Amazon’s 'Just Walk Out' grocery stores are dead
Amazon’s 'Just Walk Out' grocery stores are dead
Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.
(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)
surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive
even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down
"Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped."
the secret sauce is always hiding labor exploitation behind a thick layer of bad ideas
"hey babe.. what if we fucked the entire cashier class.... in two countries?? 🥹👉👈"
- bezos, probably
Lol. This is some.wizard in oz don't look behind the curtain level of shenanigans. I remember the news articles when it released all said it was automation.
Pretty much every startup operates like that, they hope to figure out the AI stuff later on and basically never do.
I was so excited to try one out when I was in San Francisco, but now that's it feels lame :(
Mechanical Turk.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that ...
It'd be swell if someone could go ahead and make an equal alternative to amazon. Y'know, doesn't have to be perfect, just - y'know better people and such.
Better people wouldn't be able to compete with the cutthroat business practices that put Amazon on top in the first place.
There are various European and Asian online stores competing with Amazon on national levels. Very few of them are relevant on a global scale though.
something something ethical consumption something something under capitalism
Well we could always try buying locally again. Not that that's ideal or cheaper all the time. But it helps local business owners instead of stockholders.
the only "self-check-out" system I have ever liked is:
- I have the store app on my phone.
- I scan the items with my phone app as I grab them off the shelves.
- I then tell the app, "ok, i'm ready to pay for these"
- it runs the charge digitally.
no waiting in a queue,
no 'place the item back in the bagging area',
no stuffing bills into slots,
no 'follow the instructions on the pin pad'.
I'm already done!Self-checkouts in the UK have a vital use case much in demand from the populace: they save the British from ever having to talk to another person. Probably for the best for everyone really.
Is this accurate? Amazon only recently opened some in London.
If so, it looks like even more layoffs at Amazon. For the third year running, multiple arms of the business have been running rolling layoffs, where every 6-12 months jobs will go...all while they continue to hire more people, without a mechanism to move laid-off folks into available roles.