I was in London this week and encountered these 'Amazon Fresh' grocery stores for the first time. You walk in, somehow they track your movement through the shop and know what items you have picked up (or put back), and then when you leave you scan your membership card and they charge all the purchases to your account.
So effectively they've solved the shoplifting problem. If you are not a member then you have no business being in the store.
tons of issues with the amazon go concept to fix from the tech side
> The Just Walk Out system requires a considerable number of staff to oversee manual reviews and enable the system to work. For example, while the process—from the consumer’s perspective is cashierless—Amazon still needs staff on the backend to review video footage of the transactions to “facilitate pricing and payment.” In fact, Amazon initially set out to use roughly 20 to 50 employees per 1,000 sales by mid-2022. But quickly realized that figure was too low and ended up using up to 700 employees during that timeframe.
So social graph and hobbies/passions is not enough to monetize, they want all your shopping history, habits, quirks etc., on camera to be analyzed to death? Nobody sees this as privacy and security problem in 2024?
I get that Bezos is an obsessive penny-pincher and thats part of his success (and fucked up persona that leaves a lot to be desired), but please allow me to politely say Hell fuck no, I'll give premium to competition that just doesn't have this. I can't imagine this being OK in EU, but then again we don't talk about EU standards here anymore. I wonder what makes British population OK with this, its not like we talk about former East Germany.
But retailers in some places are having to shut down stores because theft is so high and the law is not enforced and for some reason private security is not an option.
So effectively they've solved the shoplifting problem. If you are not a member then you have no business being in the store.