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This 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 groc
by bilalq 3y ago
This 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.
- Timshel 3y agoWell Amazon did not think so: > Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales.
- omgwtfbyobbq 3y agoThey didn't even agree with the 700 out of 1000 trips needing review figure > According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews. Even if the system was fairly accurate, if the vendor is charging Amazon too much for it, it can still be financially worthwhile for Amazon to switch to scanners in their carts.
- sunshowers 3y ago"inaccurate" can mean lots of things here, from "actually it was 690 out of 1000" to some other minor technicality. Note that Amazon did not provide a figure of its own. Large corporations tend to tell the truth, but push it as far as they can.
- strken 3y agoMight be "700 manual reviews per 1000 trips" getting misinterpreted as "700 out of 1000 trips needed manual reviews". If some trips were pathological edge cases that required near-constant reviews and a substantial majority took zero reviews, I could understand why Amazon would keep trying to fix its system.
- 3y ago
- unscaled 3y agoIf my memory serves me right, when I last visited the US right before COVID (SF) I wanted to see an Amazon Go convenience store but it closed down at 16:00 or 17:00. That was quite unacceptable for a convenience store and it was then I got the feeling Amazon Go was still an experiment rather than a mature technology.
- hn_user82179 3y agoRegular grocery stores have really gone downhill as well. Whenever I shop, there’s at most 1 cashier doing checkout and usually 0 (only self-checkout being open). I consider myself pretty proficient about knowing what sets off the machine but still set it off 60% of the time (about some weight imbalance etc) that requires an attendant to come fix manually. I’ve gotten to dread the grocery store trips as they require so much overhead time. I really wish the “just walk out” could’ve been popularized and caught on at more stores.
- saalweachter 3y agoYeah, the "if anything goes wrong you now stand around with your thumb up your ass while one employee makes their way from broken kiosk to broken kiosk to manually resolve the problems" model has soured me on self-checkout. I find I have a very low "dealing with this bullshit" limit, to the point that if I have trouble I'm likely to just say fuck it and walk out of the store without completing my purchase.
- bombcar 3y agoIt's really tunable and some stores are tuned to "Fort Knox" where even a fly landing UNKNOWN ITEM IN BAGGING AREA. Others are so loose that you don't even have to take things out of your cart, scan and pay and go.
- kevingadd 3y agoThe Whole Foods location nearest to me has self-checkout stations that don't even have a scale under the bagging area. You just scan, put it in your bag and go. I assume they can afford to tank the shrinkage that results from this due to their high profit margins, or they just don't consider the costs associated with the scales to be worth it.
- thejohnconway 3y agoAll the local self-checkouts where I am in London are just scan and go, no scales.
- raegis 3y agoPerhaps operating costs were more expensive than just hiring humans to run it like a traditional grocery store?
- Johnny555 3y agoLots of services would be phenomenal when you can offload much of the cost to run them to cheap offshore labor. Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when much of the cost of operating was offset by underpaid workers and VC funds? Now that they don't have unlimited piles of money and cities/states are making them pay more fair wages, the cost-benefit of those services has diminished. I was ok paying $5 for $20 of food to be delivered, but now it's more like $10 - $15 in fees/tip, plus fees hidden in menu prices making that $20 food cost $27.50.
- bombcar 3y agoI wish it could all be managed intelligently; I'm hungry but I can wait, let orders collect and make them all at once or something. Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive?
- kevingadd 3y agoThere is some degree of that in these apps already, for example I believe both grubhub and doordash will group up orders so one courier can do multiple deliveries back-to-back in a single trip.
- xp84 3y agoThey do, and they also make that a profit center too by allowing you to pay another $3 to ensure a nonstop point-to-point delivery to you.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- satvikpendem 3y agoThe company Weee which primarily sells Asian products does this sort of batch order, and their prices are the same as grocery stores because they rightly knew that their initial Chinese userbase (and other Asians in general) is extremely price conscious and won't accept such increased fees for delivery. I just listened to a podcast episode about them on How I Built This which is where I got this information, people should give it a listen.
- themadturk 3y agoShopping there always felt supremely weird to me. Scanning in, getting stuff, and walking out, but I always felt incomplete without a receipt being right there in my email, wondering if I'd done something wrong and had just inadvertently shoplifted. I shop more often at Walmart, which has recently increased the number of manned checkout lanes and restricted their self-checkout to 15 items or less.
- bombcar 3y agoThe local Walmart expanded self-checkout and it works surprisingly well (the bag scale seems to be very loosely calibrated or off). I wonder if they're doing things differently depending on how much product walks out the door.
- xp84 3y agoJust in the past month or two, in my (low-crime suburban) area, Walmart appears to have closed the two large self-checkout areas entirely and replaced them with a (relative to before) army of cashiers. I have always found their machines to be very hassle-free, but the shockingly-adequate level of cashier staffing made my last visit surprisingly quick and convenient. I could live with this.
- rwbt 3y agoI'm glad it's gone for good, if the process really works like how it's described in the article. Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout (eww- the horror!). The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.
- b112 3y agoI'm sure all those fired, new job seekers jn India agree fully with you.
- rwbt 3y agoIf the system did end up working as designed, wouldn't they get the shaft anyways?
- b112 3y agoYou were upset that due to the "entitled" west, Indians had jobs. You were glad the jobs were gone. Now you're trying to redirect, and say "Oh well, those jobs would have lasted only a few years more anyhow!". My respnse to that is the same: I'm sure all those fired, new job seekers jn India agree fully with you. Consider te perspective of those you aim to "protect".
- wyager 3y ago> Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout Wanting to make your life more convenient and pleasant isn't "entitled". 99% of jobs are things people would rather not be doing (otherwise you wouldn't be getting paid for it). The point is that we can allocate this work in a way that minimizes the amount of time everyone has to spend doing undesirable work. Are you mad that I sometimes pay "poor souls" to do the "menial work" of cooking me food so I can avoid doing it myself? > The entitlement of the west has no bounds really. A very bizarre response to "darn, this was so convenient" - I wonder if this is a troll.
- 3y ago
- madeofpalk 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. Wow - I did not know this. This makes it all a whole lot less impressive and interesting that it was just people off shore watching you.
- alsodumb 3y agoIt's just a tech-illiterate journalist who can't seem to understand the difference between "annotators watching and labeling videos to validate the model" vs "people watching the videos live to remotely decide the cost of every user's purchase". Or maybe they do know the difference, but wanted to bait audience.
- kadoban 3y agoOr it's a tech-literate journalist who knows that usually it's the latter and they have vague plans to transition to the former later.
- anthony__j 3y agoalways mturk all the way down
- Timshel 3y ago> 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. Or not ...
- ec109685 3y agoI thought so too, but the article says this: > 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoIf you required a high accuracy like 99.9% to charge a customer, you could have a system that was mostly automatic but still needed human review when the model isn’t confident enough. It’s hard to know exactly what this means without a lot more details, which Amazon is unlikely to provide.
- FourOnTheFloor 3y agoBut this was an obvious sham and a fraud that couldn't scale. I don't think its demise is sad at all. What's sad is putting cashiers out of work, and even worse is replacing them with outrageously piss-poor alternatives. Self-checkout is a clinic on incompetent system design, and has been for DECADES now. It's mind-bogglingly bad, all to take jobs away from people. Fuck that.
- arcticbull 3y agoWhy is it a fraud? Did they ever tell you it was entirely computer-driven? I thought their value proposition was you could just ... walk out. This feels pretty inescapably the future. Why have people do bad jobs like cashier work when computers could do them instead? This is why UBI is going to be critical. We're moving to a world where we'll have more people than work, and that's not just ok - it's fantastic. They're not wrong, they're just early. Which you could argue is the same thing on a micro scale, but not on a macro.
- Izkata 3y ago> Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out Technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you're done shopping, you can just leave the store. A little later, your receipt will be available and we will charge your payment method. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GQKJHZZQDJBQN2QF https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- FourOnTheFloor 3y agoThanks for answering his question.
- ricardobeat 3y agoSelf-checkout is seamless in Europe. I don't see anything that would stop the US from having the same.
- Izkata 3y agoIt is for me too in the US. I think it's either specific stores/chains or user error.
- janpieterz 3y agoCompared to simply walking out, packing everything into your bags right away without needing to scan with either a hand terminal or "repacking" at self checkout is a lot more friction. Didn't really think it would be until I tried a couple of times in a row and it was incredible.
- P_I_Staker 3y agoIt is NOT seamless. Same issues, and more, but worse service, as is customary in EU.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> 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. How do the Amazon "Dash Carts" actually work though? If it were a traditional bar code scanner, I'd agree with you. But reading up on the tech makes it sound like you just place the item in your cart and that's it. If it worked like that I don't see at all what the problem would be.
- keeperofdakeys 3y ago> The painful clunkiness of self-checkout was gone. It could be worse. Imagine a smart gate that refuses to open for wheelchair users, or claims the child in your arms is an unpaid item - something that is getting rolled out in many Australian supermarkets.
- baby 3y agoI tried one in SF and never went back because holy fuck it was expensive
- MR4D 3y agoAccording to Bloomberg, Amazon Go wil continue. I'd bet they are more correct than Gizmodo. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-02/amazon-pulls-plug-on-cashierless-system-in-us-grocery-stores https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-02/amazon-pu... From Bloomberg: "Amazon Go stores will still use Just Walk Out technology, and the company will continue to license it to other retailers. Smaller stores in the UK also will keep using the system."