Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company’s senior vice president of grocery stores says they’re moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      The automated walk out service wasn’t a con. It was a shortsighted, honestly s***** idea, that was never able to be brought past the human oversight stage.

      Con requires intent. I’m absolutely certain they fully intended to make it a completely humanless system. They failed and drug their feet trying and now they’ve shut it down.

      If it’s a con, what’s their long game? What are they gain from having humans watch the store remotely? Is it tech just so neat that they’ll have a lot more shoppers than a regular store? Do they save so much in on-site staff that it’s cheaper to run than a conventional store? There’s no advantage here that would make it a worthwhile con. It’s a failed moonshot that they ended up manning with people to see if they could make it work that’s all.

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
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      2 years ago

      And I am calling Amazon’s “just walk out” service also a con because it was touted as automatic, even if also being mostly human labour.

      That’s not what a con is. A con is a deliberate scam. Amazon’s automated checkout simply didn’t function as effectively as intended. They presumably lost money on the venture because the automation was unreliable. Nothing about this situation was a deliberate attempt to pay over 1,000 employees to check an automated system’s work.

      The Mechanical Turk is an interesting story and I’m glad you linked it, but it’s not all that similar.