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That is... insanity. I can't even believe that someone would think it was a good idea to try and use cameras rather than NFC or something. I'm pretty sure most phones have that now, why don't they have an NFC tag in front of each item that you just tap your phone to and then hit checkout on the way out? loving cameras? Seriously?
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Jan 27, 2018 08:33
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ChairMaster posted:loving cameras? Seriously?
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Jan 27, 2018 09:27
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FCKGW posted:They were talking about it on a podcast with one of the guys who checked it out. They use cameras to see the shelves and items, not weights or sensors, so as soon as you take an item off the shelf and walk away an employee has to come over and "reset" the shelf again with the products up front so the next customer can be charged properly. It's a hilariously inefficient system. These must either be very small stores or be Fielding enough people that they should just have registers
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Jan 27, 2018 11:31
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FCKGW posted:They were talking about it on a podcast with one of the guys who checked it out. They use cameras to see the shelves and items, not weights or sensors, so as soon as you take an item off the shelf and walk away an employee has to come over and "reset" the shelf again with the products up front so the next customer can be charged properly. It's a hilariously inefficient system. Do you have a link to that podcast? Sounds interesting.
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Jan 27, 2018 12:38
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FCKGW posted:They were talking about it on a podcast with one of the guys who checked it out. They use cameras to see the shelves and items, not weights or sensors, so as soon as you take an item off the shelf and walk away an employee has to come over and "reset" the shelf again with the products up front so the next customer can be charged properly. It's a hilariously inefficient system. No way, they can't have went for a solution that stupid. 
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Jan 27, 2018 13:31
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I've never heard anything like that before in all the articles about those stores, so a source would be nice.
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Jan 27, 2018 13:50
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The Ars review asked one of the employees and they said that the rearrange of the shelves was for presentation, not for the tracking to work. The reviewer tried rummaging around and taking stuff from the back and couldnt fool it.
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Jan 27, 2018 14:35
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I read a bit just the other day that specifically mentioned shelf sensors, but I also remember hearing about camera only a long ways back. Maybe that was one if the changes they made while delaying the open for so long.
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Jan 27, 2018 14:45
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The Ars review has pictures of some kind of sensor at the back of the shelves.
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Jan 27, 2018 14:54
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ChairMaster posted:That is... insanity. I can't even believe that someone would think it was a good idea to try and use cameras rather than NFC or something. I'm pretty sure most phones have that now, why don't they have an NFC tag in front of each item that you just tap your phone to and then hit checkout on the way out? NFC/RFID has a lot of issues registering in say a crowded shopping cart or basket. Also, issues with over registering and thus over charging.
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Jan 27, 2018 15:02
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MiddleOne posted:No way, they can't have went for a solution that stupid. I don't think it's about the retail store, think about other applications in the supply chain.
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Jan 27, 2018 16:24
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MiddleOne posted:No way, they can't have went for a solution that stupid. Think of how many sensors you would need to track every facing in a store. Probably around 100-150 per 4 foot section of shelving. Even for a small store you would need tens of thousands of sensors. You don't want to have to maintain 10,000+ little objects.
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Jan 27, 2018 16:30
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Why would they just not... put a disposable rfid tag on everything that rings up when you exit? Like literally every retail store in the country already does to prevent shoplifting?! What is is with tech geeks and the need to make everything as next gen as possible without any regard to feasibility, functionality, or efficiency?
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Jan 27, 2018 16:42
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ryonguy posted:Why would they just not... put a disposable rfid tag on everything that rings up when you exit? Like literally every retail store in the country already does to prevent shoplifting?! What is is with tech geeks and the need to make everything as next gen as possible without any regard to feasibility, functionality, or efficiency? That method has been being tried since the 90s and no one has gotten it to work right. It turns out RFID shits the bed at sufficient density. Which is why it works great for tracking wholesale shipments and terrible for individual items.
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Jan 27, 2018 17:02
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FCKGW posted:They were talking about it on a podcast with one of the guys who checked it out. They use cameras to see the shelves and items, not weights or sensors, so as soon as you take an item off the shelf and walk away an employee has to come over and "reset" the shelf again with the products up front so the next customer can be charged properly. It's a hilariously inefficient system. AFAIK that's not true, they do use weights and sensors on the shelves in tandem with cameras and sensors around the store.
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Jan 27, 2018 17:24
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ryonguy posted:Why would they just not... put a disposable rfid tag on everything that rings up when you exit? Like literally every retail store in the country already does to prevent shoplifting?! What is is with tech geeks and the need to make everything as next gen as possible without any regard to feasibility, functionality, or efficiency? Because you can easily not read all the tags, or accidentally register some twice. Pinging twice pisses off the customer who has to dispute a charge. Missing an item is going to piss off the store owners because the item might as well be stolen. Also part of what makes antitheft things more reliable is it only needs to detect any one thing being stolen - it doesn't need to check the tag to know to charge $2 instead of $5. Clever shoplifters know how to rearrange things inside other stuff to inhibit the reader enough to get away with it - someone actually carrying out a bunch of tagged goods at once could easily end up with some things not being tracked.
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Jan 27, 2018 17:29
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Magic Hate Ball posted:AFAIK that's not true, they do use weights and sensors on the shelves in tandem with cameras and sensors around the store. The sensors are there to make sure the camera collects the info. So instead of needing a sensor for each facing you can have a couple per shelf. When the sensors pick up a change they tell the cameras to check it out. Or at least that is my understanding.
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Jan 27, 2018 17:33
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rfids are also relatively expensive compared to the cost of the product, and so either has to be recovered (friction!) or baked into the cost (pricey!) also all of the conjectures about how it specifically works are both very interesting and very funny
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Jan 27, 2018 17:44
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I'm just going off of what's in articles.
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Jan 27, 2018 17:50
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mandatory lesbian posted:These must either be very small stores or be Fielding enough people that they should just have registers I was about to say, you're going to have an inordinate amount of stocking staff that have to really hustle constantly. I'd want more money for that job if only because I'm going to be running products all over constantly. As it is now most grocery stores allow stuff to wind down so by the end of the day there's clear gaps in stock on the shelf, especially during high traffic times.
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Jan 27, 2018 18:28
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I worked for a guy who went to college, became a Pizza Hut manager, and quit because he was working that kind of schedule for about $27k. This Pizza Hut was also one of several franchises owned by a regional company that made bonuses for those managers contingent on cost control measures, mostly skimping on ingredients. Oh, and the managers eventually had to file a class action lawsuit to get those bonuses. He quit and became a partner in his brother's small family construction firm. When I left the company I think he was making about $55k pre-tax.
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Jan 27, 2018 18:31
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Does he have a degree in communication?
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Jan 27, 2018 18:57
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Radio Shack did this for at least 30 years as well - they’d have these hosed up little stores that were full of things nobody wanted and bereft of items in demand, then ‘promote’ some poor schlub to manager. Since nobody bought anything, Corporate gave the stores no employee-hours, and the manager would have to be there from 10am to 9pm mon-fri, 9am to 6pm on weekends. The managers would do this for a few months, quit, and the whole process would happen again.
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Jan 27, 2018 19:01
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Xae posted:It turns out RFID shits the bed at sufficient density. However, combine that with minimum wage increases, and the incentives might start to shift. The whole thing is kind of stupid because the real reason that it's hard to just turn a store into a giant vending machine is that customers really want to be able to take stuff off of a shelf and then put it back in the wrong place and gently caress the product displays up all day.
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Jan 27, 2018 20:02
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OneEightHundred posted:Density isn't really a huge problem if things get funneled through checklanes though. AFAIK the problem is simply that making it viable has depended on getting RFID tags down to a certain price level that it's been turning out to be hard to get them down to. It becomes a problem because how do you tell if the customer had 5 boxes of the same pasta or if the scanner picked up some radio weirdness from trying to interrogate 100+ items in a tiny area. Think about your average family of 4 weekly grocery run probably has a cart with 50-100 items in it. You're trying to get specific and detailed information from 100 radio sources in a very small area. You get weirdness. Cheap RFID tags are something like $.05.
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Jan 27, 2018 21:31
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so I looked at the amazon grocery stores and I think maybe they work in a niche but they seem like mostly really expensive convenience stores that you need a membership to shop in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vorkmWa7He8 you can only let so many people in at a time for the cameras to keep track of everything, and if someone reaches past you to grab an item on the shelf it can't tell who picked it up also there's a line just to get in the store and one to get out so if you only have 30 minutes for lunch its slower than just going to a regular fast food place and paying and ordering at a cashier directly
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Jan 28, 2018 01:58
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Magius1337est posted:so I looked at the amazon grocery stores and I think maybe they work in a niche but they seem like mostly really expensive convenience stores that you need a membership to shop in There’s lines because it’s novel and new. The hype will die down once the only visitors are tourists and people for whom the concept works.
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Jan 28, 2018 01:59
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eyebeem posted:There’s lines because it’s novel and new. The hype will die down once the only visitors are tourists and people for whom the concept works. ok then how is it sustainable in high rent locations when you're segmenting your consumer base before they've walked in the door?
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Jan 28, 2018 02:02
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eyebeem posted:There’s lines because it’s novel and new. The hype will die down once the only visitors are tourists and people for whom the concept works. Also the prices look like garbage compared to meal prepping or fast food.
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Jan 28, 2018 02:03
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Magius1337est posted:ok then how is it sustainable in high rent locations when you're segmenting your consumer base before they've walked in the door? I don't think the inventor of the store is reading this thread.
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Jan 28, 2018 02:11
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Somebody involved popped up in the Trump thread. They thought Shimrra Jamaane was serious about firebombing them.
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Jan 28, 2018 02:23
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withak posted:I don't think the inventor of the store is reading this thread. Who knows? This place is full of Silicon Valley tech nerds.
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Jan 28, 2018 03:21
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Mozi posted:I've never heard anything like that before in all the articles about those stores, so a source would be nice. It was the guy who did the Ars article. He kept mentioning that there’s not really any shelf sensors, but it’s just a grid of hundreds of cameras that track everything you pick up and put down in the store. He did see some sensors in the back of the refrigerated shelves but suspects its additional cameras. Shelf sensors seem like it would be difficult to determine who picked up an item where a camera system could track a single product no matter where it went. Cameras make more sense than weight sensors when you think of something like 1% or 2% milk. If I pick up a 1% and realize that I needed 2% but put it back in the wrong spot, I get charged for the wrong thing and inventory is screwed. Cameras with unique packaging fixes that. I may have misremembered the need for shelf resetting though. Here’s him talking at around 29 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dPlWMSr1pk FCKGW fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Jan 29, 2018 |
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Jan 29, 2018 06:23
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So it’s a proving ground for the ultimate capitalist panopticon. Every motion is seen, every item tracked, every consumption debited to your account. This technology can be tested and improved in a simple store setup and then gradually made more sophisticated for gen pop.
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Jan 29, 2018 13:35
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For a moment I got this mixed up with the coldwar thread which talked about a different form of tracking. The Strata Fitbit stuff. People who share their Strata Fitbit info share it with the whole world, a fact many don't appreciate. The strata info is also available as a global map. And the routes can be narrowed down to individuals. This was in the news because it exposed patrol routes, but there's something else here. If a state-agent were to combine that info with commercially available info like purchase history and phone locations and browsing habits...well, I don't know. It's still uncharted territory. And if it were a company not beholden to the public at large, who knows?
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Jan 29, 2018 14:02
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RandomPauI posted:For a moment I got this mixed up with the coldwar thread which talked about a different form of tracking. The Strata Fitbit stuff. They already do. Its an open secret the NSA and other orgs buy adtech data. Alternatey look at China and its facial software the government employs.
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Jan 29, 2018 16:10
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RandomPauI posted:For a moment I got this mixed up with the coldwar thread which talked about a different form of tracking. The Strata Fitbit stuff. Do you mean "Strava" my dude?
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Jan 29, 2018 16:24
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BrandorKP posted:Somebody involved popped up in the Trump thread. They thought Shimrra Jamaane was serious about firebombing them. remember that time lowtax got the fbi on him for someone saying they wanted to kill the president
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Jan 29, 2018 19:29
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FamDav posted:remember that time lowtax got the fbi on him for someone saying they wanted to kill the president lol which one
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Jan 29, 2018 23:14
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RandomPauI posted:For a moment I got this mixed up with the coldwar thread which talked about a different form of tracking. The Strata Fitbit stuff. A lot of this is uncharted territory and there's an entire profession dedicated to exploring it and deciding "OK we have all this data now what the gently caress do we do with it?" Hilariously one of the questions they're trying to get an answer to is "how do we get millenials to buy things?" The answer is "you don't because they're broke."
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