For the sake of completeness, I will point out that Amazon also owns the “Whole Foods” brand of grocery stores. Not particularly relevant to this article, but Amazon indeed has quite a lot of grocery stores as a result.

Yes, in America they own grocery stores under the “Amazon Fresh” brand, some of which were famous for their “Just Walk Out” technology, where you scan on your way in, and then seemingly-magically got charged for everything you bought just by putting it in your trolley and walking out. When they first started out, there were news stories about how people even tried tricking it but still got charged correctly. It was never, until now, revealed how they actually did it, with people believing it was probably done via automated camera detection.

Weird, that post doesn’t seem to have been federated to my instance properly.

ISTG - Technology feels like a bunch of bots just spamming articles from all the tech rags. :(

Nobody should have to go to Lemmy.ml, OP is doing God’s work.

You can get effectively the same thing via “Scan & Go” technology. Here in Australia, one of our two main supermarkets has it. You download their app, and when you enter one of the stores that supports it, you click the “Scan & Go” button in the app, and then scan the barcode of things you want to buy (or scan the digital scales after weighing your fresh produce), and then when you leave, you click pay, scan your phone, and walk out. It sounds way worse when I explain it like that than it really is. In reality, it’s enormously convenient and I will now go out of my way to go to one of these stores rather than the competitors which don’t support it. It’s only been here for about a year now, but according to this video something similar (using a specific hand scanner, rather than a phone app) has been around in the Netherlands for at least 5 years.

And if I’m reading the article correctly, even these Amazon stores already support the same kind of thing.

So as cool as it would be for convenience if this really worked purely through technology, that technology is not needed to reduce the labour required in supermarkets.

You’re acting like the people who would be manning the checkouts would be able to live peacefully without a worry now that they don’t have a job as a cashier.

It’s also cheaper to just pay someone to work IN the store than hiring people outside of the country watching video feeds.

It’s trivially obvious that that would be the case. Paying people to do the checkout costs maybe 5 minutes per customer, total. Paying them to constantly watch the customer is going to be 20–40 minutes per customer.

I’m guessing that they thought they could develop the technology to remove the need for people to observe constantly, and have just now decided that it’s impractical.

Sounds like they’re doing a “scan & go” type technology. You scan things yourself as you put them into your basket, then you can just walk out, so no need to line up at the self-checkout.