Amazon Fresh

D.C.'s innovative new grocery store has no cash registers or cashiers.

I walked into the heart of surveillance capitalism and left with a pre-packaged sandwich for lunch.

That about sums up my experience at the Amazon Fresh grocery store in downtown Washington, D.C. The company made famous for bringing goods to your door is now expanding its presence into traditional brick-and-mortar spaces—but with a nontraditional tech twist. D.C.'s Amazon Fresh store has no cash registers or cashiers. A shopper must scan a QR code linked to an Amazon account at a turnstile to enter. Cameras synced to Amazon's Just Walk Out technology track what items you remove from shelves as you browse. When you do "just walk out," this technology totals up the cost of the items you took, charges your Amazon account, and sends you an emailed receipt.

It's pretty seamless and convenient. But not everyone approves. For some, Amazon Fresh has provoked anxiety for the inevitable corporate panopticon dystopia it signals. Each bag of chips you pick up or avocado you prod for ripeness emits little bits of data that Amazon hoovers up and stores away in its digital vaults. One can't precisely know what that data will be used for or by whom. Still, mass use of credit and store club cards show most Americans have already surrendered in the war for grocery privacy.

I'll personally take Amazon's model over D.C.'s other grocery stores, where a uniformed security guard reminds you to wear a mask as you wait for cashiers to individually inspect the items in your cart.

Comments

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

That last paragraph is the nub. Pay cash and don't use any rewards card, but you've still got a human seeing everything you buy. The self-checkout scanners aren't good enough yet -- checking out a dozen cans of tuna is a right pain in the posterior, and veggies / produce are slow because I don't memorize the codes -- heck, the professionals don't know all the codes by heart, I doubt I ever will. And I'm so slow with a full cart that sometimes I figure it's better to buy all the canned and room temperature stuff first, load it in the car, then go back through in a final quick pass for the refrigerated and frozen food.

And I bet face scanners will be common in stores within a few years, just because they will be so cheap that stores would be fools to not buy them.

On the other hand, food gets cheaper and better all the time. Is the corporate panopticon the price of progress?

[Longtobefree]

"And I bet face scanners will be common in stores within a few years, "

You don't get out much, do you?

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

You have a different, and more paranoid, definition of face scanner, don't you? I don't include humans, for one.

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[Zer0 Sum Game]

"food gets cheaper and better"

Not if you're dealing with through the roof inflation. Also it's been common practice by food manufacturers for several decades now to reduce the volume of a product while either keeping the same price tag or increasing it. Most people are paying more for less and are too dull to see they've been getting fleeced for ages. The Bezos of the world of course don't need to concern themselves with any of that.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

"D.C.'s innovative new grocery store has no cash registers or cashiers."

So it works the same as a CVS in San Francisco.

[Don't look at me!]

I’m sure the system never makes mistakes.

[Weigel's Cock Ring]

Nice little advertisement for one of Reason’s favorite patrons. I wonder how much Bezos paid, sorry, I mean “donated” for this.

I'll personally take Amazon's model over D.C.'s other grocery stores, where a uniformed security guard reminds you to wear a mask as you wait for cashiers to individually inspect the items in your cart.

And yet, you voluntarily choose to live there.

[Agammamon]

Will save a lot in payroll expenses - they'll need to save that money once the BLM crowd starts robbing it.

[CE]

Innovative?
Californians don't use cashiers or cash registers at their department stores already.

[Xamufam]

This is nothing new sweden has had this for over a decade

[Butler T. Reynolds]

You can use your phone as a scanner at Walmart and Sam's Club. Nice.

[Stuck in California]

I'm a luddite. I will never do this.

Although, I'm a hipster luddite. I refuse to shop at any store that requires a club card to get the "sale" prices that are really just the non-inflated prices. I've been this way since Vons purged the fake phone numbers I used to punch in to get the club prices 25 years ago, which proved to me that they were surveilling me.

Needless to say, my tiny bit of protest didn't stop the data revolution from happening. It's everywhere, but it's still creepy as fuck.

[Muzzled Woodchipper]

I agree about the cards.

The problem is that in my area, every store has cards.

Which don’t really bother me much. Not because of the “discounts” on food, but the gas points.

[The Encogitationer]

Take it from one who works in retail. The first wave of Antifa/BLM/Occupier/Woke-instigated Guy Fawkes mask-wearing looters will clean Jeff Bezos' clock.

More sophisticated looters will prolly find a way of hacking Amazon accounts to charge their "purchases" to the Amazon accounts of others.

The self-checkouts they have now are not true automation either. They just put the work of nine registers on two cashiers or even one cashier, who have to serve as cashier, maintenance, merchandise baby-sitter for morons who forget their payment, and loss prevention all at once! They are the top vector and venue for the slow motion looting that takes place even without the riots and chaos of the past 2 years!

And humans still have to fill them with receipt tape, bills,and coins, and provide equipment maintenance and clean-up of the filthy, pathogen-coated surfaces.

This is definitely not-ready-for-prime-time for SkyNet and Retail Singularity. That will require the big hand on "Nut" and the little hand on "Cutting" for the parasites and predators of our species.

[daveca]

self checkouts have nothing to do with automation.

Its greedy retailers who first did away with distribution by putting a pointy fascia and roof and a line of cash registers on a warehouse, then try to truck Shoppers into doing Cashiers jobs for FREE!

I refuse. The greedy Bastards can hire a few workers.

[The Encogitationer]

That's another aspect of the self-checkout that frosts me. All the real-life, modern-day Luddite clones of Ellen Goodman who hate "the self-service economy" (e.g. pumping your own gas and vending machines) all congregate to self-checkout to ask: " Duh! Kin I git ah discount, since I'm scanning muh own groceries?"

My reply to them is: "Look, Goobers. You volunteered for this. If you want personal service go to a single register with a single cashier, not one cashier babysitting nine machines!"

"Oh,wait! You can't find single registers with single cashiers? There are no other registers open? Well now you see what life is like when people just sit around and 'get paid to exist' with 'stimulus' checks, Earned Income Tax Credits, EBT/SNAP/WIC, and all the other New Deal/Fair Deal/Great Society/War On Poverty/Bilk Back Better 'gib mes!'"

"Now go away, Kid, you bother me! And stay off my lawn!"

[Mickey Rat]

If you have to pay through a Big Tech account, where are you when Big Tech unpersons you for having unacceptable opinions?

[daveca]

...home making Molotov Cocktails...

[daveca]

"D.C.'s innovative new grocery store has no cash registers or cashiers."

When the trucker strike hits, no Food either!

Whose gonna " cleanup in aisle 5?"

Clean up homeless person excrement?

[The Encogitationer]

Ah, another oversight in the system. It's not like the have Roombas for the aisles...or Woombas for all the brute-sows who use tampons as crayons in women's restrooms:

Woomba--SNL
https://youtu.be/gqesEYUXr78

(Yet another reason I welcome single-stall unisex bathrooms from our Overlords. They are much cleaner and easier to maintain than multi-stall bathrooms for either cis-genders.)

But, yep. That spray paint mess by the gangbangers in hardware ain't gonna clean itself.