It takes hours, therefore it must not be a computer? I know the author has industry experience with ML and scientific computing, so this conclusion is surprising to me. Big data pipelines, especially those that involve a lot of money, especially especially the ones that are messy and potentially unreliable and have large ups and downs in demand, are not necessarily fast. Maybe there was a bunch of sales and there's a queue. Maybe there's a buffer where they check every few hours to see if inventory matches sales. Maybe they manually validate a couple of orders in each batch before releasing the automated results. Maybe the fleet doesn't autoscale and it's overprovisioned at night but underprovisioned when you're actually shopping. Maybe it sometimes handles the work in large batches, and maybe that job periodically fails due to regular bugs and has to be restarted.
There are lots of "this works but not instantly and not 100% reliably" answers. "It was a mechanical turk all along" is not the only logical conclusion from the presented evidence.
And "usually takes a couple of hours"...isn't very bad? Is it ideal? No. Is it enough to ask "How Has Amazon Come To This?" Also no.
This would be a good excuse for a smaller company that doesn't have the resources but amazon is literally the largest cloud provider in the world. Amazon could scale instantly to deal with queue size no problem and at cost since they own the aws services needed to do so. I don't think queue size or under-provisioning makes sense here at all. Validation and some human element checking inventory matches sales makes sense but that's essentially what the author is suggesting is going on here.
That's my guess. They wait until the end of the day and see what they have in the store, since that's got to be the easiest of all of this to automate with cameras.
Then they see how far off the AI was for the day and work on error correction and send receipts.
My understanding internally at amazon is they have the same cloud tools that smaller companies have with AWS. I seriously doubt amazon is keeping some secret AWS sauce for internal-use-only.
I agree with your overall point that cloud resources probably shouldn’t be a problem for Amazon that factors into the hours of processing time. But is it true that AWS could provide at-cost resources to sister companies?
More of a legal/organizational question. But assuming Amazon Fresh is a legally-distinct entity with service agreements with Amazon Web Services, wouldn’t offering those services at below-market-rate be considered anticompetitive (and also call into question the legal separation of the two entities)?
The simplest explanation, IMO, is to look at the piece Amazon doesn't own. The bandwidth to send a continuous stream of 4K video from dozens (hundreds?) of cameras from the store to the cloud for processing. That can't be cheap.
In what world is "knowing how much you spent" not a reasonable design requirement for a supermarket?
Just to pick one user story, it's a lot harder to check / challenge an itemized receipt if you receive it hours later, once you're already packed things away or eaten some of them.
> Maybe the fleet doesn't autoscale and it's overprovisioned at night but underprovisioned when you're actually shopping.
It's further worth remembering that Amazon happens to, y'know, own AWS. Since this is not a time sensitive result at all, they could be trying to do it in spare capacity by specifically downscaling when their customers tend to use things. It's complicated to pass that efficiency on to customers, but it's probably super easy to take advantage internally.
The author clearly wants to push it as some sort of 'Amazon faking it bigtime' thing.
I am sure there are manual reviews when it gets flagged, and I am also sure there are mistakes in receipts (I had an error once out of 20 or so purchases).
I have a much simpler explanation of why billing can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours: they process the video feed in batches, and maybe even optimizing for cost depending on compute load in AWS. Video processing takes time, and each store probably has hundreds of cameras - if you want to do multi-person multi-object detection at scale on HD feeds from hundreds of cameras at so many stores, the amount of compute needed is probably not trivial. Instead of processing the video everytime after each person leaves the store, it is much more efficient to do it at intervals and process multiple individuals at the same time.
> However, self-checkout machines have already reduced queues to virtually zero in many supermarkets
This line surprised me because it isn't even remotely true in my part of the country, except during times when the stores aren't busy. The self-checkout machines almost always have a line and it's often quicker to go to one of the cashiers instead.
People are smart - they'll pick a self-checkout line or a cashier depending on which will reduce the effort they have to expend. So, even with varying shopper preferences for which is intrinsically better/worse, it'll average out to roughly the same effort required across all queues.
It should say "Amazon Fresh (retail stores)" because Amazon Fresh delivery is wildly successful. I can't see the point of having yet another brand other than Whole Foods.
Amazon Go doesn't make any money and doesn't scale.
Amazon palm pay at Whole Foods doesn't work. There's no way to easy way to opt-out of it or change cards, and took WF employees 30+ minutes to figure out how to remove it.
I was also thinking of Amazon Fresh delivery. It looks like the title of this article is actually "Amazon’s cashierless stores: artificial intelligence or major deception?", so the HN title should probably be updated to that.
Whole Foods still has very strange retailing choices (afaik, you can't get standard Heinz Ketchup or Hellman's Mayo at the big one near me - just the organic varieties).
TL;DR: Buy those at Costco or Trader Joe's (Aldi Nord). Don't waste your money buying staples at WF.
Their target demo is Mercedes or BMW SUV driver (I'm mostly joking): elitist, hyper-self-absorbed, conspicuous consumption Before Amazon acquired them, their prices were relatively absurd and the products were even bougier.
It's also true you can't get some staples at WF because they need to ensure each SKU makes enough profit / shelf area.
The priciest of WFs are the small ones in major metros in mixed use commercial-residential areas that are essentially convenience stores.
WF post-Amazon also discontinues items that seem to me to be desirable, but I guess I'm not an average WF customer.
One positive point of WF is many locations have bulk dry goods that can sometimes be almost sanely priced.
Disclosure: I live ~1 mi from 3 WF and their HQ.
PS: I recall I was walking on the sidewalk crossing a WF parking garage, and out of nowhere, a white woman driving a white Mercedes SUV with the window rolled down tried to physically push me with their vehicle, laid into their car horn, and shouted profanities at me for the crime of not moving fast enough. Makes one consider wearing several GoPros when they venture forth into the world.
Even if this is true is it a problem? It obviously has limited how Amazon can scale the product, but I don't think its a scandal worthy of a "gate" suffix. It's just a product/engineering issue. I'm sure someone in a meeting said, "We tried an experiment to scale our image recognition technology, but it turns out the problem was more complex than we thought and not worth more engineering investment"
My wife and I tried to get into our local Amazon Fresh. Sign outside said open Amazon app and scan upon entry. We were ok with that idea.
Got to the turnstiles, and the devices there demanded a palm print, no apparent scanners to scan a phone anywhere. We walked out and will never walk back in, especially considering the jackass carting out in the parking lot ridiculed us for refusing to surrender biometric data to give Amazon our money.
No, you misunderstood the interface. While they certainly encourage you to use the weird biometric scanner it's in no way required. However you do have to have the Amazon app installed on your phone. When you open the app there's an option to reveal a QR code which you scan at the turnstiles.
I did not. Had the app open, and QR code on my screen as I had previously done so many times before at Whole Foods. There was literally no device resembling a barcode scanner on the turnstile.
PS I also have a ton of experience with barcode printing and reading. As a matter of fact, software I have written has printed over 30M unique QR Codes for track and trace purposes.
Sounds like Amazon deliberately made a confusing interface to trick people into revealing more biometric data than necessary. I wouldn't say that's any better than just making it a requirement.
In my opinion, using humans in the loop to generate training data in a store like this is perfectly legitimate.
If I were building it, I would do it the same way: start out with the whole thing being people watching cameras and labeling training data, and slowly apply software/ML engineering to improve the automation rate.
In fact, this approach is the opposite of putting the cart before the horse: you test the market risk before you solve all the technical problems. The right way to find out if customers want this type of experience is to bring it to market and find out.
It depends how this works. Use of AI does not imply that everything is processed in real-time while you're walking through the store. Raw or preprocessed footage may be queued for processing at a data centre. If there are issues it is also possible that 'uncertain' AI results might indeed be flagged for human review.
I only shopped once at an Amazon Fresh store and the total receipt took less than an hour to show up.
Personally I'm not too fussed if it takes a long time, but I'm very interested in how their procedure works if there is an error to my disadvantage.
Readit News
There are lots of "this works but not instantly and not 100% reliably" answers. "It was a mechanical turk all along" is not the only logical conclusion from the presented evidence.
And "usually takes a couple of hours"...isn't very bad? Is it ideal? No. Is it enough to ask "How Has Amazon Come To This?" Also no.
That's my guess. They wait until the end of the day and see what they have in the store, since that's got to be the easiest of all of this to automate with cameras.
Then they see how far off the AI was for the day and work on error correction and send receipts.
More of a legal/organizational question. But assuming Amazon Fresh is a legally-distinct entity with service agreements with Amazon Web Services, wouldn’t offering those services at below-market-rate be considered anticompetitive (and also call into question the legal separation of the two entities)?
Just to pick one user story, it's a lot harder to check / challenge an itemized receipt if you receive it hours later, once you're already packed things away or eaten some of them.
It's further worth remembering that Amazon happens to, y'know, own AWS. Since this is not a time sensitive result at all, they could be trying to do it in spare capacity by specifically downscaling when their customers tend to use things. It's complicated to pass that efficiency on to customers, but it's probably super easy to take advantage internally.
amazon seller inventory reports may have 2 or 3 days of delay on a bad day.
I am sure there are manual reviews when it gets flagged, and I am also sure there are mistakes in receipts (I had an error once out of 20 or so purchases).
I have a much simpler explanation of why billing can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours: they process the video feed in batches, and maybe even optimizing for cost depending on compute load in AWS. Video processing takes time, and each store probably has hundreds of cameras - if you want to do multi-person multi-object detection at scale on HD feeds from hundreds of cameras at so many stores, the amount of compute needed is probably not trivial. Instead of processing the video everytime after each person leaves the store, it is much more efficient to do it at intervals and process multiple individuals at the same time.
This line surprised me because it isn't even remotely true in my part of the country, except during times when the stores aren't busy. The self-checkout machines almost always have a line and it's often quicker to go to one of the cashiers instead.
Amazon Go doesn't make any money and doesn't scale.
Amazon palm pay at Whole Foods doesn't work. There's no way to easy way to opt-out of it or change cards, and took WF employees 30+ minutes to figure out how to remove it.
Their target demo is Mercedes or BMW SUV driver (I'm mostly joking): elitist, hyper-self-absorbed, conspicuous consumption Before Amazon acquired them, their prices were relatively absurd and the products were even bougier.
It's also true you can't get some staples at WF because they need to ensure each SKU makes enough profit / shelf area.
The priciest of WFs are the small ones in major metros in mixed use commercial-residential areas that are essentially convenience stores.
WF post-Amazon also discontinues items that seem to me to be desirable, but I guess I'm not an average WF customer.
One positive point of WF is many locations have bulk dry goods that can sometimes be almost sanely priced.
Disclosure: I live ~1 mi from 3 WF and their HQ.
PS: I recall I was walking on the sidewalk crossing a WF parking garage, and out of nowhere, a white woman driving a white Mercedes SUV with the window rolled down tried to physically push me with their vehicle, laid into their car horn, and shouted profanities at me for the crime of not moving fast enough. Makes one consider wearing several GoPros when they venture forth into the world.
Got to the turnstiles, and the devices there demanded a palm print, no apparent scanners to scan a phone anywhere. We walked out and will never walk back in, especially considering the jackass carting out in the parking lot ridiculed us for refusing to surrender biometric data to give Amazon our money.
PS I also have a ton of experience with barcode printing and reading. As a matter of fact, software I have written has printed over 30M unique QR Codes for track and trace purposes.
If I were building it, I would do it the same way: start out with the whole thing being people watching cameras and labeling training data, and slowly apply software/ML engineering to improve the automation rate.
In fact, this approach is the opposite of putting the cart before the horse: you test the market risk before you solve all the technical problems. The right way to find out if customers want this type of experience is to bring it to market and find out.
I only shopped once at an Amazon Fresh store and the total receipt took less than an hour to show up.
Personally I'm not too fussed if it takes a long time, but I'm very interested in how their procedure works if there is an error to my disadvantage.