Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company’s senior vice president of grocery stores says they’re moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.
“Just walk out” was a cool idea, but I’m not sure the way they tried to implement it would have ever been successful even if they had perfected the technology. The fact that they tried to disguise it as a fully automated system when they had a team of thousands of people overseas analyzing the footage is disturbing. I like the idea of just having the scanner in the basket much better. It’s still more convenient/efficient than a checkout line or a kiosk and it helps you keep track of your total balance.
I’ve never actually been to one of these stores. They seem pretty scarce.
My university just finished replacing one of the on campus convenience stores with a “just walk out” thing. The experience just felt kinda weird overall.
I remember when this was going to be the future of physical retail and that it was part of the massive loss of jobs we would supposedly experience due to full automation. It reminds me of the hype surrounding AI and the overestimation of its capabilities and underestimation of its problems.
Damn… I go to a corner store Amazon Go almost every time I go into the office for a flavored seltzer. They have dog treats and my my dog loves going there every time.
I hope this is one of the convenience stores that it keeps open.
It was weird that last year they reversed the way you pay, making you pay/scan your code on the way out. So backwards to the “just walk out” motto. They went back on it less than 6 months later.
I scroll through to see if things have been posted before. If I don’t see it, I assume it hasn’t. And I use a client so I don’t see if there are cross posts because it doesn’t display them.
You can see from the screenshot you posted that it was only posted one other time in this community. And that was by me, posting many hours after this one. So you blaming @Stopthatgirl7 is very unfair.
As for why I posted it, simple: federation problems. I looked and didn’t see it already posted, because for whatever reason, on my instance when viewing this community, it didn’t appear. Only when someone else posted it and linked to this post on their instance did I ever become aware of it. If you look at this post on my instance you’ll note only two comments show up, and that’s because they’re the comments I forced to show up by manually searching for them using a different instance’s URL. (Not sure why, but even when trying to search for it, I can’t get your post with the actual screenshot to show up on my instance, hence my reply to this comment instead.)
Eh personally I don’t think there’s a problems with cross-posting. They’re different communities and different people might subscribe to them.
As for the federation issue, I don’t think you should have thought of that. I know I didn’t. Apparently it’s a long-lived issue with lemmy.world federation. Anyone would have assumed federation issues were resolved a while ago.
I don’t know where you live, but I’ve been in many Walmarts in the U.S. and they have private security who are never posted at the exit that I’ve ever seen. Mostly they just sit in an office and watch security cameras.
Maybe you’ve seen it, but it’s not common in my experience.
I just traveled across four states and, because of the bad weather, we stopped at Walmarts along the way so my elderly mother could walk around and stretch her legs.
I think it’s something they do or have done around the holidays when it’s very busy. They might be hiring off duty cops and having them wear their uniform.
That’s the thing that gets me where I live, the cops have reserved parking spots but they still choose the fire lane, I guess crossing the traffic lane to the building is a line they wont cross.
I don’t know about Walmart but I heard Target will facial recognize you and deliberately wait across multiple trips until you have stolen enough to make it grand theft before taking action.
Fair enough. I’m sure they likely are doing this, why wouldn’t they if no one’s stopped them. Even while being technically illegal in the US as another user stated, FBI or retired police involvement wouldn’t be surprising in the slightest, unfortunately.
I highly doubt it’s illegal for a private entity to withhold reporting a crime until they have enough evidence to be actioned on. They made a claim without providing any sort of source backing it up, and the fact that many companies do it points to it being legal, at least in most places they operate.
That’s a very good point. I don’t know why I latched on to Target’s side of things being true/untrue but looked over the legal aspect completely. Strong anti-corporation bias, I imagine…
Thanks for pointing that out. On second look, I can’t seem to find anything to back up the initial claim of their actions being illegal.
I did Target security for a few months. Yes they build cases against people until it’s criminal action. It’s also not subject to one store. Rather I could just type in descriptions of people (apparent age, height, skin tone, etc) and it would search those descriptions. I could then match the person and add it to the running total. When I left I heard that some markets were rolling out an AI to track people. I can answer any questions if there’s anyone who want to know more.
Not much. Employees don’t give a fuck and if they did, they would probably get fired for trying to stop a thief.
Actually, many places where I live are scaling back self-checkout. I suspect it’s because the geniuses who tried to save a buck by getting rid of tellers didn’t realize they would lose more from theft. (It’s amazing how many people don’t give two fucks about shareholder profits, actually.)
A thief is a thief, someone willing to steal from a store covered from top to bottom in cameras and sensors is going to be willing to steal from just about anywhere.
No one at Walmart is stopping you if you try to just walk out with product. No one is getting paid enough to risk getting sued, and there’s a non-zero chance they get fired if they do more than passively trying to stop you.
In reality, they are going to note down your info, pull up the camera feeds, and call the cops. The exact same steps a Fresh store would take.
Also, it’s not the common peasant shareholders that think they are trading real shares on Robinhood. It’s the institutional shareholders that are the real sacks of steaming dog shit.
The Amazon near me has a “Just Fuck Off” policy. They redecorated the old Toys R Us building a few years ago and then never bothered to open the store.
It worked really smoothly for me…the one time I went cuz it was such a depressing experience. Don’t get me wrong tho. I love self checkout. Amazon store sucks.
It just feels sad in there. The colors are sad, the products are boring, the cameras all over are dystopian. Even though there were other people there, it felt isolating. Too sterile.
That immediately reminded me the story of the Mechanical Turk. Check the link for further info - to keep it short both are ways to hide human labour behind alleged automation.
The Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was never a con. It’s been known for a very long time that it’s a way to outsource human tasks on a large scale cheaply. Like, a very long time. I think I first heard about it like 12 years ago?
Unless you mean the way it exploits poor countries for cheap labor. I wouldn’t call that a con, but it is fucked.
By “original Mechanical Turk”, I am clearly referring to the chess player inside a box. It was a con because the system was presented as an automaton, when it is simply human labour.
And I am calling Amazon’s “just walk out” service also a con because it was touted as automatic, even if also being mostly human labour.
I am not calling “Amazon’s Mechanical Turk” a con. It is exploitative, as you said, but it is not a con. People know that it is human labour, and Amazon does not try to hide it.
No, what makes it a con is that it was purported to be automated, but the automation was a failure and had to be done by humans almost 3/4 of the time.
Just because it was a failure doesn’t make it a con.
On its own a failure is not a con. The con is to publicly pretend that the failure is not there.
And Amazon is clearly doing the later - read the quote from the spokesperson in the article, it boils down to “The system is automated! «Chrust us lol». The human labour there is just, for, uh… improvements!” Yeah, sure, and the 1770 machine is totally automated too, the chess player there is just the maintenance worker /s
And I am calling Amazon’s “just walk out” service also a con because it was touted as automatic, even if also being mostly human labour.
That’s not what a con is. A con is a deliberate scam. Amazon’s automated checkout simply didn’t function as effectively as intended. They presumably lost money on the venture because the automation was unreliable. Nothing about this situation was a deliberate attempt to pay over 1,000 employees to check an automated system’s work.
The Mechanical Turk is an interesting story and I’m glad you linked it, but it’s not all that similar.
The automated walk out service wasn’t a con. It was a shortsighted, honestly s***** idea, that was never able to be brought past the human oversight stage.
Con requires intent. I’m absolutely certain they fully intended to make it a completely humanless system. They failed and drug their feet trying and now they’ve shut it down.
If it’s a con, what’s their long game? What are they gain from having humans watch the store remotely? Is it tech just so neat that they’ll have a lot more shoppers than a regular store? Do they save so much in on-site staff that it’s cheaper to run than a conventional store? There’s no advantage here that would make it a worthwhile con. It’s a failed moonshot that they ended up manning with people to see if they could make it work that’s all.
They couldn’t train an AI well enough to replace humans in the loop. That suggests it was a bad idea from the start. If it were possible at all with the current state of the art of AI, Amazon would be one of the companies that could do it.
According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales.
It did have AI, the cameras adjusted based on location, proximity, lighting, etc. They tracked you through the store and gavenyou a unique ID were trained to manage you being blocked from view by other shoppers.
Scanners in baskets/carts is what they are replacing this with.
The ‘Just Walk Out’ system was as the name implies; grab product and leave. No scanners, no checkout, no cashiers; just cameras watching you shop, and a heavy implication that that video is primarily watched by AI to determine your purchases. AFAIK the only scanners were to read a qr code on entry to associate you with your amazon account; the rest is hands off. Or at least that’s what it’s supposed to be. Seems there’s a lot more labour under the hood than the advertising said. Shocker.
Can’t they just…add sensors to the items and add them to your Amazon account cart anytime you add pick one, dunno, using some proximity stuff from the phone itself, then charge for the items once the phone leaves the store?
Sure they can, it just isn’t as simple as “just” ;) How do you, for example, determine who picked which item if two people are standing next to each other? Or if something is put back?
Sure, a proof of concept will always work. Building it for the real world is a completely and utterly different beast.
According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.
if Amazon wasn’t the source of this number, where is it coming from?
Or Amazon, if you don’t like your employees having labor rights, just sue to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional with such awesome groups as Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Amazon was using people to train the model, so at the starts it would be 100%, but eventually the goal would be to get near zero, maybe the average was 70% but when the ended it was near 40%?
I sat in front of one of these ideas at an airport. People are just dumb. They couldn’t figure out how to get into the store. They didn’t understand how to pay by just leaving.
Never blame people for an issue with a system. If you have to blame the people then just admit your system is shit. It’s called idiot proofing and when theirs a bigger idiot proof it some more.
I’ve said the same elsewhere, and the idiots here downvote to oblivion.
It’s so weird. This is a basic rule of building anything that engages with the public. How can anyone assume that everyone will simply “get” how an interface works?
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