Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.

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.

  • ZagorathOPEnglish
    23•9 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      38•9 months ago

      What they thought was that they had come up with a way to move the checkout cashier job to people in India so they wouldn’t have to pay minimum wage workers in the U.S.

      Pretty stupid idea, but it seems to me that it was just Amazon trying to ship jobs overseas to cut labor costs. Perhaps they thought eventually they’d be able to use AI to screw over the Indian workers too.