Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.

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.

  • Jolteon@lemmy.zipEnglish
    48·
    3 months ago

    It turns out that paying people to observe every second of a shopping trip is a lot more expensive than paying people just to check customers out.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      18·
      3 months ago

      It’s trivially obvious that that would be the case. Paying people to do the checkout costs maybe 5 minutes per customer, total. Paying them to constantly watch the customer is going to be 20–40 minutes per customer.

      I’m guessing that they thought they could develop the technology to remove the need for people to observe constantly, and have just now decided that it’s impractical.

      • NABDad@lemmy.worldEnglish
        27·
        3 months ago

        What they thought was that they had come up with a way to move the checkout cashier job to people in India so they wouldn’t have to pay minimum wage workers in the U.S.

        Pretty stupid idea, but it seems to me that it was just Amazon trying to ship jobs overseas to cut labor costs. Perhaps they thought eventually they’d be able to use AI to screw over the Indian workers too.

    • Shadywack@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      It’s also cheaper to just pay someone to work IN the store than hiring people outside of the country watching video feeds.

  • blackfire@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    3 months ago

    So the AI wasn’t good enough and now they are going to do what? Self checkouts?

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Sounds like they’re doing a “scan & go” type technology. You scan things yourself as you put them into your basket, then you can just walk out, so no need to line up at the self-checkout.