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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 PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:13PM
I am curious about how this works, since it seems to combine the two biggest retail fails of all time, security systems and self checkouts. I can't get out of a store with a product I legitimately bought because it sets off the security system (I actually order electronics stuff online for that reason!), while thieves aren't even slowed down. Self checkouts simply do not work, and have to have an attendant manually reset them almost after every item. So I really would like to know on a technical level how this is different with Amazon Go. How did they solve problem that retailers haven't solved yet?
Wal-Mart hasn't made either of these work. They have every incentive to make them work because Wal-Mart wants to get rid of the expense of employees.
Did Amazon study the complete failures? Barnes and Noble disabled their security system because it simply didn't work. I got to where I took the tags out of the books I bought and left them on the shelf because the employees seemed unable to deactivate them. K-Mart got self checkouts and got rid of them months later because they didn't work.
I'm also curious about how Amazon knows you bought the items you walk out with. What stops me from adding items to someone else's cart? Do you have to make a list of items before you go to the store, and get only those items? I would like to know how they solved the technical challenges.
Remember the game Nethack? Getting things out of the store in that game was possible. You could throw things out the door, or have a pet carry them out. Did Amazon study this game?
This is one area of technological progress I can get behind. The brain donors who work in retail are ripe to be replaced by a better system. But what do we do with these brain donors? Someone who is too dumb to deactivate a security tag isn't going to be retrained as an AI expert. If we lose the jobs that the bottom of the gene pool uses to support themselves, what becomes of them? The brain donors at Wal-Mart need those jobs because they simply couldn't do anything else. They can't even really do their jobs at Wal-Mart. I hope they have never read about a little historical event you may have heard about ... The French Revolution!
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:59PM
They probably make shoppers pass through the entrances and exits in single file. I imagine there might be gate coming in where, if they can't recognize you based on face req, you have to have your ID scanned by a guard. Going out it's RFID combined with face/body req.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:40PM
> if they can't recognize you based on face req, you have to have your ID scanned by a guard.
They make you check in by smart-phone when you enter the store. You have to have their app on your phone and you walk through a lane where you tap your phone on a scanner pad. If that info isn't in TFA then its a poor article since that info is in all the video news reporting on this story.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:22PM
They make you check in by smart-phone when you enter the store. You have to have their app on your phone
Amazon doesn't even make the app for a lot of phones anymore [mspoweruser.com]. Is this a ploy to get people to switch from an unsupported phone to a Fire Phone just to be able to use the app? Oh wait, that was discontinued too back in mid-2015 [geekwire.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:47PM
Here's how it works (meta level) -- Amazon knows that you are buying way too many energy drinks, (or cigarettes, booze, etc) and they sell this info to your health insurance company.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:23PM
Wal-Mart's self-checkouts just plain suck. I don't think I've ever used one at a K-Mart, but the one down the road from me closed up a few years ago. The regional grocery chain I go to has pretty good self-checkouts, but buying alcohol is a pain since a worker still has to check ID.
For a while they had a couple self-checkout lanes for full (12+ item) carts but those didn't have much of an advantage over just finding a lane with a human cashier. They were removed and the only downside was that instead of 2 workers taking care of 10 stations between the full cart ones and express, there's now just 1 worker for the 6 express stations. Doing anything with potential resource waits like the ID check is going to go a lot smoother with 2 workers/resources for 10 processes than 1 worker/resource for 6 processes, especially when the tasks with the fewer resource/worker waits over time (full cart lanes) are eliminated.
It'll be interesting to see the full details of how Amazon's system works and how it defeats some of the edge cases you mentioned, particularly surreptitiously removing an RFID tag.