The first time I went into an Amazon Go store, I was fairly impressed with how accurate it was, to the point that they knew that I had filled my cup with an Ice

The first time I went into an Amazon Go store, I was fairly impressed with how accurate it was, to the point that they knew that I had filled my cup with an Icee rather than a fountain beverage. This was notwithstanding the creepiness factor of feeling like you’re under constant surveillance. The second time I went in, I tried to game it a little bit—putting items back on shelves after a while, taking two items and putting only one in my bag and the other on the shelf, that kind of thing. They still got my purchases 100% correct. I was still fairly impressed. The most recent time I went there, I wasn’t even trying to be crafty, but they still only ended up charging me for three out of five of the things I got, and that’s when I realized that the whole thing was a facade, running on something akin to Amazon Mechanical Turk. The problem as I see it is that the technology is working at cross-purposes with itself. On the one hand, it has to tend to err in favor of undercharging, because it won’t take many false charges that customers have to dispute to turn them off from ever wanting to come back to the store again. I suspect that’s why Amazon Go has an extremely liberal return policy—In essence, say you want to return anything and they just give you your money back, no questions asked, no need to even bring the product back. On the other hand, merchants obviously aren’t in the business of giving away free stuff, so unless this technology can have insane levels of accuracy, as in at least 99.9% accurate, there’s no way it makes financial sense for other businesses to adopt it.