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Walmart Is Planning a Store Without Cashiers (recode.net)
According to Recode, Walmart's startup incubator is experimenting with a cashier-less store concept called Project Kepler, which "aims to reimagine the in-store shopping experience with the help of technologies like computer vision." The goal is reportedly the "creation of physical stores that would operate without checkout lines or cashiers -- in a similar fashion to Amazon's futuristic Amazon Go store." From the report: The Project Kepler project focused on the future of in-store shopping is being led by Mike Hanrahan, the co-founder and former chief technology officer for Jet.com, multiple sources tell Recode. It is located in Hoboken, N.J., where Jet is based. A Project Kepler job listing for a "computer vision engineer" says that the role will involve creating a "best-in-class consumer experience in the physical retail space." Amazon's Go concept uses a combination of sensors and cameras to track what each store shopper takes off of shelves so it can automatically bill them for their purchase without their having to stop to pay on the way out. The store's launch has been severely delayed, however, with reports that the technology did not work well when the store was crowded. Walmart is envisioning a similar system that would potentially eliminate the need for cashiers in stores outfitted with the technology. Walmart has more than two million employees worldwide, many of whom work at checkout.
If it has enough automated machine guns in the inside and outside.
Mount cameras everywhere and do an internet live feed. Peopleofwalmart will have a field day.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Combined with robotic stockers, a walmart store will probably bring under two dozen jobs while destroying many more jobs.
In theory, it's good because it lowers prices. But once no one has money left, lower prices don't matter.
And walmart closes shop and moves on to extract money from another economy.
I'm not against it. But we need to seriously slow down automation or our entire way of life/system of government is at risk of collapsing into an autocratic oligarchy.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
People have much less ethical concerns to fool machines then they have with people. So people are going to try to trick the system much more often than they would with people there.
I tried Walmart's self-checkout lane once. After scanning about 50 items and putting them on the scale, it suddenly decides that a can of cashews is not heavy enough and no progress is possible. I had to call in a human cashier just to abort the process and go to a proper checkout lane.
If the self-checkout is anything to go by, avoid this new cashierless store in much that same manner that a plague would.
With any sufficiently large number of items you can almost gaurantee the self checkout will complain at some point and require a member of staff to put in an override code.
Quite why these checkouts require you to put the damn things in the bagging area to be weighed is a mystery to me - if you're going to steal something you're not going to scan it in the first place, it'll go straight from trolley to bag!
The assumptions these systems make and the constant faults they exhibit lead me to believe they were designed by idiots and coded by minimum wage morons presumably somewhere in asia.
I rarely go in Walmart, but the last time I did I saw four self-checkouts and only two human cashiers. The rest of the checkouts were unused and the lines were really backed up. I didn't buy anything, just turned around and walked out.
The idea of customers checking out their own items is great in theory, but it just doesn't work that well most of the time.
I'll gladly stand in line to get money, but I'll be damned if I stand in line to give money. Want my business? Then make it convenient for me to shop in your store. That means hiring more (good) people and moving your ass a little faster.
...supermarkets in the UK have had remote hand-held bar code readers for its customers for the last couple of decades. You scan your shopping and then either take in home yourself or leave it at customer service, who'll deliver it for free the next day. No need for guards on the doors or people spying on them because, as it turns out, their customers are pretty honest and trustworthy.
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I generally use self checkout at Walmart but if I am purchasing alcohol it's all stop until a Walmart employee okays the transaction. How will this work?
Stores are expensive. You could replace them with smartphone-vending kiosks and delivery cabinets which are unlocked by smartphone. The app would let you flip through pages of aisles and you'd drag them around and pinch to zoom to look at the products on each aisle. Sell, negotiate for, or otherwise apportion "shelf space" on the app the same way you do real shelf space. Wal-Mart already has a functioning website, so this would be a relatively minor revision. That gets you entirely out of the "people of Wal-Mart" business.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I read that headline as "Project Klepto", honest to glub I did.
No sig today...
It's holiday season and the store, in Big Box Row next to a Home Depot and a Kroger, is packed. It has about thirty checkout stations up front, but only two are ever manned (okay, personned). The customers are stacked in line for those and the self-check area.
I do not do automated cashout for sever reasons:
1) I would need to have a card, keychain pr something with the bardcode for every store I visit. I am not brand loyal, so I would need about 5 of them
2) It is my small way to keep these people at a job.
3) It is not that much faster.
I will go onto detail and obviously YMMV. I tried it for 2 months at one store and what I measured was the time from storedoor to storedoor. Meaning from the moment I get into the store and leave the stor, including the walking around. This was after trying it out 2 times. Yes, the time at the checkout will be fster, unless you are up for a check. Then it is way slower.
However you need to do the scanning yourself and you lose a bit of time right there. Somebody who does this all day in and out will do this faster, no matter how good you are. Taking out the scanner, turn it, point it and turn it back also takes time. However as you are not standing still and it goes reklatively fast, you will not notice it.
OTOH standing at the checkout you e stnding still and you do notice that.
The time lost for weekly shopping came to under 5 minutes. That is 5 minutes a week for keeping somebody else his or her job. Makes me feel good.
What some stores are trying to do is just have less people so they can push people towards the use of them. In Belgium for these stores for you to have a store card is the only way to keep track of your buying habits as they will not have it any other way, regardless if you pay cash, debit or credit cards. And the cards will not know what you bought, just how much and they are not allowed to share the info berween them. The CC company is not even allowed to do an analysis of your type of purchases (e.g. via Internet, in gas stations, ...) for marketing purposes. If they do they risk their license to do business.
So for 5 minutes a week is the the only downside. I can live with that. I wasted more typing this.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Already, there are a disturbing number of "self check-out lanes" popping up at various stores.
I (and many others) avoid those lanes, no matter what the wait, for a lane with an actual cashier. To me, I am supporting a job. A legitimate, one-on-one job. I have seen that there is an attendant at the self-checkout lanes, but they are responsible for 6 or more kiosks. That's one person doing the work of 6 (at least).
If such a store in my area were to open (or convert to) such a setup, I'd be hard pressed to patronize that place.
What next? We unload the trailer for them too? Maybe stock the shelves? "If you put two on the shelf for every one you take, we'll give you a discount"?
Not for me, thank you.
Checkout at Aldi is a breeze. The checkers are lightning fast.
There's no need for self checkout, or machine vision, or any other bells or whistles.
Every task is either trivial or useless from a cosmological viewpoint.
In the long run we are all dead.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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I am unable to find a cashier at Walmart. They have like 30 lanes, but no one cashiers are eve manning them. I've often wondered why they even bother to build the lanes at all.
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Years and Years ago there was an IBM Super Bowl ad.
The actor works his way thru a store stuffing items into his leather coat. You are made to assume he shoplifting. He than walks strait out the door and we are somehow informed he has paid for everything, some RFID scanner has identified him and all the items he has taken and will send him the bill.
Obviously there are all kinds of huge privacy problems with that. It was the 90's though and the general public was not yet even remotely cognizant of what privacy threats were coming in the Internet age.
I don't know how to solve all the inherent privacy problems, implementing something like that; it is however a shopping experience I would *want*. Being able to just walk into a place pickup whatever I want / need; stuff it into my pocket if that is the most convenient thing to do with it and walk out entirely friction free is the sort of thing that would get me back into a brick and mortar store; in lots of cases.
I am thinking things like books, office supplies, small tools and things I buy online today, I might go pickup in person if picking up is all I had to do! Just working my way thru isles at Walmart or marching around the shopping complex without breaking stride to stand in lines, while 10 people a head of me figure out if they need to swipe or chip, write checks etc...would be great.
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" ....uses a combination of sensors and cameras to track what each store shopper takes off of shelves so it can automatically bill them for their purchase without their having to stop to pay on the way out."
So what if you take an item off the shelf to examine it, the sensor/camera records that action, then you put it back because it's not exactly what you were looking for (the ingredients listed something you're allergic to for example) and the camera or sensor fails, for any number of possible reasons, to detect that it's put back? You just walk out of the store and get your bill later? There was no mention here of any method whereby you verify your purchases before you leave.
I suppose one good outcome is, it would deter people from removing items from one shelf and then later dropping them off on the wrong shelf. That's inconsiderate to other shoppers and store employees alike, I hate when people do that, it's lazy and ignorant.
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I do not think this will work because mistakes happen. I once bought a sandwich at Walmart along with other items. The sandwich was supposedly priced at $3.80. After I was done, I thought the tally seems expensive. The price of the sandwich was $38.00. I got it corrected, but the thought of not having people to fix problems scares me.
I remember Walmart tried this a few years ago (perhaps a decade or so) when RFID tags became prevalent. Between the cost of the RFID tags and system and the losses due to the amount of stuff that wasn't correctly scanned, they stopped doing that really fast.
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They need to be able to run kiosk maintenance in a staggered/staged manner.
Because, right now, it takes roughly 30 minutes to do it on extant kiosks. Yet they only leave one or maybe (if we're lucky) two regular registers open.
Or worse, have to do register maintenance simultaneously...
If they're doing register-less stores, they need to be able to keep banks of them up and running while maintaining others.
If someone is just late-shopping for a shirt or socks, they can just drop them and go.
When someone is shopping for frozen foodstuffs, 30+ minutes waiting for kiosks or in a line of 30 peopleis just unacceptable.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I just heard on the radio how US companies will use their new US corporate tax break to invest in their employees, and in new technologies. It was followed by an announcement by a few corporations that they will raise their minimum wages and give employees $1000 bonuses.
I bet that in 10 years those investments will go into technology that eliminates employees. And the money they spent on increased wages and bonuses will be an argument in favor of those investments. Of course, the reality is that this was going to happen anyway. We already are at the cusp of the point where replacing physical laborers and service personnel with robots was aaalmost economically viable. With the recent minimum wage increases, constant improvements in tech, and now this - the fate of low-end service work is doomed. I wonder if restaurants with actual human employees will be a mark of a high-end place. Most of us will dine in the robotic restaurants.
It's faster, I bag things how I WANT, use less bags. With the walmart app, scan the QR code, boom! Done. In 6 months, I've gotten back almost 40 bucks in purchase match.
Are you four feet tall or something?
There'll be on employee to watch 8-10 registers. Also, that employee's job will just be to make you feel watched. They'll make minimum wage, where right now Walmart has to pay $9-$12/hr to get a cashier that can keep a line moving.
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It's paradoxical to say that automation will eliminate as many jobs as most here predict. Think critically here: If nobody has enough money to consume, then there's nothing for automation to do.
More realistically, you'll probably see a massive change in how economies work, assuming that high unemployment lasts long term (historically, frictional unemployment doesn't last very long.)
Not really paradoxical. The answer is automation will increase productivity to the point where most people don't need to work 40+ hours a week to generate enough wealth to enable them to consume as much as they need, and as much as a lot of people even want to.
The only problem is we have a lot of antiquated rules that say stuff like 32+ hours is a full time employee and those are the ones who get benefits. We have a tiny as compared to what it should be individual insurance market because of a bunch of antiquated tax rules that were created which prompted business to compensate people with insurance policies instead of large enough paychecks to just go get their own coverage... We have antiquated ideas and value judgements that term anyone not working full time to be a slacker...
Really the answer is pretty simple. We just need to move to flat taxes and let everyone know you can be a decent human being and only work 16 hours a week.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
for WalMart to employ fewer cashiers than they do now
I still won't shop there.
This has not been my experience with Walmart which seems to vary widely by location from all the stories I've heard.
I do try to avoid it before midnight but even when I've gone during the day it doesn't take significantly longer (if at all) than other stores.
I usually shop between midnight and about 5 AM. It's just less crowded.
The only problem I've run into while trying to check out is that they do software updates at about 4 AM. Not every night of course but when they do update their registers the whole system is down for about 45 minutes (based on the 2 times I've had it happen when I was there). A cashier told me it can take 15 minutes to an hour.
So there I am with all my groceries wondering if I should wait or just abandon them. I've waited both times.
It made me curious about their POS system. Back in the early '90s I was a developer for one but that was a much simpler and smaller retailer with different needs than Walmart. I still wonder why it takes that long or why they don't have any way to process customers while they're updating.
They somehow manage to do end-of-day processes at midnight without shutting down all the registers.
That was something my POS was not capable of but none of those stores were 24 hour operations either.
Not really paradoxical. The answer is automation will increase productivity to the point where most people don't need to work 40+ hours a week to generate enough wealth to enable them to consume as much as they need, and as much as a lot of people even want to.
That is a viable outcome; one among many (hence my comment about a big shift in how economies work) but what is paradoxical is the assumption that automation will just make everybody unable to afford anything. It just doesn't make any logical sense to have an outcome where people are too poor to afford what is produced by automation; after all, the endgame of automation is to make everything less expensive and more practical.