On a recent visit to Seattle, I had a chance to visit an Amazon Go store. This location was the newest and largest of the three Seattle locations. The store offers your typical convenience store type products as well as meal kits and sandwiches.

 

The concept of the store is that there is no cashier, and you do not have to interact with any employees (unless you are buying alcohol, in which case an employee has to check your ID). You open the Amazon Go app on your phone and scan it when you enter the store. The technology built into the store tracks you around and determines what you pick up off the shelves. When you are done shopping, you simply leave. Moments later, your receipt appears in your Amazon Go app.

 

I don't think Amazon has talked in detail about how the technology works, but it seems to be a combination of facial recognition technology tracking your every move around the store, and scales on the shelves that detect which products you pick up. My receipt was completely accurate but I arrived right when they opened for the day and I was the only customer in the store. I wonder if the technology struggles when there are, say, a few dozen people in the store.

hmm, wow i have heard of this, but to see it is pretty rad. i'll have to try it out sometime when we go out there.

 

and good taste buying stumptown beans, lol, they are easily consistently the best of any i ever buy. hair bender is thee one for sure, but all their beans are always roasted to my taste. too many local roasters disappoint me.

Don't give that shithead your money.

I'm pretty sure Amazon's long game here is not to run a chain of convenience stores across the country. It's to develop and perfect the technology and sell it to other retailers. So I wouldn't be surprised at all if Kroger and Target and Walmart, or perhaps 7 Eleven and Ameristop, are using Amazon's technology under the hood 10 years from now.

what if you took an item off the shelf, then later decided you didn't want it. do you have to go back and neatly put it back where you found it?

 

yes, this will certainly make society better:  less and less human interactions with fellow citizens, less jobs for people of limited skill or ability (not everyone can have one of the new jobs fixing the tech), and of course, more profits to the company that is destroying the foundation of captialism--that there are many stores and choices. Amazon now has over 50% of all internet sales, not to mention how many stores and small towns are negatively impacted by amazon--and a few which get low-paying 'distribution center' jobs after other shops and livelihoods have been destroyed. I wouldn't--and don't--buy anything on amazon.

what if you took an item off the shelf, then later decided you didn't want it. do you have to go back and neatly put it back where you found it?

 

It's smart enough to know if you put something back down.

 

Do they have Slim Jim's and lotto tickets up by the door? 

No, techies never think of people doing stuff like messing up the machines by doing scratch-offs on them.

No, techies never think of people doing stuff like messing up the machines by doing scratch-offs on them.

 

What about Coinstar? 

what if you took an item off the shelf, then later decided you didn't want it. do you have to go back and neatly put it back where you found it?

 

yes, this will certainly make society better:  less and less human interactions with fellow citizens, less jobs for people of limited skill or ability (not everyone can have one of the new jobs fixing the tech), and of course, more profits to the company that is destroying the foundation of captialism--that there are many stores and choices. Amazon now has over 50% of all internet sales, not to mention how many stores and small towns are negatively impacted by amazon--and a few which get low-paying 'distribution center' jobs after other shops and livelihoods have been destroyed. I wouldn't--and don't--buy anything on amazon.

 

At the risk of starting a huge debate, your ire appears to be with online shopping and automation of routine processes.  Amazon is certainly the face of that, but I think this probably would happen no matter what and adapting is a better strategy.  Life is change, we will need to figure out how society should work when we get more efficient and don't need people moving an item across a bar scanner and placing it in a bag.  Since we existed we have looked for ways to make our lives easier and more convenient - this trend is not likely to stop now.  Fighting it may delay it, but we will need to accept and address it at some point.  If that means making a law requiring cashiers (e.g. Oregon requires a person gets paid to pump gas) then so be it.  I think we need to get a bit more creative though.

I'm fine with advances in technology that are designed to make our lives more convenient/easier.  However there is a whole other category of technological advancements that are designed primarily or exclusively to drive up profits.  Self-checkout lanes, for example; disguised as the former, but clearly falls in the latter category once you've tried using them.  'Cloud' services, 'x as a service (AAS)' probably as well.

The cloud is all about efficiency.  This includes environmental, cost, and i/o gains.  In no way is the cloud solely about profits, although it is very profitable at this stage for just about everyone (customer and provider) due to the amount of efficiency actually being realized.  Most companies running their own servers are wasting most of the compute capacity a majority of the time, not using optimized cooling solutions, likely drawing power from regular sources, and paying to maintain that hardware.  The cloud is brilliant regarding nearly all aspects of operations.  There aren't many new solutions that come out where the customer gets better service, cheaper bills, and the company providing it still makes good margins.  It's a radical shift from the way things were being done. 

 

And I love self-checkout lanes.  Never had an issue.  Again, you take one person and allow them to handle 6 checkout lanes at once - that's a big gain in efficiency not only for the consumer (who has to wait less) but also the business.  And I can avoid the judgement of the cashier when I'm buying that big box of captain crunch! :)

 

Anyway, overall just an opinion.  I do think a lot of worry is about misunderstanding or incomplete facts.  But, obviously not all - there's definitely a big issue about human labor that needs to be addressed. 

I'm fine with advances in technology that are designed to make our lives more convenient/easier.  However there is a whole other category of technological advancements that are designed primarily or exclusively to drive up profits.  Self-checkout lanes, for example; disguised as the former, but clearly falls in the latter category once you've tried using them.  'Cloud' services, 'x as a service (AAS)' probably as well.

 

I've shopped at the original Amazon Go store... and loved it. To me, the NO WAIT angle was what differed from a cost-saving self-checkout lane. There is no comparison. You just walk out on your own schedule. (Notes - there is a designated employee on hand to ID check anyone walking into the beer/alcohol section of store. There are numerous employees all around store, prepping food and watching over... It isn't devoid of staff.)

The cloud is all about efficiency.  This includes environmental, cost, and i/o gains.  In no way is the cloud solely about profits, although it is very profitable at this stage for just about everyone (customer and provider) due to the amount of efficiency actually being realized.  Most companies running their own servers are wasting most of the compute capacity a majority of the time, not using optimized cooling solutions, likely drawing power from regular sources, and paying to maintain that hardware.  The cloud is brilliant regarding nearly all aspects of operations.  There aren't many new solutions that come out where the customer gets better service, cheaper bills, and the company providing it still makes good margins.  It's a radical shift from the way things were being done. 

 

Right, the Cloud is not a good example of a pointless profit grab. It is the infrastructure-ization of computer hardware. It allows software companies to focus on their core competency (writing software) and outsource the other stuff (buying and maintaining web servers, running a data center) to companies like Amazon or Microsoft that can do those things at a much larger scale and more efficiently.

^ yep and thars $$$ to be made in them thar clouds too. thats one thing my spouse’s company does, they are sort of the backbone of the internet. they co-own these gigantic server farms with that other much more well known company whose name is bigger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe, but still smaller than the total number of possible different games of chess. they also do ad-serving, email and other stuff too. all so your business does not have to bother with it.

The place runs off an honor system. If you take items from location you can go to your receipt on amazon and submit a refund. I'm not paying $9.00 for a sammich.

I mean, sure, you can challenge any item on your receipt and say that you didn't actually take it. They can also send you a link to a high definition video showing that you, in fact, did.

I think this video goes more in depth with the technical aspect of the place.

*Warning*

It's LinusTechTips, so it may be nerdy af.

 

Kroger thinks the future of grocery stores is having customers pick up a scanner when they walk in the door, scan all of their items as they pick them up, and then pay the bill before they leave. Really? I thought they were trying to be a tech company now. That's the boldest vision they can come up with?

 

Obviously Amazon's cashierless store technology has a long way to go before it can be rolled out to a large store like a supermarket, but it does seem like they have worked out most of the kinks. They now have nine Amazon Go stores operating in Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago. We're probably only a few years away from them incorporating this technology into Whole Foods stores.

 

It doesn't make me super confident about the future of Kroger...

The introduction of bar codes in the late 1970s made a profound difference in retail.  Everything since is just peanuts.  They're making a big deal out of these cashier-less stores but there is still the need for all of the support staff that already existed, which far outnumber cashiers. 

34 minutes ago, taestell said:

Kroger thinks the future of grocery stores is having customers pick up a scanner when they walk in the door, scan all of their items as they pick them up, and then pay the bill before they leave. Really? I thought they were trying to be a tech company now. That's the boldest vision they can come up with?

 

It's not even a new idea, Kroger themselves already tested it out 6 years ago...

 

 

That is not particularly exciting, but I did see a presentation of a much more interesting version of this. In that example, future grocery stores may have a much more limited customer area where people scan images of the products they wish to buy and when they proceed to check out, a worker (or machine) has gathered and bagged all of the purchased items in the back. This would mean the majority of the store would be comprised of warehouse rather than customer aisles.

Ironically that's basically how grocery stores all used to be before Piggly Wiggly invented the modern store layout. 

20 minutes ago, CbusTransit said:

That is not particularly exciting, but I did see a presentation of a much more interesting version of this. In that example, future grocery stores may have a much more limited customer area where people scan images of the products they wish to buy and when they proceed to check out, a worker (or machine) has gathered and bagged all of the purchased items in the back. This would mean the majority of the store would be comprised of warehouse rather than customer aisles.

 

Yeah, this is how my great-uncle's grocery store was back in the 1940s and 50s.  He or one of the other guys went in the back and brought up whatever you wanted.  He ended up knowing at least 1,000 people in the neighborhood because of his business, and spent the last 20 years of his life attending at least one funeral per week. 

Remember Service Merchandise? Some stuff like toys, jewlery and housewares (stuff that sells better when it can be seen up close and touched) was up front, but the real fun was busting out the catalog and entering your order into the DOS terminals. Then 10-15 minutes later your stuff came down the conveyor belt.

Also, I noticed that the Canal Winchester Kroger now has the handheld scanners for people to enter barcodes as they put them in the cart then cash out at the U-Scan.

1 hour ago, GCrites80s said:

Remember Service Merchandise? Some stuff like toys, jewlery and housewares (stuff that sells better when it can be seen up close and touched) was up front, but the real fun was busting out the catalog and entering your order into the DOS terminals. Then 10-15 minutes later your stuff came down the conveyor belt.

 

Yeah we had one near where I grew up.  I remember there being general "stuff" on one side of the store, nothing but jewelry and maybe brass lamps on the other.  In the middle was the conveyor belt.  I remember them having a pretty robust 300+ page catalog.  I never, ever looked at the jewelry.  It was all about electronics, slot car racing, etc. 

 

In Aristotle's The Poetics, he remarked on how much humans love to simply recognize something.  Looking back, I remember paging through that catalog and maybe the Sears one, and it made walking into the physical store like walking into some sort of glamorous place.  Everywhere you looked, there was a "friend" who you recognized. 

 

I also remember all of the emotions that went into visiting a hobby shop.  There you'd see -- in real life -- all of that amazing stuff from the catalog.  Your brain was firing on all cylinders when you walked those aisles and could read the packaging hoping to glean some sort of detail that wasn't covered in the catalog text. 

 

 

^I actually worked at a hobby shop near New Albany for a year as an R/C tech. The people who were into the various hobbies were all so different that you had to be ready to go on all the different products at any time. It was the kind of hobby shop that had a dab of everything rather than just specializing in R/C and slot cars. That means it also had a nerd section so I had to suffer the "nerd cling" that I've had to deal with for most of my life simply for playing Mario 2 in 1989 just like every other kid. With all the other things I've been into everybody knows when to stop but not the nerds. Oh... OK, also sometimes the musicians didn't either.

 

Re: the Aristotle analogy, that's one reason my stores full of old video games have a billion looky-loos and window shoppers as compared to most other stores in the malls is due to them being filled with familiar products. In Lancaster especially my store will be full of people at times that most of the other stores have nobody in them. This doesn't mean I'm making a lot of money. I did for a few years though.

Edited January 8, 20196 yr by GCrites80s

The thing about these Amazon Go stores is that they inherently only serve people who have a smartphone, Amazon account, and credit card. That's the prerequisite for entering. Amazon also owns Whole Foods which is a brand that caters to higher income levels. So imagine that they start rolling out new "Whole Foods Neighborhood Market" stores in higher income neighborhoods that use this technology. Amazon/Whole Foods skims off more and more of the high end of the market, leaving Kroger and other traditional grocery stores to serve the lower end. Kroger is already struggling to keep grocery stores in lower income neighborhoods open. What happens when they keep getting more of the high end market, which helps to subsidize those stores, stolen by Amazon/WF?

^That's a good point, since no doubt the margins are higher on higher-end product.  But as-is, it's difficult for supermarkets like Kroger to get those people anyway when Whole Foods, etc., already exist in nearly every wealthy neighborhood of every American city. 

On 1/8/2019 at 11:26 AM, jmecklenborg said:

^That's a good point, since no doubt the margins are higher on higher-end product.  But as-is, it's difficult for supermarkets like Kroger to get those people anyway when Whole Foods, etc., already exist in nearly every wealthy neighborhood of every American city. 

 

When I worked at Kroger in high school, I remember them telling us during the training that Kroger only makes 1¢ in profit for every $1 a customer spends in the store. If that's accurate it makes sense why Kroger has been pushing more into financial services, prepared food, and other areas where the margins are much higher. They're not making any real profit off of someone buying a can of green beans.

That's how Amazon works as well, but with non-food items. So real stores that make actual margin on the same stuff Amazon sells for the same price made real money but Amazon only makes a penny on everything since the company is so bloated. That's why they have to treat their workers like total crap. So our physical landscape is a total wreck just so Amazon can make money off of digital stuff like webhosting and selling search technology. That's the only business they should really be in. Groceries by nature are a volume business and has to be low margin from having to throw out so much stuff. Meanwhile general merchandise and apparel are margin businesses. Amazon managed to destroy that both to their own detriment and everyone else's.

Amazon has announced they're opening a new brand of grocery stores (name not yet announced) that will be lower priced than Whole Foods. I wouldn't be surprised if they use this new brand to roll out their cashierless technology across the country.

That is such a saturated market. I suppose they need to make sure they don't turn a profit so that they never have to pay taxes. If Wall Street doesn't care if they never turn a profit then they don't have to.

Unlike Kroger which has to survive on the razor thin margins of the grocery business, Amazon can justify losing money with their Whole Foods/grocery division and make it up with the profits they're making from AWS. They can explain away their loss in the grocery division by saying "we're using our stores to test out new technologies." Frankly I think the executives at Kroger should be terrified because Wall Street is going to hold Amazon to "tech company" standards but Kroger is going to continue to be held to "normal company" standards.

7 minutes ago, taestell said:

Unlike Kroger which has to survive on the razor thin margins of the grocery business, Amazon can justify losing money with their Whole Foods/grocery division and make it up with the profits they're making from AWS. They can explain away their loss in the grocery division by saying "we're using our stores to test out new technologies." Frankly I think the executives at Kroger should be terrified because Wall Street is going to hold Amazon to "tech company" standards but Kroger is going to continue to be held to "normal company" standards.

 

I think Kroger will outperform Amazon in grocery. With HQ2 and Bezos/National Enquirer News it seems like Amazon is in danger of “jumping the shark” and losing focus- plus if they had some kind of winning grocery formula they could have applied it to Whole Foods already. But what you mention is a real problem for Kroger- Amazon can move the stock market (not only their own share price, but Kroger’s) by pushing narratives to the media (an ability held by tech companies,) while Kroger can’t.

Amazon jumped the shark around 2010 when it learned it could control and bully the market.

On 1/7/2019 at 5:58 PM, taestell said:

Kroger thinks the future of grocery stores is having customers pick up a scanner when they walk in the door, scan all of their items as they pick them up, and then pay the bill before they leave. Really? I thought they were trying to be a tech company now. That's the boldest vision they can come up with?

 

Kroger has started rolling out "KroGo" carts in its Madeira store. Customers scan items as they place them in their carts and pay for their order on a screen attached to the cart.

 

Meanwhile, Amazon now has 25 Amazon Go cashierless stores across the country, including one that it calls Amazon Go Grocery, which is more like a full blown grocery store than a convenience store. This is in addition to its Amazon Fresh grocery stores which are "regular" grocery stores (& a home delivery service) priced lower than Whole Foods.

^I think there is some potential for cashless corner stores to win some market share merely by not having lotto tickets, cigarettes, and other items that hold up the line at every gas station and corner store across the country.  

 

I'd like to see Amazon and Kroger's data on the the items that poor people buy and how much time they spend at live checkout lanes and U-scan.  I have little doubt that poor people spend way more time fiddling around with dumb stuff like choosing lottery numbers than wealthy people, and a cashless store requires a smart phone and so by default keeps the most disorganized and slowest people out of the store.  

 

A year ago at the Mitchel Ave. Kroger I saw a woman buy scratch-off tickets and hand one to her kid, who was about 5.  When the ticket didn't hit she yelled at him and started beating him as if it was his fault.  

Keeps out old people too who are like pouring broken glass into the smooth transmission created by operations people.

4 minutes ago, GCrites80s said:

Keeps out old people too who are like pouring broken glass into the smooth transmission created by operations people.

 

Oh yeah...old people.  Coupons.  Checkbooks.  Lots of dumb questions.  

All of the Amazon Go stores so far are located in CBDs and dense, affluent neighborhoods in big cities. They seem to mostly cater to office workers who want to grab a quick lunch, so in a way, they compete more with Pret A Manger than Ameristop. The single Amazon Go Grocery location seems to be their first that is more resident-oriented. The fact that you have to download an app and set up an account before you can even enter the store helps eliminate delays associated with paper coupons, checks, paying with coins, lotto and cigs, etc.  Like I said earlier in the thread, I don't expect Amazon to operate a nationwide chain of convenience stores. They will probably keep Amazon Go in big cities and license the technology to other convenience stores that already have a nationwide presence. It could be a really be a useful technology for truck stops like TA or Love's that want to have a large number of items for sale 24/7 but might only have 1-2 employees working third shift. And since many people already have loyalty to a specific band (points programs!), it shouldn't be that difficult to get people to download their app and set up an account.

5 minutes ago, jmecklenborg said:

 

Oh yeah...old people.  Coupons.  Checkbooks.  Lots of dumb questions.  

 

Stopping every two feet

 

So we've gotten rid of low income individuals. Said no to old people. There will be few kids or teens in the store. Only people 23-65ish. Can something low-margin such as a grocery store reject that many customers?

1 minute ago, GCrites80s said:

Can something low-margin such as a grocery store reject that many customers?

 

I think the existence of Whole Foods shows that they can.

But Whole Foods doesn't actively reject them. And doesn't have to turn a profit since it's not just tech but FAANG.

 

 

I expect FAANG to start staging old-timey locomotive collisions soon just like the train barons did. And the stocks will go up afterward since they "learned so much" from the events.

 

 

1 hour ago, taestell said:

 They will probably keep Amazon Go in big cities and license the technology to other convenience stores that already have a nationwide presence. It could be a really be a useful technology for truck stops 

 

Yeah I see this as something like Amazon web services.  They'd build the infrastructure that various chains would then have to pay a subscription to use.  So you might go into a Flying J or a Kroger and customers would be using Amazon POS equipment the whole time without knowing it.   

I'm pretty sure Certified Oil stations use Kroger/Turkey Hill's credit card interface.

36 minutes ago, GCrites80s said:

I'm pretty sure Certified Oil stations use Kroger/Turkey Hill's credit card interface.

 

I seem to recall that the Ohio Lottery was on its own completely independent payment system back in the 80s.  I saw recently that this is still the case - if you buy items at a store AND lotto tickets with a credit card, you have to run the same card on two different card readers, one of them being permanently hooked up to the lottery.  

 

It made me wonder if state lotteries didn't exist mid-century because it wasn't technically feasible.  Previously, you had all sorts of local numbers rackets being run by organized crime.  The ability to do an official up-and-up statewide lottery was a necessary evil to put those ethnocentric numbers rackets out of business.  

 

I also wonder if that early wireless payment system employed by state lotteries was also what enabled Ticketmaster and Ticketron.  

On 1/21/2021 at 2:27 PM, jmecklenborg said:

 

I seem to recall that the Ohio Lottery was on its own completely independent payment system back in the 80s.  I saw recently that this is still the case - if you buy items at a store AND lotto tickets with a credit card, you have to run the same card on two different card readers, one of them being permanently hooked up to the lottery.  

 

It made me wonder if state lotteries didn't exist mid-century because it wasn't technically feasible.  Previously, you had all sorts of local numbers rackets being run by organized crime.  The ability to do an official up-and-up statewide lottery was a necessary evil to put those ethnocentric numbers rackets out of business.  

 

I also wonder if that early wireless payment system employed by state lotteries was also what enabled Ticketmaster and Ticketron.  

 

 

they did exist. of course there were bookies everywhere for sports and horse racing and locally for running numbers and the like, but there was also at least one sort of underground national or semi national lotto called the irish sweepstakes. i recall seeing the tickets as a kid, but no idea how it worked. dubiously no doubt.

they were tax-free, too.