Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the surveillance-as-a-service dept.

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.

3 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Don't buy at Amazon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Amazon's boss earns 23.3K in nine seconds. That's more than what half of his employees earn /per year/.

    1. Re: Don't buy at Amazon by LordWabbit2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Why bother automating while its still cheaper to just throw cheap labor at your problems?

      When the problem is not wages, but people themselves, then their jobs are going to get automated.
      People committing suicide at Fox-con was really bad publicity for them.
      People getting sick, HR issues, theft, strikes, holidays, work hours, labor laws etc. etc. etc.
      Now that the cost of automation has come down a LOT, and it's a lot more capable you are going to get jobs automated.

      I still remember the look on a woman's face when she realized that the logistics system we were rewriting would automate away her daily job. She was old and sickly, for her to try and get another job was going to be a problem for her. I mean, we do this all the time, but actually sitting in front of her and seeing that look on her face... not something I enjoyed, and since we were actually work friends it was even harder.

      That same woman who I was coding out of a job used to get an excel spreadsheet that had each line of data split over two lines in excel (a COBOL thing) it would take her two days to manually remove the page break headers and footers, take the one line and add it to the end of the other so that it could be sorted properly. She used to take it home in the evenings and work on it as well, because it was a big ass report. I wrote a script for her in VBA which took 2 minutes to run and did it all for her. Two days work automated into two minutes, but that she was grateful for, because I automated a lot of tedium from her monthly work duties. But automating her job out of existence, not so much. I also think she never told anyone about the script, I didn't think about it at the time either, it was a personal favor. So I think she had two "days off" every month. Ironically she never lost her job when the system went live, she died from cancer about a year before, as sad as that was I think I would have had a harder time knowing I wrote a program that forced an old lady to live on the streets. I know, we programmers are doing that all the time, but actually knowing the person I was replacing with code... I will never forget that look on her face.

      --
      There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
  2. How are errors dealt with? by mark_reh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If their system screws up and charges me for something I put back on the shelf how do we prove that I didn't take the item? How do they legally prove that I did take it?