Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores
gizmodo.com
Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.

(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)

surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive

even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down

  • lettruthoutEnglish
    122•1 year ago

    “Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.”

    • Hello_there
      31•1 year ago

      Lol. This is some.wizard in oz don’t look behind the curtain level of shenanigans. I remember the news articles when it released all said it was automation.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•1 year ago

        I was so excited to try one out when I was in San Francisco, but now that’s it feels lame :(

      • @[email protected]English
        17•1 year ago

        Pretty much every startup operates like that, they hope to figure out the AI stuff later on and basically never do.

            • David GerardMEnglish
              5•1 year ago

              activitypub is underspecified in practice and interop comes from seeing what breaks

              • @[email protected]OPEnglish
                4•1 year ago

                and the Lemmy devs generally insist on only implementing what is specified by activitypub, leading to some truly low-hanging fruit being absent. and besides that approach to federated software being fucking nonsense, it’s also something they’re very inconsistent on — they’ll use “we don’t implement mastodon-specific interoperability features” as an excuse to not fulfill feature requests, then use mastodon-specific interoperability features to implement their own pet features. it’s just pure toxic developer double standards

      • @[email protected]English
        16•1 year ago

        “hey babe… what if we fucked the entire cashier class… in two countries?? 🥹👉👈”

        - bezos, probably