[trome]

What about using worthless phones and masks? For under $5 I can get an Android or a dozen of them, load them up with this app, and be good to go. Need a credit card? No trouble, get a prepaid card for $1.95 at the corner store, load 5 dollars on it, auth it with the Amazon account, and pull $4.99 off it. Then go get some steaks on the house!

[dangrossman]

There's nobody guarding the doors at the average grocery store. You can walk in and walk out with a steak without anyone stopping you, and without having to buy prepaid debit cards and make online accounts in advance. Far fewer tracks to cover. They also don't have every square inch of the store covered in face-detecting cameras, like Amazon's store, making pretty much anywhere else a better target once you're set on shoplifting. A grocery store probably won't even notice the missing steak, where the Amazon store will have timestamped logs of every unpaid product leaving the store and video of it happening to pass on to authorities.

[trome]

Wow, you are unfamiliar with retail. Sure, you can probably steal small things, but repeatedly stealing larger objects (book size and above) is generally a pain in the ass. Hence why Costco & Sams Club make better targets than average stores, its much easier to throw something in the cart of high value and slip it by.

Booster bags will be a major issue for Amazon's stores if they ever launch this.

[dangrossman]

> Wow, you are unfamiliar with retail.

That was unnecessary.

> Booster bags will be a major issue for Amazon's stores

None of the products in Amazon's stores carry any kind of tag, so there's nothing for a booster bag to block.

They're using computer vision to identify when a customer takes a product off a shelf, or puts a product back on the shelf. That customer's virtual cart is updated in turn, and charged after the customer leaves the store. The people are what's being tracked going in and out, not the products.

[IanCal]

I don't understand what this gets you. You'd be on camera, accessing the store using your own amazon account, wearing a mask. Do you think you wouldn't be caught?