[alden5]

What never made sense to me with their go stores was why a store that only needed 1-2 people max to operate had such bad hours. Hearing now that getting the bill is a mainly manual process i guess their hours had to line up with their data entry team in india so people could get their recipes quickly. insane to think about

[bilalq]

It's not manual. This is a case of mistaken journalism. The labeling is for training data of the models.

Before covid, the hours were much better too.

[sunshowers]

> 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022

That's manual by any reasonable description.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

I think it depends on how much each human reviewer did.

If they manually reviewed most of the items on each shopping trip, then it's mostly manual.

If they only manually reviewed an item or few per trip, I'd consider it to be mostly automated.

[Timshel]

Well Amazon did not think so:

> Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

They didn't even agree with the 700 out of 1000 trips needing review figure

> According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.

Even if the system was fairly accurate, if the vendor is charging Amazon too much for it, it can still be financially worthwhile for Amazon to switch to scanners in their carts.

[sunshowers]

"inaccurate" can mean lots of things here, from "actually it was 690 out of 1000" to some other minor technicality. Note that Amazon did not provide a figure of its own.

Large corporations tend to tell the truth, but push it as far as they can.

[strken]

Might be "700 manual reviews per 1000 trips" getting misinterpreted as "700 out of 1000 trips needed manual reviews". If some trips were pathological edge cases that required near-constant reviews and a substantial majority took zero reviews, I could understand why Amazon would keep trying to fix its system.

[imperfect_light]

So if it's mostly automated then why are they abandoning it after investing so much time and energy?

[unscaled]

If my memory serves me right, when I last visited the US right before COVID (SF) I wanted to see an Amazon Go convenience store but it closed down at 16:00 or 17:00.

That was quite unacceptable for a convenience store and it was then I got the feeling Amazon Go was still an experiment rather than a mature technology.