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from the amazon-knows-your-spouse-better-than-you-do dept.
Amazon is testing a brick-and-mortar concept store that would allow shoppers to pick items off the shelf and leave without waiting in a line:
Amazon.com Inc said on Monday it has opened a brick-and-mortar grocery store in Seattle without lines or checkout counters, kicking off new competition with supermarket chains.
Amazon Go, the online shopping giant's new 1,800-square-foot (167-square-meter) store, uses sensors to detect what shoppers have picked off the shelf and bills it to their Amazon account if they do not put it back.
The store marks Amazon's latest push into groceries, one of the biggest retail categories it has yet to master. The company currently delivers produce and groceries to homes through its AmazonFresh service.
"It's a great recognition that their e-commerce model doesn't work for every product," said analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research, noting that physical stores would complement AmazonFresh. "If there were hundreds of these stores around the country, it would be a huge threat" to supermarket chains, he said.
Also at CNBC, Bloomberg, and The Verge:
It'll feel like shoplifting, except you're actually being watched by more cameras than you can imagine.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:18AM
>> It'll feel like shoplifting, except you're actually being watched by more cameras than you can imagine.
So it will feel like a prison? That is what prisons are like. You are watched everywhere you go like a hawk, be it by cameras or guards, and you better not overstep the rules. Sure the punishments are the not the same, but the concept seems identical.
While this is fine, because you can choose not to go into Amazon go, or use it at all, but how long before people become accustomed to this, and it spreads beyond. I would hate to eventually live in such a society, even if I get the "convenience" of being able to be automatically billed/fined for what I do instantly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:26AM
I would hate to eventually live in such a society...
Whichever planet you live on, I wish I were there.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:09PM
>Whichever planet you live on, I wish I were there.
Eastern Europe, too disorganised and corrupt to implement such a system. Also too poor to push so much money into such a system, and quite frankly they don't care enough about what you do to bother.
Africa is pretty good too, too chaotic to implement such a system. Half the time they don't even know how many people live in the country. Russia is too big to implement such a system everywhere (you can spend your entire life on a road trip, and not see every part of the country).
The former Communist states generally have populations that are highly distrusting of government, spying and mainstream media, as such you should get a few generations of resistance to such new applications of technology. "Western" countries have populaces that never experienced Fascist/Communist police states, so have no idea what they are sleep walking into.
Sure, you lose some comforts and luxuries, and experience different languages, cultures, morals and opinions that you may be used to, but there are places out there that, if it is that important to you to make an effort.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:24PM
Quite a few European countries spend time teaching their children about that time when someone decided to unite the place under him.
Databases and permanent tracking are not as popular, but they're correcting that issue courtesy of a few convenient terrorist plots, and of course the app-of-the-day.
On the other hand, I still can't stand watching US elementary kids taking that stupid pledge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @06:37AM
At least they stopped giving the Bellamy salute [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:32AM
Welcome to the future. Soon everyone will have a mandatory RFID tag implanted in their forehead or right hand, which is used to bill everything you buy or use automatically. It will no longer be possible to buy anything without that tag.
The system will be known as Billing Electronically and Automatically with Subcutaneous Tags (BEAST).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:43PM
Outer Limits did episodes about the head chip ("Stream of Consciousness") and the hand chip ("Zig Zag"). Too bad millennials interpret dystopian fiction as instruction manuals.
(Score: 2) by rondon on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:23PM
What the actual fuck?! What millennial do you know who has the power to implement this dystopian crap? Jesus Christ you freakin AC's are blind, deaf, dumb, and stupid today.
Please, completely ignore that our current surveillance and police state was implemented by 70 year old white men for the last however-many years and blame this all on millennials.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:42PM
Fuckerberg
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:53PM
Stop generalizing.
How many ACs do you know?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:09PM
Just one, but he is a complete piece of trash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:06PM
Haha, I'll bet that millennials burned the Library at Alexandria because it didn't have a safe space!
(I'd also bet that it's a millennial who's posting about how this or that is all the fault of millennials.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:48AM
Don't forget one important aspect: Rectium, Intel inside...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:30PM
On the other hand if they don't have pictures everywhere, anyone on the planet can pown my phone or steal my amazon credentials, walk into the market, and buy whatever they want on my account.
On the other hand I don't want them doing facial recognition or it'll be really weird shopping with my wife and they'll call the cops because we're together physically but I'm putting stuff on her account and she's putting stuff on my account and obviously we're not the person on the account. Or my Mom asks me to pick something up for her on the way to her place.
Something not discussed is we're pretty close to snapping a pix of everything you buy at the scanner. Which is pretty boring if you're buying the eleven trillionth identical 2L bottle of soda but interesting if you are trying some kind of weird return fraud with custom/handmade stuff from the deli or meat or produce or whatever. We're almost at the point where its cheaper and faster to take pix and OCR the bar code than to laser scan and sweep the object bar code thru the beam. Then you can OCR or amazon turk purchases to a crazy level, like I didn't just buy Deli $6 or even Deli Sushi $6, I bought a "california roll fake crab exp date 12/7 serial number 123wtf456" or whatever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:43PM
I expect the facial req stuff will spread to all big stores whether or not they eliminate the checkout lines, just so they can collect targeted data on each customer's shopping/browsing patterns. What items did they pick up and not buy, etc.