with an equivalent virtual shopping cart. Then, put an RFID tag on the outside of the cart/basket, which will be detected by the door scanner when you leave. Charge for what's in the virtual basket when the physical basket leaves the premises. Yes, you'll have to recharge your shopping carts/baskets. Just design them to ensure they pass through charge (like a string of Christmas lights) when stacked together, so you only have to plug in (or have a cradle for) the bottom one (for baskets) or frontmost one (for carts.) It's still a worse idea than using computer vision, if you've got that, but it's not something we couldn't have pulled off a decade or more ago.
sushikokk 7y ago
Not only your data, but the stores also. Now Amazon will know every item that sells, and at what price. Wonder what comes next?
- isthisreality 7y ago
  Well, the most obvious is selling that data to competitors (store-level and product-level) and governments.
csomar 7y ago
Or maybe the thing turned out not profitable/non-functional but they are trying to profit from it nonetheless.
kortilla 7y ago
> And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this? Um, Walmart and most major grocery stores already have self checkout areas. So “wait in line to get served” isn’t quite the comparison. Most companies will give zero fucks about adopting this unless it becomes the expected norm.
- jshevek 7y ago
  I may be misunderstanding your argument, but I think the parent argument still applies whether you are getting served by a human or being served by a machine which has the same "one checkout at a time per person" kind of bottleneck that a human has. Edit: The "scan your own cart" model is a more compelling counter-argument than the self checkout machines currently at Wal-Mart, as this can accommodate a much higher throughput.
wheaties 7y ago
This will destroy more adtech companies than you can imagine. Amazon will have so much of your shopping habits. They'll have even more than just one credit card company will be able to have...
inkaudio 7y ago
There are number of tech companies directly competing in this space: https://standard.ai/ https://standard.ai/ https://grabango.com/ https://grabango.com/ https://www.getzippin.com/ https://www.getzippin.com/ https://www.v7labs.com/retail https://www.v7labs.com/retail https://www.getzippin.com/ https://www.getzippin.com/ There are competitive options, if you’re in retail you do not have to give Amazon all your “retail data” or use their tech.
- arcadeparade 7y ago
  Reminds me of this old IBM ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA
  - tmilard 7y ago
    Yes, IBM "thinks" the future. Other companies build them. Conclusion : ideas are worthless, Execution is key
    - Klinky 7y ago
      >Conclusion : ideas are worthless, Execution is key This was also often the conclusion found during the Dark Ages. ;D
      - krthr 7y ago
        Hahahaha Spanish Inquisition likes this
    - jp555 7y ago
      And in what universe is great execution devoid of ideas? Do you mean to say that doing something well is way better than imagining doing something well?
      - Rantenki 7y ago
        Doing something well means you already imagined doing something well first. Or, in other words, "imagining doing something well" is necessary, but not sufficient to actually do something well.
raydev 7y ago
Walmart. But they only care about what lowers costs. They've been researching RFIDs and stufff like this since at least the early 00s, and they rolled a lot of it out in their shipping/transit network, but I'm guessing they have too much shrinkage/theft to worry about in most of their stores. No cost savings, so it doesn't happen.
codazoda 7y ago
I don't see it mentioned elsewhere, but Amazon could very easily disrupt credit card companies as part of this play as well.
- zbruhnke 7y ago
  BINGO - this is basically the ultimate play for getting rid of the networks almost entirely if not entirely
monkin 7y ago
> You either opt-in to giving Amazon all your retail data, or you become the only old fashioned “wait in line to get served” store on the street. Is this still a thing? In Poland most shops allows you to scan and pay for products in matter of seconds without any help. No lines, no hassle. :)
- lm28469 7y ago
  It's been like that in most supermarkets I went in the last 5 years. I don't really see the point of amazon's version. And from what I read it doesn't even work yet. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/02/amazon-made-a-bigger-camera-spying-store-so-we-tried-to-steal-its-fruit/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/02/amazo... I'd be really impressed if any large supermarket chain (outside of the US) would be ok to be so tightly coupled to amazon for virtually no benefits compared to self checkout. It's like a lot of what SV is pumping out, half assed solution to non existing problems.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > In Poland most shops allows you to scan and pay for products in matter of seconds without any help. No lines, no hassle. In my part of the US this is common as well, but there's almost always a line to use the scanners that is about the same as the line for the a human checkout clerk. So I almost always opt for the human.
philwelch 7y ago
We have to consider the question: “why not both?” Consider that Amazon, in addition to serving a high scale, high availability e-commerce website, also offers white label services for fulfillment, payment, and serving high scale, high availability websites. In other words Amazon provides, as a service, virtually every piece of infrastructure needed to deliver Amazon’s core business. So I wouldn’t infer that this is an either/or. At the very least I’d expect Whole Foods to adopt this service, for instance.
grumple 7y ago
Probably not as impactful as it would have been 20 years ago - why go to the store at all when I can order from Amazon online?
jsjohnst 7y ago
> And where is the competition? Technically Walmart did this in their Rogers, AR flagship store in the late 90s, but consumers found it awkward/error prone and didn’t use it much. I have a feeling Walmart shockingly enough was just to far ahead of the curve technology and culture wise (if memory serves, self checkout wasn’t even a common thing back then or if so, was just becoming one).
plorntus 7y ago
Their FAQ states they do not collect data right at the bottom of the page?

MattDamonSpace 7y ago

Yep. I've been sitting here thinking Amazon was going to spool up tons of retail locations that leveraged their tech to create a massive moat that other Brick & Mortars couldn't possibly compete with. In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world.

altec3 7y ago
And they didn't just do that with AWS. They did it with ecommerce as well. Become the biggest online retailer, nail the implementation, then get everyone else to jump on your platform.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  They are only good because Ebay is pathetically bad.
  - turc1656 7y ago
    They're only good because they were repeatedly given an infinite amount of money for 2 decades by investors while their retail operations lost money so that they could nail the implementation and the promise that they would figure out how to make it profitable.
    - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
      Did they really nail the implementation? I still refuse to buy anything that would go on or inside my body from amazon because I'm worried about getting counterfeits.
    - adenverd 7y ago
      Amazon effectively leveraged investment capital to do exactly what they said they would do - innovate, learn into the market, and improve iteratively. From investors' perspectives (and probably consumers' perspectives as well), Amazon has succeeded brilliantly.
    - thu2111 7y ago
      You talk as if Amazon was like an Uber or WeWork. That's really far from the truth. Amazon were slightly profitable or break-even since 2003. There's a convenient chart of their profits since day one here: https://qz.com/1196256/it-took-amazon-amzn-14-years-to-make-as-much-net-profit-as-it-did-in-the-fourth-quarter-of-2017/ https://qz.com/1196256/it-took-amazon-amzn-14-years-to-make-... Starting in 1997 they bled money with mounting losses until about 1999, when they began to turn things around. The dotcom pop is clearly visible but they recovered almost immediately and their losses continued to shrink until about 2001-2002 when they became break even. From 2002-2011 they either made small profits or nothing, but that was obviously because they were growing at a rapid pace and putting all the money back into the business. Once AWS launches in 2006 (so about 10 years after day 1 in retail) profits start growing but then are back into the red around the time of the GFC+recession, and again in the 2012-2013 European recession. After that it's stratospheric profits. How much investor money is "infinite money"? Somewhere between $8-$9 million before they floated on the stock market. https://www.quora.com/Who-were-the-original-investors-in-Amazon-and-how-much-pre-IPO-investment-did-Amazon-receive-in-total?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Who-were-the-original-investors-in-Ama... Obviously, investors who put money into their IPO have done extremely well and cannot claim they were shovelling money into a furnace, far from it. The inflation in investment round sizes over the past 20 years has been staggering. I see nothing that suggests Amazon was unusual in raising so little money (comparatively speaking) before they went public.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
  - athenot 7y ago
    That was true 5 years ago but with the quality issues on Amazon, I've found myself buying more on eBay.
    - paulmd 7y ago
      Yeah, ebay has much better buyer protections unless the item is Fulfilled By Amazon (which carries a cost premium). eBay prices also tend to be better. If you're going to buy cheap chinese crap anyway, just cut out the middleman. Finally, Amazon's marketplace is just not navigable. Their search is pathetically bad, and this is nothing new, it's been a common complaint for years. Some fairly massive amount of their traffic is inbound from Google searches like "some product amazon" just because of how pathetically bad it is. The only other reasonable way to navigate their site is if their similar product suggestions or "commonly bought together" happens to nail the item you were looking for. I've had searches where adding an additional keyword that is in the product title will actually cause the product to disappear from the search. What in the actual fuck.
      - popinman322 7y ago
        I personally find eBay to be much better for items that I can't buy from the manufacturer already. Individual sellers have reputations & reviews separate from product reviews, and those ratings are among the first things you're exposed to when interacting with a seller.
      - aficiomaquinas 7y ago
        > Yeah, ebay has much better buyer protections unless the item is Fulfilled By Amazon (which carries a cost premium). eBay prices also tend to be better. If you're going to buy cheap chinese crap anyway, just cut out the middleman. That's what I thought until I was scammed by a Chinese on eBay... after countless emails, calls, even police reports, eBay did not return the 800 dollars I lost... not sure if it's an isolated case but it was pretty frustrating.
      - athenot 7y ago
        Yes! Amazon's search has been driving me crazy but it went from bad (loose interpretation of what I typed with a whole bunch of irrelevant stuff) to worse (adding more sponsored results, i.e. even less what I want). Their recommendation engine for related prducts used to be nice but that's been replaced by sponsored products which lowers the quality. Now, the only way I use Amazon's search is when I have a SKU or part number and type it in directly. But I also do that in Google and often find the same thing elsewhere at similar or less cost (including shipping, though to be fair it may take a day or 2 longer). eBay's search is still one of the best for me, in that it respects the keywords I put in and allows for extended query syntax to really hunt something down (which then can be turned into a saved search). One of the most creative things I found on eBay was tool rental. I needed a tool to replace the bearings on my washing machine, and a seller was selling one explicitely as a rental: tool was charged about $120, with $35 shipping. When done, sent it back for a refund. The "shipping" included the rental fee and shipping both ways.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Amazon has become my "last resort" place. These days, I check eBay before Amazon.
- morganvachon 7y ago
  They are following it up with shipping and logistics. Amazon has been pushing us hard to switch from FedEx/UPS/USPS to using them for most of our packages, and it's working. Our defect rate is less with Amazon despite all of the anecdotal evidence of lazy/incompetent last mile Amazon personnel, and our rep bends over backwards to make sure she can fix any issues and get us what we need. She's sending us free label printers even though ours are generic enough to work with all carriers including Amazon, just because the labels for them are less expensive. After shipping with Amazon for our non-Amazon orders for six months, we've moved about 80% of our shipments to them because they save us that much time, hassle, and money. FedEx picks up almost all the rest, with a handful of packages going out UPS and Postal due to address requirements, or customer preference on phone orders (all online orders are Amazon/eBay/website where we limit shipping choices; we are about 60% Amazon, 30% eBay, 8% website, and 2% phone orders on a typical day).
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > Amazon has been pushing us hard to switch from FedEx/UPS/USPS to using them for most of our packages I hope that there's always a USPS option. My apartment complex has package lockers that can only be used by the USPS, so that's the only safe way to get packages delivered when I'm not home.
sarah180 7y ago
It's hard to imagine Amazon actually starting a bunch of retail locations. They'd probably buy Whole Foods or something…
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- vl 7y ago
  Or Borders...
- derefr 7y ago
  Surprising to me that Whole Foods still doesn't have this tech integrated. You'd think that'd be the "beta" step after the Amazon Store's "alpha" step.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mkolodny 7y ago
    Maybe they don't want to draw attention to how many people are going to lose their jobs because of this yet. Cashier is the #2 job in the US (by number of people employed) [0]. If they released this at Whole Foods, I'd guess they'd fire all the cashiers there. That would make this rollout a lot less exciting for a lot of people. I hope Amazon comes up with an awesome way to help the cashiers this technology replaces. Then if self-driving cars end up working out, that industry can learn from what Amazon did. [0] https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/rudy-takala/top-2-us-jobs-number-employed-salespersons-and-cashiers https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/rudy-takala/top-2-us-jo...
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > If they released this at Whole Foods, I'd guess they'd fire all the cashiers there Since Whole Foods sells alcohol, I doubt that. There are things that lots of governments won't let you have customers “just walk out” with.
hammock 7y ago
>In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world. It's not just about "AWS"-ing the thing. It's about gaining access to all of the transaction data and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you. A retailer like Walmart would NEVER use this tech, they know their data is one of the most valuable things they have (in fact they don't share their data with anyone, while all the other FDM retailers do), but boutique retailers like J Crew or whoever would happily.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you. Amazon is always putting up ads for me based on my purchase history, but they're never what I wind up buying. I have no explanation for what is wrong with their algorithm.
  - xapata 7y ago
    Turns out that math is hard and people are difficult to predict.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      I suspect Amazon would have better success with me (i.e. better than 0%) if they simply showed me a random ad.
  - larzang 7y ago
    But you just bought a toilet seat, surely you want five more toilet seats, you toilet seat enthusiast you.
    - Godel_unicode 7y ago
      I've always assumed that was an artifact of free returns; if you bought one thing, maybe you're actually still shopping and want to know other options. I've noticed when I get these they're frequently more expensive than the one I already bought.

dosethree 7y ago

Where’s the evidence anyone will actually use this thing? Maybe eventually. You can already do this at apple, but does anyone do it? Perhaps, they will get used to it in time, but i don’t know.

iNate2000 7y ago
But at apple it's a much more standard checkout flow, right? Scan an item, press "buy" and done, right?
hamandcheese 7y ago
I do it at Apple, but afaik Apples system is based mostly on trust? You just scan and pay with your device, then walk out. Granted, I haven’t tried to steal so there could be more tech than I realize.
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  I know someone who worked at an apple store a few years ago and they told me that they really had no way to know and lots of products were stolen.
  - sib 7y ago
    And that's also why you can't do it with small, high-demand products such as AirPods (at least in the stores I've been in).
reaperducer 7y ago
I do. I think in my last ten purchases from an Apple Store I've only not had a zero-interactivity experience once. And that was because a Genius had get a Thunderbolt 2 to USB-C cable from the back. Even then, once she handed it to me, I still checked out on my phone with the Apple Store app.
obmelvin 7y ago
> Where’s the evidence anyone will actually use this thing? Well, who knows how much interest will truly materialize, particularly given the data leaked to amazon, but the post claims/implies that retailers reached out to Amazon and were interested in licensing the technology.

tomjakubowski 7y ago

No idea about the quality of their competition, but a startup called Standard Cognition has been in this market. https://standard.ai/ https://standard.ai/

TheEzEzz 7y ago
Jordan from Standard here. We absolutely believe that retailers will prefer to get this new technology from providers like us as opposed to Amazon, their biggest competitor. So far Amazon has also not shown their technology deployed in an existing store, rather than an Amazon Go. We're actively working on being the first to demonstrate this. Stay tuned over the next couple of months.
- UweSchmidt 7y ago
  I truly believe that you are "actively working" right now lol. But, sincerely, good luck. New technology should shake up the existing players, not be an occasion for oligopolies to become even more powerful.
- anon102010 7y ago
  I've used amazon go - the tech worked very well for me. They have at least 4 or 5 stores in San Francisco alone - I'd guess 20+ at least if you include Seattle or wherever else they are operating. I haven't see the go grocery store yet. Can you give us a sense of how many transactions standard is doing every day with it's tech that's further along / more deployed than Amazon? At least the SF location I visited had steady traffic so Amazon is collecting some real data (selection a bit limited so go grocery interesting to me)
  - TheEzEzz 7y ago
    Amazon is certainly in the lead in terms of total locations. All of their locations are stores they own, however. The race right now is to show this tech working in existing stores, with a fairly light (aka scalable) install process. We have multiple installs in existing stores at the moment, running in "shadow mode" to confirm the accuracy is the system. These sites are predicting the carts of hundreds of people a day, and seeing good results.

aguyfromnb 7y ago

>And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this? Isn't the better question, "where is the product"? Is it a gimmick? This looks awesome, but until I see it in action, working flawlessly, outside of the Seattle/Silicon Valley nexus, I'm not sure there will be (or needs to be) any competition.

npo9 7y ago
I moved from Seattle to the midwest. I’ve seen a lot of very intolerable lines in the suburbs. It’s not unusual for me to wait 15 minutes to checkout at Target or Costco and last December I remember a 25 minute line. I think this is a product. There’s about six different grocery store within a fifteen minute drive from my house. I’ll switch to the first one to implement this system.
- lm28469 7y ago
  What about self checkout or just adding more lanes ? This really doens't sound like a problem that needs amazon and "technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning"

mdturnerphys 7y ago

Skip [0] lets you scan and pay for items with your phone, so it doesn't require any infrastructure be installed but isn't as simple for the customer. [0] https://getskip.com/ https://getskip.com/

milofeynman 7y ago

It's interesting that they rolled this out as a thing, but didn't start retrofitting all of their Whole Foods with it. Does it have problems with grocery stores? How does it handle fruits by weight, etc.

CreepGin 7y ago
I'm wondering the same thing. Seems like the typical problem with AI in general: dealing with all edge cases in real world scenarios.
filoleg 7y ago
Amazon probably doesn't want to radically rock the boat when it comes to Whole Foods at the moment. It is an established well-working business, and they don't want another wave of "WF went to shit after Amazon bought it out, just look at all those changes they've implemented!", given that Amazon's reputation has already been kinda questionable in the public eye recently.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Last Thanksgiving, I visited my parents in the town where I lived before college, and we went to the Whole Foods where we used to shop at all the time. It looked basically the same, except that there were these huge, bright blue Amazon Prime ads everywhere. It felt vaguely dystopian—a store of my youth invaded by the giant tech monolith. If Amazon is trying to not noticeably change Whole Foods, they're doing a pretty lousy job.
  - goatlover 7y ago
    Just need giant holograms from Blade Runner to complete the look.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Well, i didn't say they weren't changing anything at all. Given how perturbed you are by those Prime ads that don't functionally affect anything, imagine the magnitude of the public outcry if Amazon implemented something as radical as "just walk out" tech at Whole Foods.

kryogen1c 7y ago

Fear not! Yesterday I shopped at a big box grocery store where all I did was scan my cart with my phone, pay with the attached card, and walk out the door.

smeyer 7y ago
What brand grocery store was that?
- monk_e_boy 7y ago
  Most UK supermarkets offer this service. You need a store scanner that you pick up with the trolly. Scan everything, then pay and leave. You'll get stopped very occasionally for staff to check you aren't stealing. But they don't do much other than make you pay for things you haven't scanned. "Oh the kids put it in there without me noticing."
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    ASDA, at least, offer an iOS app that lets you scan as you go. Which is handy because the scanners are at the wrong* end of the store for me. (I believe M&S has something similar?)
- asdff 7y ago
  I've seen this at giant eagle a couple of years ago

reaperducer 7y ago

And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this? One of the big tech companies in the 80's demonstrated this. I think it was either IBM or AT&T/Bellcore. Essentially, it was just a scanner at the door that read RFID tags in each item, and your credit card. This was back when RFID was still oh-holy-shit technology. The reason I think AT&T might have been involved is that the video demonstration was very similar to AT&T "You will" series of commercials that aired around the same time.

paulmd 7y ago
IBM was playing with this for sure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-1F71Wa_zo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-1F71Wa_zo
thu2111 7y ago
That's not the same thing at all. Doing it with RFID is trivial. The hard part here is the backwards compatibility with a retail ecosystem that uses UPC barcodes rather than (expensive) RFID tags.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Well it goes to show you that this isn’t really solving a burning issue at all. If it was, they would have thrown the cheap RFID tags on everything 30 years ago.
- dfox 7y ago
  Doing it with RFID is surprisingly non-trivial even in the physical sense. That is the error rate of RFID bulk reads is small enough for opportunistic tracking of stuff, but mostly unacceptable for basing any kind of financial transaction on that.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Don't do a bulk read, then. Build RFID readers—and an RFID-blocking envelope, and a 3G or WiMAX radio—into shopping carts/baskets. Detect each item as it enters/exits the cart using the RFID reader inside the cart, and then use the radio to report it to the store, to sync the physical state of the cart/basket with an equivalent virtual shopping cart. Then, put an RFID tag on the outside of the cart/basket, which will be detected by the door scanner when you leave. Charge for what's in the virtual basket when the physical basket leaves the premises. Yes, you'll have to recharge your shopping carts/baskets. Just design them to ensure they pass through charge (like a string of Christmas lights) when stacked together, so you only have to plug in (or have a cradle for) the bottom one (for baskets) or frontmost one (for carts.) It's still a worse idea than using computer vision, if you've got that, but it's not something we couldn't have pulled off a decade or more ago.

sushikokk 7y ago

Not only your data, but the stores also. Now Amazon will know every item that sells, and at what price. Wonder what comes next?

isthisreality 7y ago
Well, the most obvious is selling that data to competitors (store-level and product-level) and governments.

csomar 7y ago

Or maybe the thing turned out not profitable/non-functional but they are trying to profit from it nonetheless.

kortilla 7y ago

> And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all who can provide something like this? Um, Walmart and most major grocery stores already have self checkout areas. So “wait in line to get served” isn’t quite the comparison. Most companies will give zero fucks about adopting this unless it becomes the expected norm.

jshevek 7y ago
I may be misunderstanding your argument, but I think the parent argument still applies whether you are getting served by a human or being served by a machine which has the same "one checkout at a time per person" kind of bottleneck that a human has. Edit: The "scan your own cart" model is a more compelling counter-argument than the self checkout machines currently at Wal-Mart, as this can accommodate a much higher throughput.

wheaties 7y ago

This will destroy more adtech companies than you can imagine. Amazon will have so much of your shopping habits. They'll have even more than just one credit card company will be able to have...

inkaudio 7y ago

There are number of tech companies directly competing in this space: https://standard.ai/ https://standard.ai/ https://grabango.com/ https://grabango.com/ https://www.getzippin.com/ https://www.getzippin.com/ https://www.v7labs.com/retail https://www.v7labs.com/retail https://www.getzippin.com/ https://www.getzippin.com/ There are competitive options, if you’re in retail you do not have to give Amazon all your “retail data” or use their tech.

arcadeparade 7y ago
Reminds me of this old IBM ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA
- tmilard 7y ago
  Yes, IBM "thinks" the future. Other companies build them. Conclusion : ideas are worthless, Execution is key
  - Klinky 7y ago
    >Conclusion : ideas are worthless, Execution is key This was also often the conclusion found during the Dark Ages. ;D
    - krthr 7y ago
      Hahahaha Spanish Inquisition likes this
  - jp555 7y ago
    And in what universe is great execution devoid of ideas? Do you mean to say that doing something well is way better than imagining doing something well?
    - Rantenki 7y ago
      Doing something well means you already imagined doing something well first. Or, in other words, "imagining doing something well" is necessary, but not sufficient to actually do something well.

raydev 7y ago

Walmart. But they only care about what lowers costs. They've been researching RFIDs and stufff like this since at least the early 00s, and they rolled a lot of it out in their shipping/transit network, but I'm guessing they have too much shrinkage/theft to worry about in most of their stores. No cost savings, so it doesn't happen.

codazoda 7y ago

I don't see it mentioned elsewhere, but Amazon could very easily disrupt credit card companies as part of this play as well.

zbruhnke 7y ago
BINGO - this is basically the ultimate play for getting rid of the networks almost entirely if not entirely

monkin 7y ago

> You either opt-in to giving Amazon all your retail data, or you become the only old fashioned “wait in line to get served” store on the street. Is this still a thing? In Poland most shops allows you to scan and pay for products in matter of seconds without any help. No lines, no hassle. :)

lm28469 7y ago
It's been like that in most supermarkets I went in the last 5 years. I don't really see the point of amazon's version. And from what I read it doesn't even work yet. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/02/amazon-made-a-bigger-camera-spying-store-so-we-tried-to-steal-its-fruit/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/02/amazo... I'd be really impressed if any large supermarket chain (outside of the US) would be ok to be so tightly coupled to amazon for virtually no benefits compared to self checkout. It's like a lot of what SV is pumping out, half assed solution to non existing problems.
JohnFen 7y ago
> In Poland most shops allows you to scan and pay for products in matter of seconds without any help. No lines, no hassle. In my part of the US this is common as well, but there's almost always a line to use the scanners that is about the same as the line for the a human checkout clerk. So I almost always opt for the human.

philwelch 7y ago

We have to consider the question: “why not both?” Consider that Amazon, in addition to serving a high scale, high availability e-commerce website, also offers white label services for fulfillment, payment, and serving high scale, high availability websites. In other words Amazon provides, as a service, virtually every piece of infrastructure needed to deliver Amazon’s core business. So I wouldn’t infer that this is an either/or. At the very least I’d expect Whole Foods to adopt this service, for instance.

grumple 7y ago

Probably not as impactful as it would have been 20 years ago - why go to the store at all when I can order from Amazon online?

jsjohnst 7y ago

> And where is the competition? Technically Walmart did this in their Rogers, AR flagship store in the late 90s, but consumers found it awkward/error prone and didn’t use it much. I have a feeling Walmart shockingly enough was just to far ahead of the curve technology and culture wise (if memory serves, self checkout wasn’t even a common thing back then or if so, was just becoming one).

plorntus 7y ago

Their FAQ states they do not collect data right at the bottom of the page?