9mo ago

Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores

gizmodo.com Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores

Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.

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.

Technology @beehaw.org

Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores

gizmodo.com /amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116

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Technology @lemmy.world

Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores

gizmodo.com /amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116

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96 comments

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.
Lmao.
- idk...
  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?
  
  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%?
  
  If the numbers don’t match your narrative, just make them up! That’s the Gizmodo way.
  
  Probably the '1000 people in india' reviewing that footage.
  The rest of the articles linked in the above one are pay walled and I don't care enough to dig further.
- Goes to show the true state of the art for AI right now
  
  Meanwhile, my college machine learning model made to recognize three types of flower by sepal length: 92% success rate.
  
  I'm not an expert but uh, I don't think this had anything to do with AI. It was just a scanner in a basket.
- This feels so creepy to, being watched spending your money by slaves on the other side of the globe, and Amazon pretending it to be automated !
  
  Amazon pretending it to be automated !
  Is it surprising for a company running a service called Mechanical Turk?
  
  Slaves?
- Incredible. Their "AI" is just a bunch of people watching cameras in India.
  
  AI stands for Actually India
- 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.

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.

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.
- You linked to the original Mechanical Turk. Perhaps you already know this but Amazon actually runs an Mechanical Turk service:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
  
  You linked to the original Mechanical Turk.
  Yup, that's intended. The original Mechanical Turk was a con, just like Amazon's "just walk out" service.
- I believe it was Molly White (@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io ) who said that every AI idea like this will eventually be revealed to be a mechanical turk. So far she seems right on point.

It's a shame this isn't working out, I was really hoping it would turn out to be a better way of doing self-checkouts.
The little convenience store on my way to work is nice, but I guess it falls apart in a larger store situation.

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.

"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.

What is preventing someone from just walking into a random store with no Amazon account and walking out with stuff?
- What is preventing someone from doing that at Walmart?…
  
  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.)
  
  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.
  
  The state constables posted at the exit usually lol
- The one I went to had a turnstile after you walk though the front door so you needed to scan the code from the app.
  
  There was a video going around on Twitter when they first implemented this where people were just hopping the turnstile a la NYC Subway

All this complexity and expensive tech just to avoid paying a couple of cashier's and bagboys. It amazes me
- But the guy with the MBA had a graph showing it pays for itself in 38 years! (46 if you add consulting fees.)

Joke's on them, I was already Just Walking Out without going to the checkout 😎

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.
- What made it depressing for you?
  
  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.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday.
The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store.
Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts.
However, the spokesperson acknowledged these associates validate “a small minority” of shopping visits when AI can’t determine a purchase.
Amazon Fresh, the e-commerce giant’s grocery store first launched in 2007, has just over 40 locations around the United States.
Amazon’s push away from expensive tests like Just Walk Out may be a sign the company is looking to further expand its presence as a supermarket.
The original article contains 512 words, the summary contains 126 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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.
- If they lose even a cent doing something new its right back to the old way every time. Can't let the share holders down I guess.

Could we please stop crossposting to 7 different communities?
- ?? I didn’t post this anywhere else? Or even see it anywhere else?
  
  I'm not saying you did this, but someone did.
- 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@lemmy.world 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.)
  
  I'm not blaming any specific person, I'm blaming whoever thought it was a good idea to cross-post this 7 times.
  As for why I posted it, simple: federation problems.
  Ok sure, that explains it. I should have thought about that.

96 comments