Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
Just Walk Out was first introduced in 2016, presenting Amazon’s biggest and boldest innovation in grocery shopping. The technology seemed incredible, but there were some stumbles. It often took hours for customers to receive receipts after leaving the store, largely because offshore cashiers were rewatching videos and assigning items to different customers. The system of scanners and video cameras in each store is also incredibly expensive.
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.
Maxwell Zeff
A thousand plus people reviewing checkouts in some 30 stores (according to Wikipedia, Amazon Fresh had 38 locations in the US and 17 locations in London, UK in 2022, of which half were equipped with Just Walk Out) doesn’t sound that bad honestly. The bigger issue here though is that the reliability of the technology was far lower than projected, and wasn’t improving anywhere as fast as initially expected – it’s almost 8 years old at this point. Coupled with the excessive costs of the in-store video hardware, the cost-to-benefits ratio was likely deemed too poor to continue investing in this.
I expect that many of the seemingly magical AI-powered promises of recent years will suffer the same fate when confronted with the tough realities of an actual business environment. No matter how much training and human labeling you pour into machine learning models, they remain incapable of anticipating or reacting to edge cases, which is why human oversight will be needed in many situations still.
I am personally more excited for their Dash Carts; a lower tech variant is already deployed in a couple of stores here in Romania. It uses either a hand scanner or the shopping app on your phone to add items to the shopping cart, and when you’re done you pay directly at the express checkout – the checkout process is basically frontloaded into the store visit, which should reduce or eliminate the waiting in line at the end.
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