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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 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...