Amazon Is Planning To Open Cashierless Supermarkets Next Year (bloomberg.com) 77
Amazon.com is preparing to open Amazon Go supermarkets and pop-up stores, an expansion of the company's cashierless ambitions that includes the possibility of licensing the technology to other retailers. From a report: The new store formats and licensing initiative could launch as soon as the first quarter of 2020, according to a person familiar with the project. Amazon is testing a supermarket equipped with Go technology in a 10,400-square-foot retail space in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. The Go expansion is the e-commerce giant's latest attempt to compete in the $900 billion U.S. grocery industry and perhaps other areas of retail, as well. The company already operates the Whole Foods Market chain and last week confirmed plans to launch a separate supermarket brand, starting with a location in the upscale Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Those stores will have human cashiers. The previously unreported plan to expand Go revives Amazon's original vision of creating full-size grocery stores without checkout lines. Amazon opened the first Go convenience store at its Seattle headquarters almost two years ago and now operates 21 locations around the U.S. It's not clear how much money the company has lavished on the project, but some of the 1,000 or so people working on it were recently told their cumulative salaries have totaled more than $1 billion since the project got underway in 2012, the person said.
Those stores will have human cashiers. The previously unreported plan to expand Go revives Amazon's original vision of creating full-size grocery stores without checkout lines. Amazon opened the first Go convenience store at its Seattle headquarters almost two years ago and now operates 21 locations around the U.S. It's not clear how much money the company has lavished on the project, but some of the 1,000 or so people working on it were recently told their cumulative salaries have totaled more than $1 billion since the project got underway in 2012, the person said.
How are they going to prevent (Score:3, Insightful)
Jamal from walking in, taking $949 worth of stuff, and just walking out?
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Jamal from walking in, taking $949 worth of stuff, and just walking out?
Robocop!
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To get in the door, you have to log on to Amazon...
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laws about non-member items may stop that idea (Score:2)
laws about non-member items may stop that idea
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Why is waiting in line to get into the store better than waiting in line to get out with your goods?
To go in, you just wave your phone. So there is no line.
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Re:How are they going to prevent (Score:5, Interesting)
Employee theft always outruns losses from shoplifters in the large retailers, it's been that way for decades. Just like in the banking world embezzlement far outstrips losses from bank robberies, but it's always the guy with the gun you hear about.
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Employee theft always outruns losses from shoplifters in the large retailers
Exactly. And a good way to reduce these losses is to reduce the number of employees.
People steal. Robots don't.
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In the supermarket where I shop, the cashiers do double duty as stockers when the lines are not long, so who's going to do that, or is Amazon going to have its warehouse robots run in reverse and put things in stock?
Amazon is planning to take this one step further, and require that shoppers restock the shelves.
You take the last can of chili con carne from the shelf? You are required to fetch another crate from the store room.
Otherwise . . . the system will not let you out the door.
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Jamal from walking in, taking $949 worth of stuff, and just walking out?
What is to stop that happening in a normal shop?
Many stores have a "no confrontation" policy. They give the surveillance video to the police and let them handle it.
It isn't a big problem because most people aren't willing to risk jail time and a criminal record for a few bags of groceries.
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In California, Prop 47 was passed a few years ago which reduced some crimes to misdemeanors from felonies if the amount involved was under $950. Now, in many areas, police won't bother to investigate or act on a shoplifting case involving under $950 of stolen goods as it's not worth the resources because the criminal won't get any jail time anyway due to jail overcrowding and the shoplifter knows that. Some municipalities, spurred on by the "success" of prop 47, have expanded these "non-enforcement" policie
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Cashierless =! secirityless
Gaming (Score:3)
Re:Gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
Theft from people gaming self-checkouts is huge where I live. They will find a way to game this too.
I don't condone theft, but... I wish Amazon cashierless stores get looted hard, fast and relentlessly out of existence. To me, they're the pinnacle of dehumanized consumerism and wanton social destruction for the sake of profit.
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I don't condone theft, but... I wish Amazon cashierless stores get looted hard, fast and relentlessly out of existence. To me, they're the pinnacle of dehumanized consumerism and wanton social destruction for the sake of profit.
These stores already exist, I even used the one in Seattle.
I don't think that's gonna work because they're tracking everything you pick up and will just bill your card for everything.
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Theft from people gaming self-checkouts is huge where I live. They will find a way to game this too.
I don't condone theft, but... I wish Amazon cashierless stores get looted hard, fast and relentlessly out of existence. To me, they're the pinnacle of dehumanized consumerism and wanton social destruction for the sake of profit.
Are you saying that you are not in love with Ayn Rand? And that Ayn Rand style chaos of consumer driven checks and balances is not good for the economy? Greed is not good? The unlimited printing of money has consequences contrary to the beliefs Bernanke and the Wall Street speculators he feeds?
Bezos like all successful speculators is just taking advantage of the fact that people have to eat and have more money from the feds to do so.
However Whole Pay Check foods will be a real issue when the Wall Street c
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Times are different than the 1930s. We have had nothing but an economic boom since 45 became President, and the most prosperous economy in human history, with no signs of a decline. Things like recessions just are engineered not to happen. The buggy whip days are gone, and things only are going to improve. Just the fact of Apple introducing a revolutionary new iPhone year after year keeps the economy going flawlessly.
The days of recessions are over, dude. Stop the alarmist stuff.
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Times are different than the 1930s. We have had nothing but an economic boom since 45 became President, and the most prosperous economy in human history, with no signs of a decline. Things like recessions just are engineered not to happen. The buggy whip days are gone, and things only are going to improve. Just the fact of Apple introducing a revolutionary new iPhone year after year keeps the economy going flawlessly.
The days of recessions are over, dude. Stop the alarmist stuff.
I hope you are correct and the endless mindless consumerism continues. However the planet that sustains us all is starting to object and the price of basic food stuff is starting to go through the roof, just in case you have not noticed lately. So I am not so optimistic that a system of food on credit is going to work out in the long run. It is obvious that Amazon will eventually become a credit granting organization, my suspicion is that Bezos is setting up a food credit system that will be independent of
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However, "economic boom" is not the way to describe a pay raise for the top 10% of Americans and a cut in pay for the bottom 70%.
A boom that isn't shared with most of the population isn't actually an economic boom for the country. It's not like the rich can invest in public infrastructure such as roads and public education the way America did in the 1950s and 1960s when we were scared of the Russians
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Again, I don't condone theft.
But if Amazon went crying to the police here, I hope they'd get told "___ off! you dodge taxes - you don't get the societal protection on the backs of honest folk!"
Or, perhaps more subtly, "we only lease the police logos and from our branch in Luxembourg, and the cars from Ireland - go there for the support -- here's an incredibly opaque process for logging a call with a convoluted way of following through (n+1) phone/email/web-chat sessions to here the excuse of the day".
Now
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Why? A fully automated store is just a way to do the same as before (get groceries), but more efficiently. Possibly lowering prices for consumers. And a logical extension of fewer & fewer humans touching your food on its journey from where it's grown to your plate. Which has been going on for a loooonng time in case anyone missed that.
I don't particularly like grocery shopping. Nor do many other people. And judging from cashier's faces @ supermarket checkouts, often they don't really want to be there
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Possibly lowering prices for consumers
Thanks for the laugh!
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Possibly lowering prices for consumers
Thanks for the laugh!
The grocery business is very competitive, with thin margins. So, yes, much of the savings will go to the consumer.
If the prices aren't lower, why would anyone shop there?
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So grocery stores aren't publicly traded companies that have to show a profit to the investors?
Thin margins aren't the same as no margins.
You don't need to make much on each bag of groceries because everybody needs to eat. It is a big market.
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No you don't, Even Amazon understands this - their customer support is one of the best in the business precisely because they have humans in the mix able to help you (and very little is "I need to talk to my supervisor").
And that's the thing - what happens when the system screws up? What happens if the item is $2 on the shelf, but you get charged $5? (And I don't care if it's because the human changing the price
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To me, they're the pinnacle of dehumanized consumerism
To me, requiring an employee to stand and scan barcodes for an eight-hour shift is more dehumanizing.
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I really don't want it gamed.
We have had a high trust society in the US.
I really don't want to live in a low trust society where all shops just have thick windows on the streets, no customer ever sets foot inside, and has to order through a thick glass window, then fetch your stuff through an evidence room vandal-resistant airlock. Because of things like Proposition 47 in California, a number of shops are going from the old "get stuff, check out at counter" back to the pre-WWII store style of "come to the
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I work at Amazon in physical security. When they opened the first Go store several of my coworkers went there every day for two or three weeks trying to trick the system. Whether working alone or together they utterly failed. We were all impressed.
For myself I'm not a fan of the Go stores, and even less of the self-checkouts. Cashiering is a shitty job, but it's better than being on the dole.
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Cashiering is a shitty job, but it's better than being on the dole.
Lump of labor fallacy [wikipedia.org].
We have a full-employment economy. The alternative is another job, not the dole.
As low productivity jobs are eliminated, GDP per capita goes up, and living standards rise.
This has been happening for 250 years.
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I wonder (Score:2)
I wonder if all the purchases in the store are picked up by the computers or they have an army of mechanical turks picking up the slack.
Amazon-law of the jungle (Score:1)
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You are talking from the standpoint of an US fellow obviously. I'm not a "leftist", I'm a full fledged european communist like my father and my grandfather before me, and both, along with the rest of the family children included fought historical fascism guns in hand, literally, getting wounds, prison and death sentences. This said, I can see clearly why american so-called "leftists" are obnoxious, ha. They look just like a bunch of spoiled , decadent hooligans. They don't pursue class struggle, and in their ways they look just like a bunch of anarchists. Also they lose their time courting transvestites, homosexuals, blacks and other groups that only care about their own good. Boy, I can't wait to see how low this post will fall in scores lol. ps. if you don't like this, it's just free speech baby.
What a fucking joke. Hitler was a self proclaimed socialist, the leader of the NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS PARTY
Communism and your racial slurs against the blacks and others who are born with differing sexual characteristics: brands your mentality as far more dangerous to European stability than even Tzar Putin and his Russian mafia backers who are definitely not Communists and certainly are not followers of Karl Marx.
Obviously you have never scoped out the meaning and significance of the little book
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Tell us about the businesses you know of who AREN'T trying to cut expenses by substituting workers with machines. For example the machine most of us in this forum are familiar with is the computer. Up until a few decades ago business got along just fine without them. For example using calculating machines instead of computers to calculate payroll. But business was willing for people to lose their jobs operating calculating machines just to save a few bucks.
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Super ultra mega tracking! (Score:2)
I wouldn't spend a dime with Amazon, but if I did, there'd be no fucking way I'd ever use a credit card with them. You just have to truly not give a shit if you're going to use a credit card with Amazon. That's the lynchpin that ties all of your data together.
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HAHAHBAHAHA
That's the lynchpin that ties all of your data together.
No dude they host half the internet; THAT is the lynchpin holding it all together. Next to Google, Amazon probably knows more about you than any other entity. Even if you never spend a dime with them
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I don't know you; I will allow you may be a god of operational security. However with all the data sharing etc that goes on out there and as advance as these data harvesting and correlation efforts have become I would suggest for most people its incredibly naive to think *they* (being any of Google/Amazon/Facebook and possibly Microsoft) can't tie your browsing history to something concrete like your SSN or current name + address.
Remember when IOS13 dropped and all the normies were asking "How come the Bu
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You have no cellphone? Have **never** browsed the web on your phone or installed an app? Hats off to you for technologically crippling yourself in the vain attempt to remain anonymous. You have undoubtedly still failed, especially if you've ever purchased anything online. Scott McNealy, CEO of database server company Sun Microsystems, declared in the late '90s, "Privacy is dead. Get over it." The man was an asshole, but two decades later he's more right than ever.
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Yeah, I'm not getting over it.
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Grocery shopping: now, with SUPER ULTRA MEGA tracking!
I wouldn't spend a dime with Amazon, but if I did, there'd be no fucking way I'd ever use a credit card with them. You just have to truly not give a shit if you're going to use a credit card with Amazon. That's the lynchpin that ties all of your data together.
I always pay in cash when I check out at Amazon for this very reason.
Just upload a scan of the bills and they mail me the change. (I do of course have to write "Mobile deposit Only" on each bill I upload, nut no big deal, I bought a stamp for that.
and its chump change (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not clear how much money the company has lavished on the project, but some of the 1,000 or so people working on it were recently told their cumulative salaries have totaled more than $1 billion since the project got underway in 2012, the person said.
While an interesting fact, everyone needs to remember Amazons real business is logistics. The GO stores don't need to pay back the investment. They will probably keep them if people like them and they can break even at it but their real reason for being is to provide first a development platform and later a working scale POC.
Amazon probably has only a limited interest in operating cashier-less bodegas; what this is really about is being the purveyor of totally automated retail inventory and checkout management systems to as many other retailers as they can possibly land contracts with. This is about largely replacing the "store systems group" that exists at every large scale retailer today with their own offering - oh and while you are at it you can move the rest of your IT infrastructure to AWS for simple integration!
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Once they have them on board with that; it will be hey you know you really don't need all those regional distribution facilities and to deal with keeping track of shipping lanes etc; why we could keep your stores stocked from Amazon fulfillment centers!
Eventually the board of directors will look around realize their company is nothing but intellectual property and branding, because Amazon does everything else; at which point Amazon will buy them out. The valuable brands Amazon will buy out and keep for thei
Welll... (Score:2)
Too bad PEOPLE needs jobs to get money to buy the food a grocery store sells.
This kind of insane capitalism will require UBI or whatever it's called at this rate.....
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Yeah, isn't it a shame the way there are no jobs at the local livery stables since Amazon came along?
Oh, wait, those livery stables went away long before Amazon. We need to blame Ford and Chrysler and GM for doing away with those livery stable jobs....
And to make up for it, they need to retain every job that has ever been required at their plants - no more computers, no more email, none of that nasty stuff that costs jobs! Go b
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Please don't breed. We don't need more "people" like you
I will never buy at Amazon. (Score:1)
And everyone committing the crime of doing so, will be embargoed by me in all things business and personal
Either you have morals, or you don't.
I won't support people who actively or passively harm others, even if they are too stupid to realize it.
Crime Blotter Map (Score:3)
My neighborhood crime map shows most crime in my area is from the supermarket for shoplifting, and I live in a nice area. They now have the alcohol behind glass also.
The trusting nature seems to not match reality.
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My neighborhood crime map shows most crime in my area is from the supermarket for shoplifting, and I live in a nice area. They now have the alcohol behind glass also.
The trusting nature seems to not match reality.
Yeah there has always been theft. But it's ok though, they include the cost of the stolen items in the prices the people that don't steal pay.
I use self checkout all the time. Never felt compelled to "game" the system.
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My neighborhood crime map shows most crime in my area is from the supermarket for shoplifting, and I live in a nice area. They now have the alcohol behind glass also.
The trusting nature seems to not match reality.
Oh yeah, and just because they are "cashierless" stores doesn't mean their won't be any employee(s).
Re:Crime Blotter Map (Score:5, Interesting)
My neighborhood crime map shows most crime in my area is from the supermarket for shoplifting, and I live in a nice area. They now have the alcohol behind glass also.
The trusting nature seems to not match reality.
There's no trust involved in a Go store. It's a Panopticon like no other in history. People in prison are under less surveillance than customers in a Go store. Much less.
Cameras watch everything you do. Weight sensors on shelves measure everything you pick up, everything you put down. They're watching your face, your hands, your feet, with neural nets trained to recognize the images of a person performing actions meant to conceal items about their person or in their carts.
Jeremy Bentham never dreamed how closely the machines can watch you in a Go store. In his original Panopticon prison, a human guard could only watch a few prisoners at a time, but the prisoners couldn't tell if they were being watched, and so had to behave as if they were always being watched. In a Go store, you are always being watched, with an attention no human is even capable of bringing to the task. The machines never so much as blink, let alone get bored and look away.
There's no trust in a Go store, and eventually the machines will recognize every physically possible way to shoplift, and will bill you for everything you take out of the store no matter how you do it. Put the cucumber in your cart or shove it up your ass, the machines don't care. You will be billed.
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Like what was said in a previous Slashdot article: If it stops theft and saves children, no amount of surveillance, and totalitarianism is too much.
Really? Do you know what all the possible totalitarianism does to people?
That was a rhetorical question. Obviously you don't, or you wouldn't have said something so blindly stupid.
Can you even imagine what all possible surveillance and totalitarianism can do when it's enforced by machines? It's barely distinguishable from Terminator.
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Put the cucumber in your cart or shove it up your ass, the machines don't care. You will be billed.
But do Prime members get a discount for shoving up their asses? Guess we'll have to wait for the AI to do the calculations.
Wrong Angle. (Score:2)
For Grocery Shopping, we often buy a lot of small products. When you use the Cashier they will often help you bag the products, and often do it faster then you can, and at least where I live, they are rather good at stacking product for maximum food safety.
I do not want to do my families weekly grocery shopping with me trying to bag stuff in real time, or fumble trying to bag the stuff in my car in rain, snow, winds....
Other then thief protection, the cashier is offering a service kindness to the shoppers.