Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with "Just Walk Out" technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company's senior vice president of grocery stores says they're moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.
Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. 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.
Instead, Amazon is moving towards Dash Carts, a scanner and screen that's embedded in your shopping cart, allowing you to checkout as you shop. These offer a more reliable solution than Just Walk Out. Amazon Fresh stores will also feature self check out counters from now on, for people who aren't Amazon members.
[...] The company is reportedly keeping Just Walk Out technology in a small number of Fresh stores in the United Kingdom, and some of its Amazon Go convenience stores. Amazon has also implemented Just Walk Out technology at several ballparks around the country. These locations will keep the technology going.
Previously:
• Amazon Go Grocery Review -- Constant Tracking to Buy Bananas [2020]
• Amazon Go: It's Like Shoplifting [2016]
Related Stories
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.
Ars Technica has a "review" of the new Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle, WA.
Apparently, the author's first thought was to engage in some petty theft, given that there are no cashiers or visible security guards.
The article is fairly verbose, with lots of photos of the crime scene store. Overall, the new store is just like the original Amazon Go stores, but with extra surveillance features.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday April 06 2024, @01:29PM (14 children)
Jamie Zawinski posted some interesting details at his blog:
Knowing that, we can see that this incident is not about AI but about remote outsourcing to third world prices. And, because of that, one can suspect that the outsourcing of all similar level jobs is most likely the ultimate goal.
That would be in line with the use of "apps" for gig work which are being used to knock the bottom rung out of the labor market. If Amazon, or a competitor, pulls off this kind of remote outsourcing at third world prices, they will have succeeded in knocking out the next rung. In some countries, there are political parties which aim to do this to even do this to K-12 teaching so that it becomes centralized indoctrination rather than basic education.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Saturday April 06 2024, @03:32PM (5 children)
Doesn't sound like this JWZ character was wrong tho. Going "walk out" is all about cutting cost in the store. It's not about anything else. Your shopping experience isn't really better cause there are no cashiers or less staff in the store. After all there are always more steps. Eventually robots will stock the shelves and when that becomes to expensive the roboforklifts will just bring pallets out into the store. No more shelves.
The amount of time saved at the end of the shopping is probably insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But for the stores having the customer scan the goods themselves or it being scanned some other way is a huge boon to them and a cost cutting. If this is AI or some other system or call- video-center workers in a third world country checking up on you while you walk about the store doesn't matter. As noted those people will always cost less then staff in the store.
Were prices lower in the store since there were no cashiers? Of cause not. That would just be silly. It would be like stealing money out of Bezos wallet. Can't have any of that. Lets try and convince the punters that this is the future instead and this is what they always wanted. All they need now is to get the customers to stock the shelves for them to and it would be perfect.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Saturday April 06 2024, @04:42PM (2 children)
The main reason why robots can't currently stock the shelves is that customers can't be bothered to put things back where they belong, or bring them to some sort of collection point to be put back. Simply putting the items into trays that can be placed on the shelves isn't that hard and the packaging could be designed with that in mind. But, the customers that insist on putting things in the wrong sort of temperature storage or crammed into random places are very hard to account for with a robot.
(Score: 5, Funny) by crafoo on Saturday April 06 2024, @09:58PM (1 child)
Thank you. My mission is clear. Continue to be an absolute shithead when I shop. If you think I'm going to spend my life-essence making life easier for outsourcers and globalists you should come have a coffee with me. I'm a one-man radicalizing army.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 08 2024, @04:48AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by krishnoid on Saturday April 06 2024, @07:00PM (1 child)
Jamie Zawinski was one of the first core developers at Netscape. When Netscape went public, he did the smart thing and sold some of his stock, and bought the DNA lounge [dnalounge.com] nightclub in San Francisco.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2024, @01:35AM
Of course he could have got a lot more fun and fame from DNA Lounge, but the smartness is not clear from the context of your post.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday April 06 2024, @06:13PM (2 children)
And put in a rung in India's labor market! Automation can eliminate jobs, but not this - moving work to where the labor is cheaper. And well, the people in those places need work too.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Sunday April 07 2024, @05:04AM (1 child)
And well, the people in those places need work too.
Sounds nice in principle, but as it turns out in practice things are otherwise. The people in those outsourcing shops in those countries work excessively long hours while being severely underpaid even by local standards. They do it until they burn out or are discarded and there is queue waiting to replace them as they fail. Yet they work like that and accept those working conditions anyway because of the false hope of using the time to either land a real job or move up at least a little in the current one. And it goes without saying that they do it without health care or other necessities.
Anyway it's not for American businesses to look out for the employment prospects of people in India, with all due respect to India. If those companies have any responsibility (and they do) then it is to look out for the employment prospects of people in the US. They are all so myopically focused on short term profit or "long term" quarterly reporting that they both forget and ignore the important lessons from Henry Ford's factories: pay people adequately and the local economies will flourish, which in turn feeds back into the company itself. Also, give people decent working conditions and they'll do great work and stick around, increasing profit and demand. Investment == growth; Divestment == decline.
Aside from divestment, the current model is also focused on extraction. By skipping the middle step of letting workers have some crumbs from the table, the local economies are starved of money. If, on the the other hand, the companies went back to paying local employees and paying them an honest wage, then the money would still end up in the pockets of the wealthy by the end of the day anyway because poor and middle class buy a lot. Their money percolates quickly upwards, both to private hands and to federal coffers. Each transaction has a tax, each sale ostensibly a profit. So every one benefits. As for what is happening now, "trickle-down" economics [thumbpress.com], that has been debunked time and again even before Reagan and Thatcher inoculated society with a veritable fungus which has been rotting for decades and which has now most recently begun to produce fruiting bodies such as DJT.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 07 2024, @05:22AM
In other words, by your point of view.
Then why don't they work local jobs instead, if that work is so bad? Answer, they aren't being severely underpaid by local standards.
It's not for American businesses to look out for the employment prospects of people in the US either. The alleged obligation to look out for certain people (at the expense of others!) is an example of social wood [soylentnews.org], couching an argument based on self-interest or ideology in moral terms. The moral argument applies just the same to Indian workers as it does to American workers.
If you ignore the money going into an economy, then of course, it looks like it's going out. Here, even if a single business is highly extractive, it's embedded in a greater economy that is less so or even not at all. And there are automatic corrective processes that keep extraction or injection in check (for example, monetary imbalances between countries with trade deficits create inflation and deflation that reduce the imbalance by changing the relative value of money in the corresponding economies.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday April 06 2024, @07:15PM
Maybe it's about something else altogether [youtu.be], but that would be racist.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by corey on Saturday April 06 2024, @10:38PM (2 children)
Would Trump with his America First thing ban outsourcing like this? It would make sense in that it aligns with the intention (as far as I understand it). But it will impact the rich people which he won’t want to do.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday April 08 2024, @02:02AM (1 child)
Hint: His MAGA hats are still made in China.
(Score: 3, Informative) by weirsbaski on Monday April 08 2024, @06:38AM
According to the AP, the MAGA hats sold on DT's website are made in Carson, California, and the knock-offs are made in China. Though other official MAGA merchandise may be made outside the U.S. .
https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-6391630154 [apnews.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by julian on Saturday April 06 2024, @11:28PM
AI = Actual Indians
(Score: 5, Funny) by stratified cake on Saturday April 06 2024, @04:57PM
AI was always supposed to mean "Asian Intelligence"; that just got lost in communicating with the press. Honest mistake, nothing to see.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday April 06 2024, @06:51PM (4 children)
The best way to implement self-driving cars is to turn them into radio-controlled cars and have a massive merge where the control inputs to the car are the average of a large odd number, let's say, 49, remote drivers. Then the automated system fires drivers who don't follow the groupthink reasonably close enough to keep the average driver quality to a high level.
The problem with automating stuff during a civilizational collapse is there's no labor shortage to "fix" so there's no need to spend trillions to save thousands. Just hire a bunch of un and under-employed dudes and keep the cash.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Sunday April 07 2024, @11:31AM (3 children)
What is this "civilization collapse" you seem to be talking about? Because if it comes, it probably is not what you think it will be and you will definitely not be able to hire someone for cheap. If you haven't noticed, lately the problem is lack of labour which is everywhere where you have a slowdown in population growth. Lack of labour is not a sign of "civilization collapse".
Doomers and gloomers may bring about their own version of civilization collapse, but it will be on them and not on the "foreigners" or whatever is fed in the far-right media these days.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Mykl on Monday April 08 2024, @02:10AM (1 child)
More specifically, lack of relevant and willing labour.
There are a sizeable number of these types of people in cities such as Portland, OR and San Francisco, CA. When enough of them gather in one place, they can form groups intent on breaking society's current norms in an attempt to replace them with something that better suits those individuals. Combine that with the intense concentration of wealth into the top 0.1% that's happening in the US and it could very well lead to civilization collapse.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday April 08 2024, @03:12PM
I had a look for data to support your assertion, but did not find supporting evidence. I looked at UK data and US data. It looks like indeed, employment rates have generally decreased in the last 30 years among the sample of 16-24 year olds; but that decrease is not reflected in the employment rate of 25+ year olds which seems to be roughly flat over a 30 year period. One interpretation is that the number of young people in full-time education has increased, resulting in a fall of "employment" for the young cohort. However, the lack of a decrease in "employment" for the 25+ cohort does not support your assertion.
I note that there is some subtlety; I assume the statistics for "employment" does not include people in full-time education, but I don't know the definition of "employment" for the different samples, so this may be an incorrect assumption.
UK:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/280228/uk-employment-rate-by-age-group/ [statista.com]
US:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/217899/us-employment-rate-by-age/ [statista.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 08 2024, @08:29PM
This doesn't exist AFAIK outside of pro-immigration propaganda.
Some dying business models try to eeek out a few more years of operation by offering lower than subsistence wages but they go out of business soon enough anyway. For example, Sears department stores paid only $9/hr, until they closed. They had trouble staffing at $9/hr LOL, but since they had no customers, not having employees wasn't as big of a problem as you'd expect. The "long-term civilizational collapse" is the entire class of people who used to work at Sears now are unemployed. Or possibly making much more money at Amazon, likely a modest multiple of what Sears could pay.
In a sense you are correct; if an American company tried to implement my idea of 49 people driving the same car, they'd demand everyone they hire have a spotless job record and at least a Masters degree in "remote driving studies" and then whine about mismanagement resulting in staffing issues. Or they could go gig economy and hire real people and not have the slightest problem...