[deanCommie]

This is the "lame - no wireless, less space than a nomad" take.

Are the prices not listed on the individual items?

Purchasers make decisions on a product by product basis, not based on the total.

How often are you at the checkout and say "Wait, HOW MUCH is my bill? never mind then, going to go put some things back."

Sure, it happens, but it's a 0.0001% use case.

edit: OK, fair play to everyone who responded and said this is a common use case if you're poor. Not sure how relevant the food stamps argument is here, since this is an automatic pay and checkout system.

But, remember - this requires a credit card and an app. As you put things in your basket, your app shopping cart is also updated, and you can track your running tally.

[sykick]

I was a cashier in college for several years. Your scenario happens far more than 0.0001% of the case. It's fairly common amongst poor people. Then there are items that aren't acceptable for use by food stamps and must be paid for separately. Then there is WIK and trying return WIK items for cash refunds. You also have people who misread the labels. Then there are items that aren't in the right place and the label says a price different than what the register says. For instance, "Cambell's Tomato Soup" can is misplaced in the "Cambell's Healthy Alternative Tomato Soup" location. Most people don't carefully read labels of the items on the shelf. They just assume that the label under the item is correct.

[mason55]

Then this solution sounds like a huge improvement. Instead of getting to the register and finding out you grabbed the wrong thing or overspent, which is a huge inconvenience to you and the other people in line, you can now track everything as you go.

Put a can of soup in your basket. Oops! The alert I set up for items that aren't covered by Food Stamps just fired. Let me see what the issue is. Oh! I just got an alert because I went over my budget, let me review my items and figure it right away.

And even if you don't have a smartphone/app, the process of going to a kiosk to review your order will be much faster than at a register. Walk up to the kiosk and it instantly shows what's in your basket, with a total and flags for non-Food Stamp items. Now you can go swap things out or put things back and the whole interaction only took a second and was must less of a commitment than going through a checkout lane.

[sykick]

What you say seems plausible and I agree with it. I was responding only to the belief that not having enough money at checkout is 0.0001% of the cases.

[mc32]

To add. When I was poor and in college I definitely had a few instances where I had to put something back because the total was more than I could afford.

[LeifCarrotson]

Hopefully the same tech used to measure when someone takes or replaces something on the shelf can be used to monitor when stuff is in the wrong spot, making stocking easier.

[chrisseaton]

> It's fairly common amongst poor people.

Are these people shopping at Amazon boutiques?

[rtkwe]

Amazon wants to spread this to more than just their stores. It's a mild problem now but most things are when new tech is introduced. Accessibility doesn't matter when only a few sites are on the web but becomes critical when the web is the default way to access information.

[uselesstech]

Amazon Go is a convenience store...if convenience stores pick this up then yes, they will shop there.

[bigiain]

But sadly, will no longer be able to get a job there...

[joezydeco]

The Amazon Go I used to visit was maybe 200 square feet in size but had 4-5 people stocking and moving things around. And apparently there are others in the back assisting the cameras and making sandwiches and whatnot.

[Cyph0n]

The whole point of this post is that Amazon is opening up the tech to other grocery chains...

[bradlys]

Yeah - actually, it does happen often enough... I'd say it's much higher.

I know a lot of HN is full of people who don't pay attention to prices (for whatever reason - probably the inordinate amount of obscenely high incomes) - but it's really common outside of this crowd.

When I was poor - I thoroughly examined prices and only bought things that were on sale. If it rang up and wasn't the price that it said it was - I put it back. An example in my mind would be something like a block of cheese being $12 instead of $10. It's only $2 but it's also $2 that I was not willing to pay. Sometimes the staff at the store were not removing the old sale tags - thus it looked like it was on sale but it wasn't.

[daveFNbuck]

If it rings up for $12 when it's labeled as $10, you can usually get it for $10 if you tell someone it rang up wrong.

[smeyer]

In MA it's even better: if a grocery store item was labeled as $10 and rang up as $12, you'd just pay $2. The rule is that the item is free if it's less than $10 and $10 off if it's more than $10 (although this only applies to one item; you can't just go grab 20 of them).

[njarboe]

Stores have problem with pricing all the time. If you don't look at your receipt when buying things at the grocery store, you are going to be overcharged sometimes. Especially at stores that don't have a "Over charged and you get it free" policy. Pricing problems are even more common when a new store opens. This tech is going to make mistakes all the time for quite awhile. I would definitely want to see a list of the items and prices the system charged me for before I left the store.

[sincerely]

>How often are you at the checkout and say "Wait, HOW MUCH is my bill? never mind then, going to go put some things back."

That's a pretty common occurence for poor people. If you only have $70 and your bill comes to $72 because you did the mental math wrong you're gonna have to put something back.

[thewebcount]

Are you in the US? Because in the US it happens more often than elsewhere because you can't actually know the full price until you check out due to taxes not being included in the price on the box/shelf. Plus, especially with groceries, some items are taxed and some aren't in some states.

[pjmorris]

I'm more concerned about whether the store system gets my order right than whether I do. What if it, e.g., mistakes a can of soda for a 12-pack? Three hundred times on the order?

[ayberk]

FWIW, I've been using Amazon Go stores regularly for a while and have never had any issues.

There's a link to dispute the receipt should something happen, right on the receipt itself. Now this is specifically Amazon Go app, but I would expect it to be same for other retailers.

Edit: I see that this is a little bit different than Go stores. It's far less convenient, but you can still get the receipt in your email by visiting a kiosk it seems.

[noahtallen]

I wonder if Amazon can offer some kind of good-will insurance here. Like “if our system mistakenly looses a customer money, we’ll cover it for you.”

[sixothree]

Agreed. I feel like the point of this is to separate the buyer from the notion of total price. They may as well change the unit from dollars to "credits".

[miguelrochefort]

This is unlikely to happen. Shelves act as scales, and there is a big weight difference between 1 can and 12 cans.

[mentat]

That would be very unlikely and easily reversed based on video data.

[thfuran]

>That would be very unlikely

Would it?

>easily reversed based on video data

That suggests a level of effort from multiple parties well in excess of the typical "look at item; look at receipt"

[miguelrochefort]

Given that the exact timestamp of when the system thinks an item is picked up is known, it should be trivial to review a 5-second clip and flag it as correct or not, training the ML model at the same time.

[totalZero]

You've gotta be kidding me. The vast majority of Americans are constantly managing a battle between their means and their desires. The total bill matters immensely.

[obmelvin]

> Not sure how relevant the food stamps argument is here, since this is an automatic pay and checkout system.

Not sure why you feel the need to say that anyone who is conscious of their grocery budget is irrelevant to an automatic system? You don't say this, but that basically implies that anyone who does so is 'beneath' this tech/convenience.

[gmadsen]

just an observation, but it is pretty obvious you have never been poor or interact with poor people. That situation is a lot more common than you would think.

[arkades]

> Sure, it happens, but it's a 0.0001% use case.

Apparently I can guess an awful lot about how you grow up based on your estimate of how infrequently that happens.

I'm betting you can guess something about how I grow up that I know you're off by quite a few orders of magnitude.

[noja]

> How often are you at the checkout and say "Wait, HOW MUCH is my bill? never mind then, going to go put some things back."

Not often, because I can look at the prices of things as I buy them. Unlike here.

[noahtallen]

In the Amazon Go stores, there are still price labels on the shelves, if I recall correctly. Nothing stopping a retailer from doing that.

[ben174]

And how often do you stop your checkout clerk and tell them to stop scanning because you've exceeded N number of dollars? Once you've pulled your cart up to the checkout line, I'm betting you've most likely settled on what you want to buy.

[TeMPOraL]

I've seen people do just that often enough. They'll sometimes sort their items in order of descending importance, and ask to stop when the total exceeds some amount.

[x0]

I don't want to say the "p" word and spark a huge social justice flame war, but a lot of comments in this thread are so obviously speaking from a place of financial advantage.

In response to your comment in particular, yes, I have done that. Not often, but it has happened often enough, and only a few dollars each time. Do you think people whip out Excel and keep a running tally of every item in their carts?

[jshevek]

"A place of financial advantage" is a more specific and useful characterization, anyway.

[x0]

Agreed.

[callmeal]

>Are the prices not listed on the individual items?

This is not aimed at deanCommie, but I just want to comment on the massive cognitive dissonance in effect when the issue of listing tax-included prices on individual items in America is raised.

Do none of those arguments hold anymore? Why? Because it isn't European tourists asking the question?

[samatman]

European VATs are routinely much higher than any state sales tax in the US.

I can't prove it, but I suspect this is directly related to the fact that in the US system, we see the tax on every purchase.

I admit it's annoying to not have a single number to work with, having to juggle sticker price and real price sucks (the same argument applies to tipping).

But sales taxes are regressive and I don't want them to creep upwards indefinitely. A compromise would be to always display both prices, and make the price-at-register larger.

[Aeolun]

While I agree with listing tax inclusive prices. Is it really that much of a mental effort to add 7%?

[samatman]

Absolutely, large swaths of the population can't do simple mental arithmetic like this at all.

The US system discriminates against those people, no denying it. That said, I'm sure our European friends are absolutely drooling at the thought of a 7% VAT...

[disgruntledphd2]

It's just part of the price, you don't really notice.

Like I do sometimes, but then I consider VAT policy somewhat interesting, in that it specifies the "essentials" (VAT is not charged on these) of what a tax authority thinks one should have.

But most Europeans tend not to think about it on a daily basis, because it's baked into the price.

[tialaramex]

Legally VAT isn't about essentials, although luxury taxes which pre-dated VAT were often specified this way.

VAT is just a tax on Value Added like it says, and the exclusions targeting items you see as essential aren't focused on somebody's idea of what's essential but are the result of various lobbying. That is, it was not the goal of the tax system to encourage petite women to buy clothes intended for children nor to punish the largest children (or their parents) with more expensive clothes that's just the consequence of a lobbied-for exemption for kid sizes.

So "But it's an essential" is a useful emotional tactic but has no legal implications for VAT.

[Aeolun]

I’m not sure that’s unfair, because they ostensibly all learned it in elementary school.

If they willfully forget/ignore something as basic at that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[samatman]

No, you misunderstand, they can't. It's not for lack of trying.

[callmeal]

If you live in the San Francisco Bay area, sales taxes in SF are 8.5% Tax rates in Oakland are 9.25%. South San Francisco: 9.75% Mountain View: 9% Humboldt County: 7.75% Sonoma: 8.75%

The mental effort is not in the calculation but in figuring out what the tax rate is where you are. There really is no excuse for retailers not listing "tax-included" prices.

[bogomipz]

>"This is the "lame - no wireless, less space than a nomad" take."

Can you elaborate? What does this mean exactly?

[deanCommie]

https://www.google.com/search?q=no+wireless+less+space+than+...