I've seen trust-based mate shops at hackerspaces around the world, and I've been told that the ones that have a credit system (even one that's not limited, checked, and that's not even authenticated) end up actually not having any significant losses. Like, anything from a piece of paper with people noting down unpaid mate purchases to things like android tablets with a webapp letting you note that you put in a bill of N euros and taken out a bottle of mate.
Friction from being able to pay right away seems to lead to "I'll pay extra later" thinking, which makes people either forget or miscalculate how much they actually owe.
Also, when your balance is negative, after every purchase there is a big red notification reminding you of that.
I've spoken with grocery store clerks in SF (at major chains like Walgreens) who were concerned that their stores might be closed because of truly excessive losses due to constant shoplifting. Of course the shrinkage is factored into the price, but you can only raise prices so much before it starts eating into your sales.
BTW, when I visited the Amazon Go in SF it actually seemed to have more staff present than a regular grocery store of comparable size.
People aren't likely to repeatedly steal from an honours system cafe if there are regular customers witnessing them.
I'd say, in a cafe, besides cash you could have a touchscreen to key in your order and tap your phone to pay. The walk in walk out Amazon model is not an honours system, it's a technological policing model.
Passing items between friends that used the same phone to get in is also seamless (I’ve never tried passing an item between two amazon accounts).
I believe there are weight sensors to counteract stuff like taking out half a sandwich and putting the rest back, but I’m not sure about this one.
There are definitely ways to cheat the system. But the tech is at a point where it is similar hassle/consequences to other petty shoplifting that happens across the world (the cameras can always be checked by a human in a post-mortem).
The reality is convenience store shopping is at a point where it is almost always better for the company and the customer with Amazon Go tech.
The bigger problems with the Amazon Go tech is, how do you scale it to a supermarket size, how do you get around or change regulations that a human needs to validate ID for alcohol, how do you auto-stock the place, how do you get away from needing a human for security guard / first aid reasons? Also I imagine it costs a lot to set up. How do you make this cheap enough to be financially worth the ROI?
I agree with you - the stores will save more money by switching to this tech and it will be better for the customers.
I really hate having to queue for 10 minutes in a busy supermarket to buy groceries - it's probably the worst UX I experience on a regular basis.
Why do people do this? Why can’t you put it back where you got it if you don’t want it any more?
Some people are just terrible.
I was in a supermarket sometime last year and saw a woman put a package of meat in the toilet paper aisle and walk away. She saw me staring at her and began shouting at me.
The world is full of awful people.
I mean it's kind of symbolic: meat is basically absolute, complete and utter shit, anyway.
A store that is arranging things so that there are no checks is a store that is going to profit from its own mistakes. Impersonal forces will drive it to do so regardless of particular human intentions.
This is the sort of relationship I do not want to get into for ordinary purchases. It demands too much trust, which is hard to build and unnecessary for most things.
The issue I have is that once you add the friction in, it prevents errors from being corrected, and that reduces the incentive to prevent them. It's not about whether I can get a problem fixed when I notice it. It's that the number of problems will be higher because on average fewer will be noticed and fixed. Furthermore, whenever the rate of problems seems a little too high, the easy "fix" is to add a little more friction.
Of course they are "priced" in the sense of the vendor assigning a price to deduct, but transparency to the purchaser is legally required.
It's just walk in, pick up a drink and a snack, walk to the self check kiosk and scan both barcodes, tap a few times rapidly (you can just hammer a button in the same place a few times) and wave my card. If I had to guess I'd say the entire checkout process takes ~10s, most of which is getting my card out of my wallet.
This differs from a US self checkout in a few ways:
- I nearly always had to queue in the US. I nearly never have to queue in Switzerland, at least at this store. This may be because:
- Swiss self checkout kiosks don't weigh the bagging area like US ones do. In the US there's always a small delay between scanning items while you bag the item and wait for the checkout to detect it. In Switzerland you just scan it and the kiosk doesn't care what you do with it afterwards.
- Payment is extremely fast, like sub-second end-to-end fast. You literally just wave your card at the terminal.
- There are usually 15-20 self checkout terminals in the larger supermarkets you find in the city so unless you're there at a really busy time, they usually have more than enough throughput to deal with traffic. In the US I'm used to seeing <10 self checkout terminals.
No you won't. Our standard of living is built on automation in a million ways, big and small.
You're only actually opposed to recent, more visible examples. Why?
Also, they have a kitchen attached to them, and prepare food in it, so they have kitchen staff for that and all the delivery surrounding it.
They also now need to hire engineers to work on the system, maintain and repair it, and service workers to setup and maintain the infrastructure needed in the store.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure the whole things turns out way more expansive for them than hiring a few cashiers. I think the idea is that the extra convenience given to the customers mean that customers will prefer to shop at Amazon Go instead of elsewhere, and that might be worth the extra cost to grow the marketshare.
A weird moral compass that had you not using technology that replaced menial labor would be actually impossible in any (even ancient) society.
A tech worker who claims to value a cashier's job over their own convenience is basically gorging on two large deluxe pizzas while criticizing others for eating an olive.
Just look around you. Pick just about anything. A wall. A refrigerator. Your shoes. A spice jar. They all have stories to tell about automation and job loss.
It was stupid scapegoating in the past and it is even stupider now. Notice specifically that scapegoating is specifically at who is weak and at hand - not actual sources of problems.