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Their fate seemed sealed when it was revealed a bit back that the “just walk out” technology was more hype than substance. Just lots of people watching what you

by cmiles8 9mo ago

Their fate seemed sealed when it was revealed a bit back that the “just walk out” technology was more hype than substance. Just lots of people watching what you’re doing on camera vs an actual AI that worked well at mass deployment scale. A good idea, poorly executed. Reports said the “AI” was largely 1000+ people in India watching the cameras. If Amazon actually managed to build AI that worked well at a decent cost point it would have been great since nobody likes those silly self checkout machines. What’s amusing about all of this is that before it got leaked that it was basically a bunch of people in India watching cameras Amazon folks spoke about the tech like there was some super secret AI they developed. Since that story broke nobody there seems to want to talk about “just walk out” anymore.

lumost 9mo ago
Even that didn't work well, when I was at an airport recently I had investigated 4-5 items as I had some time to kill. When I was walking out it wanted to bill me for 70 dollars even though I only had a bottle of water and a candy bar. I have little trust that a corporate behemoth will do right by me and refund the discrepancy at an unspecified later time as it says it will on checkout.
- itsamario 9mo ago
  They pay the most for human involvement. Wages, special conditions, and insurance are exponentially higher than their plans of warehouse to end-user via lockers and drones.
- rurp 9mo ago
  This keeps me away from these sorts of stores if I can avoid them, which is pretty much always (so far, anyway). I would be absolutely shocked if the error rate was comparable to a normal checkout process and I don't want to waste the cognitive overhead of either wondering how much I'm getting ripped off by a corporation or having to go back and review and try to resolve overcharges.
usefulposter 9mo ago
AI: Actually Individuals¹ ¹ Individuals manning a labyrinthine system of cameras and sensor fusion, like hawks, logging the precise moment you plop a Twix into your basket! Praise Bezos!
hackingonempty 9mo ago
There is no difference from the customer perspective so the store failed for reasons that have nothing to do with the "just walk out" technology or lack thereof. Why spend lots of money doing R&D only to find out that the concept doesn't sell? Wait for the product to be successful before spending the money to scale it up. Same as anything else. "Do things that don't scale."
- cmiles8 9mo ago
  I think the idea could work well but the execution in the field was consistently very poor. There were a few of these at airports with just an intimidating gate and generally non-engaging human standing there. It was as if they expected everyone to know what to do, but when I’d watch 99% of people just sort of looked at the store, saw the odd gate things, and then just shrugged and walked off. The stores were almost always completely empty amidst a busy concourse. Even if the tech worked (reports say it didn’t work well) they completely missed the boat on creating a clear customer experience that navigated the new tech.
  - xp84 9mo ago
    I agree, it needed a better hook to get people in the 'gates' so to speak. I don't think I've ever waited behind like maybe a single transaction at an airport convenience store, so it's not like having to fiddle with my phone to get in beats tapping a card or phone or watch at checkout. Either way most people are buying 1-3 things so it's not like it saved time scanning. As for the big Amazon Fresh grocery stores, I only have one out of my way so I only visited once or twice, but the big things I noticed were that it had a small selection and very average prices. Not that surprising because even after buying Whole Foods, Amazon itself has terrible prices on dry goods (meaning supermarket items besides fresh food), and relies heavily on random third-party sellers with big markups for a ton of it. If they really wanted to get people to buy into Amazon Fresh it would have taken a lot more money (and thus pretty unprofitable for a long while): Probably one way to do that would have been making it as attractive as Costco for Prime members.
bsimpson 9mo ago
That 90s IBM commercial was pretty rad though.
chilmers 9mo ago
Yeah, we had one near us, close to the metro exit, and it was genuinely great when you needed to grab something for dinner on the way home. Once you knew where things were, you could be in and out in 20 seconds. That said, it never seemed busy compared to other grocery shops in the area, so I think a lot of people were put off by it feeling "weird" to shop without checking-out.
- goatforce5 9mo ago
  You can use the Apple Store app to purchase physical items at Apple retail locations (smaller items like cables or cases). I've used it a couple of times, and I feel very awkward using it, so much so that I'll walk out kinda waving the receipt/acknowledgement screen around so that staff/security can hopefully see I'm not nicking something.
- ryukoposting 9mo ago
  IIRC the Fresh near my old job required you to have a Prime membership, otherwise it was just a normal grocery store. I only went in there a few times, but I don't have a Prime membership, so there wasn't much of a point.
bayarearefugee 9mo ago
> Since that story broke nobody there seems to want to talk about “just walk out” anymore. Optimus and Robotaxi are just as fake and Elon Musk never shuts up about them. I guess Amazon never learned the important lesson that the OP meta for modern technology companies is just to consistently and blatantly lie.
in_a_hole 9mo ago
A.I. = Actually Indians
Fernicia 9mo ago
> Reports said the “AI” was largely 1000+ people in India watching the cameras. This was totally fake news though. Those people were labeling training data and reviewing low confidence labels, after the fact. There wasn't ever live monitoring of shoppers.
AppleAtCha 9mo ago
Do people really have problems with self-checkout? I use it all the time in box stores like Kroger, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. It seems to work just fine for me and doesn't add more than a minute or two vs just walking out of the store.
- vikingerik 9mo ago
  Self checkout is fine, if the happy path works. If everything scans once and doesn't accidentally scan a second time, if everything scans at the price you thought it was posted for, if you don't have any controlled substances requiring approval, if the weight sensor doesn't freak out incorrectly or from putting your bags on it, if it accepts any coupons you have, if it accepts and processes your payment method correctly. If everything goes fine, self checkout is fine. But the exception handling process for any of those is thoroughly aggravating, as you wait and try to get the attention of the one overworked attendant dealing with a dozen of these machines constantly throwing exceptions, as the computer screams at you for whatever it thought you were doing wrong.
  - AppleAtCha 9mo ago
    Yeah I agree that it can potentially go wrong but in my experience here in east TN the machines have gotten better to the point that hasn't happened for me in the past few years. Also it seems like the "just walk out" process would have more potential error modes but I never visited one.
    - OkayPhysicist 9mo ago
      The best machine I've seen so far is one in my local gas station, where there's just a surface and a camera. Toss whatever you want onto the surface, all haphazard like, check that the screen agrees with reality (it always has so far), and bump your watch/phone/credit card and walk out. We're talking substantially less than 30s, oftentimes less than 10s.
    - aworks 9mo ago
      I've had three failures in the last week. I had the "thought my bag was product" problem, the "I somehow double scanned" problem and the "need a reset but no one can explain why." The first and third were on the same visit.
MengerSponge 9mo ago
AI: Actually Indians
GorbachevyChase 9mo ago
I’m a bit surprised a publicly traded company is allowed to make materially false claims about their products and capabilities without getting into a major lawsuit for defrauding shareholders. Maybe Amazon is just above such trifling things such as law.

by cmiles8 9mo ago

lumost 9mo ago

Even that didn't work well, when I was at an airport recently I had investigated 4-5 items as I had some time to kill. When I was walking out it wanted to bill me for 70 dollars even though I only had a bottle of water and a candy bar. I have little trust that a corporate behemoth will do right by me and refund the discrepancy at an unspecified later time as it says it will on checkout.

itsamario 9mo ago
They pay the most for human involvement. Wages, special conditions, and insurance are exponentially higher than their plans of warehouse to end-user via lockers and drones.
rurp 9mo ago
This keeps me away from these sorts of stores if I can avoid them, which is pretty much always (so far, anyway). I would be absolutely shocked if the error rate was comparable to a normal checkout process and I don't want to waste the cognitive overhead of either wondering how much I'm getting ripped off by a corporation or having to go back and review and try to resolve overcharges.

usefulposter 9mo ago

AI: Actually Individuals¹ ¹ Individuals manning a labyrinthine system of cameras and sensor fusion, like hawks, logging the precise moment you plop a Twix into your basket! Praise Bezos!

hackingonempty 9mo ago

There is no difference from the customer perspective so the store failed for reasons that have nothing to do with the "just walk out" technology or lack thereof. Why spend lots of money doing R&D only to find out that the concept doesn't sell? Wait for the product to be successful before spending the money to scale it up. Same as anything else. "Do things that don't scale."

cmiles8 9mo ago
I think the idea could work well but the execution in the field was consistently very poor. There were a few of these at airports with just an intimidating gate and generally non-engaging human standing there. It was as if they expected everyone to know what to do, but when I’d watch 99% of people just sort of looked at the store, saw the odd gate things, and then just shrugged and walked off. The stores were almost always completely empty amidst a busy concourse. Even if the tech worked (reports say it didn’t work well) they completely missed the boat on creating a clear customer experience that navigated the new tech.
- xp84 9mo ago
  I agree, it needed a better hook to get people in the 'gates' so to speak. I don't think I've ever waited behind like maybe a single transaction at an airport convenience store, so it's not like having to fiddle with my phone to get in beats tapping a card or phone or watch at checkout. Either way most people are buying 1-3 things so it's not like it saved time scanning. As for the big Amazon Fresh grocery stores, I only have one out of my way so I only visited once or twice, but the big things I noticed were that it had a small selection and very average prices. Not that surprising because even after buying Whole Foods, Amazon itself has terrible prices on dry goods (meaning supermarket items besides fresh food), and relies heavily on random third-party sellers with big markups for a ton of it. If they really wanted to get people to buy into Amazon Fresh it would have taken a lot more money (and thus pretty unprofitable for a long while): Probably one way to do that would have been making it as attractive as Costco for Prime members.

bsimpson 9mo ago

That 90s IBM commercial was pretty rad though.

chilmers 9mo ago

Yeah, we had one near us, close to the metro exit, and it was genuinely great when you needed to grab something for dinner on the way home. Once you knew where things were, you could be in and out in 20 seconds. That said, it never seemed busy compared to other grocery shops in the area, so I think a lot of people were put off by it feeling "weird" to shop without checking-out.

goatforce5 9mo ago
You can use the Apple Store app to purchase physical items at Apple retail locations (smaller items like cables or cases). I've used it a couple of times, and I feel very awkward using it, so much so that I'll walk out kinda waving the receipt/acknowledgement screen around so that staff/security can hopefully see I'm not nicking something.
ryukoposting 9mo ago
IIRC the Fresh near my old job required you to have a Prime membership, otherwise it was just a normal grocery store. I only went in there a few times, but I don't have a Prime membership, so there wasn't much of a point.

bayarearefugee 9mo ago

> Since that story broke nobody there seems to want to talk about “just walk out” anymore. Optimus and Robotaxi are just as fake and Elon Musk never shuts up about them. I guess Amazon never learned the important lesson that the OP meta for modern technology companies is just to consistently and blatantly lie.

in_a_hole 9mo ago

A.I. = Actually Indians

Fernicia 9mo ago

> Reports said the “AI” was largely 1000+ people in India watching the cameras. This was totally fake news though. Those people were labeling training data and reviewing low confidence labels, after the fact. There wasn't ever live monitoring of shoppers.

AppleAtCha 9mo ago

Do people really have problems with self-checkout? I use it all the time in box stores like Kroger, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. It seems to work just fine for me and doesn't add more than a minute or two vs just walking out of the store.

vikingerik 9mo ago
Self checkout is fine, if the happy path works. If everything scans once and doesn't accidentally scan a second time, if everything scans at the price you thought it was posted for, if you don't have any controlled substances requiring approval, if the weight sensor doesn't freak out incorrectly or from putting your bags on it, if it accepts any coupons you have, if it accepts and processes your payment method correctly. If everything goes fine, self checkout is fine. But the exception handling process for any of those is thoroughly aggravating, as you wait and try to get the attention of the one overworked attendant dealing with a dozen of these machines constantly throwing exceptions, as the computer screams at you for whatever it thought you were doing wrong.
- AppleAtCha 9mo ago
  Yeah I agree that it can potentially go wrong but in my experience here in east TN the machines have gotten better to the point that hasn't happened for me in the past few years. Also it seems like the "just walk out" process would have more potential error modes but I never visited one.
  - OkayPhysicist 9mo ago
    The best machine I've seen so far is one in my local gas station, where there's just a surface and a camera. Toss whatever you want onto the surface, all haphazard like, check that the screen agrees with reality (it always has so far), and bump your watch/phone/credit card and walk out. We're talking substantially less than 30s, oftentimes less than 10s.
  - aworks 9mo ago
    I've had three failures in the last week. I had the "thought my bag was product" problem, the "I somehow double scanned" problem and the "need a reset but no one can explain why." The first and third were on the same visit.

MengerSponge 9mo ago

AI: Actually Indians

GorbachevyChase 9mo ago

I’m a bit surprised a publicly traded company is allowed to make materially false claims about their products and capabilities without getting into a major lawsuit for defrauding shareholders. Maybe Amazon is just above such trifling things such as law.