News: 0133355370

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Amazon Introduces Dash Cart, Essentially an Amazon Go Store on Wheels (cnet.com)

(Tuesday July 14, 2020 @01:33PM (msmash) from the how-about-that dept.)


Amazon just reinvented the lowly shopping cart. The company on Tuesday unveiled the Amazon Dash Cart, which is infused with weight sensors and cameras that [1]allow it to scan your items as you're placing them in the cart so you can skip the checkout line. From a report:

> The concept is kind of like a compact version of Amazon Go, a whole store that does away with the checkout experience by using hundreds of cameras on the ceiling to let customers pick up whatever items they want and walk out. "Our primary motivation for building this was to be able to save customers time," said Dilip Kumar, vice president of Amazon's physical retail and technology. "The alternative solutions are standing in the express checkout lanes or fumbling through self-checkout stations." Dash Carts will debut at Amazon's Woodland Hills, California, grocery store, when the location opens later this year. The company last November unveiled plans for the Woodland Hills store as the first location for a new supermarket chain that will be separate from its Whole Foods chain. The store will include conventional checkout lanes, too.



[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-introduces-dash-cart-essentially-an-amazon-go-store-on-wheels/

Yeah no (Score:2, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward

After 4 months of sitting in my house I think I am done with the whole "zero human contact techno future".

Re: (Score:2)

by Arthur, KBE ( 6444066 )

I'm a Teddy Ruxpin guy myself.

Not boldly going where no store has gone before... (Score:2)

by shanen ( 462549 )

I dismiss FP thusly (and without propagating the BS subject).

Two reactions to the topic:

(1) Is it yet another serious threat to the surviving non-Amazon brick-and-mortar stores? Can Amazon deliver this service on a scale and with prices that will put yet more stores out of business and unemploy yet more people?

(2) How much market share can Amazon capture in this new niche? For all ecommerce, I quickly found a figure of 49% in 2018. Later figures seem shakier, but the lead over #2 is clearly huge. Basically

An actual cart... (Score:2)

by RamsesTheAmnesiac ( 7037844 )

..linstead of pretending to "invent" something and demand others pay for implementing a similar simple feature as they did with Buy It Now.

Along with the added bonus they can now more easily and cheaply track individual shoppers around the store without doing any construction or overhaul of the premises!

Durability? (Score:2)

by xack ( 5304745 )

Will the cameras be able to survive being thorwn in the local stream? What about vandals in general?

Primary motivation (Score:1)

by Anonymous Coward

"Our primary motivation for building this was to be able to save customers time"

I suspect that your primary motivation was instead to sell these carts to large store chains that have seen an increase in shoplifting and who thus desire better technology to help improve the bottom line through more advanced loss-prevention methods.

California would seem to be a good place to start since they changed their shoplifting laws to only be a misdemeanor if under $950. I can only imagine what loss insurance premiums

Seems fit for urban area...avoid long lines (Score:2)

by Somervillain ( 4719341 )

> I suspect that your primary motivation was instead to sell these carts to large store chains that have seen an increase in shoplifting and who thus desire better technology to help improve the bottom line through more advanced loss-prevention methods.

All I can say is move to the city. My grocery store, Market Basket, requires 15 to 75 minutes (on holidays) to get through line, depending on when you go...and that's with like 50 cashiers and baggers. There are a lot of grocery stores in urban areas that have more demand than real estate and workers. Because my local store has such long lines, I go to a worse one when I need something and cannot make it at the odd sweet spot time. So yes, they are literally losing lots of money because people see the l

one shoplifter vs. many real shoppers (Score:2)

by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 )

I don't know how many people shoplift at grocery stores, but I don't imagine they're losing as much money from that as people just seeing a long line and thinking "maybe I'll just buy this later...do I really really need it?"

Grocery stores turn over the stock in a few days. So they get their margin on their capital many times per year. As a result they can run on razor-thin markups.

But that means a "shrinkage" (shoplifting) event requires MANY real equivalent purchases to make up the loss. So suppressin

Re: (Score:2)

by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 )

Large store chains don't have loss insurance and haven't seen an increase in shoplifting. Nor do I think that only spending up to a year in jail will suddenly cause people to start stealing.

The purpose is to try to get these carts everywhere, because they are not about selling the carts. It's the data that they are after.

Re: (Score:2)

by leonbev ( 111395 )

Funny, I thought that the "primary motivation" was really to cut down on the number of cashiers that they now need to pay $15 an hour.

"standing in the express checkout lanes" (Score:2)

by alleycat0 ( 232486 )

Serious first-world problem.

First slashvertisement in a while (Score:2)

by rsilvergun ( 571051 )

Also, isn't this just putting a self checkout lane hardware in a shopping cart?

Re: (Score:2)

by backslashdot ( 95548 )

Yes. So? In terms of convenience it is as big a jump as the self checkout lane was from cashiers.

Re: (Score:2)

by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 )

Nope! A self-checkout lane goes off UPC codes and can be double checked as each item is added. This goes off computer vision and you have to trust Amazon to get it right.

Re: (Score:2)

by Ksevio ( 865461 )

I actually took a couple minutes to watch the video and everything you said was wrong.

It scans barcodes (you have to type in the codes for fruit and stuff), and you have an opportunity to fix things that didn't scan correctly.

Re: (Score:2)

by Fly Swatter ( 30498 )

Yes, that way all that technology is easy to load into the back of a white van along with whatever you bought.

Re: (Score:2)

by The New Guy 2.0 ( 3497907 )

It seems like this is an enhancement to Amazon Go's concepts of tracking people around the store. Adding a scale to the cart is like the scale in self-checkout lanes in order to make sure the counts and items are exact.

Re: (Score:2)

by phantomfive ( 622387 )

No, you don't understand.....it's a shopping cart, but it's reinvented. The weight of the word reinvented is 10,000 tons. It means nothing!

Re: (Score:2)

by The New Guy 2.0 ( 3497907 )

Nice article, but did it work?

Seems like that trademark now has a mess of other uses according to Google.

Right (Score:2)

by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

Like that massive amount of data generated won’t be used for anything nefarious.

Re: (Score:2)

by backslashdot ( 95548 )

Nefarious like what? They'll know your shopping habits, and use that to send a team of ninjas to come get you?

"Woodland Hills" (Score:2)

by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 )

LOL this sounds like a first-world solution in search of a problem, and being pushed in a gentrified community. Try this in a non-gentrified neighborhood where people take shopping carts. Kids will steal them to rip the electronics from them, thinking it's worth something.

Meanwhile why the hell do we need anything like this? Does anyone even have a problem using a self-checkout? I don't.

The way this reads reminds me of some of those late-night TV commercials for gadgets you don't even need: someone is fum

How expensive is this (Score:2)

by zuckie13 ( 1334005 )

How much cost per cart for a store to buy this? Now when a cart gets lost or broken it's gonna cost you a whole lot more to replace it.

Some stores have a much cheaper solution like Wegmans (use an app on your own phone to scan barcodes) or Giant food (a handheld barcode scanner) then just quickly pay at a self serve kiosk when you leave. Lot cheaper to maintain than this will be. If Amazon wants to blow money on these at Whole Foods, I guess good for them.

Talk about over complication (Score:2)

by SilverJets ( 131916 )

Just use RFID.

An adequate bootstrap is a contradiction in terms.