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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 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.