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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.
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.
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?
Driving the push to automation is not a bug, it's a feature. It's always framed as if higher wages will get rid of jobs, instead of the reality, which is that low wages are holding back technological progress.
Now, the economics of how to transition away from human labor is a bit more complicated, although it mostly just means taxing the rich so they aren't eaten by the jobless peasants.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I'm about ready to go this route too in the name of disconnecting more.
Sucks more places don't or can't give a discount for cash only sales. A good number of smaller gas stations around my area do for the price of gas (you save around 10 a gallon if you pay cash)
And somehow we’re all ok with that.
"We" who? Speak for yourself. I don't think it's a sign of a healthy society (and I don't spend money on sports or entertainers).
And even so, what's your point? Something is bad, so something else bad is OK? C'mon, dude.
I don't respond to AC's.
I cannot see how low wages holds technology back.
As long as it's cheaper to hire a human than to develop technology to automate their job, the job doesn't get automated. Thus, useful progress is retarded by making it legal to pay starvation wages.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So what? They have hundreds of thousands or millions of people that want to pay money to see them perform. Would you rather a record company or sports team owner get all of that money instead?
Why should I disparage someone who earns millions of dollars when I haven't had to pay them any of it unless I wanted to. It doesn't cost me anything if Taylor Swift or LeBron James are able to sell their time and talents for millions of dollars and I'm not about to start telling other people what they're allowed to spend their own money on either.
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.
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.
Actually, you probably do. You might not do it directly, which is what I think you were saying, but their cost is factored into the price of many products under the marketing expense category.
If I see sports bullshit on a product, as in "official sponsor of" then I make an effort to find an alternative product. That goes double for the Olympics. I am actually willing to pay more in order to not sponsor professional sports.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sucks more places don't or can't give a discount for cash only sales.
As a volunteer at a community theatre I sometimes have worked in the box office. I HATE people who pay with cash. It is so much easier to close out when all the sales are credit card. Just press the "batch" button on the machine and it prints out a report of the day's sales and you're done.
Counting the dirty wrinkled torn cash is a tedious nuisance and then finding that you don't have enough small bills to leave as change for the next shift and somebody needs to go to the bank. Or worse starting a shift and seeing that the last shift left you a stack of twenties as "change".
As a volunteer I put up with it for the sake of keeping the community theatre in operation, but if I were an employee of a company I'd damn well expect to be paid for that tedium and hassle. Why should the owner give you a discount for creating extra work that he/she has to pay me to do?
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