The author clearly wants to push it as some sort of 'Amazon faking it bigtime' thing. I am sure there are manual reviews when it gets flagged, and I am also su

The author clearly wants to push it as some sort of 'Amazon faking it bigtime' thing. I am sure there are manual reviews when it gets flagged, and I am also sure there are mistakes in receipts (I had an error once out of 20 or so purchases). I have a much simpler explanation of why billing can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours: they process the video feed in batches, and maybe even optimizing for cost depending on compute load in AWS. Video processing takes time, and each store probably has hundreds of cameras - if you want to do multi-person multi-object detection at scale on HD feeds from hundreds of cameras at so many stores, the amount of compute needed is probably not trivial. Instead of processing the video everytime after each person leaves the store, it is much more efficient to do it at intervals and process multiple individuals at the same time.