
Amazon’s Cashierless Store Is Almost Ready for Prime Time - kungfudoi
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/amazon-s-cashierless-store-is-almost-ready-for-prime-time
======
pwinnski
So they've spent an extra year with people who fit the demographics of an
Amazon employee trying to trick their systems. That should protect them from
people who fit the demographics of an Amazon employee.

There still seem to be many of the issues people brought up a year ago, such
as how this depends on the presence of a phone with the appropriate app
installed, or what happens with groups of people in which only one person has
the app (such as with kids).

More to the point, I can see how this would be better for Amazon, but I'm not
sure it's better for most shoppers. Amazon gets to charge people who graze on
produce while in the store, and kids who consume snacks in the store, and can
presumably produce video evidence when customers throw a fit. But they can
also overcharge me for things and how am I supposed to know that? Check the
app in the parking lot to make sure I have everything it charged me for? What
recourse do I have if not? What if something wasn't charged as marked on the
shelf? I've already paid at that point. I've gone through this enough times
with stores high-end and low-end to know it's inevitable for Amazon.

The leverage is all Amazon's, and the convenience doesn't offset that for me.
I know I'm not alone, but maybe there aren't enough like me to dent their
ambitions.

~~~
mnr
I presume you can check your cart via the app before checking out... in terms
of overcharging, how do you know when you’re overcharged at the store when the
cashier checks you out if you have more than 10 or so items? Do you remember
all the prices of each item?

~~~
pishpash
Yes. People who care remember the prices.

~~~
mstolpm
Congrats if you are able to do so.

I often try to predict the value of the items in the shopping cart when
waiting in the cashier queue. Most of the time shopping in a supermarket, I
can predict the total sum in a range of +/\- 2 Euros. My girlfriend? Perhaps
in a range of +/\- 5 Euros. My mother? She would only be irritated if the sum
is at least 10 Euros above what she expected. And that is for 15-25 items and
a total sum in the range of 40-60 Euros. But there is no way my mother, my
girlfriend or even I would detect small over- or undercharging most of the
time.

~~~
mkl
It's not about the total, but the prices of individual items as they show up
on the checkout screen, which are pretty easy to remember (they're mostly the
same week to week).

My local supermarket has some specials which are loyalty card only, so when
the item is scanned the full price shows up. I use this to determine when to
use the loyalty card for minimum tracking, minimum time, and minimum price (it
doesn't have my personal info associated with it, but still connects purchases
and it's faster to skip).

------
tarboreus
You know what I find convenient? Cash. You just take it out of your wallet and
hand it over in exchange for goods. No tracking, no receipt emails, no machine
learning of my behavior to figure out when my partner is pregnant or whatever,
no extra apps, no facial recognition, no 2-4% charge for businesses that only
doesn't apply if you're an international monopoly.

Oh, my phone is out of batteries. Guess I'll just give up and head home.

Oops, looks like a hurricane/forest fire/proletarian uprising has knocked out
local infrastructure. (Luckily, this almost never happens anymore!) Man, it
would be great if we had a medium of exchange that would work under these
adverse conditions. Guess I'll just barter my Harry's razors and other hipster
goods to get some formula for my baby!

~~~
chrisseaton
Cash is somewhat ok until you buy something. It's fine to carry around say
£100 in a few notes, but then you buy something and you get back £5 and £10
notes and a handful of change and now it's a big jingly mess of shrapnel. I
think contactless credit cards are the best right now. You don't need to hand
anything over, get anything back, or enter anything, just wave the card.

~~~
tarboreus
I personally love $5 and $10 bills. I frequently do exact change when I have a
bunch of those. Buying a BLT at the bodega? That's $5.75 with a coke. Here's
$6. At the end of the day, I fire my change in a bucket and bring it to a
machine once a year to get exchanged.

Also, taking out $100 in 2017 is silly, at least if you spend more than $200 a
week, which is most non-students here. I just get out the max that the ATM
will let me have and I never regret it.

"But what if I get mugged?" This is silly. If you actually do get mugged, you
want to have a big load of money on you, not $3.29. Happy muggers mean fewer
dead programmers.

~~~
rtpg
This works less well with other currencies

If you're working with euros your largest denomination coin is 2€ . In Yen
it's 500 yen! This is not chump change and just throwing those coins into the
charity box can leave you with effectively increasing your lunch pricing by
50% if you have a "give all coins to charity" policy.

If you have the cash for it more power to you, of course.

~~~
Simon_says
Who said anything about charity?

~~~
rtpg
Ah, I think I misread the original comment to be something like "drop the
coins in the tip jar". Please disregard.

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cardamomo
> Engineers are also figuring out which person to charge when a couple goes
> shopping together.

This made me giggle. I've tried to figure out the same thing myself when
shopping with a significant other or close friend. I'm having a hard time
imagining how this would be cast as an engineering problem.

~~~
dannyw
A “split the bill” function in your receipt?

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brownbat
My pain point isn't checkout, it's wandering around a store and dodging large
carts in narrow aisles. Maybe they'll tackle that next.

I really wish Amazon would let me put dry and frozen goods in an app, then
have kiva robots fetch those while I just browse produce. Like, you could
leave the produce section normal, people freak about produce, but make the
rest of the store a robot filled warehouse that customers don't even enter.

~~~
harryh
People spend more money when they spend time wandering around the rest of the
store.

~~~
brownbat
Yeah, planet money had a good episode debating whether that's why they put
milk way in the back of the store.

But people also spend more money when it's easy to do so, and when they aren't
frustrated by the process. How many trips to the store aren't even happening
because it's an ordeal?

Malls are playing the strategy of keeping people in store, while the internet
is lowering barriers to the experience.

Malls are dying and the internet is winning. There are a lot of reasons, but
'make it easier for customers to give you money' is probably not an awful
business model.

------
shpx
There's a YC company also working on the same thing, here's their demo from 3
months ago
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeS8TJwBAFs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeS8TJwBAFs)

[https://www.standardcognition.com/](https://www.standardcognition.com/)

~~~
ramzyo
Nice! It sort of looks like they’re deliberately exaggerating their hand
motions when they pick up an item to maybe ensure the camera gets a good look?

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gwern
> Shoppers visiting an Amazon Go store will scan their smartphones upon
> entering. Cameras and shelf sensors will then work together to figure out
> which items have been removed and who removed them, the person says; there
> will be no need for tracking devices, such as radio frequency chips,
> embedded in the merchandise.

Hold on - "shelf sensors"? Wasn't Amazon originally advertising this as being
_purely_ camera-based, and that was why everyone was so skeptical it could
ever work sufficiently well? 'Shelf sensors' could cover a heck of a lot short
of embedding individual RFID sensors...

~~~
Operyl
I wonder if it still is camera based, and just a disconnect with the press'
understanding of Amazon's technology/terminology. I consider a camera to still
be a sensor, in this fashion. So, a camera pointed at a shelf could still be a
"shelf sensor."

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perseusprime11
I still dont see anyone in Amazon Bookstores. Expecting them to close soon.
Why is there so much fascination to reinvent physical stores when we are
perfectly happy to get stuff delivered to our homes.

~~~
pwinnski
In October 2017, an estimated $486.6 billion in sales took place at retail
stores in the U.S.

For e-commerce, the total for the entire three-month quarter was $115.3
billion.

[0] [https://www.census.gov/retail/](https://www.census.gov/retail/)

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sschueller
What if I don't have an Amazon account? Can I even enter the store?

~~~
justonepost
Very likely no. Much like costco, I suspect.

~~~
pwinnski
One person in a group must wave around a Costco card for the entire group to
enter.

I wonder if I would be allowed to grocery shop as I do now, with my adult
daughter who doesn't have an Amazon account of her own.

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tabeth
No mention of people wearing masks or putting them on after the fact or better
yet, completely changing clothing? That's the easiest, simplest and cheapest
way to beat this.

~~~
adventured
How do you figure? Identification isn't only based on your face.

From the article:

"Employees have tried to fool the technology. One day, three enterprising
Amazonians donned bright yellow Pikachu costumes and cruised around grabbing
sandwiches, drinks and snacks. The algorithms nailed it, according to a person
familiar with the situation, correctly identifying the employees and charging
their Amazon accounts, even though they were obscured behind yellow polyester.
"

It links to an account on your phone. You're under full surveillance while in
the store.

To go any further down the premise you're suggesting, you're already getting
to traditional methods of walking into a store, stealing merchandise, and then
running for it.

~~~
anigbrowl
Pfff. If I could get a waiver of legal liability in advance I can think of
multiple ways to get around that. Since there aren't any cashiers whose safety
could be threatened I'm heartily in favor of people developing creative hacks
for the brief duration that remains before we turn the whole damn world into a
capitalist panopticon.

~~~
mstolpm
So, why trying to be creative? Just robbing the store in a conventional
fashion should do - and facing security/police when leaving. Good luck.

~~~
anigbrowl
Because that's boring and not responsive to the situation.

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polyomino
Except if you wear red

------
0xbear
It’ll be “almost ready” for prime time once it undergoes extensive adversarial
“testing” by Seattle bums. Until then it’s a PR exercise.

------
jcoffland
There's a real danger of someone forcing an Amazon customer back in to the
store at hidden gun or knife point.

------
mtgx
> _Employees have tried to fool the technology. One day, three enterprising
> Amazonians donned bright yellow Pikachu costumes and cruised around grabbing
> sandwiches, drinks and snacks. The algorithms nailed it, according to a
> person familiar with the situation, correctly identifying the employees and
> charging their Amazon accounts, even though they were obscured behind yellow
> polyester._

Okay, so 3 employees tested it? This tech is going to be "tested" in the real
world by tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the first few months/year.
Something tells me things will go far from smoothly.

I've only had an experience with a "semi-cashierless" store, sort of speak,
where the cashier would scan your stuff, and then it would give you a ticket,
and you'd go to pay with it at a not-so-intuitive machine. Oh, and you also
had to scan it again before you left the area at the designated exit-gate.

Let me tell you, it felt like both a more frustrating experience than just
paying the cashier _and_ it took longer time. The only thing this did is save
the cashier 15 seconds per person, while the store paid for a dozen of those
machines who knows what.

So we'll see if this is indeed a better experience, or it's just meant to save
Amazon money on not having to pay for cashiers, while giving customers a more
frustrating experience and making them spend more time in the store to
register every item (for the same number of purchased items).

Apple's Face ID can't even identify your own face 100% of the time. How is
Amazon's tech going to identify (from a distance) millions of people that pass
through the store and every item they got with 100% accuracy??

~~~
alwaysanon
You need to have an app on your phone and scan a code from the app/phone to
enter. My guess is that it is based on location tracking of the phone (via
either Bluetooth or WiFi) rather than facial recognition.

~~~
justonepost
Probably some facial / clothing recognition goes on as well when you scan to
keep track of you.

~~~
ZenoArrow
How about if someone dressed in a niqab, how will those people be identified?

