11 ms·

AWS Just Walk Out Technology

57 points by amalfra 4y ago

KerrAvon 4y ago
SNL satire of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS9U3Gc832Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS9U3Gc832Y
- bushbaba 4y ago
  This is the best example as to why DEI for companies matters. A room full of white & asian men would likely not pick up on this prior to the launch.
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    Obviously white and Asian men are capable of realizing that customers might feel like they are stealing items (or will be accused of stealing) in the Go store. It is ridiculous to think such an obvious concern would be invisible to people based on their race or gender. It's also very strange to think that team members should be responsible for speaking for their race. Imagine if your team had a black engineer and your team expected him to explain to everyone "the black perspective" or "how will black people think about this". An individual doesn't represent anyone beyond themselves and, ironically, it is racist to think otherwise. A black engineer is there to do the job of an engineer, not tell you what his racial group will think. If you want to know what a demographic will think of something you use surveys, focus groups, and market research - DEI is not relevant.
    - thrashh 4y ago
      No one is responsible for representing any of their background but you work with a diverse group of people because different people bring different ideas to the table You cannot do focus groups for issues you don’t even know about. Race isn’t the only factor here — someone who grew up on a farm is going to have different things to say than someone that grew up in the city.
      - deepdriver 4y ago
        >you work with a diverse group of people because different people bring different ideas to the table This is sometimes true, but quite often it is ownership-class propaganda to depress wages and prevent worker solidarity. For example: >Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers' compensation claims, according to [Whole Foods'] documents. https://archive.ph/1khJw https://archive.ph/1khJw
      - ALittleLight 4y ago
        My impression is that you are trying to be racially sensitive or politically correct. You are using terms like DEI and saying it is important. But what you are writing comes across as very racist. "We have to have a black person on the team because black people think different!" No, your race and gender don't determine your beliefs or perspectives. The way to find out what different groups will think about your product is to survey representative samples - not to hope that the person of background X on your team could speak for all X. You can use focus groups for issues you don't know about - absolutely. That's one of the main benefits. Get a group to use the Go store. Ask about what they thought. Ask the people who used it a lot and those who used it a little - why did you use it so much/little. You find that some people are made uncomfortable because it feels like stealing. There - if you didn't realize that was an issue before, now you do.
        deepdriver 4y ago
        >You are using terms like DEI and saying it is important. But what you are writing comes across as very racist. This as DEI working as designed. The latent condescension in the corporate propaganda is apparent and offensive when verbalized. If you speak it aloud like the GP did, you are chastised. In a professional setting that's an effective humiliation ritual. It strongly discourages you from speaking up again in the future. Eventually you notice more flaws in the DEI sales pitch, but by then you've learned your lesson. You stay quiet. Thus the worker is controlled and the corporate propaganda is shielded from criticism. As posted below, Amazon has been caught measuring workplace diversity and correlating it negatively with unionization and worker solidarity. To them, forced diversity is a net benefit. But the downsides of forced diversity are never to be mentioned by the workers themselves, who are irredeemable racists if they say what Amazon internally acknowledges to be true: https://archive.ph/1khJw https://archive.ph/1khJw
  - junofan 4y ago
    They’d probably pilot the store in a couple target markets to find issues, then prioritize and solve issues. I don’t think skin color or gender makes one worse at launching products.
- deepdriver 4y ago
  Real-life satire of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1FUMdHU29c&t=332s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1FUMdHU29c&t=332s
- kn0where 4y ago
  I'm 90% sure Amazon paid SNL to make this ad (SNL does paid brand integration in various skits, see Tom Scott's video on product placement for other examples https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w). It's a spoof commercial where the product advertised isn't what's being made fun of. The set is unusually authentic to actual Amazon Go stores, down to the "just walk out" logo signage, and the loud and clear message of the ad is that you should stop worrying and trust Amazon. They're lampshading people's distrust of automation, especially in a liberal context of racial equity, and demonstrating that actually Keenan was really silly for thinking a computer would be racist.
  - bigmattystyles 4y ago
    Same with Alexa silver. That being said it was pretty funny. https://youtu.be/YvT_gqs5ETk https://youtu.be/YvT_gqs5ETk
  - deepdriver 4y ago
    Corporate AI would never be racist. Just ask Microsoft Tay, or Meta's latest chatbot, or Google Photos, or GPT-3 prior to hard-coded tweaks...
  - allenu 4y ago
    I was thinking it looked way too much like the real thing. As soon as I caught on that it wasn't making fun of the actual service, yeah, I started thinking it was a paid spot as well.
outside1234 4y ago
Great idea - let me install of this stuff to let you suck analytics out of my store and then compete with me in two years. Yeah, no thanks.
- Guthur 4y ago
  social credit scores, sorry, I mean personal carbon scores...
SteveNuts 4y ago
That's a really unfortunate name considering their reputation for employees walking out on the job.
tbrownaw 4y ago
> 60 percent of respondents state that long wait times to check out are a major concern while shopping in a store. The report also revealed that 80 percent of retail executive respondents believe that smart checkout is one of the most important solutions to invest in over the next five years. The local Kroger instances here have these handheld things you can use to scan items as you put them in your cart rather than at a checkout station. I don't exactly see a large number of people using them. Like, I think I might have seen one, once?
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  Walmart+ app allows you to scan items with your phone as you pick them up. Then, when you reach the self-checkout, you just scan a QR code and you are "checked out". I wish you didn't need to do the self-checkout thing, and could just finalize the transaction entirely from your phone, but other than that it is pretty good.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    When this was piloted years ago at Sam’s Club (subsidiary of Walmart Inc) it was possible, but only because their door team was able to scan it before you walked out.
- sdoering 4y ago
  > 60 percent of respondents state that long wait times to check out are a major concern while shopping in a store. There is an easy fix: hire people to ensure that wait time is minimal by opening as much checkout isles as possible. But in the economists wet dream the automated, humanless solution wins by being cheaper. > The report also revealed that 80 percent of retail executive respondents believe that smart checkout is one of the most important solutions to invest in over the next five years. Absolutely, because you have no need to pay additional squishy meat sacks when people/shoppers can do the work themselves with self checkout. Externalise the cost onto the customer.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
nprateem 4y ago
Expect to have to install an app for every store you want to go into over the next few years with all the accompanying snooping. This tech is a wet dream for retailers. Who needs store cards when they can just see in realtime what you're picking up and putting back, along with your demographic data.
- willio58 4y ago
  And then expect Apple to come along with a solution that 1. Protects your privacy and 2. Locks you into their ecosystem even more
  - judge2020 4y ago
    There’s not much room for privacy when you can only shop there by scanning a barcode linked to your account and having cameras pointed at you that are likely reading your emotions/seeing if you pick up an item then put it back (as the OP pointed out).
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Sure although it is worth noting that Apple's privacy protections are more of a legal framework than a technical one.
- reidjs 4y ago
  Hate to admit it, but if it saves me time on checkout, they can have that information.
- sdoering 4y ago
  You mean like trying to drive through Germany in an electric car and having multiple standards/vendors for the chargers each with their own app, no cash, no maestro or credit card option. Especially funny when in an area with poor mobile reception (basically rendering the charger somewhat useless). Having these competing non-standards is a pita for customers as well as for adoption. I would think that it would be the same for jwo.
ALittleLight 4y ago
I've been impressed by the Amazon Go stores. They seem to work pretty well. I'm glad to see Amazon at least trying to spread this technology. I enjoy using it. I do think the palm reading thing will be a potential vulnerability in two regards. First, maybe as a "hack". Is there a way to fake the palm scan? Something you could put on your palm to assume someone else's palm print? If I use this service will I have to be concerned with thieves scanning my palm print? Second, I think it will also invoke a "creepiness" concern among the general population when Amazon starts wanting your palm prints. I am also confused as to why this falls under the AWS umbrella. It seems very unlike other AWS offerings. This requires adding hardware to your store.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  AWS appears to be an umbrella for all the B2B stuff that is not B2C/Amazon itself, and in many cases is not directly "web" (see private 5G networks, Snow, Ground Station, etc.)
  - t0mas88 4y ago
    Hmm, I thought infrastructure components were AWS branded and business services Amazon branded. Like AWS EC2 vs Amazon Quicksight. But then this probably should have been under the Amazon brand so maybe they have another split.
    - true_religion 4y ago
      This is not Amazon branded due to optics. Amazon itself is also a store, so it’s competition doesn’t to buy something with the Amazon brand name on it for their key operations. On the other hand, they may already use AWS which feels like “a company owned by Amazon” rather than Amazon itself.
    - throwaway290 4y ago
      It's true that some of AWS have "Amazon" in the name, but from what I know they are all under AWS anyway.
- 4y ago
asah 4y ago
Meh - I was excited by JWO but it now looks like self-checkout will win because it works pretty well these days, and it handles all the corner cases including product sold by weight, large items, identical-looking items (common in grocery), etc. With self-checkout, you don't need an account which is crucial for travelers. Self-checkout also supports cash for the unbanked. I've tried SC in multiple countries, just hit the button for English, scan, scan, scan, weight, scan, scan, scan, checkout, touch my credit card, go. Late night in Stockholm train station, I bought one bottle of fizzy water and checkout added 30 seconds or so. Obviously, from place to place you sometimes get "rough edges" with mis-scans etc but JWO has its own problems. I'm not even sure how much floor space JWO saves vs self-checkout.
- eightysixfour 4y ago
  > With self-checkout, you don't need an account which is crucial for travelers. At non-Amazon branded JWO locations you insert a credit card in the machine when you walk in, no account needed. I recently encountered one like this at an airport.
  - wenc 4y ago
    I was at Kastrup (Copenhagen) and saw a 7-11 Go self-serve. I didn't get to try because it hadn't opened (I was on an early flight), but I can see this working. https://twitter.com/CPHAirports/status/1520015132050481153 https://twitter.com/CPHAirports/status/1520015132050481153
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    I just returned from a trip in Asia where 50% of machines did not accept any of my cards. In one case (parking garage) I asked a passerby to pay for me with their card, and gave them cash. While I enjoy that I can pay everything by card at home, and mostly stopped going to the handful of places that don't accept cards, I do appreciate the fact that cash is usually available as a backup.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
awill88 4y ago
As I read this title, for whatever reason, I imagined Walk Out Technology as being some kind of worker’s union SaaS and had to do a double take. I’m not intending to be unproductively facetious mind you, those types of specialized SaaS offerings that let workers operate and organize and educate should exist, and if AWS ever wanted to spend PR money in the right place… eh? Eh?
topicseed 4y ago
Many commenters haven't read the blog post. A retailer app or Amazon One account is not necessarily required. From my understanding, you can simply enter with a credit or debit card. > Consumers can enter a Just Walk Out technology-equipped store using one of three methods—method types available can vary by store: (1) Amazon One, a contactless identity service that uses your palm to pay; (2) credit or debit card; or (3) app-based entry, using retailer-branded apps.

57 points by amalfra 4y ago

KerrAvon 4y ago

SNL satire of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS9U3Gc832Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS9U3Gc832Y

bushbaba 4y ago
This is the best example as to why DEI for companies matters. A room full of white & asian men would likely not pick up on this prior to the launch.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  Obviously white and Asian men are capable of realizing that customers might feel like they are stealing items (or will be accused of stealing) in the Go store. It is ridiculous to think such an obvious concern would be invisible to people based on their race or gender. It's also very strange to think that team members should be responsible for speaking for their race. Imagine if your team had a black engineer and your team expected him to explain to everyone "the black perspective" or "how will black people think about this". An individual doesn't represent anyone beyond themselves and, ironically, it is racist to think otherwise. A black engineer is there to do the job of an engineer, not tell you what his racial group will think. If you want to know what a demographic will think of something you use surveys, focus groups, and market research - DEI is not relevant.
  - thrashh 4y ago
    No one is responsible for representing any of their background but you work with a diverse group of people because different people bring different ideas to the table You cannot do focus groups for issues you don’t even know about. Race isn’t the only factor here — someone who grew up on a farm is going to have different things to say than someone that grew up in the city.
    - deepdriver 4y ago
      >you work with a diverse group of people because different people bring different ideas to the table This is sometimes true, but quite often it is ownership-class propaganda to depress wages and prevent worker solidarity. For example: >Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers' compensation claims, according to [Whole Foods'] documents. https://archive.ph/1khJw https://archive.ph/1khJw
    - ALittleLight 4y ago
      My impression is that you are trying to be racially sensitive or politically correct. You are using terms like DEI and saying it is important. But what you are writing comes across as very racist. "We have to have a black person on the team because black people think different!" No, your race and gender don't determine your beliefs or perspectives. The way to find out what different groups will think about your product is to survey representative samples - not to hope that the person of background X on your team could speak for all X. You can use focus groups for issues you don't know about - absolutely. That's one of the main benefits. Get a group to use the Go store. Ask about what they thought. Ask the people who used it a lot and those who used it a little - why did you use it so much/little. You find that some people are made uncomfortable because it feels like stealing. There - if you didn't realize that was an issue before, now you do.
      - deepdriver 4y ago
        >You are using terms like DEI and saying it is important. But what you are writing comes across as very racist. This as DEI working as designed. The latent condescension in the corporate propaganda is apparent and offensive when verbalized. If you speak it aloud like the GP did, you are chastised. In a professional setting that's an effective humiliation ritual. It strongly discourages you from speaking up again in the future. Eventually you notice more flaws in the DEI sales pitch, but by then you've learned your lesson. You stay quiet. Thus the worker is controlled and the corporate propaganda is shielded from criticism. As posted below, Amazon has been caught measuring workplace diversity and correlating it negatively with unionization and worker solidarity. To them, forced diversity is a net benefit. But the downsides of forced diversity are never to be mentioned by the workers themselves, who are irredeemable racists if they say what Amazon internally acknowledges to be true: https://archive.ph/1khJw https://archive.ph/1khJw
- junofan 4y ago
  They’d probably pilot the store in a couple target markets to find issues, then prioritize and solve issues. I don’t think skin color or gender makes one worse at launching products.
deepdriver 4y ago
Real-life satire of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1FUMdHU29c&t=332s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1FUMdHU29c&t=332s
kn0where 4y ago
I'm 90% sure Amazon paid SNL to make this ad (SNL does paid brand integration in various skits, see Tom Scott's video on product placement for other examples https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w). It's a spoof commercial where the product advertised isn't what's being made fun of. The set is unusually authentic to actual Amazon Go stores, down to the "just walk out" logo signage, and the loud and clear message of the ad is that you should stop worrying and trust Amazon. They're lampshading people's distrust of automation, especially in a liberal context of racial equity, and demonstrating that actually Keenan was really silly for thinking a computer would be racist.
- bigmattystyles 4y ago
  Same with Alexa silver. That being said it was pretty funny. https://youtu.be/YvT_gqs5ETk https://youtu.be/YvT_gqs5ETk
- deepdriver 4y ago
  Corporate AI would never be racist. Just ask Microsoft Tay, or Meta's latest chatbot, or Google Photos, or GPT-3 prior to hard-coded tweaks...
- allenu 4y ago
  I was thinking it looked way too much like the real thing. As soon as I caught on that it wasn't making fun of the actual service, yeah, I started thinking it was a paid spot as well.

outside1234 4y ago

Great idea - let me install of this stuff to let you suck analytics out of my store and then compete with me in two years. Yeah, no thanks.

Guthur 4y ago
social credit scores, sorry, I mean personal carbon scores...

SteveNuts 4y ago

That's a really unfortunate name considering their reputation for employees walking out on the job.

tbrownaw 4y ago

> 60 percent of respondents state that long wait times to check out are a major concern while shopping in a store. The report also revealed that 80 percent of retail executive respondents believe that smart checkout is one of the most important solutions to invest in over the next five years. The local Kroger instances here have these handheld things you can use to scan items as you put them in your cart rather than at a checkout station. I don't exactly see a large number of people using them. Like, I think I might have seen one, once?

ALittleLight 4y ago
Walmart+ app allows you to scan items with your phone as you pick them up. Then, when you reach the self-checkout, you just scan a QR code and you are "checked out". I wish you didn't need to do the self-checkout thing, and could just finalize the transaction entirely from your phone, but other than that it is pretty good.
- judge2020 4y ago
  When this was piloted years ago at Sam’s Club (subsidiary of Walmart Inc) it was possible, but only because their door team was able to scan it before you walked out.
sdoering 4y ago
> 60 percent of respondents state that long wait times to check out are a major concern while shopping in a store. There is an easy fix: hire people to ensure that wait time is minimal by opening as much checkout isles as possible. But in the economists wet dream the automated, humanless solution wins by being cheaper. > The report also revealed that 80 percent of retail executive respondents believe that smart checkout is one of the most important solutions to invest in over the next five years. Absolutely, because you have no need to pay additional squishy meat sacks when people/shoppers can do the work themselves with self checkout. Externalise the cost onto the customer.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago

nprateem 4y ago

Expect to have to install an app for every store you want to go into over the next few years with all the accompanying snooping. This tech is a wet dream for retailers. Who needs store cards when they can just see in realtime what you're picking up and putting back, along with your demographic data.

willio58 4y ago
And then expect Apple to come along with a solution that 1. Protects your privacy and 2. Locks you into their ecosystem even more
- judge2020 4y ago
  There’s not much room for privacy when you can only shop there by scanning a barcode linked to your account and having cameras pointed at you that are likely reading your emotions/seeing if you pick up an item then put it back (as the OP pointed out).
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Sure although it is worth noting that Apple's privacy protections are more of a legal framework than a technical one.
reidjs 4y ago
Hate to admit it, but if it saves me time on checkout, they can have that information.
sdoering 4y ago
You mean like trying to drive through Germany in an electric car and having multiple standards/vendors for the chargers each with their own app, no cash, no maestro or credit card option. Especially funny when in an area with poor mobile reception (basically rendering the charger somewhat useless). Having these competing non-standards is a pita for customers as well as for adoption. I would think that it would be the same for jwo.

ALittleLight 4y ago

I've been impressed by the Amazon Go stores. They seem to work pretty well. I'm glad to see Amazon at least trying to spread this technology. I enjoy using it. I do think the palm reading thing will be a potential vulnerability in two regards. First, maybe as a "hack". Is there a way to fake the palm scan? Something you could put on your palm to assume someone else's palm print? If I use this service will I have to be concerned with thieves scanning my palm print? Second, I think it will also invoke a "creepiness" concern among the general population when Amazon starts wanting your palm prints. I am also confused as to why this falls under the AWS umbrella. It seems very unlike other AWS offerings. This requires adding hardware to your store.

throwaway290 4y ago
AWS appears to be an umbrella for all the B2B stuff that is not B2C/Amazon itself, and in many cases is not directly "web" (see private 5G networks, Snow, Ground Station, etc.)
- t0mas88 4y ago
  Hmm, I thought infrastructure components were AWS branded and business services Amazon branded. Like AWS EC2 vs Amazon Quicksight. But then this probably should have been under the Amazon brand so maybe they have another split.
  - true_religion 4y ago
    This is not Amazon branded due to optics. Amazon itself is also a store, so it’s competition doesn’t to buy something with the Amazon brand name on it for their key operations. On the other hand, they may already use AWS which feels like “a company owned by Amazon” rather than Amazon itself.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    It's true that some of AWS have "Amazon" in the name, but from what I know they are all under AWS anyway.
4y ago

asah 4y ago

Meh - I was excited by JWO but it now looks like self-checkout will win because it works pretty well these days, and it handles all the corner cases including product sold by weight, large items, identical-looking items (common in grocery), etc. With self-checkout, you don't need an account which is crucial for travelers. Self-checkout also supports cash for the unbanked. I've tried SC in multiple countries, just hit the button for English, scan, scan, scan, weight, scan, scan, scan, checkout, touch my credit card, go. Late night in Stockholm train station, I bought one bottle of fizzy water and checkout added 30 seconds or so. Obviously, from place to place you sometimes get "rough edges" with mis-scans etc but JWO has its own problems. I'm not even sure how much floor space JWO saves vs self-checkout.

eightysixfour 4y ago
> With self-checkout, you don't need an account which is crucial for travelers. At non-Amazon branded JWO locations you insert a credit card in the machine when you walk in, no account needed. I recently encountered one like this at an airport.
- wenc 4y ago
  I was at Kastrup (Copenhagen) and saw a 7-11 Go self-serve. I didn't get to try because it hadn't opened (I was on an early flight), but I can see this working. https://twitter.com/CPHAirports/status/1520015132050481153 https://twitter.com/CPHAirports/status/1520015132050481153
- newaccount74 4y ago
  I just returned from a trip in Asia where 50% of machines did not accept any of my cards. In one case (parking garage) I asked a passerby to pay for me with their card, and gave them cash. While I enjoy that I can pay everything by card at home, and mostly stopped going to the handful of places that don't accept cards, I do appreciate the fact that cash is usually available as a backup.
  - londons_explore 4y ago

awill88 4y ago

As I read this title, for whatever reason, I imagined Walk Out Technology as being some kind of worker’s union SaaS and had to do a double take. I’m not intending to be unproductively facetious mind you, those types of specialized SaaS offerings that let workers operate and organize and educate should exist, and if AWS ever wanted to spend PR money in the right place… eh? Eh?

topicseed 4y ago

Many commenters haven't read the blog post. A retailer app or Amazon One account is not necessarily required. From my understanding, you can simply enter with a credit or debit card. > Consumers can enter a Just Walk Out technology-equipped store using one of three methods—method types available can vary by store: (1) Amazon One, a contactless identity service that uses your palm to pay; (2) credit or debit card; or (3) app-based entry, using retailer-branded apps.