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Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
- barrkel 3y agoI think this was probably a machine learning play, generating data for training, and I guess it didn't add up in the end.
- speff 3y ago> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. That line was unintentionally hilarious to me. Like looking inside a TV and finding a bunch of fast-working little people drawing images.
- silverquiet 3y agoI often wonder how much human intervention goes into self-driving car fleets.
- BitwiseFool 3y agoThat reminds me of this, https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/ perhaps it was based on something after all.
- leviathan303 3y ago2-4% of the time according to the former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt in a Hacker News comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997
- fsckboy 3y agothose grocery delivery robots you see in LA, turns out are being monitored/operated by people in a central location with all their camera feeds.
- deathanatos 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk, on the off chance you've never heard of it. (This article is not the AWS service by the same name, though by the time you conclude reading the Wikipedia page, it should be obvious where the AWS service got its name, and what it does.)
- speff 3y agoThanks for the link. I knew of the concept and the Amazon service, but wasn't aware of the connection between the two. Interesting stuff.
- saddist0 3y agoIt isn't that bad an idea. Imagine that next time you are drunk, you can hire a driver who will drive you back home remotely (along with some AI to stop the car in case connection goes away).
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoImagine you hire a taxi, but the taxi driver follows commands of someone in another country who receives video stream from the car. That’s what it’s actually like. It’s just strictly more work than simply having a cashier.
- munk-a 3y agoI disagree - at a basic level if people are able to tell which products you're picking up the resolution is necessarily high enough that there's a huge creep factor. I am sometimes amazed at what companies will pursue without a glance towards common sense.
- stemlord 3y agoSomeone will reply to you saying "I have nothing to hide"
- cdchn 3y agoIs high enough resolution to identify products more creepy than simple ubiquitous surveillance?
- saghm 3y agoOne creepy thing existing doesn't mean that another thing can't also be creepy. Getting rid of one of many creepy things is still nice even if it's not the only one.
- freedomben 3y agoI'm a huge privacy advocate and don't think stores should track what you buy at all, so don't confuse what I say next with the is/ought fallacy. They already have perfect resolution and data retention of everything you buy at checkout time when it's scanned, plus they can verify your identity rather than have to rely on facial recognition or other things. I don't think this is any creepier than what they already do so from their perspective it is "common sense."
- rco8786 3y agoMechanical Turk
- ribosometronome 3y agoThe article they link for that isn't readable without subscription. Were they actually labeling data live? That sounds like effectively a secret concierge following you around and writing down what you're getting & like it would be pretty difficult to keep up with. Otherwise, labeled data and machine learning kind of go hand and hand. It's not wild that Amazon would dogfood its own product while creating training data to improve it.
- diggan 3y agoIt does sound like a person was watching the shopper live: > Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. But who knows, tech articles are so inaccurate that it might as well have been some misunderstanding regarding how the labeling/training was done.
- ribosometronome 3y agoYeah, that's line was what got me trying to look at the article they cite, which is unfortunately paywalled. It'd be one thing to do that at like... several stores to generate the training data. But scaling it to dozens while it still requires that? Baffling.
- skywhopper 3y agoIt sounds like the receipts weren't necessarily "live", sometimes taking hours to appear, so I'm guessing they did it as live as possible and when they got backed up they would just revisit recorded video. Something tells me the expectations for throughput were also pretty overwhelming to the individuals who worked there.
- dotnet00 3y agoKind of reminds me of how back when speech-to-text started to get good enough to use (in the form of Google Assistant/Siri), my parents wondered if there was someone on the other side doing the transcription.
- mikehollinger 3y ago> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. Yup. I got the chance to go shopping at one in 2018 (so it's been a while). You could tell there was some "reconciliation" happening, because your receipt didn't show up until 20-30 minutes after you left. My guess is that this was some person via mechanical turk crawling thru the data and indexing what you -really- bought. Of course, my colleague and I (who were working on computer vision at the time) did stuff like take our bags off, put them in the middle of the floor, and roll a can of soda into the bag, just to see what would happen.
- giantg2 3y ago"Of course, my colleague and I (who were working on computer vision at the time) did stuff like take our bags off, put them in the middle of the floor, and roll a can of soda into the bag, just to see what would happen." I'm many jurisdictions this could be enough to get you prosecuted for shoplifting if it evaded payment.
- walterbell 3y agoAfter advertising "Just Walk Out"?
- giantg2 3y agoYeah, the author is trying to see what would happen if they roll a can into the bag. This is meant to conceal the act from the computer. The act of concealing merchandise is all that is required in many jurisdictions. If they walked out without the concealing act, then I would think the error should be on the store. There have been some cases of self checkout prosecution too. They don't need any proof of intent. Even regular errors can be prosecuted.
- walterbell 3y ago> Even regular errors can be prosecuted. Volunteer to work for free, with bonus legal liability, as a self-service cashier. So convenient!
- shmatt 3y agoi've written about this multiple times on HN and always got downvoted I work in the CV industry and this was a very badly kept secret. There is absolutely no financially feasible way to run something like this with current CV
- Ginobili 3y agoi'm curious to know what the limitations of the technology are. Are the machine learning/CV algorithms not accurate enough to run it at scale?
- JohnFen 3y agoI work with ML CV industrial systems, and they can certainly do accurate and detailed analysis and identification very quickly. The systems that do this are also necessarily very, very expensive -- much more expensive than any grocery store could possibly justify. Of course, costs change with time, but right now I don't see how this sort of application could approach being financially feasible.
- PreachSoup 3y agoIt's me, aws Mechanical Turk again!
- slaymaker1907 3y agoSo what we thought was automation was really just outsourcing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nicechianti 3y ago[dead]
- fullshark 3y agoSo they are offloading checkout onto the consumer via dash carts. There's no value proposition for the consumer unless somehow they are able to lower prices by not hiring cashiers.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoIf I can scan as I shop, that could save me time. I am repeatedly stuck behind individuals with ludicrously full carts, ill suited to self checkout.
- brightball 3y agoSam's Club does this now. You scan on the mobile app while you shop, then pay right there on the app. It's great.
- Bluecobra 3y agoYou can also do this at Walmart (with Walmart+), though you still need to stop at the self checkout on the way out to get a receipt. It's pretty handy. I wish Costco would adopt this too.
- bshep 3y agoI agree, and if you bring bags with you, you can bag as you scan. Works great for quick shopping trips, not so much when I'm making a big purchase.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoI am just a few minutes walk from my local grocery store, so I go frequently. Rarely use a cart, just my canvas bag. Will there be portable scanners, or will I have to drag a cart around to benefit from real time scanning?
- frakkingcylons 3y agoIt’s a huge advantage if you don’t have to wait in line for self checkout machines or human checkout.
- noodlesUK 3y agoI think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. I really like using them, as they allow me to put stuff directly into my bags as I go. I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan anything.
- underyx 3y agoSee also the RFID tags Uniqlo and Decathlon use for self-checkout. You just place your shopping bag in a bin and it reads all the items within in a second.
- f_allwein 3y agoused it only once, but it seemed neat.
- noodlesUK 3y agoMy guess is that right now this isn't viable for lower margin food products. Uniqlo and decathlon probably don't sell that much for less than £10. It's going to be a while before you can reasonably do that for a pint of milk.
- skyyler 3y agoYou're right - the cheapest thing uniqlo sells are $5 pairs of socks. Their $15 shirts are the next cheapest thing they sell, I'd imagine.
- unscaled 3y agoThese would be 290 yen ($1.90) 790 yen ($5.20) in Japan respectively. I still don't think an RFID will eat that much into their profit margin, but Uniqlo is in the unique position of having stricter control over their supply chain. All the products they sell are Uniqlo-branded products, manufactured specifically for Uniqlo, and they can just have RFID tags embedded in the price tags for all the products with little extra cost. Grocery stores sells cans, plastic jugs, glass bottles, shrink-wrapped fresh produce and even plain vegetable and fruit or grain and legumes by weight. All of these comes from a wide variety of manufacturers that don't produce directly for you (or even have any kind of direct relationship with you). The wide variety of form factors makes attaching RFID to everything unrealistic, and even for the stuff you could attach RFID to, it's not like manufacturers would do that for you.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. More of the same. I wonder if the incredible use of labor in India and other countries will cause their society to bypass their own growth so that the citizens of those countries become pure consumers, the majority of which can only ever get menial or gig jobs due to AI taking over most of innovation. In such countries, the only jobs left may be to aid in the extraction of larger and large amounts of natural resources required for the technological expansion of the west. In this way, developing countries will never be able to gain independence from the few global powers at the top: instead, they will be forced to follow the folly of the United States and Europe: developing more technology for the sake of technology, and in return they will get a free Unlimited Streaming plan to watch the garbage that we have come to call entertainment.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago> I wonder if the incredible use of labor in India and other countries will cause their society to bypass their own growth so that the citizens of those countries become pure consumers Never gonna happen in India, by the sheer number of populace. You can see the thing you are talking about in some countries in Europe where a small population and a lack of heavy manufacturing drives the whole economy to the servicing sector. It's a question if you can label these countries as developing, though.
- ortusdux 3y agoSNL had a great sketch about them - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS9U3Gc832Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS9U3Gc832Y
- sgarman 3y agoSkit or ad?
- code_runner 3y agoamazon is notorious for paying late night sketch comedy shows to make fun of them in order to promote their niche projects that only exist in a few cities.
- steelbrain 3y ago> Video unavailable > The uploader has not made this video available in your country In UAE.
- Voultapher 3y agoI like this one better https://youtu.be/gc12eBPuxwg https://youtu.be/gc12eBPuxwg
- vultour 3y agoWait what? When did they reveal it's offloaded to workers in India? I remember this being touted as fully automated when it was announced, surely being watched by strangers from creepy angles would discourage a large portion of customers.
- dboreham 3y agoSometimes people are lying.
- rchaud 3y agoChatGPT is also trained by the efforts of thousands of people in low income countries getting paid a pittance. We don't hear about it much because it's easier to credit a few suits at the top as harbingers of the future.
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoYep https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
- shmatt 3y agoThere is usually a mention of "humans in the loop" when articles discussed Amazon Go[1]. Amazon just always refused to give actual numbers. The best "give" that humans were watching you was that Amazon Go receipts often arrived in your email many hours after you left. Anyone who works in computer vision immediately knew this wasn't possible beyond a cool proof of concept in a tiny room with <300 SKUs. Even in 2024 [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/21/inside-amazons-surveillance-powered-no-checkout-convenience-store/?guccounter=1 https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/21/inside-amazons-surveillanc...
- deathanatos 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrmMk1Myrxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrmMk1Myrxc says nothing about humans in the loop, and that it's technology, all automatic. Am I surprised? No, not at all. But there is a definitely "how it was marketed", "how it was implemented" here.
- jimbob45 3y agoThere was a really neat company called Digimarc[0] a while back that promised to bake the barcode into the packaging such that you could scan any part of the label and receive a barcode successfully. I have no idea what happened to them because it seemed like a slam-dunk idea that would have greatly improved the purchasing process virtually everywhere (and you could just have a traditional fallback barcode in case the baked-in one fails). [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimarc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimarc
- throwway120385 3y agoThe problem with that is the same problem with self-checkout and Amazon Dash. It's solving a problem the retailer has -- the cost of employees -- by turning shoppers into store employees. But it doesn't really solve any problems that the shopper has because scanning all of your own stuff and laying it out on the scale is so inconvenient that it ruins everything else. The only place where I've seen self-checkout be as good or better than having a checker is Lowes or Home Depot, because they don't require you to weigh each item in turn to unlock the scanner so you can move as fast as a checker can. But I think grocery shopping will be the last place self-checkout moves in in a big way because the grocers insist on weighing everything you buy before unlocking the scanner.
- deciplex 3y ago> I think grocery shopping will be the last place self-checkout moves in in a big way Self-checkout is the norm in my area.
- heywire 3y agoMost of the retailers in my area have turned off the bag scale security. But I live in a pretty small town, so maybe theft is at an acceptable level where they’re willing to make that trade off. They’re also using more and more computer vision to ensure what passes into the cart is scanned (Everseen and others), so perhaps they’re finding better success with that than the bag scale.
- pas 3y agoScanning is fun! The scale sensitivity was a bit off initially, but it seems okay nowadays. (If I dropped something on the bagging area it didn't wait for the item to settle.)
- k8svet 3y agoI feel like Sams Club has this down pretty well. You self-scan as you shop. You checkout as you walk towards the door. You flash a QR code to them and then they quick scan spot check items to make sure you weren't missing anything.
- fhub 3y agoFWIW, this was the fourth attempt by Walmart to get Scan'n'Go working well (each one a complete reboot). It was majority designed and built by two talented developers who were acqui-hired and managed at at distance by another acqui-hire developer.
- whyenot 3y ago"Ginger Market" on the SJSU campus has attempted to use a similar "Just Walk Out" approach. It has not worked well. I've been double charged, charged for items I did not take, not charged for items I've taken, etc. The refund process was also a pain. It was so bad that they had to stop using it last spring, although they claim they are going to give it another go. Why even bother? Self checkout or a cashier work so much better and I have a hard time believing they are less expensive. The store is plastered with cameras. Seriously, there must be 100 cameras in the place. That's a lot of video to process, which has got to be costly, whether it is a machine or people who are reviewing it.
- spike021 3y agoDoesn't that take away jobs students used to get? Which storefront is that? The one at the bottom of MLK Library or McQuarrie Hall?
- SmellTheGlove 3y agoNo, students just have to wait until after graduation to get retail jobs now.
- philipwhiuk 3y agoI mean sure, welcome to technology - low skilled jobs are gonna vanish via some method.
- spike021 3y agoI mean ideally students can still get jobs on campus serving other students and staff considering how expensive education is.
- kbos87 3y ago> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. I know this is ripe to use as a way to dunk on Amazon, but I sincerely doubt that it was as inane as it sounds. They likely had this workforce to train a system that they hoped would eventually operate autonomously. That being said, it sounds like it never panned out.
- randmeerkat 3y ago> They likely had this workforce to train a system that they hoped would eventually operate autonomously. That being said, it sounds like it never panned out. And this is why I think current “AI” technologies are a dead end. Once the rest of the market realizes that maybe we’ll finally get past this “AI” hype bubble.
- Animats 3y agoThat's an interesting point. Amazon tried an AI application where errors were a cost to Amazon, rather than to the consumer. They failed to make it work well enough to use. What AI applications are in use where the error cost is imposed on the company using them, not the consumer? Reading paper checks and mail envelopes come to mind. Those are automated and work well. Waymo's automatic driving, but not Tesla's. What else? This is a useful metric for gauging real progress.
- randmeerkat 3y ago> Those are automated and work well. Waymo's automatic driving, but not Tesla's. If Tesla geofenced their FSD applications as aggressively as Waymo, I suspect the two would be near peers. You can hide an incredible lack of a capability by artificially limiting the scope of your application. > This is a useful metric for gauging real progress. Sure, cost / benefit analysis is always useful. I would propose a broader analysis for grading “AI” disruption though. 1. Are humans involved at any step? 2. What is the probability of success? 3. What is the consequence of failure? (Profit loss / property loss / personal injury, etc…) 4. How many variations on a domain (think winter driving, summer driving, driving in a tropical storm, driving dirt roads in a jungle, etc) can the application work in while maintaining consistent performance? 5. Can the model leverage its “learnings” to solve problems / reason about new domains that it hasn’t been trained on? That’s just a few metrics I can think of off the top of my head that would help to distinguish a true disruptor from the hype.
- Ajay-p 3y agoI recently finished a book called "The Secret Life of Groceries" by Benjamin Lorr. Amazing book. I learned that grocery and supermarket stores of the past, seemed to have worked very hard to give the best customer experience possible. Today it feels that customer experience has been replaced by cost cutting. Self checkout has been rife with problems, internally and socially, but supermarkets keep pushing them. I can only conclude it is cost cutting.
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoOne of the various jobs I had during the 90s to put myself through college was stocking store shelves in a large grocery store. During my time there, I placed every item on the shelf by hand, rotated forward, so that the shelves were easy to front and look respectable by the time the morning came. After a few months, it was fairly easy to eyeball an item in the case, lift it while rotating, and place it on the shelf facing forward. It also became reflex to hear something fall and catch it without looking. We also mopped the entire store by hand, twice, before getting down to the business of fronting the shelves one final time. As time went on, they hired a cleaning crew to clean the floors with a machine. They'd miss things. After my time, they started having their employees cut boxes and just plop entire boxes onto store shelves, ripping the fronts off of them. I'm sure it saves a little bit of time, but you end up with a store that is a complete mess full of discarded cardboard. All of that adds up to a terrible customer experience.
- hackable_sand 3y agoI appreciate the effort. I think manual, menial labor is pushed very hard in the US today. One thing that really bothers me is that older stock is not brought to the front and they just push it back with the new stuff. It's doubly frustrating because sometimes products change so you'll find what you're looking for after digging through three layers of assorted items. I don't really blame the apathy directly, but there are doubtless solutions over the horizon.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
- brogrammernot 3y ago[flagged]
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- ein0p 3y agoApple Store in Oakland is moving a lot of merchandise that way, too. Customers just walk out all the time.
- jonnycat 3y agoCan we start a list of technological magic that is actually "1000 people in India watching and labeling videos" (or functional equivalent)?
- RankingMember 3y agosort of surprised it wasn't just using their Mechanical Turk site
- philipkglass 3y agoMechanical Turk suffers from coordinated fraud by people who want to be paid for doing a task without actually doing it [1]. The company I work for had to spend more engineering effort on building an internal reviewing-the-reviewers system to make it useful than we spent on the original Mechanical Turk integration. I'm not surprised that Amazon would avoid Mechanical Turk for higher consequence applications. [1] e.g. https://timryan.web.unc.edu/2020/12/22/fraudulent-responses-on-amazon-mechanical-turk-a-fresh-cautionary-tale/ https://timryan.web.unc.edu/2020/12/22/fraudulent-responses-...
- ozim 3y agoIt will be fun to watch as AI tools flood mainstream. We already had a lawyer having case thrown out because he didn’t do the job properly and got hallucinations from LLM. Mostly because people don’t want to work.
- LawnGnome 3y agoExpensify was a pretty well known case of this several years ago — their marketing was all about their advanced scanning technology, and it turned out they were using Mechanical Turk in many cases with little concern for PII (or corporate security) concerns. (I have no idea if this is still the case, for the record.)
- mparkms 3y agoThat would explain why their receipt scanning is so damn slow even for easily scannable PDF receipts.
- omgbear 3y agoThere was one in London I used to walk past all the time. It was a neat experience to shop there once, but the selection was very slim and ocado was even more convenient. I'd always peek through the windows and it never had any shoppers.
- Shank 3y ago> I'd always peek through the windows and it never had any shoppers. My experience using these locations is that I entered, grabbed the items I wanted and just left. Because they were closer to convenience stores, I was basically speedrunning it. A drink and a sandwich? Maybe 30 seconds tops. There wasn't any point in lingering. I wonder how much of that changed the dynamics of how many people were inside?
- tim333 3y agoMy experience with London, Canary Wharf - I'm hungry but the darn Amazon app has auto offloaded. Spend 3 minutes re downloading with bad data signal. Buy sandwich. Meh - it was ok but normal check out easier for me. Chancery lane Tesco who also had one - darn I don't even have the Tesco app, I guess I'll wait for a normal shop. For me the system would be better if you could just tap your card like everywhere else rather than needing an app. (mixed reviews on Tesco GetGo https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Tesco+Express/@51.5184374,-0.1151112,17z/data=!4m8!3m7!1s0x48761b777ce55a79:0x36fb31d4e220993c!8m2!3d51.5184341!4d-0.1125363!9m1!1b1!16s%2Fg%2F11j2y6_5v5?entry=ttu https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Tesco+Express/@51.518437...)
- lulznews 3y agoHow many execs got promoted over this nonsense?
- seydor 3y agoCan they change the title to say "Amazon walks out ..."
- kylehotchkiss 3y agoI wish Target would add computers to their carts. For most people, it'd be a nice alternative towards the self checkout area with limited space to place things. For the more unsavory customers, it could offer video evidence that they're stealing stuff, lock the wheels at the door if more than $X isn't paid for, and create GPS reports of where all the stolen carts end up.
- akira2501 3y agoThey already have good videos of thefts. Wheel locks have been around forever. I can just _tell_ you where all the stolen carts "end up." None of this has an impact on theft; however, it does a great job of making me feel like I live in a prison.
- op00to 3y agoTarget allegedly has such good video capabilities they can recognize repeat thieves, keep a record of what they steal, and wait until it reaches felony level after multiple trips before they flag a person to be detained. All in super duper high definition.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoAll that money down the drain now that people just wear hoodies and facemasks to shoplift
- kylehotchkiss 3y agohttps://phys.org/news/2012-09-tracking-people-gait-signature.html https://phys.org/news/2012-09-tracking-people-gait-signature...
- Dylan16807 3y agoThat's not going to get a felony conviction.
- bilalq 3y agoThis is pretty sad to read. Before Covid, the Amazon Go store experience was phenomenal. All the convenience of a 7-Eleven but with the pricing of a normal grocery store. The food options were really good and the BlueApron style meal-kits were amazing. The Alexa integration was also nice for being able to just verbally ask what's the next step on a recipe while you're busy stirring or chopping things. When it rolled out to Amazon Fresh stores, it was a breadth of fresh air. The painful clunkiness of self-checkout was gone. The slow and pointless exercise of unloading and reloading your cart was gone. You could just bring your reusable shopping bags, throw stuff in, and walk home. By far the most hassle-free shopping experience to be had. Scan as you shop is a big step backwards and feels like you've got the annoying self-checkout experience looming over you the entire time you're there. The selection and operating hours both took a hit during covid and never recovered.
- alden5 3y agoWhat never made sense to me with their go stores was why a store that only needed 1-2 people max to operate had such bad hours. Hearing now that getting the bill is a mainly manual process i guess their hours had to line up with their data entry team in india so people could get their recipes quickly. insane to think about
- bilalq 3y agoIt's not manual. This is a case of mistaken journalism. The labeling is for training data of the models. Before covid, the hours were much better too.
- sunshowers 3y ago> 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022 That's manual by any reasonable description.
- omgwtfbyobbq 3y agoI think it depends on how much each human reviewer did. If they manually reviewed most of the items on each shopping trip, then it's mostly manual. If they only manually reviewed an item or few per trip, I'd consider it to be mostly automated.
- LightBug1 3y agoFeedback: I'm a Prime customer and I've never even got into one of the stores. Having the on-site staff waiting at the front of the store like bouncers just put me off as I walked by! Hahah ... I also kind of like the idea of people having jobs, so that's also a factor. But I didn't even get a chance to try these out ... and I would have but for the henchmen and women waiting to welcome me, LOL
- CodeWriter23 3y agoHeh, Read the instructional sign outside the store. Opened up my Amazon App and got the QR Code on my screen. Could not figure out where on the turnstile to scan it, and I'm a barcode app guy. There was a screen prompting me for my palm print. Um, no. You don't get my money AND my biometrics. We turned around and walked out. To top that off, the associate carting out in the parking lot ridiculed us and gave us a "buh bye". So, Amazon Fresh is off the list for me. I don't even go to Whole Foods after that experience.
- smugma 3y agoUniqlo (in Japan and at least in SF) has a cool checkout method. You drop your clothes into a big bin (I’ve always done it one piece at a time, didn’t think to do all at once) and it adds up all your items. I’ve used this maybe 8 times, 100% accurate so far. Not sure how it works but I guessed RFID and quick Google appears to confirm: https://www.wsj.com/articles/uniqlos-parent-company-bets-big-on-tiny-rfid-chips-600b124f https://www.wsj.com/articles/uniqlos-parent-company-bets-big...
- browningstreet 3y agoMy local library does the same thing (books not clothes, glass surface not bin).
- pembrook 3y agoI'm pretty sure this is global, have experienced it at all their locations throughout Europe as well.
- dyim 3y agoThe one by Barclays (in NYC) has the same thing! It's the best self-checkout experience I've had.
- kungito 3y agoDecathlon has the same
- mathgeek 3y agoUniqlo in Orlando also does this. Wonderful system.
- gambiting 3y agoDecathlon in the UK has the same thing. You just drop everything in a bin near a till and it "magically" knows what you've put in.
- dahdum 3y ago> Uniqlo (in Japan and at least in SF) has a cool checkout method. Saw this in the Honolulu location and was similarly impressed. It's got to be pretty close to a theoretical minimum in check out speed, while requiring no labor and no accounts.
- browningstreet 3y agoIn Sherman Oaks, CA they had a Whole Foods with the "just walk out" system...
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoThat's Amazon too.
- nemothekid 3y agoThere was a startup, Standard Cognition, that offered the same experience, but I checked their website (https://standard.ai/ https://standard.ai/) and it seems they have given up on it too. Edit: Looking over their marketing videos now and taking a more optimistic approach, is "just walk out" technology all that useful? It seems they pivoted to a product where is much clearer what the value add is (Predictive analytics, loss prevention, context-aware marketing). I imagine "just walk out" technology was likely pretty expensive to implement, but wouldn't have saved much more that self checkout. Maybe the lesson here isn't that "it didn't work", and more so "it wasn't economically efficient"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dangerwill 3y agoWell from the article it's clear that this camera+ai based detection of purchases never worked for Amazon. They had to rely on Indian contractors watching people remotely. It never technically worked, and even if it did, then yeah I agree that it wouldn't make economic sense. Cameras with that level of fidelity and with 100% coverage, tracking N customers at once, are probably a huge capital expense. And all for slightly faster shopping. I tried the store in Seattle in 2021 and it was a shitty experience. Overpriced, bad stock, and since few are going to actually trust Amazon to get it right, you still find yourself with the Amazon app open the whole time
- strgcmc 3y ago> And all for slightly faster shopping. Wanted to comment on this part -- Prime itself was nothing more than faster shipping, though yes the difference between 4-6 weeks standard vs 2-days was massive (not just slightly faster). But the point is, Amazon excels at identifying friction points that others have just accepted as industry norms, but which, if unblocked, could actually meaningfully shift consumer behaviors. Go might be a failed experiment, but "slightly faster shopping" is probably an unfair trivialization of what the experiment hypothesis was really about. A core thesis of Amazon in general is basically, to fanatically remove any unnecessary extra steps/friction/bureaucracy/etc., between a consumer and their act of purchasing. For another example, think back to why Amazon cared so much about the 1-click patent -- legal validity aside, the idea that you can have 1-click checkout, was pretty revolutionarily customer-obsessed, compared to the average online shopping experience of the early 2000s. And in fact, the natural progression from 1-click, is of course going down to "0 clicks", which is what things like, subscribe-and-save, memberships/subscriptions, or Alexa/Echo styling clothes for you, are meant to do -- they are meant to shift the consumer's mental model of shopping away from emphasizing the build-up from browsing into the climax moment of then clicking to purchase, to instead make the actual purchase decision more of a hidden-in-the-background/automatic thing, instead of a foreground conscious choice.
- mrbonner 3y ago[flagged]
- hot_gril 3y agoSeattle Target was the worst shopping experience I've ever had. No cashiers because the employees are tasked with opening locked cabinets instead, even for sunscreen. Security guards with bulletproof vests add to the ambience. Gave up on buying oranges cause the checkout machine wouldn't scan them.
- mrbonner 3y agoTarget, Walmart and all other big chain stores just gave up after the pandemic in 2022. I saw people came and just grabbed whatever they see fit, including a TV or a PS5 out of the door. I understand employees were trained not to intervene but even police were told by city council as well. Target now puts every valuables behind steel doors, not even a cage anymore. That's fucked up to think about how our society has turned out.
- steelframe 3y agoCool. Now can I pay with cash? Because I'm not going to let anyone build a profile on whether I like warming lube or just regular lube, how much sugar and alcohol I consume, what kind of romance novels I read, how often I floss, and whether I feel I can afford organic fruit.
- annexrichmond 3y agoI think it should be a fundamental right to pay for goods with cash.
- pas 3y agono, no, because you can just grow your own, or just buy guns with cash and use them to exchange them to food. (and if it's not interstate no need for paperwork, right? - in freedom states)
- floren 3y agoHmm you make a good point, but have you considered that your health insurance provider really wants to know these things, and will pay up to $0.35 to learn them? It would be criminally negligent for Amazon not to build and sell that profile!
- nickpsecurity 3y agoMy concerns about this were theft, mistakes, cost to operate, and opportunity costs. Theft is an obvious one. It happens in self checkouts in many ways. We had people come into our store to just leave with baskets of stuff, load their pockets, take stuff from one box to put in a cheaper one they bought, or even put raw eggs and meat in their pockets. That was with a ton of workers in the store looking out for thieves. Errors could result in us being charged for what we didn’t buy. The amount could be lower or higher. Some people go through their whole receipt double checking it. Many of us just watch it as they ring it up, deal with it there, and stop thinking about it once we leave. Could this impact peace of mind? Cost to operate seemed like it might be high. Aldi and Costco show a traditional self-checkout can be cheap to operate on top of serving high-end customers. (See theft/shrink, though.) I figured the machine learning alternatives would cost thousands to tens of thousands a unit for combinations of cameras, servers, and licensed software. They’d also need to be monitored and/or trained by humans which this article just confirmed. I was also worried about fraud. My company bought a solution that monitored customers with infrared cameras, monitored checkouts, and predicted how many registers we needed. That was a terrible system that hurt us more than it helped. We were required to act like it worked to please those who spent hundreds of millions on it. I wondered how often such dishonest referrals helped the supplier sell them. Made me skeptical about more AI. Finally, the human touch that comes with good cashiers increases customer satisfaction. Our customers often looked forward to seeing us. For some, we were the only or best social contact they got that week. Others liked getting out of the house for a long period of time. Sometimes they’d have us push products and services which, normally a negative for all, is largely how they drove up credit card use and feedback on the customer tracker. For those reasons, I advised against using AI for anything other than helping employees do their jobs more easily. If for that, that it would be a support tool instead of trying to replace skilled, decision makers. Then, simply invest those millions to hundreds of millions in the employees. Worked for Costco and Publix. :)
- pas 3y agoPeople can put stuff into their pockets during regular checkout too, no? > take stuff from one box to put in a cheaper one isn't the scale supposed to catch this? > predicted how many registers we needed that seems like the dumbest because No.1. useless thing in a supermarket where cashiers see the lines :D
- pierrec 3y agoSay goodbye to the future! The one that IBM promised us 18 years ago in this advertisement: https://vimeo.com/29120357 https://vimeo.com/29120357 In fact, that ad also shows how awkward the concept is (or maybe the fact that we're still not ready for it). It's a really fun well-made video but a thoroughly unconvincing advertisement.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoStill waiting for my flying car that folds up into a briefcase.
- chrash 3y agothis might be my first comment here heh. i've worked on a similar product before. there's no way they were turning a profit. they definitely missed stuff all the time even with a ton of sensors. and sensors aren't the only cost. annotation is by far the most costly operational expense. new product? needs several annotated photos and recalibrated weight sensors. merchant decides to put Christmas branding on the same UPC? now all your vision models are poisoned for that product. it needs to be re-annotated for the month and a half it exists and the models need to be swapped out once inventory changes over again. as long as merchants are redesigning products (always) your datasets will be in a constant state of decay. even if your vision sensors are stationary and know the modular design up front, you still need to be able to somewhat generalize in case things get misplaced (big problem for weight sensors) or the camera gets bumped. between dataset management, technology costs, research costs, rote operational costs, etc this is a very expensive problem to solve. and large models with a ton of parameters are little help; they may lower annotation costs a bit but will increase the cost of compute. once i really dug into this problem i saw Amazon Go's Just Walk Out for what it really was: a marketing stunt
- shay_ker 3y agoare larger image/video models unable to catch things like Christmas branding?
- chrash 3y agoa big problem in the space is that products that look very similar will be clustered in the same section. large models are very good at generalizing, so they may be more attuned to "this is a Christmas thing", but they won't know that it should be classified as the same UPC as the thing that was in that spot yesterday without you specifically telling it to. how would it know it's not a misplaced product or a random piece of trash? (you won't believe the things you find on store shelves once you start looking) you can definitely speed up your annotation time with something like SAM[1], but it will never know without training or context that it's the same product but Christmas (ie it resolves to the same UPC). [1]: https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything
- ThinkBeat 3y agoStores in earlier times in Norway³ were geared towards convenience¹ for the shopper. You went in, went up to the counter, told the clerk what you wanted, a series of clarifications, advice and suggestions, then clerk² would fetch your goods, wrap it up all nice for you, handle payment and hand you the goods. All you did was request what you needed, got advice, paid for it and off you go⁴ Then came the supermarkets. Suddenly every customer was a mouse running in a maze trying to find the cheese, milk, washing powder and whatever else. Endlessly walking up and down every isle desperately seeking what they needed. Then the customer had to accumulate all the products into bags or carts, Push or carry it all to the cash register. Where one person (per register) would sit on their ass, add it all up, you paid, you bagged, and you were on your way. A lot of customers did not like that at all. It wasn't rational. In the old system the clerk at a store knew where everything was. It was not necessary for ever customer to memorize and learn every store they went to in order to go shopping. It was a massive inconvenience for everyone, except for the person at the register who was sitting comfortably. These days, not only must you hunt in the maze, push it to the counter, now you must also do the checking out yourself. Finally, the companies have outsourced all the labor to the customers themselves and they are happy about it. There are of course still stores that operate the old way. but they are in the minority in most places. When I read about it the first time it felt so backwards. It more convenient to be able to grab what you need and be on your way. Then as I was running up and down isles trying to find what I need i started noticing and thinking about it. I dont really think it is rational that everyone has to do all that walking and hunting. Perhaps with robots we can be back to the old ways. But really the old system is back in places where you order things online and go pick it up, all picked by clerks, all you need to do is pay and be on your way. and I love it. When it comes to groceries and many other products they will even deliver it to your house. Its how I get most of my groceries as well as other stuff. Now I can sit on my ass, and I have outsourced all of that back to the store. The old becomes new sometimes. In fact often. I would be interested in a study that calculated what amount of our lives on average spent walking around in stores trying desperately to find what you need. ¹ It may not match what we think of as convenience today. ² The clerk may work on his own, or there might be more than one, there might be people working in the back fetching things from storage. But your point of contact would be the clerk. Of course often the owner in smaller stores. ³ Probably in most other places as well. ⁴
- xyst 3y agoSome of the questionable "grocery store tech" that I have seen Amazon push out: - "just walk out" - what a joke. just another way to capture more data points on your "shopping habits" and build more meaningful profiles against you. Oh John picked up the "Radical Juice X", let's start pushing out the "GOP" package of ads when John searches on Amazon for products. Prefer products with "red" color. - "pay with your palm" [at Whole Foods] -- yea, right. I am going to give out my handprint to amazon. piss off
- sebzim4500 3y agoSurely the data of what products you picked up is much less valuable than the data of what products you actually bought, which would be trivial to collect with a normal checkout system.
- XorNot 3y agoThis always made a whole lot less sense to me then say, solving the logistics of grocery delivery. Which isn't solved despite availability, because it's "solved" by just having someone else walk through a store, maybe doing a few customers orders all at once. Like it would seem to me that for, at least packaged goods, an entire city could and should be serviced out of a couple of warehouses with better stocking and fulfillment systems?
- divbzero 3y agoI’ve used “Just Walk Out” at Amazon Fresh regularly over the past few years and it has been both convenient and reliable. But the machine learning is clearly stuck at a level where the need for ML data associates is cost-prohibitive: 70% requiring human verification is an order of magnitude off from their target of 5%. Notably, they are continuing “Just Walk Out” at a few locations in case future advances make the technology more viable.
- wnevets 3y ago> . Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped So they just outsourced the cashiers to India
- Reason077 3y agoI've shopped at Amazon Fresh's London stores occasionally, mainly for the convenience and novelty. And sometimes I've had Amazon orders shipped there for collection. But never really felt the desire to do regular daily shops there because the prices seemed higher than Tesco etc for roughly the same sort of products? Aldi has also been trialing the same "just walk out" shopping model at their Greenwich store in London[1]. I always suspected that theirs had some manual intervention involved because of the variable time it takes to get the bill. Sometimes I'd be charged nearly instantly after walking out of the store, other times it would be hours later. Aldi's one is more compelling, IMO, because you get the regular, competitive Aldi prices. [1] https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/shopandgo https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/shopandgo
- wolverine876 3y agoI wonder about putting some sort of camera-readable code or even a wireless signaling device (passive/reactive?) on the packaging, even as stickers, a modern equivalent of barcodes for their readers. Amazon would have to add the stickers for now, but it could revolutionize retail. IIRC I read that a bookstore chain revolutionized their retail industry by putting barcode stickers on all their books, allowing computerized inventory, and now publishers print them by default.
- innocentoldguy 3y agoI think this is funny. I worked on this team at Amazon for two years after successfully building an app similar to Dash Cart for another company using Elixir (which is still going). I repeatedly tried to convince Amazon to do Just Walk Out differently, but their toxic culture wouldn't hear of it. I got bored with the project (and a little disgruntled, to be honest) and left after my signing bonus ended. I guess it is good that they figured it out in the long run, but they could have fixed this in 2020 if they had just listened.
- prteja11 3y agoWhat should they have done differently if you don’t mind sharing ?
- bob_theslob646 3y agoYou worked with Medioni ?
- sashank_1509 3y agoI remember the one time I went to a just walk out store, I bought a chocolate and got the bill the next day which felt weird but now makes complete sense if they couldn’t get the Computer Vision to work but just relief on humans to identify this stuff. I’d contend that even if a much more capable company like OpenAI tried this, they’d get much closer, maybe good enough for a product but this a really ill defined problem where even the best results may not be worth it. Putting cameras on the roof doesn’t let you see everything a person grabs, there will always be weird occluded angles. On top of that the cameras need to be super high resolution and zoomed in to detect some of the smaller stuff in shelves. This is just for the trustworthy customers, now consider the thieves, they’re gonna have a field day with this, it’s not going to be easy to prevent a determined thief from not fooling the systems. A self checkout cart honestly makes much more sense, still prone to thieves but it at least lets you skip the line much more reliably.
- liampulles 3y agoI don't live in a country with anything like this sort of retail experience, but I feel like there is a middle-ground approach which is a fast self-checkout with async payment. Maybe even just dumping your cart on a conveyer and letting the products be scanned in a more controlled environment, or even just QR code stickers.
- mystcb 3y agoUniqlo has something similar to this - they use RFID's on their stock so you can dump it into a bucket at the self-checkout, and it scans everything immediately [1]. You still have someone pop over to check if you are OK, but it is a lot quicker than self-scan or usually waiting for someone. [1] https://www.rfidcard.com/uniqlo-has-rolled-out-rfid-technology/ https://www.rfidcard.com/uniqlo-has-rolled-out-rfid-technolo...
- baby 3y agoWas going to mention Uniqlo as well! Their self-checkout is the future.
- pas 3y agocontactless payment is really just a few seconds nowadays at self-checkout machines.
- killerstorm 3y agoThere's a system where you scan barcodes with an app on your phone. No need to repack, pay with one click at the end.
- serf 3y agogood. returning/replacing something at a grocery store shouldn't take hours of overseas phone-calls and arguments. ask me how I know.
- asah 3y agoJWO can work in cultures where most people are honest e.g. Japan. JWO stands no chance in cultures where grift is the norm e.g. NYC where people jump turnstiles let alone snatch groceries. Even self checkout struggles. In these cultures, checkout staff invite their friends to shop then "accidentally" forget to ring up an item or two. If you can keep shrinkage to a few percent you're doing great. Source: longtime in the industry and owned/operated 3 retail shops myself.
- fer 3y agoJWO as Amazon does it has your identity to begin with, and as per TFA, the problem wasn't keeping people honest but the amount of human verification needed. If anything, self-checkouts are a larger target to grift and yet they seem to do fine.
- fedeb95 3y ago"Dash Cart" is something Esselunga does in Italy since a long time ago. Nothing new.
- climateactivist 3y ago[flagged]
- Ellipsis753 3y agoGutted to hear this. I used these in London and they were magical and extremely convenient. I would show them to visiting friends as if they were one of London's main tourist attractions! I knew they relied on some manual labor (bills were delayed), but assumed this was only an intermediate step to collect more real-world training data (until they sorted out the AI). I still think this is the future though. They could reduce staffing costs and free-up floor space that would otherwise be used for self-checkouts. All the while actually drastically improving the customer experience too. If someone cracks it, it may make it impossible for other supermarkets to complete economically. As a fun aside, all the stores were incredibly over-staffed and helpful. If you couldn't install the app they had a browser-based fallback (type "fresh code" into the amazon searchbar on a mobile). They could also lend you a battery bank if you were low on battery. I think they even had phones to lend out to those without smartphones. It was all very optimized around customer experience first and foremost and with no real attempt for the stores to be profitable.
- rhapsodic 3y ago[dead]
- TurkishPoptart 3y agoThis was an amazing system! All we needed was more law enforcement to keep things running.
- laurels-marts 3y ago> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. This is both sad and pathetic. Not to mention devastates the local community. Instead of kids being able to get their first part-time job in a local shop stocking shelves or doing checkout these opportunities were completely offshored abroad.
- Friedduck 3y agoI can’t believe they didn’t start with this model before attempting what seems like self-driving cars level of difficulty for shopping. Use carts like IKEA that hang your reusable bag. Scan as you pick up items. Walk out.
- davidbanham 3y agoWoolworths in Australia has a solution called Scan and Go. You use the app on your phone to scan barcodes as you take things off the shelves. When you’re done, the app charges your stored credit card and you scan a qr receipt at the door as you leave which opens a little boom gate. I believe there’s still some AI based visual monitoring in place but it’s much simpler. Instead of needing to identify exactly what you’re picking up, it just needs to flag when it thinks you might have picked something up without scanning it. If that happens, it triggers a staff member to come have look in your bags when you scan your receipt to leave. It seems like a much more pragmatic way to realise 80% of the value you get with “just walk out”.
- zikohh 3y agoHow just walk out works https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/how-does-amazon-just-walk-out-work https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/how-does-amazon-just...
- cushpush 3y agoBring it back!
- ijijijjij 3y agoMaybe it didn't work because they were using video as opposed to something like RFID tags?
- hot_gril 3y agoThere was just a Shark Tank episode where the entrepreneurs pitched essentially this. Nobody questioned the tech side of it, but they still didn't get a deal.
- idk1 3y agoI've done all checkout styles and I think the best is scan as you shop with a little handheld scanner is best by far, you can pack as you go along and I think I've had a random check like 3 times in years of doing a weekly shops. I like having a running total and being able to price check, it's mostly fantastic. Only downside is fruit and veg which you have to weigh and print a sticker for, that's about it. In my mind the perfect experience would be a trolley/cart/basket with a screen on it that detects what was inside.
- thegrim000 3y agoIs it intentional that so many people are confusing/conflating teams in India labeling data for input to a machine learning algorithm vs. teams in India watching you shop in real time? It's the former. That's how machine learning works. You need labeled training data as input. The article clearly states it's only a small minority of all customers that had to be corrected in real time by actual people.