11 April 2024

Amazon's "Automated" Grocery Checkout is Ending

From Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony we get the following. Daily News Stuff 3 April 2024: The Telescreen Was Behind The Potatoes Edition

Amazon is closing its automated grocery stores that delivered the magical experience of walking in, picking out whatever you needed, and walking out again, and then having an amount possibly even related to what you had taken deducted from your credit card. (Gizmodo)

Automated.

Well, as to that, all those cameras weren't hooked up to some carefully trained visual AI system, but to a warehouse full of people in India keeping track of your every move.

Not sure if that's better or worse.

As the underlying article at Gizmodo notes, they only moved the cashiers offshore, and made their jobs ridiculously hard. But that sums up a lot of work that tech did moving stuff offshore.

So here in the Eastern Time Zone - with Daylight Savings - we are 4 hours behind GMT. In India, they are 5 and a half hours ahead of GMT. That is a 9 and a half hour time difference. (Yes 5½ hours off of GMT. I won't go into the reasons behind that, but you can look it up if you doubt me.)

Also from Gizmodo...

It often took hours for customers to receive receipts after leaving the store, largely because offshore cashiers were rewatching videos and assigning items to different customers. The system of scanners and video cameras in each store is also incredibly expensive.

Amazon will now institute another form of insane checkouts, though they are keeping the offshore system in a limited number of places.

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