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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 zocalo on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:37PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:32PM
I suspect the store will have a "foyer" where you can collect your shopping cart and bag your groceries. In the store you need to put the article in the cart which would be equipped with an RFID reader. This would also allow a display to be integrated into these smart carts to display the items selected for purchase. Crossing the threshold to the bagging area would initiate the transaction. Cameras are there to prevent shoplifting.
Now my theory undermines the headline of the article (shoplifting typically does not involve placing groceries in a cart). I just suspect it would be the simplest system to implement. I also assume this store will have no loose produce, as those items are difficult to tag. Bagged produce probably, although I suspect the store will be more like Fresh and Easy with lots of premade meals and a relatively small selection.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:50PM
I have never worked out why shopping isn't RFID like this.
It doesn't need to have UNIQUE RFID tags, just the RFID equivalent of the barcode that's scanned.
Push trolley through scanner arch. Several hundred beeps in the space of a second. Your bill.
You can argue about "Did you actually buy a toy car for 99c, or was it a bottle of vodka who's tags you switched" all day long, but barcodes are vulnerable to exactly the same attack, and you can randomly-stop people at the door for anything suspicious.
But for YEARS now, I've been watching a teenager beep through my entire shopping one item at a time, after I'd unpacked it all, only to then repack it back into the same trolley (that I then have to re-unpack back at my car and again back home) and thought "Can't we just RFID this?"
If it's good enough to detect theft from a shop, why can't it add up what's in your trolley?
But, no, I still have to deal with dumb teenager, or stupid self-service checkouts where I have to do the work of dumb teenager but aren't compensated for that.
Fill trolley.
Push through archway. bbbLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLEPEPEPEPEPEPPEPE. £115.60. Credit card. Done.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:56PM
You would need some way to make sure that you are not being billed or items you had previously purchased in your bag or for the items in the cart of the person ahead of or behind you.
It is trivial to jam RFID as well. The system works by walking a binary tree of bits in the IDs. First developed for the ISA PNP standard (or that is where I first read about it). To jam the system, you simply have to respond in the affirmative every time you are asked if you have a specific bit in a specific position.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 07 2016, @06:45PM
That's exactly the issue, because barcodes *aren't* currently vulnerable to that because of the way they are individually scanned. If a cashier is sitting there scanning each item, they're likely to notice if the item that pops up on screen isn't the same as what they're holding. And on those self-checkout registers, they measure the size and weight of the item to ensure it's a match. With RFID tags, they can't do that. You can just pull the tag off and walk out and the scanner won't notice. Buy a couple metal baking sheets and you might (perhaps even accidentally) end up with a faraday cage in your cart. At best they could weigh the entire cart, but that's going to be far less accurate (has to account for variance in the cart itself), more prone to errors (it's gonna have to be a scale in the floor, making it more likely to get whatever dirt and gunk jamming it up) and easier to fool (swap the labels from a bottle of juice to a bottle of vodka, it won't notice it's the wrong size or wrong product and won't be accurate enough to detect it's the wrong weight). And since it would have to operate on the entire cart instead of items pulled from the cart, it gives people more time and more privacy to set up some kind of scam. You can move some lead bricks from your handbag into the cart if you need to increase the weight to fool the sensor, and just bury them under merchandise. But try sneaking a bunch of weights onto the supermarket belt alongside each item without anyone noticing...