Amazon's Checkout-Free Stores Are Coming to Three More Cities (reuters.com)

Reuters reports: Amazon said on Friday it plans to open its checkout-free 'Amazon Go' grocery store in New York, expanding beyond Seattle where it is headquartered. The Amazon Go store, which has no cashiers and allows shoppers to buy things with the help of a smartphone app, is widely seen as a concept that can alter brick-and-mortar retail... Customers have to scan a smartphone app to enter the store. Once inside, cameras and sensors track what they pick up from the shelves and what they put back. Amazon then bills shoppers' credit cards on file after they leave.
CNET adds: The expansion comes after two Amazon Go stores opened in Seattle. The first one debuted in January 2018 and the second opened last month... Amazon confirmed in May that it'll open Amazon Go stores in San Francisco and Chicago, but it didn't say when.

Comments

Re: Don't buy at Amazon

[alvinrod]

So if we increased the minimum wage to $50 an hour, everything would be great all of a sudden. Wouldn't $100 an hour be better still then? I think the logic breaks down and it's easy to see why.

It also doesn't make much sense when looking at history. There were no minimum wage laws and people often were paid starvation wages if they were paid at all. And yet useful progress occurred nonetheless. People are always going to try to find a cheaper way of doing something as long as there's a potential for increased profit that they can realize as a result of doing so. While there are some that don't even need that and are quite happy to work away at some problem for its own sake, they are rare.

Perhaps what you're thinking of is that there's less pressure to find a less expensive alternative when the cost of some aspect of production is low relative to the other components and that's certainly true, but the logic still does not hold. One could argue that paying starvation wages to the low skill labor leaves more money available to invest into research and development. That naturally implies that there will be higher wages for researchers if there is more demand for that kind of labor, but it does nothing for the kind of low skill employees whose plight the original poster was bemoaning.

I suppose you can try to play economic god and demand that certain jobs pay more in order to try to drive technological advancement in those areas, but history has shown that the people who try to run planned economies often make an utter mess of things.

Re:I don't have an "app"

[rjr162]

Many places do it because of the typical purchase amounts compared to the fees the processor charge.

I know that's not true for all companies/businesses, but around here a lot of smaller ones operate this way.

As a consumer, it tends to be easier to monitor spending when you have a physical representation of dollars in a wallet vs a piece of plastic for a lot of folks