So Amazon put out this video a few days ago showing off a grocery store with no checkout lines and no cashiers. You just walk in, grab what you want off the shelf, and walk out, and apparently your Amazon account gets charged automatically. They're calling it "Just Walk Out" shopping, and the pilot store is in Seattle, near their office campus, open to employees first before (they say) it opens to the public sometime early next year.
I've watched that promo video three times now and I still cant decide if its impressive or just deeply unsettling.
Here's how it supposedly works: you scan your phone on the way in through a turnstile-looking gate, and then a wall of cameras and a pile of sensors track every item you pick up. Put it in your bag, its yours. Put it back on the shelf, its off your tab. No barcode scanning, no register, no sixteen-year-old cashier asking if you found everything okay. Amazon is leaning hard on computer vision and sensor fusion and deep learning to pull this off, which, fine, thats the buzzword soup you'd expect from them. What I keep getting stuck on isnt whether the technology is cool. Its that this store is going to know exactly what I pick up, put down, pick up again, and put down again, every single time I go in.
Im not actually worried about surveillance, Im worried about the false charges
Okay thats not entirely true, I am a little worried about the surveillance part too. But mostly what bugs me is that Ive used self-checkout machines at the grocery store near me for years now and they are, without exception, terrible. You know the one that yells "UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA" the second your reusable bag touches the scale wrong? Ive had that thing lock up because I set my keys down for two seconds. Ive had it fail to recognize three different kinds of apples in a row. And thats a machine that only has to track one item moving across one scale at a time, with a barcode to help it out. Amazon wants to track dozens of small, similarly shaped items moving around an entire room, with people bumping into each other, kids grabbing stuff off shelves, somebody picking up a yogurt to read the label and then changing their mind. I dont doubt they can make this work most of the time. I doubt they can make it work all the time, and "most of the time" is a genuinely bad standard for a system thats charging your credit card without you ever seeing an itemized receipt until after you leave.
The other thing nobody in the coverage Ive read wants to say plainly is that this is a jobs story dressed up as a convenience story. A grocery store with no cashiers is a grocery store that employs fewer people. Amazon will talk about "associates" who restock shelves and help customers, and sure, some jobs stay. But the entire pitch of the technology is removing the labor of scanning and bagging and handling money, and that labor used to be somebodys paycheck. Im not saying dont build it. Im saying lets not pretend the headline is "shopping is now magic" when the more honest headline is "shopping now requires fewer human beings," and those are different things worth being clear-eyed about.
I also just have a personal thing about being tracked item by item in a physical space the same way Im tracked click by click on a website. Theres something about a grocery store, of all places, that felt like it was still just a room with food in it. Amazon Go turns the room itself into the interface. Youre not browsing a store anymore, youre generating a session log that happens to also contain milk.
None of this is stopping me from wanting to see it in person eventually, if they ever let regular people in the door. Im curious in the same way Im curious about self-driving cars: I dont fully trust it yet, but I want to know what it feels like when it works. Just dont expect me to pretend the cashier-free future is purely a win for the person doing the shopping. Some of whats being optimized away here is a job, not just a line.