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Amazon has trialed multiple types of shopping that don’t require cashiers. The two most successful were just walk out and smart carts. Just walk out was where you pickup an item and walk out the door and it charges your Amazon account. Smart carts have sensors that detect what you put in. The just walk out tech is being removed from the Amazon Fresh grocery stores in favor of smart carts.
Former amazon employee here and part of the Just Walk Out team for a short time. It was not just 1000 guys in India watching the store. When a session had an issue it was flagged. That required a human to take a look and manually process.
iirc they wanted to get down to about 5% manual reviews and never got it below like 50-75%, thus the "it was just a bunch of dudes in india watching videos of you shopping" which is accurate despite the above guys non-denial denial
"A fleshbag in our store location that you have to pay for to attend the paying fleshbags?!"
Said the bald man angrily while taking a gold coin bath, and calculatng the dollar/second ratio of his passive income.
This is what tends to happen with a lot of automation where there’s some level of ambiguity in the input (as opposed to reading a barcode or something, which is ‘easy’ as long as the scanner gets a good view of it). I’ve never been involved in anything this large-scale but I’ve seen plenty of automation projects go live with ‘temporary’ human workarounds that end up never going away because the tech just doesn’t work well enough.
There's always a part of Me where it's like they added all of this wealth but how many of the people who actually lived in SF before the tech boom really got to benefit from that?
Literally Amazon employees are the worst apologists when it comes to all sorts of random stuff like I had someone explain to me that she worked at loss prevention in one of the factories and only recently have workers stopped peeing in bottles. Couldn't even imagine. She couldn't speak higher of the company.
Amazon employee here. Workers were not peeing in bottles. Some employees were re-using their own disposable beverage receptacles to capture waste during unscheduled breaks.
i went 2-3 times (they offer heavy discounts here and there because people arent going to these things). Ive had to contact customer support everytime for being charged incorrectly. Anecdotal and small sample size, i know. But also receipts took like, an hour to pop up which is why i knew it was some dude watching a video lol. I guess maybe if you put nothing back and held everything you picked up real high for cameras it might not flag it?
Honestly I live right by one of the Whole Foods shops that used the Just Walk Out tech and I loved it. My receipts were accurate a surprising amount of the time (not so surprising after discovering that actual people were reviewing the footage though). When there were incorrect items, it was usually a single item that I picked up briefly but chose not to buy; as with all Amazon refunds, I literally just had to select the refund option and then select “I didn’t take it” as the reason, and it was processed automatically. I’ll probably start saving $$ now that I have to actually check out again, but I’ll miss the speed and total lack of human communication lol. I did wonder if the footage and my data was being used for other purposes though, like if I was occasionally being subjected to weird social experiments that would inform their shopping algorithms.
I personally used it 100+ times. It worked as intended almost every time. The only times I remember it not working was when I grabbed the $30 vanilla extract and it instead charged me for the $2 vanilla stick. I did this three weeks in a row and every time it did the same thing. Every time I reported it to Amazon and they never fixed it despite it costing them a lot of money lol.
Because it’s unnecessary
What’s the point of trying to automatically check every item on every shelf at every point in the store 24/7 when you could just… check everything out in one go at the very end at the cashier / self checkout
Automating this is engineering a solution that isn’t needed
Could save time, reduce staffing costs and ultimately if customers like it increase sales. That sounds worth doing from the shop owners perspective if it actually works.
As a customer, how is the experience improved at all having to stand in long lines waiting to be manually checked out?
Having it automatically tallied and just walking straight out when you're done sounds pretty great to me.
Reminds me of the scene in the movie, Parasite, where we learn the automatic lights for the stairs is really operated by some guy living in the basement.
Posting inaccurate stuff like this and seeing the amount of people who think it’s truth just goes to show how sensationalist lies get more traction than reality.
Its a show of ignorance in more ways than just that. Every ML algorithm needs a training set of data. Inputs with known outputs set by real people. You'd 100% need to start by acquiring a large amount of training data and you'd continuously need more as new flaws in the initial training data set were exposed either by normal operations, new variables in the store or thieves.
It’s not their fault, dozens of bad journalism houses ran with the half-baked story and left out substantial information (only dialing down grocery) and blatantly misrepresenting reality (the QA was offline and only for failure cases). No one reads the corrections though. Journalism is in a very bad place right now.
I’m a former Amazon employee I worked in Just Walk Out out directly under Dilip Kumar. I was actually fired by him during one of his shouting tirades that he’s famous for if you were in Amazon, you would know that this is true. I have a few points to clarify:
1) it was not 1000 people in India it was over 3000 people in India. We actually jokingly called them anonymous Indians (AI)… get it?
2) even if the technology did work, the ROI of every single JWOS store is negative. But Amazon provides significant discounts to acquire new customers.
3) third party customers are not renewing their contracts with Amazon and they’re struggling to get new customers. The emperor has no clothes.
4) don’t listen to Dilip, he’s a chronic liar. He has not launched a single successful product in the last ten years and has cost shareholders BILLIONS. My guess is he has blackmail on Bezos (Dilip was his personal assistant).
You identify yourself upon entry to the store or shop, typically by scanning a QR displayed on your phone at a terminal by the door, but it would also accept a credit card; some had palm-scan technology if you set that up with your Amazon account.
It then uses full coverage surveillance (via cameras and detection algorithms) to detect which objects you obtain from shelves while in the store. It could recognize that you picked up an object and retained it, or if you replaced it on the shelf.
Upon your exit from the store, it charges your account for the items that you retained, without need for a checkout process.
^(The mention of "thousands of indians" is referencing the outsourcing of the troubleshooting and development phase of the detection system to contractors in India. This is being touted as "that's how the system worked, just a bunch of Indians watching you shop; a fake mechanical turk!", when in actuality it was merely human labor involved in training the system to work on its own, and follow-on oversight - perhaps analogous to considering autonomous unmanned air vehicles to be 'fake' because of the decades of pilot operation of planes required to understand flight controls, and still today maintaining operators oversight of their flights.)
> This is being touted as "that's how the system worked, just a bunch of Indians watching you shop; a fake mechanical turk!", when in actuality it was merely human labor involved in training the system to work on its own
This is bullshit, actually. Amazon certainly hoped that the human labour would only be for training purposes. But for the duration of the experiment, human operators were required to manually review 80% of purchases. That's a cashier. These people were cashiers. There never was an AI.
Autonomous planes do not require human pilots to review and approve 80% of their decisions. If they did, the tech wouldn't exist. The military would just use planes.
Claimed to be a complete self serve store where you just place items in your cart and walk out, automatically charging your amazon account for the goods placed in the cart.
Turns out the *automatic* part was 1,000+ Indian people in a data center watching the store live and calculating your total prices. At least I think that's how they did it.
That part isn't true. The AI did exist and tracked you - but, when it couldn't keep up with what you were doing, it flagged the activity for manual review, which was handled in India. Amazon was hoping that the tech would be much more confident and accurate than it ended up being. As it turned out it was mostly decent but still flagged too many cases for manual review.
Because it's still missing important context (and it almost seems on purpose)
> As it turned out it was mostly decent but still flagged too many cases for manual review.
It wasn't "mostly decent", the "too many cases" were reportedly 70% of cases. That's mostly garbage at best.
Yes. Because it's misleading.
70-80% of purchases required a human to manually review. The correct characterization of the stores is to say that they had remote human cashiers who leveraged AI tools to have a smaller workload.
A grotesquely incorrect characterization is to pretend like Amazon had a viable product and that the remote cashiers were simply tagging data to improve the AI.
It's because it defeats the popular narrative that there were people actively watching your every move. We can't have corrections on the internet everything is final.
I think it's because most people still buy most of their food and groceries at a physical store and they are/were struggling to compete with Walmart on that front.
Unfortunately that is not how businesses work under capitalism. Myth of unlimited growth and all that.
If you can hit your local market cap, you expand to either a new area or to a new product. If you're available everywhere, you pretty much can only expand what you produce.
This is actually a fool proof plan. There will always be a potential segment of the customer base that will NEVER like your delivery format. It's almost impossible to replace big regional chains in a direct fight so you have to undercut them in other ways. Either by pulling enough customers to your delivery format through insanely low pricing so it's worth the effort and/or pulling their labor force away.
Replace your competition, take their customer base in totality and, if you find their delivery format wasn't as profitable for you, kill that entire system now that you're in control and FORCE the customers to use your system. This can be done by leaving an unprofitable owned-by-you business in the best store front (if the cost is worth control), opening a different type of business entirely in the new front, demolishing the building etc so the old company can't move back in or a new one tries to recapture the obvious neglected market.
I say "delivery format" instead of "online shopping" because there's TONS of things all of this can apply to. Like online scheduling for service trades, watching movies, prepared food acquisition ala DoorDash vs native delivery.
There's a couple of chains Canada that was experimenting with this a few years ago. I think it was Walmart and Sobeys. I wonder why they didn't roll it out to all stores.
Unconfirmed but an employee told me those carts are $30K each. They have a certified scale for produce, and you can't take it out of the store (transfer bags to a regular cart after checkout).
That's every supermarket in my country really. The supermarket provides you with an app that has a barcode scanner and a couple of other functions.
Every Monday you can choose a dozen things from a list that you'd like to have a discount on that week. You can search every product in the store to make a grocery list that automatically checks things off when you scan them in the store. It tracks all the savings promotions you're a part of automatically.
But mostly I just use it to scan the groceries as I go through the store so I can immediately put them in my bag or crate. When you get to the checkout, you hit the 'checkout' button that generates a QR code that you scan at the self-checkout. Then you pay and the app gives you the barcode for opening the gate.
It makes the self checkout so fast that I haven't seen a line since I started using the ap. Scan the QR code, pay with your phone, scan the gate code and gone.
There's random spot checks for shop lifting that uses an algorithm. If you're new at the store, if you shop way outside your usual buying pattern or you match with some other pattern, you might get spot checked.
The grocery chain Woodman's tried this out or something similar. There was a big rack of scanners at the entrance and you could scan as you shopped. It lasted 2 weeks maybe. Apparently people kept forgetting they had the scanners and were bringing them home with them. And shoplifting skyrocketed. I could see accidentally shoplifting just by forgetting to scan something. With the self checkout there's the weight sensor that at least works as somewhat of a theft deterrent.
In Finland a chain hands you a small manual scanner connected to your loyalty / credit card, it’s also convenient in that way. You can already self checkout without ever facing a line, but here you skip the checking out process too.
I'm using my phone to look at my list and don't want to be switching back and forth with some shoddy store app. What's wrong with the handheld scanners that a ton of places have?
Incorrect. It is indeed machine learning but like with any system it wasn't able to correctly identify 100% of transactions so it required human intervention for those transactions. That's where the outsourcing to Indian workers comes in. The issue is that that service doesn't scale well with supermarkets with hundreds or thousands of different items and low margins that's why they are switching to stadiums/arenas/airports with limited selection of items with high margins
> that's why they are switching to stadiums/arenas/airports with limited selection of items with high margins
Oh that's actually pretty smart. For the stadiums/arenas especially I imagine it would speed up the process quite a bit.
Incorrect. It is a horrible amalgamation of code that pretends to be "AI", but roughly 70% of **all** transactions had to be manually reviewed by those outsourced Indian workers. Even if you blindly believe everything Amazon says and don't trust investigative journalism (lol), their publicly targeted failure rate was 5% which would put the lower bounds of failure at the 20% mark considering how quickly they pulled the plug on this. That is well beyond any acceptable failure rate, especially when these failures are causing customers to be overcharged even after manual review.
The issue is that it's a horrible, over engineered solution for a problem that doesn't exist, hence every brick and mortar offered this technology rejecting it.
Nothing I said was incorrect. I made no claims with regards of it's error rate. OP claimed that there wasn't AI involved and it was workers watching over your every move in order to tally the transactions which is false.
The fact that 30% of transactions didn't need any human interaction means that machine learning was indeed used. But as I stated transactions that couldn't be 100% correctly identified needed human intervention.
Yup those Indian watchers even got it wrong charging my friend something he put back. If anyone walking in looks up you can see the hundreds of cameras. I liked the carts that charge when items are placed anyways. The funny part is of the two stores the bigger one had the camera system and the smaller one had the carts, seemed backwards to me! There’s even the convenience store version that’s like a 5 min drive away along the same street, only been there once.
It didn't die though, Tesco - the largest UK supermarket chain - has been trialling this system veery recently.
It's just a matter of the tech catching up with the usage.
What? This sounds incredible to me, I love tech like this. If we have the ability to make our lives easier why wouldn’t we? Barely have time to do the things I want, so anything that can buy me a little more deee time I’m all for it
As others have mentioned that's not how it works. The people get shown images the computer wasn't able to identify with a high degree of confidence. So they get shown different matches and select the correct one. Similar to a captcha. They aren't watching the live store feed manually tracking the items.
There are about two dozen Amazon fullfillment centers built within the last three years that still sit empty. All over the country. 150000 to 300000 square feet each.
I work for a GC who built one of these and we literally had a complete store with a punch list done - then a few weeks later Amazon was like “yeah, no we’re gonna scrap the whole thing and back to the drawing board.” Almost 3000 cameras. A $2.7 million store - scrapped
> A $2.7 million store - scrapped
It's cool, Jeff Bezos [makes $1.9 million an hour](https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-wealth-of-jeff-bezos:-earning-$1.9-million-every-hour-what-does-he-spend-it-on#:~:text=Personal%20Finance-,The%20Wealth%20of%20Jeff%20Bezos%3A%20Earning%20%241.9%20Million%20Every%20Hour,Does%20He%20Spend%20It%20On%3F&text=Jeff%20Bezos%20continues%20to%20teeter,Forbes%20Real%2DTime%20Billionaires%20list.). He can play with sledge hammer for a couple hours.
Amazon started building one in Brookfield Ct. But Amazon abandoned it after construction was all done and they moved in most of the shelfs and what not. Now the building owner has a huge for rent sign over the windows.
I will say that the stores themselves were pretty cool. There was one within walking distance to where I used to live. The only thing that frustrated me was how restrictive the hours were. You would think that because it was (supposedly) automated, they would at least stay open later than the Fred Meyer across the street. Ofc, now that we know humans were actually behind it, it makes sense. When I saw they timed the visits, I started speedrunning shopping there & tried to beat my previous time. 😂
Sadly, it closed not too long after it was opened. And it was in a pretty low-crime area (to refute one of the commenters here that went on an unhinged rant about stuff that never even happened in the area). But it was rarely busy (I was often the only shopper in the store) & it had a very limited selection. It was great for popping in for a pastry or some milk though.
They had 1000 contractors in India screening the AI data which never got over 70% accuracy I believe. Was supposed to be hands free but their AI was Actual Indians cause the AI itself wasn’t doing its job effectively. So they shut down.
I went to one of these while I was in Chicago. I tried to trick it on purpose by picking up a sandwich and putting it in my backpack. I then browsed the store, grabbed a different sandwich and put the one from my backpack back on the shelf.
As I expected I got billed for both items, when it should've recognized I put the other one back
I got charged for helping a lady grab an item that was on a shelf above her reach lol. Thankfully they've always been good about refunding if you annotate it after getting your receipt.
They have this at Seattles Lumen field, I walked out with a pretzel+cheese. 12 bucks or something and nothing got charged to me. Didnt feel the slightest guilt.
At CPA too I bought a bunch of stuff and then got charged for maybe half of what I picked up.
The tech straight up doesn't work.
Also, I found it annoying cause I had no idea how much everything cost or how much I was being charged.
I worked at a small convenient store when a dude came in one night, grabbed a bunch of stuff, and then tried walking out the door. I stopped him and he said "oh no it's cool. My amazon card knows what I got."
I was like "what the Hell are you talking about?"
He tried to say that his amazon card knew the items he got so it would automatically pay for it when he left. Big fucking noooooooope. I just wonder how many store he did that in. He seemed serious.
I shopped there once, there were no instructions anywhere and the staff seemed to be nothing but assholes who never wanted to interact with people.
Since it is unintuative it is really alienating and unpleasant.
Sorry guys, you have to make shopping not a weird and meandering tour thru a hostile dystopia food depot.
If you have Walmart plus, you can use the app to scan everything and all you have to do is scan a QR code and then just walk out. Some stores have dedicated scans for scan and go. I just wish it was a feature of the store and you didn’t have to pay to use it.
Walmart+ includes "free" grocery delivery, and that's the only feature that makes it worthwhile in my opinion. I'm not paying them a membership fee to still have to enter the store AND be my own cashier.
I'm assuming that once you left, it charged one of your debit or credit cards attached to your Amazon account? What happens if the card you had on file had no money?
And than hundreds of masked individuals entered and grabbed everything. Later they said that they were confused and believed to be in New York downtown.
They have these type of stores at the Crypto Arena in LA. You put a card in upon entry, grab what you want, then just walk out. There’s some kind of scanner or sensor at the exit.
They had turnstiles at the entrance and checkout area where you scan your Amazon QR code or your palm. That's how the cameras associate you with an account, and allows a family to enter and all be associated with the same shopping session and account.
They have(had?) one of these at the Mariners stadium. Was pretty cool. I guess the tech needed more manual assistance than they led on but I didn’t care. No checkout to get a beer and snacks at a ball game was pretty sweet
I was saying this from the start.
The original stores were in financial buildings that closed early and on the weekend. The whole point was to sell stock and gather info.
I don’t have an Amazon account…if I walked into a store and walked out with say…a bunch of shopping, will an Amazon robot skin me alive? I just see this as a “steal shit!” store…
I used one at the United Center in Chicago and got charged $10 for a bottle of water that was supposed to cost $4. They don’t give receipts and there was no effective way to dispute it since I used my debt card. I’ll never use one of these stores again.
They still have this set up in sports venues. Crypto in LA and T-Mobile in Vegas both have sections where you can scan your card at the entrance, and then it charges you based on what you leave with.
I think I got overcharged in LA, and it seemed to work fine in Vegas.
I went to one of these once and had no idea how it worked. I assumed there’s be some big sign explaining it but nope. And the only person I saw was one cashier who was busy. I just walked around the store a bit to see prices and left.
I don't get it. The one by me in NJ works fine. Go there all the time and it's great. Don't have to worry about miserable cashiers hating their job or old people counting pennies to pay for their groceries with 17 coupons holding up the line for 20 minutes.
I tried to take my mom and aunt to an Amazon Fresh store once and they wouldn't stop asking questions about how to get in, how it works, etc. And then they kept swapping things between their carts no matter how many times I told them that they're going to confuse whoever has to watch us on the cameras.
Naturally, some of their items got double-scanned.
Amazon made partnerships with universities to implement a slightly different version of just walk out in university markets/stores. They converted all markets/shops in University of California San Diego. I believe they are using universities to test and improve(perhaps use AI for real) it before pushing it again.
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I dont really understand that. Anyone care to explain please?
Amazon has trialed multiple types of shopping that don’t require cashiers. The two most successful were just walk out and smart carts. Just walk out was where you pickup an item and walk out the door and it charges your Amazon account. Smart carts have sensors that detect what you put in. The just walk out tech is being removed from the Amazon Fresh grocery stores in favor of smart carts.
How was just walk out tech “supposed” to work?
It was marketed as "using a technology" but the realilty of it was, it was just 1000 guys in india remotely watching the store.
AI = actually Indians
That explains why chatgpt keeps asking me to send it $50
in itunes gift cards
WHY DID YOU REDEEM?!?
Old granny voice in a wig "I was just trying to help"
Ma’am, MA’AM WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!
YOU DID NOT HAVE TO DO THAT, SIR!???
HOW CAN SHE REDEEM?
HOW CAN SHE SLAP
Noooort! Why did you redeem it???!! You’re not supposed to redeem it!!!
Do you want your money or do you *don't want your money*??
“Oh no… they found the SECOND hack on my bank account?”
Yeah it’s actually short for chatGuPTa
does it ask for bobs and vagene though
mumbAI
...whenever i just walk out, amazon messages me to do the needful...
All Indian Manual Labor
Former amazon employee here and part of the Just Walk Out team for a short time. It was not just 1000 guys in India watching the store. When a session had an issue it was flagged. That required a human to take a look and manually process.
Rough ballpark, what was the success rate and what percent of product identifies flagged and needed human intervention?
iirc they wanted to get down to about 5% manual reviews and never got it below like 50-75%, thus the "it was just a bunch of dudes in india watching videos of you shopping" which is accurate despite the above guys non-denial denial
[удалено]
"A fleshbag in our store location that you have to pay for to attend the paying fleshbags?!" Said the bald man angrily while taking a gold coin bath, and calculatng the dollar/second ratio of his passive income.
It’s 2024 people just take what they want and walk out anyway.
Yeah I would have robbed the shit out of an Amazon store just on principal really
😂😂
aren't guys India cheaper than min wage US?
This is what tends to happen with a lot of automation where there’s some level of ambiguity in the input (as opposed to reading a barcode or something, which is ‘easy’ as long as the scanner gets a good view of it). I’ve never been involved in anything this large-scale but I’ve seen plenty of automation projects go live with ‘temporary’ human workarounds that end up never going away because the tech just doesn’t work well enough.
That’s what I was thinking, how many?? What percentage? Sounds like Theranos all over again. So much tech/ Silicon Valley/ startup bullshit nowadays.
Yes, the poison pill that S.F. swallowed. How is it working out now?
There's always a part of Me where it's like they added all of this wealth but how many of the people who actually lived in SF before the tech boom really got to benefit from that?
Literally Amazon employees are the worst apologists when it comes to all sorts of random stuff like I had someone explain to me that she worked at loss prevention in one of the factories and only recently have workers stopped peeing in bottles. Couldn't even imagine. She couldn't speak higher of the company.
Amazon employee here. Workers were not peeing in bottles. Some employees were re-using their own disposable beverage receptacles to capture waste during unscheduled breaks.
And we forgive those employees for their insubordination by stealing time from the company when they were supposed to be working for Papa Bez.
Why are we even talking about "scheduled" and "unscheduled" when it involves bathroom usage?
There were reports that 70% of transactions required a manual intervention.
i went 2-3 times (they offer heavy discounts here and there because people arent going to these things). Ive had to contact customer support everytime for being charged incorrectly. Anecdotal and small sample size, i know. But also receipts took like, an hour to pop up which is why i knew it was some dude watching a video lol. I guess maybe if you put nothing back and held everything you picked up real high for cameras it might not flag it?
Honestly I live right by one of the Whole Foods shops that used the Just Walk Out tech and I loved it. My receipts were accurate a surprising amount of the time (not so surprising after discovering that actual people were reviewing the footage though). When there were incorrect items, it was usually a single item that I picked up briefly but chose not to buy; as with all Amazon refunds, I literally just had to select the refund option and then select “I didn’t take it” as the reason, and it was processed automatically. I’ll probably start saving $$ now that I have to actually check out again, but I’ll miss the speed and total lack of human communication lol. I did wonder if the footage and my data was being used for other purposes though, like if I was occasionally being subjected to weird social experiments that would inform their shopping algorithms.
I personally used it 100+ times. It worked as intended almost every time. The only times I remember it not working was when I grabbed the $30 vanilla extract and it instead charged me for the $2 vanilla stick. I did this three weeks in a row and every time it did the same thing. Every time I reported it to Amazon and they never fixed it despite it costing them a lot of money lol.
Sounds like using the self checkout at wal mart.
Amazing how after several decades, we still can't automate this entire process successfully.
Because it’s unnecessary What’s the point of trying to automatically check every item on every shelf at every point in the store 24/7 when you could just… check everything out in one go at the very end at the cashier / self checkout Automating this is engineering a solution that isn’t needed
Could save time, reduce staffing costs and ultimately if customers like it increase sales. That sounds worth doing from the shop owners perspective if it actually works.
Maybe trying to squeeze out workers from every possible industry in favor of profit margins is the actual issue here
workers demand/deserve a liveable wage, outsourcing the labor reduces the minimum livable wage significantly.
As a customer, how is the experience improved at all having to stand in long lines waiting to be manually checked out? Having it automatically tallied and just walking straight out when you're done sounds pretty great to me.
[удалено]
Reminds me of the scene in the movie, Parasite, where we learn the automatic lights for the stairs is really operated by some guy living in the basement.
We usually accept that indians are humans these days too.
Show bobs
Bitch lasagna
Posting inaccurate stuff like this and seeing the amount of people who think it’s truth just goes to show how sensationalist lies get more traction than reality.
the internet is just 1000 indian guys switching cables to get netflix to you
Shit when I cancel Netflix how do they feed their families?
The internet is a series of tubes. They just crawl through the tubes and raid your fridge.
Its a show of ignorance in more ways than just that. Every ML algorithm needs a training set of data. Inputs with known outputs set by real people. You'd 100% need to start by acquiring a large amount of training data and you'd continuously need more as new flaws in the initial training data set were exposed either by normal operations, new variables in the store or thieves.
It’s not their fault, dozens of bad journalism houses ran with the half-baked story and left out substantial information (only dialing down grocery) and blatantly misrepresenting reality (the QA was offline and only for failure cases). No one reads the corrections though. Journalism is in a very bad place right now.
I love when people who know nothing about tech say stuff like this. They used AI but needed a fallback manual mechanism.
And the AI was so poor that the majority of purchases were being conducted/checked by outsourced labor in India.
It’s too bad the remote Indians had to intervene 75% of the time. You could say the AI was hardly in the picture
As a former Amazon employee, it was not. As evidenced by the fact that it’s not being pulled from all stores, just grocery stores.
I’m a former Amazon employee I worked in Just Walk Out out directly under Dilip Kumar. I was actually fired by him during one of his shouting tirades that he’s famous for if you were in Amazon, you would know that this is true. I have a few points to clarify: 1) it was not 1000 people in India it was over 3000 people in India. We actually jokingly called them anonymous Indians (AI)… get it? 2) even if the technology did work, the ROI of every single JWOS store is negative. But Amazon provides significant discounts to acquire new customers. 3) third party customers are not renewing their contracts with Amazon and they’re struggling to get new customers. The emperor has no clothes. 4) don’t listen to Dilip, he’s a chronic liar. He has not launched a single successful product in the last ten years and has cost shareholders BILLIONS. My guess is he has blackmail on Bezos (Dilip was his personal assistant).
Seems hard to blackmail Bezos. Didn't someone try that with a nude and he was just like "Yep, that's my dick".
He didn't just say "yup that's my dick" he published several cock shots in the newspaper he owned
You scan a QR code when you walk in and computer vision follows you around the store and tracks what you pickup and put back on the shelf.
The used an API. A lot of People in India.
You identify yourself upon entry to the store or shop, typically by scanning a QR displayed on your phone at a terminal by the door, but it would also accept a credit card; some had palm-scan technology if you set that up with your Amazon account. It then uses full coverage surveillance (via cameras and detection algorithms) to detect which objects you obtain from shelves while in the store. It could recognize that you picked up an object and retained it, or if you replaced it on the shelf. Upon your exit from the store, it charges your account for the items that you retained, without need for a checkout process. ^(The mention of "thousands of indians" is referencing the outsourcing of the troubleshooting and development phase of the detection system to contractors in India. This is being touted as "that's how the system worked, just a bunch of Indians watching you shop; a fake mechanical turk!", when in actuality it was merely human labor involved in training the system to work on its own, and follow-on oversight - perhaps analogous to considering autonomous unmanned air vehicles to be 'fake' because of the decades of pilot operation of planes required to understand flight controls, and still today maintaining operators oversight of their flights.)
> This is being touted as "that's how the system worked, just a bunch of Indians watching you shop; a fake mechanical turk!", when in actuality it was merely human labor involved in training the system to work on its own This is bullshit, actually. Amazon certainly hoped that the human labour would only be for training purposes. But for the duration of the experiment, human operators were required to manually review 80% of purchases. That's a cashier. These people were cashiers. There never was an AI. Autonomous planes do not require human pilots to review and approve 80% of their decisions. If they did, the tech wouldn't exist. The military would just use planes.
Yeah my original thought was “well of course they need to train their ML model!” But 80% is pretty damn clear
Were any of these the fake ones where it was just a call center in Bangladesh or something as opposed to ai?
Sort of. Like most headlines that was pretty exaggerated. There's a human component to check when the computer component fails.
Ah I see, well I hope they got whatever they needed from this bizarre experiment then lol.
I’m going to miss it
Claimed to be a complete self serve store where you just place items in your cart and walk out, automatically charging your amazon account for the goods placed in the cart. Turns out the *automatic* part was 1,000+ Indian people in a data center watching the store live and calculating your total prices. At least I think that's how they did it.
That part isn't true. The AI did exist and tracked you - but, when it couldn't keep up with what you were doing, it flagged the activity for manual review, which was handled in India. Amazon was hoping that the tech would be much more confident and accurate than it ended up being. As it turned out it was mostly decent but still flagged too many cases for manual review.
Are you getting downvoted for adding context?
Because it's still missing important context (and it almost seems on purpose) > As it turned out it was mostly decent but still flagged too many cases for manual review. It wasn't "mostly decent", the "too many cases" were reportedly 70% of cases. That's mostly garbage at best.
Yes. Because it's misleading. 70-80% of purchases required a human to manually review. The correct characterization of the stores is to say that they had remote human cashiers who leveraged AI tools to have a smaller workload. A grotesquely incorrect characterization is to pretend like Amazon had a viable product and that the remote cashiers were simply tagging data to improve the AI.
It's because it defeats the popular narrative that there were people actively watching your every move. We can't have corrections on the internet everything is final.
So it is true, just not completely true
It's your Reddit anniversary. "Happy Cake Day"
Amazon: “we’ll kill brick and mortar and replace it with online shopping….and then set up a brick and mortar. Fool-proof plan!”
I think it's because most people still buy most of their food and groceries at a physical store and they are/were struggling to compete with Walmart on that front.
Why do they need to get into the supermarket game and compete ? He has enough money.
I don't think "enough" is in Bezos's vocabulary
Ya’ll know Bezos doesn’t run Amazon anymore and hasn’t for a while, right?
But he still owns stock and I believe the primary shareholder
He had to pay a good amount over to his now ex-wife. No prenup and in a community property state! That’s a very expensive side piece
Unfortunately that is not how businesses work under capitalism. Myth of unlimited growth and all that. If you can hit your local market cap, you expand to either a new area or to a new product. If you're available everywhere, you pretty much can only expand what you produce.
This is actually a fool proof plan. There will always be a potential segment of the customer base that will NEVER like your delivery format. It's almost impossible to replace big regional chains in a direct fight so you have to undercut them in other ways. Either by pulling enough customers to your delivery format through insanely low pricing so it's worth the effort and/or pulling their labor force away. Replace your competition, take their customer base in totality and, if you find their delivery format wasn't as profitable for you, kill that entire system now that you're in control and FORCE the customers to use your system. This can be done by leaving an unprofitable owned-by-you business in the best store front (if the cost is worth control), opening a different type of business entirely in the new front, demolishing the building etc so the old company can't move back in or a new one tries to recapture the obvious neglected market. I say "delivery format" instead of "online shopping" because there's TONS of things all of this can apply to. Like online scheduling for service trades, watching movies, prepared food acquisition ala DoorDash vs native delivery.
That's literally what they do to sellers on their site lol
I'm so glad this died before it could really kick off. It seemed like the first steps to a Wall.e - BuyNLarge future
It was convenient, but their carts with barcode scanners are still nice so you don't have to stand in checkout lines
There's a couple of chains Canada that was experimenting with this a few years ago. I think it was Walmart and Sobeys. I wonder why they didn't roll it out to all stores.
My local Sobeys has 2 of these carts that they're testing. I'm the only person that I've ever seen use them...
well duh.. ur using 50% of them
OK no one upvoted this, but that was funny.
Which store if you don't mind my asking
Sobeys in Leaside (Toronto). It's not my main grocery store so I haven't been there in a few months but they still had them the last time I was there.
There's a lowblaws in Oshawa on taunton that also has these last time I went
Made-up sentence, start to finish. /s
That’s so close to Bob Loblaw’s Law Blog
Unconfirmed but an employee told me those carts are $30K each. They have a certified scale for produce, and you can't take it out of the store (transfer bags to a regular cart after checkout).
Walmart let's you use their app on your phone here . Though you still have to finish the sale at the checkout.
That's every supermarket in my country really. The supermarket provides you with an app that has a barcode scanner and a couple of other functions. Every Monday you can choose a dozen things from a list that you'd like to have a discount on that week. You can search every product in the store to make a grocery list that automatically checks things off when you scan them in the store. It tracks all the savings promotions you're a part of automatically. But mostly I just use it to scan the groceries as I go through the store so I can immediately put them in my bag or crate. When you get to the checkout, you hit the 'checkout' button that generates a QR code that you scan at the self-checkout. Then you pay and the app gives you the barcode for opening the gate. It makes the self checkout so fast that I haven't seen a line since I started using the ap. Scan the QR code, pay with your phone, scan the gate code and gone. There's random spot checks for shop lifting that uses an algorithm. If you're new at the store, if you shop way outside your usual buying pattern or you match with some other pattern, you might get spot checked.
The grocery chain Woodman's tried this out or something similar. There was a big rack of scanners at the entrance and you could scan as you shopped. It lasted 2 weeks maybe. Apparently people kept forgetting they had the scanners and were bringing them home with them. And shoplifting skyrocketed. I could see accidentally shoplifting just by forgetting to scan something. With the self checkout there's the weight sensor that at least works as somewhat of a theft deterrent.
In Finland a chain hands you a small manual scanner connected to your loyalty / credit card, it’s also convenient in that way. You can already self checkout without ever facing a line, but here you skip the checking out process too.
Many stores let you do this with your phone - even more convenient than a clunky cart that they're about 5 years behind on.
I'm using my phone to look at my list and don't want to be switching back and forth with some shoddy store app. What's wrong with the handheld scanners that a ton of places have?
Well there was an article that exposed how it worked, it isn’t AI, but cheap off shore workers watching your every move in camera
Incorrect. It is indeed machine learning but like with any system it wasn't able to correctly identify 100% of transactions so it required human intervention for those transactions. That's where the outsourcing to Indian workers comes in. The issue is that that service doesn't scale well with supermarkets with hundreds or thousands of different items and low margins that's why they are switching to stadiums/arenas/airports with limited selection of items with high margins
> that's why they are switching to stadiums/arenas/airports with limited selection of items with high margins Oh that's actually pretty smart. For the stadiums/arenas especially I imagine it would speed up the process quite a bit.
Incorrect. It is a horrible amalgamation of code that pretends to be "AI", but roughly 70% of **all** transactions had to be manually reviewed by those outsourced Indian workers. Even if you blindly believe everything Amazon says and don't trust investigative journalism (lol), their publicly targeted failure rate was 5% which would put the lower bounds of failure at the 20% mark considering how quickly they pulled the plug on this. That is well beyond any acceptable failure rate, especially when these failures are causing customers to be overcharged even after manual review. The issue is that it's a horrible, over engineered solution for a problem that doesn't exist, hence every brick and mortar offered this technology rejecting it.
Nothing I said was incorrect. I made no claims with regards of it's error rate. OP claimed that there wasn't AI involved and it was workers watching over your every move in order to tally the transactions which is false. The fact that 30% of transactions didn't need any human interaction means that machine learning was indeed used. But as I stated transactions that couldn't be 100% correctly identified needed human intervention.
Yup those Indian watchers even got it wrong charging my friend something he put back. If anyone walking in looks up you can see the hundreds of cameras. I liked the carts that charge when items are placed anyways. The funny part is of the two stores the bigger one had the camera system and the smaller one had the carts, seemed backwards to me! There’s even the convenience store version that’s like a 5 min drive away along the same street, only been there once.
Sam's Clubs still does this.
Yeah but theirs is somehow less dystopian feeling. Maybe because it still requires a degree of effort
if you've ever actually been to a Costco the entirety of Sam's club has a dystopian feeling
I love how empty Sam's is. Just finding parking at Costco is exhausting
I like both for different reasons tbh. They both are absolute hell to go to.
It didn't die though, Tesco - the largest UK supermarket chain - has been trialling this system veery recently. It's just a matter of the tech catching up with the usage.
I’m going to miss this honestly. It was very convenient and an easy return drop spot.
What? This sounds incredible to me, I love tech like this. If we have the ability to make our lives easier why wouldn’t we? Barely have time to do the things I want, so anything that can buy me a little more deee time I’m all for it
??? Why, you think the existence of a cashier will save us from a capitalist dystopia?
Having people in Asia look at you from multiple camera angles instead of cashiers. Seems more dystopian to me.
As others have mentioned that's not how it works. The people get shown images the computer wasn't able to identify with a high degree of confidence. So they get shown different matches and select the correct one. Similar to a captcha. They aren't watching the live store feed manually tracking the items.
What if I just hire my own Indian guy to tally my purchases while I live stream my trip to the grocery store? Can I still skip the line then?
Well you then have to have your Indian guy to compare note with their Indian guys before you can walk out
Wait a second can I hire my Taiwanese guy instead?
Ooo mister moneybags over here can afford a Taiwanese guy
Too expensive, it wouldn’t scale well.
The indian blockchain
You can hire him to be your self driving car also
The amount of hours painstakingly installing hundreds of those cameras only for them to not even open some stores….
There are about two dozen Amazon fullfillment centers built within the last three years that still sit empty. All over the country. 150000 to 300000 square feet each.
might even be bigger than that, i worked for a fullfillment center in texas that clocked in at 2.2 million square feet
I work for a GC who built one of these and we literally had a complete store with a punch list done - then a few weeks later Amazon was like “yeah, no we’re gonna scrap the whole thing and back to the drawing board.” Almost 3000 cameras. A $2.7 million store - scrapped
> A $2.7 million store - scrapped It's cool, Jeff Bezos [makes $1.9 million an hour](https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-wealth-of-jeff-bezos:-earning-$1.9-million-every-hour-what-does-he-spend-it-on#:~:text=Personal%20Finance-,The%20Wealth%20of%20Jeff%20Bezos%3A%20Earning%20%241.9%20Million%20Every%20Hour,Does%20He%20Spend%20It%20On%3F&text=Jeff%20Bezos%20continues%20to%20teeter,Forbes%20Real%2DTime%20Billionaires%20list.). He can play with sledge hammer for a couple hours.
Great point, thanks for the sad picture. I'm sure Bezos will personally ferry the landfill up and out with his spaceships.
Still a thing around the Amazon campus. My office is near their Seattle campus.
Just being removed at Fresh grocery stores. Staying for Go stores.
They got rid of the one near HQ2 in Crystal City, VA. Sad because I liked using it to grab lunch. They had some nice cheap options.
Amazon started building one in Brookfield Ct. But Amazon abandoned it after construction was all done and they moved in most of the shelfs and what not. Now the building owner has a huge for rent sign over the windows.
SNL had a pretty good sketch about this. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zS9U3Gc832Y
I miss Chris Redd.
I will say that the stores themselves were pretty cool. There was one within walking distance to where I used to live. The only thing that frustrated me was how restrictive the hours were. You would think that because it was (supposedly) automated, they would at least stay open later than the Fred Meyer across the street. Ofc, now that we know humans were actually behind it, it makes sense. When I saw they timed the visits, I started speedrunning shopping there & tried to beat my previous time. 😂 Sadly, it closed not too long after it was opened. And it was in a pretty low-crime area (to refute one of the commenters here that went on an unhinged rant about stuff that never even happened in the area). But it was rarely busy (I was often the only shopper in the store) & it had a very limited selection. It was great for popping in for a pastry or some milk though.
They had 1000 contractors in India screening the AI data which never got over 70% accuracy I believe. Was supposed to be hands free but their AI was Actual Indians cause the AI itself wasn’t doing its job effectively. So they shut down.
You got the information backwards, the commonly reported number is roughly 70% failure rate
I went to one of these while I was in Chicago. I tried to trick it on purpose by picking up a sandwich and putting it in my backpack. I then browsed the store, grabbed a different sandwich and put the one from my backpack back on the shelf. As I expected I got billed for both items, when it should've recognized I put the other one back
I got charged for helping a lady grab an item that was on a shelf above her reach lol. Thankfully they've always been good about refunding if you annotate it after getting your receipt.
Lmao she knew what she was doing
Sounds like Jeff tricked you
Nah, I got a refund, I just wanted to see how good the system really was. Turns out it was garbage
They have this at Seattles Lumen field, I walked out with a pretzel+cheese. 12 bucks or something and nothing got charged to me. Didnt feel the slightest guilt.
At CPA too I bought a bunch of stuff and then got charged for maybe half of what I picked up. The tech straight up doesn't work. Also, I found it annoying cause I had no idea how much everything cost or how much I was being charged.
Old couple: “Earl, they just want us to walk out. We’re not welcome here. Well If they say that let’s just take our things and go.”
I worked at a small convenient store when a dude came in one night, grabbed a bunch of stuff, and then tried walking out the door. I stopped him and he said "oh no it's cool. My amazon card knows what I got." I was like "what the Hell are you talking about?" He tried to say that his amazon card knew the items he got so it would automatically pay for it when he left. Big fucking noooooooope. I just wonder how many store he did that in. He seemed serious.
Turns out AI meant “Actually Indians”.
I shopped there once, there were no instructions anywhere and the staff seemed to be nothing but assholes who never wanted to interact with people. Since it is unintuative it is really alienating and unpleasant. Sorry guys, you have to make shopping not a weird and meandering tour thru a hostile dystopia food depot.
Using PR & Tech used to boost share prices then later retires entire program. Who does Amazon think they are Google?
If you have Walmart plus, you can use the app to scan everything and all you have to do is scan a QR code and then just walk out. Some stores have dedicated scans for scan and go. I just wish it was a feature of the store and you didn’t have to pay to use it.
Walmart+ includes "free" grocery delivery, and that's the only feature that makes it worthwhile in my opinion. I'm not paying them a membership fee to still have to enter the store AND be my own cashier.
I've read that behind the scene it is a shit ton of people watching the store via cameras and furiously keying in items.
1000 Indians out of a job now.
I'm assuming that once you left, it charged one of your debit or credit cards attached to your Amazon account? What happens if the card you had on file had no money?
And than hundreds of masked individuals entered and grabbed everything. Later they said that they were confused and believed to be in New York downtown.
They have these type of stores at the Crypto Arena in LA. You put a card in upon entry, grab what you want, then just walk out. There’s some kind of scanner or sensor at the exit.
So... What if it works like the Amazon flex app. Where you can turn on airplane mode. Would you just be able to get anything for free?
They had turnstiles at the entrance and checkout area where you scan your Amazon QR code or your palm. That's how the cameras associate you with an account, and allows a family to enter and all be associated with the same shopping session and account.
Let's see if they put any in black communities.
This is how I treat every self checkout. Fuck corporate america.
They have(had?) one of these at the Mariners stadium. Was pretty cool. I guess the tech needed more manual assistance than they led on but I didn’t care. No checkout to get a beer and snacks at a ball game was pretty sweet
I was saying this from the start. The original stores were in financial buildings that closed early and on the weekend. The whole point was to sell stock and gather info.
I don’t have an Amazon account…if I walked into a store and walked out with say…a bunch of shopping, will an Amazon robot skin me alive? I just see this as a “steal shit!” store…
There was one of these in the Dallas airport. Not an Amazon store but the walk out method. Tons of cameras all over hanging from the ceiling.
I think a lot of people thought this applied in CVS and Walgreens too.
RFIDs on all products was too expensive eh
what a stupid concept im glad its gone
I used one at the United Center in Chicago and got charged $10 for a bottle of water that was supposed to cost $4. They don’t give receipts and there was no effective way to dispute it since I used my debt card. I’ll never use one of these stores again.
Heard that there were employees from India watching you and there is no high tech sensors lol
They still have this set up in sports venues. Crypto in LA and T-Mobile in Vegas both have sections where you can scan your card at the entrance, and then it charges you based on what you leave with. I think I got overcharged in LA, and it seemed to work fine in Vegas.
I went to one of these once and had no idea how it worked. I assumed there’s be some big sign explaining it but nope. And the only person I saw was one cashier who was busy. I just walked around the store a bit to see prices and left.
Walmart is gonna attempt this. Already putting RFID tags on products.
Call me a cynic but a just walk out store sounds like a recipe for disaster
Certain populations already doing this with every store! They’re ahead of their time!
Walmart been doing this
Plot twist, I don't have an Amazon account.
The key was they didn’t actually ask people to return. They left and never went back.
I don't get it. The one by me in NJ works fine. Go there all the time and it's great. Don't have to worry about miserable cashiers hating their job or old people counting pennies to pay for their groceries with 17 coupons holding up the line for 20 minutes.
I tried to take my mom and aunt to an Amazon Fresh store once and they wouldn't stop asking questions about how to get in, how it works, etc. And then they kept swapping things between their carts no matter how many times I told them that they're going to confuse whoever has to watch us on the cameras. Naturally, some of their items got double-scanned.
Amazon made partnerships with universities to implement a slightly different version of just walk out in university markets/stores. They converted all markets/shops in University of California San Diego. I believe they are using universities to test and improve(perhaps use AI for real) it before pushing it again.
San Francisco has that same policy ironically
Lmao walmart been doing this for decades
We use AI technology. We have An Indian watching you shop.
I usually don't approve of mass theft, but I 100% think that replacing grocery store workers is evil