Posted by trenning 8 hours ago
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-to-shut-down-all-...
Amazon straight up wants to just become Walmart. Or maybe Sears is a more apt comparison given their mail-order beginnings.
The interesting question isn't whether the tech was ready. It wasn't. The question is whether Amazon learned anything useful from the attempt.
Computer vision for retail checkout is a legitimate hard problem. Occlusion, similar-looking products, people changing their minds. I've worked on CV pipelines and the gap between "works in the demo" and "works at scale" is brutal.
My guess: they collected a ton of training data from those human reviewers. Whether they'll use it for a v2 or just write it off, who knows.
Knowing this, it was over before it ever started. Beyond the masses of people already having aversion to the oddness of how it worked and likely never wanting to try it, these and others would swear off the store forever the first time they ever got charged for something they didn't take. No one wants to monitor and fix erroneous purchase errors.
Edit: it actually opened in August, so it was around for about six months instead of two.
Now it seems Amazon is going to leave us a grocery desert yet again.
They were piloting smart carts at the location. The cart scans your items so checking out you just push the cart through a scanner that weighs it. But this invention was like a microcosm of Amazon’s whole fuckup with groceries. The problem with the store wasn’t that I couldn’t check out fast enough, it’s that it was a shit grocery store. They had popular products but they were missing all the unpopular, low margin products you need to actually cook (baking powder, shortening, tomato paste, soy sauce…). They only hire non-union jobs program people at the registers because Amazon believes that cashier is a sub-human role.
The previous store had an owner who would wander the aisles and chat with customers. The new store has Europeans with clipboards who watch you as you shop.
What grocery stores still have union workers?
I had a job as a union worker in a supermarket, and am glad that's still available to others.
https://www.ufcw.org/actions/campaign/albertsons-and-safeway...
In the Seattle area where the poster is from, pretty much all the grocery stores are unionized. Workers at big stores like Safeway, Fred Meyer, QFC, and Albertsons, and local stores PCC, Uwajimaya are represented by UFCW3000. https://ufcw3000.org/shop-union
Additionally, Teamsters 174 organizes a lot of the grocery freight workers. https://teamsters174.net/warehouse-and-grocery/
For instance, the one in north Seattle (Shoreline) is within eyesight of a Safeway, a Sprouts, two international markets and a chef wholesaler.
The other three locations are similarly crowded with options.
What food desert are you referring to?
There's no walkable grocery store in that area. My friend lives in the area and uses a wheelchair, and Amazon Fresh was the only actual grocery store she could go to.
As much as I'm hoping they do, I would be very surprised if they open a Whole Foods in that area.
His food desert that doesn’t exist.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-...
It's really the suburban areas of Seattle that develop food deserts, likely due to restrictive zoning for commercial properties and minimum lot-size requirements that make sure that every grocery store is a long SUV ride away from the cu-de-sac neighborhood.
If the term Food Desert offends you, I can gladly switch to calling it Food Apartheid instead.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/15/food-aparthe...
You just know at least five people within the administration, one of whom being Elon Musk, wanted to change "Atlas" to "Tool"
The implication being that humans who aren't in a union are "sub-human" in your opinion? If so, that's pretty messed up man.
Surely it doesn't have anything to do with their documented history of treating their blue-collar workforce like utter garbage.
But the implication above was that the non-union employee is the "sub-human" option. I find that attitude pretty gross too. Humans are human whether they are union members or not.
Ok, fine, but the OP never said this, you are the only person talking about this.
Work on your reading comprehension dude.
I guess it turned out that the need more human intervention than they hoped, so the cost is too high for regular stores. However at places where a premium can be charged for high throughput or a low friction experience then the cost of the human intervention can be recouped.