This is pretty sad to read. Before Covid, the Amazon Go store experience was phenomenal. All the convenience of a 7-Eleven but with the pricing of a normal grocery store. The food options were really good and the BlueApron style meal-kits were amazing. The Alexa integration was also nice for being able to just verbally ask what's the next step on a recipe while you're busy stirring or chopping things.
When it rolled out to Amazon Fresh stores, it was a breadth of fresh air. The painful clunkiness of self-checkout was gone. The slow and pointless exercise of unloading and reloading your cart was gone. You could just bring your reusable shopping bags, throw stuff in, and walk home. By far the most hassle-free shopping experience to be had.
Scan as you shop is a big step backwards and feels like you've got the annoying self-checkout experience looming over you the entire time you're there.
The selection and operating hours both took a hit during covid and never recovered.
Lots of services would be phenomenal when you can offload much of the cost to run them to cheap offshore labor.
Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when much of the cost of operating was offset by underpaid workers and VC funds? Now that they don't have unlimited piles of money and cities/states are making them pay more fair wages, the cost-benefit of those services has diminished. I was ok paying $5 for $20 of food to be delivered, but now it's more like $10 - $15 in fees/tip, plus fees hidden in menu prices making that $20 food cost $27.50.
From my point of view, Uber and DD were always going to head in that direction because by any objective measure, they are worse than the solution that already existed. The introduction of a middleman created new costs for drivers, customers, and restaurants alike, yet it's actually worse at delivering food than the conventional "drivers work for the restaurant" model. Sure, you get one website where you can see all the delivery options in the area, but the cost is making all of those options shittier. I could rant about how stupid that industry is for hours, but I digress.
What Amazon is doing is different because they're actually doing something that adds value, and they're solving a problem that actually exists. Maybe I'm naive for believing any of this matters.
To be honest, I never thought much about how the whole system worked. I've only been in an Amazon Fresh twice. It had the "just walk out" thing but I don't have a Prime account so I never used it. I just figured it was UHF RFID. Seems like an obvious solution, but I'm not the engineer responsible for figuring out what to do if you put two exits next to each other.
It's true that delivery services add a middle-man, but you don't seem to be considering that they add a lot of value in some important ways:
1. The single website/app is not just useful for discovery, but also to provide a consistent ordering experience. An individual restaurant might take orders over the phone, via their website, or via their own app. Those options will vary from one restaurant to the next. Not great for customers.
2. In the old model, restaurants would have to decide how many drivers to have on hand at any given time. During quiet periods they would have to decide between not offering delivery at all, or having a driver sitting around doing nothing. A delivery service that aggregates demand & supply is very useful for restaurants & drivers. Pooling of resources & layering on surge pricing creates a lot of elasticity.
I would argue that what they should have done is tried to at this value at minimal cost to customers, drivers & restaurants. If they were leaner businesses the overall proposition could be a lot better.
You bring up an interesting point. Just thinking out loud for a moment here. Is the current VC business model potentially the problem area and not the actual businesses? The need for rapid growth/software company like profit margins when these companies need more time and potentially are like non-software companies in terms of profits?
> 1. The single website/app is not just useful for discovery, but also to provide a consistent ordering experience. An individual restaurant might take orders over the phone, via their website, or via their own app. Those options will vary from one restaurant to the next. Not great for customers.
Aye. Arguably this is why old-school streaming Netflix won so well -- all of your options in one place. Likewise, there is one app for all food choices nearby.
Also agree on the second point, though presumably larger chains in built up areas could play the same game; e.g. Domino's in a borough of NYC has an "all-drivers-in-Queens" pool.
I'm curious as to how food delivery worked in your country before Uber et al.
In the UK, outside of corporate chains, it was largely a cash in hand operation for both the restaurants and drivers.
Drivers would typically be paid a small sum for showing up on the night and then keep the delivery charge and any tips. The cost to the restaurant was pretty much negligible.
The middle-men, in addition to their own cut, have likely lead to a larger tax burden on many of the drivers and restaurants.
Honestly I think there's a great role something like Uber could fill, simply as a nationalized, not-for-profit tax funded arrangement that businesses could opt into, maybe even a branch of the post office. Ensure delivery people get good benefits and pay for doing a needed job, and the service brings those people, restaurants and stores, and consumers together. We could make things more convenient for people, provide businesses with more opportunities to sell their products, while providing a lot of jobs to people who need them, and also cutting down on the number of vehicles going around at any given moment.
The main drawbacks to these services are the outrageous fees they charge to make money, and that there's more than one so drivers and businesses have to manage an array of phones or tablets. This would address both of those things.
> Under that model, wouldn't drivers only want to work for the busiest restaurants?
It doesn't take many orders to keep an individual driver busy. Typically the restaurants would manage how many, and which, drivers worked each night. If the night was unexpectedly quiet then a driver might finish early.
> With delivery apps, a restaurant can have just a few orders per night and still be open for delivery.
Yeah, the main benefit of delivery apps is enabling restaurants who primarily serve sit-in diners to deliver also. The overall benefit to delivery focused restaurants is much more tenuous.
> I would bet that there's an order of magnitude more deliveries happening (and drivers working) these days vs pre-Uber.
Perhaps, but if a driver was already busy all night under the previous model, then they're potentially harmed by the current model.
> also to provide a consistent ordering experience
Vendored web POS is widely available, and was emerging before UberEats and DD ever did. See: Toast
> A delivery service that aggregates demand & supply is very useful for restaurants & drivers.
This is only true in theory. You aren't giving enough credit to the logistical skills of small business owners, they are really good at allocating and dispatching drivers. If you're small enough to have no deliveries for several hours, then don't schedule any drivers during that time. If a delivery comes in, tell your cashier the address and have them run the delivery. Besides being quite efficient, there's an added bonus that you're cross-training your staff. That's how we always did it, at least.
It's anecdotal evidence, sure, but every delivery driver I have asked (half a dozen from several different cities and states) has said that their job is harder and pays worse today than 10 years ago.
"Well, just be more lean!" What a concept, I'm sure they haven't thought of that. It's much easier said than done. Logistics software is extremely complicated at scale- there's a reason governments subsidize delivery logistics through services like USPS, Royal Mail, etc. However, at the one-business microcosm, it's a simple enough problem that a seasoned owner/manager can organize an optimal dispatch in their head, on the fly.
Thankfully the local pizza place here still has their own drivers and it’s only a two dollar delivery fee. Totally fine with that. And everything always arrives fresh and fast and I know where and who to complain to and I know the drivers are at least somewhat vetted.
I'm with you. After trying a few of those delivery services and finding them poor at best, I've gone back to only ordering delivery from places that do it themselves.
Did you ever try getting groceries/food (other than pizza) delivered before the apps? Uber didn’t replace a better option, they made it literally possible to get these services in many places where it wasn’t an option at all. And in areas like Manhattan, where city cabs and delivery options abound - the the fact that many (most?) people still use UberEats/DD is instructive.
The value of convenience is significant. I happily pay to avoid the mental overhead of shitty restaurant websites or repeating a paragraph-long group order back and forth across a poor kitchen speakerphone call.
Yes the current system has many flaws but let’s not pretend it was utopia before.
> they made it literally possible to get these services
These companies also made it possible for restaurants to be taken hostage and be registered for delivery services or marked as closed/unavailable on those platforms against their wishes, or pay even 60+% commission on an order for the service. Once only a couple of these companies are left standing and have all restaurants in a chokehold I'm convinced the situation will be even "better".
> the the fact that many (most?) people still use UberEats/DD is instructive
Yes, it says that too many people do what's best for them and them alone. It's not as instructive as you think. Many people had slaves because it was good for the owner. What did you learn from that case of "many people do it"?
> I happily pay
You don't and don't even realize that. You get an overall cheaper service but someone pays. Usually the restaurant owner, employees, and delivery people. Maybe some VCs too, for now, while they don't completely own the market. Just like Amazon's same day delivery means some driver has to pee in a bottle for close to minimum wage but otherwise it's absolutely a huge win for everyone who is you, needing the delivery now.
The value of convenience may be significant but is it really great enough to find the cost of providing that convenience without external subsidy over the long run.
To me it is ridiculous that anybody thought local personal services like food delivery, dog walking, and taxi driving could ever be converted into durable, efficient, profitable national or global monopolies. In the absence of monopoly power such low barrier to entry commodity services invariably see their profit margins squeezed to cost from competition. All this is freshman or highschool level economics.
You're right, it sucked. Here's the thing: we can have the shiny, sleek ordering system without the stupid parts of the Uber/GrubHub/whatever business model. You've probably used Toast before.
> in areas like Manhattan, where city cabs and delivery options abound - the the fact that many (most?) people still use UberEats/DD is instructive
I would have leaned towards "destructive" but I get your point.
UberEats and DoorDash are still money-losing operations that subsidize the actual cost of the service, despite rising prices, barely paying their workers, and abusing their relationship with restaurants.
>What Amazon is doing is different because they're actually doing something that adds value
is scanning your groceries manually really so cumbersome to say the "just walk out" model is adding value?
It's nice, but like you said. it's not really that better than existing solutions, and knowing the underworkings makes it much worse. Maybe the tech will catch up in a decade, but it was definitely unviable with the current system.
The scanning isn't the problem. It's the pedestal the size of a postage stamp upon which I'm expected to balance $250 worth of groceries. And if I fail to do so, the machine freaks out. And even if I do succeed in stacking all my groceries up as demanded, the machine still freaks out. Want a beer? Fuck you, wait god-knows-how-long for an attendant to come appease the machine.
I always go to a human cashier whenever the option presents itself, simply so I don't have to deal with the miscarriage of engineering that is the self-checkout machine. Unfortunately, my local grocery stores don't staff their registers very often anymore.
> they are worse than the solution that already existed.
In my country taxis were (and price wise still are) the worst; Uber is a vast improvement; better cars, nicer drivers, convenient booking (until very recently you had to call 1 day in advance to book a taxi) and a bizarrely lower price. The same trip with a normal taxi costing 130 euros is 30 with Uber. So yeah, no. Oh but the taxi companies made their own app! Which is of course a horrible failure.
Ah yeah, my comment was specifically related to the food delivery services provided by Uber.
Granted, the taxi service hardly any better in many countries. In the US, it's rapidly building a new underclass of indentured cheauffeurs, chained down by vehicle maintenance costs and massive fees from service providers.
> What Amazon is doing is different because they're actually doing something that adds value, and they're solving a problem that actually exists.
This shook a bit of illusion from my eyes, thank you. I never thought of Amazon's efforts in this as solving a real problem or adding real value! This is because for me, it doesn't, and I never thought it through beyond that.
Once again, the human tendency to think that our own situation represents the norm fooled me.
>Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive?
The people making the app need a much bigger cut than Domino's. Domino's cut only needs to be big enough to pay their delivery drivers, they make their money selling pizza and the delivery is just an additional service that drives business.
The app maker needs a cut big enough to pay their delivery driver and also be the main revenue stream for their entire business since they're not making money off the pizza.
While I'm not going to claim that was a good idea, the point is that Dominos sees making and delivering pizza as one and the same business.
> 154 examples of the DXP cars were built. Along with the delivery driver, each DXP car could carry up to 45 pizzas, 12 two-liter sodas, and all the extra dipping sauces one could ever want. Add to that the fact that the car’s still held their five-year 100,000-mile warranty, were cheap on gas, and created a surprising amount of buzz, it is hard not to look at the DXP program as a success, low production aside.
I believe that Dominos would include the delivery as part of its core competencies and business value that distinguishes it from other pizza companies while others do not consider delivery as part of their core business.
The margins of the delivery business could be razor thin because the scale at which the app can operate is much bigger than domino's. There are ~7000 domino's in US, and hundreds of thousand on uber eats. I think as more apps offer the same service we'll see a race to the bottom and have a reduction in cost, but not to the VC subsidized levels we saw five years ago.
Picking up one order from a restaurant takes the same amount of time as picking up a dozen. This is a much more important economy-of-scale than having a large app country-wide install base to spread dev costs over.
So I think a third-party delivery business must seek exclusivity contracts to be competitive with an in-house solution.
So what we need is bundling of orders based on
1) restaurant location
2) recipient location
3) time
And if that could be done, maybe just 2 orders to start with (for example carpool benefits for 2 people), that will be awesome, but if you could pool 4-5 orders, that will make bank !
I guess this model, if scaled purely based on the model, will imply restaurants co-located (same parking lot) will benefit from such an arrangement.
At least in the UK this is the default behaviour from Deliveroo, standard delivery does cost money but might get your driver/biker go to multiple other houses on their way to you, or pay extra to get it direct. It made me stop using them, as there's no way to guess whether the normal option will bring the food fresh or not, and paying the premium each time made it feel too expensive.
Also paying the extra premium (whether Deliveroo, Just Eat or Uber Eats) for first delivery is kinda pointless (at least here in the South West) as the drivers seem to be delivering for all the apps at the same time, so your delivery takes 35 mins for the 10 min premium delivery and sometimes they even turn off GPS after they've picked it up if they're delivering for another app first.
So expensive for a frustrating cold food delivery.
I think that's the real difference under all this - Dominos employs drivers (and they get paid by tips, sure there are issues) but it's all one thing. If they deliver a cold pizza it's on them.
All the delivery app companies are NOT making the food so the blame game starts AND they are not employees so a bunch of gaming is going on.
I know my one experience with Uber eats is such that I'll never use it again, and instead travel myself.
Also food delivery drivers employed directly by restaurants typically have an insulated carrier in their car or on their bike to keep your food warm. Uber Eats drivers don't so the food gets cold way faster.
Guess that depends on your location - in the 3 European countries I've lived in, Deliveroo and Uber drivers/riders almost universally had insulated cuboid bags (usually with one of the companies' branding on) in their car or on their bike in all three countries, while Dominos pizza was the same in one country, in another country Dominos used cars with no insulation except the cardboard pizza box, and I don't know about Dominos in the 3rd.
(And I'm not sure if my experiences were representative of each country, just that they were consistent in each city.)
Uber Eats drivers definitely don't have them where I live. Food almost always arrives cold, even when the delivery time is very short. When I lived in NYC most deliveries were done by bike and all of them had insulated bags so the food was typically warm unless it had been super delayed.
That factor is driving the virtual restaurant (ghost kitchen) trend. There are commercial kitchens set up purely to service delivery orders. They use a single facility but have multiple different restaurant brands with different menus (burgers, Mexican, Italian, vegan, etc). These ghost kitchens have no dining rooms and you probably can't even directly order food outside of a delivery service.
These are the worst quality-wise. Yes, you can write a review if something went really bad. But not having customers right there who can complain and might even get an extra or a replacement gives less incentive to keep quality up. "Specialising" in everything, pizza-burger-kebab-china, is also likely a warning sign.
IMO thats the most important point of delivered food. Just compare the process and you will instantly see the difference. In a restaurant, the waiter will openly serve you your food. You get instant feedback. And see right away if something is off. In the delivery case, you get a closed package at your door, say "Thanks" to the deliverer and close the door again. Only when the guy (who isn't responsible for the quality anyway) has left you open your package and are confronted with whatever you got. Maybe something spilled, maybe something misses, maybe something was wrong. And maybe its already cold... Whenever you use a delivery system, you take all these risks, and apart from a grumpy review, you can't do much about these... Personally, I think this is where the margin hides. Delivered food can generally have lower quality without customer complaints reaching the vendor.
I was thinking about it context of complaing to folks running the ghost kitchen vs say at a pizza hut location. I have gotten free food when they screwed up my order at pizza places, and they did care about resolving my problems.
I wonder if it could be solved with a decentralized system. You'd still need a way to vet drivers and handle refunds. I'm not sure other delivery apps bother with the former until bad reviews come in, and maybe the latter could be just between the customer and the store? Would be a big win for customers and gig workers if you could get past the obstacles.
The VC industry is like Hollywood: both smart purveyors of a popular, highly value added service to begin with, both driven by nepotism and inertia via far more scope for capture than your average line of work, and both with a cost structure mostly about the lifestyle of the executive class.
when it’s just starting out in something, you get instant classics.
when it’s out of ideas but still has the levers of access tilted all the way to “got mine bitches”, you get the late MCU, Uber for X, and OpenAI Larry Summers Edition.
The company Weee which primarily sells Asian products does this sort of batch order, and their prices are the same as grocery stores because they rightly knew that their initial Chinese userbase (and other Asians in general) is extremely price conscious and won't accept such increased fees for delivery. I just listened to a podcast episode about them on How I Built This which is where I got this information, people should give it a listen.
There is some degree of that in these apps already, for example I believe both grubhub and doordash will group up orders so one courier can do multiple deliveries back-to-back in a single trip.
> how come everything with an app is so much more expensive?
After ton of investment investors are finally looking for returns now. And consumers have decided convenience reigns supreme. Right from the SAAS products to daily breakfast customers there is lot of premium on convenience.
> After ton of investment investors are finally looking for returns now.
We need a quippy phrase for this, but unfortunately "Pump and Dump" is already taken for a kind of stock-market manipulation.
Instead, I would like to coin/nominate "Tease and Squeeze".
First consumers are teased by the idea that the disruptive new service has invented a magic new secret to low prices and great value... But after the company as achieved some kind of market strangehold, those consumers are squeezed with price-hikes and quality-drops as the investors--who bankrolled the early predatory pricing [0]--try to recoup their investment plus additional profit.
[0] Note that the term "Predatory Pricing" usually refers to artificially low prices to destroy competitors, although I can totally understand why some may assume it means preying on customers with high prices.
Granted, Tease and Squeeze has a nicer ring. Then again, the enshittification neologism became standard langue in no time and is understood by everybody.
I did consider the term when writing my post, but they only partially overlap.
First, the issue of intent and overall history. Tease and Squeeze implies it was the plan all along, but an "enshittified" product doesn't have to be that way. For example, a company could have been successful without any "Tease"--no predatory pricing or monopolistic behavior--and then taken a nosedive later when the founder retired and sold it to a new owner, meaning it's Squeeze-only.
Second, "Squeeze" doesn't require a quality-drop, it can include purely a price-hike, but "enshittified" products almost always mean a drop in quality, regardless of whether prices rise or not.
"Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion. As this is an immortal pressure and negotiating tactic. It is incentivized, and therefore we will get more of it. That works both ways, but at some point there has to be a reckoning that accepts that it is better to have employed than unemployed unskilled workers. In the context of a massive and growing unskilled population base. Yet the same people who demand that everyone earn a living wage, sometimes punctuating their points with riots, tend to be the same crowd who wants to import unskilled workers by the millions.
There is no effectively borderless world in which most are both employed and not "underpaid". It won't happen both ways. In fact, the pay trend is about to tip massively against fairness. In a manner that even will make economic rationalists uncomfortable. These "fair pay" efforts are a distraction before that storm.
A free market without political intervention is at least as much of a myth. If employees don't engage in politics with concepts like "fair wage" and "underpaid", employers certainly will with concepts such as "bottom quantile wages drive inflation". The Nash equilibrium is for both sides to engage in the market but also in the political context the market is embedded in. So complaining about workers demanding higher wages instead of letting the market sort it out is pointless, regardless of your political convictions.
I noted that there were two sides. Explaining it doesn't advance the conversation.
"...in the political context the market is embedded in" is nonsense, especially when appealing to the "market sorting it out" in the next breath.
Which argument are you recruting? Political intervention or the free market? Both? That's nice hand waving, no offense. Seemingly to make it as if your position is so elevated that it satisfies all political ideals. Instead, choose. Unless you mean to imply that the (free) market is also the political market. But your language should be a lot more precise if that's your point, so as to eliminate the look of vague line straddling as a rhetorical tactic.
Your rebuttal over-simplifies my response and therefore seems like a word dump.
Your view, absent your muddled (imo) rationale described above, is included in my response. The complicating factors were a). the common simultaneous advocacy for importing millions of unskilled workers and b.) the implied fact that increasing wages decreases available jobs.
Those factors are included in my total "complaint" (observation). Which is not a "political conviction".
Re-reading your comment I think we actually have the same understanding of the dynamic, I think I misread "immortal" as "immoral" before which gave the comment a quite different vibe.
> "...in the political context the market is embedded in" is nonsense, especially when appealing to the "market sorting it out" in the next breath.
I meant:
complaining about (workers demanding higher wages instead of letting the market sort it out) is pointless
Not:
(complaining about workers demanding higher wages) instead of (letting the market sort it out) is pointless.
Agreed my wording could have been more precise there.
looking forward to a world where everyone anywhere can make a decent living wage. The technology and productivity have improved so much but the wealth inequalities have only grown wider. If AGI arrives and we have abundance, lets hope that it is not only the few elites that control all of that wealth and power.
Maybe that "storm" is consequences of unchecked ML, make the rich richer and the powerful more powerful, push the poor out of jobs. I disagree that fair pay is impossible though.
Yeah you’re leaving us hanging here! To me it seems like people are learning their worth a little bit more lately and are demanding a little bit more/less financial stress.
I took it to mean that whatever amount of money people currently think would be needed to be "fair", say, an increase from $20/hour to $25/hour, would within a year or so become "unfair" again, even if inflation was zero. Employers will always want more work for less money, employees will always want more money for less work. Same as the seller of any product would like more money for that product, and the buyer would always like to pay less for the same product.
So you can say the company is "greedy"...but that implies that the worker is also "greedy" - which is true for both IF you define it the way I described above. Or you could say that the company (owners) are trying to maximize their return on investment (time + money), and the the workers are trying to maximize their return on investment (of time).
>Employers will always want more work for less money, employees will always want more money for less work. Same as the seller of any product would like more money for that product,
Is that true though? I come from a family that works in the crafts, small business mostly (which is like 70% of businesses). Most employees are employed for life, what's being made generally costs a decent amount but quality is high, people are content when they make what's perceived as fair and enough to maintain a middle class lifestyle, and so on.
Nobody actually tries to rip each other off, cuts every penny and leaves for 5% higher salaries. People are around for decades. The MBA business logic isn't some universal truth, in fact it's not even how most people work.
It'll "never be enough" in the sense that there is a non-existent potential of higher wages to stop agitation for more money.
Because there is no disincentive for labor to ever-advance the claim that their wages are enough.
In addition, the incentive to ever-claim that wages are not enough is unable to be quneched due to the fact that there is no risk. That logic is what supports my point.
The point can be proofed to economic mechanisms, as well. The exchange of money for goods naturally sets prices via an auction mechanism that, in turn, naturally creates an economic hierarchy in purchasing power.
Which is a verbose way of saying that raising the wages of the working class, while periodically necessary, will always lead to rising prices to create relatively par pourchasing power over time. When speaking of wages, purchasing power is all that matters (assuming lack of debt).
Artificially and dramatically forcing wages up only creates economic churn in job availability, housing equality, and asset ownership. All negative for the working class. If forces them into unemployment, out of urban centers, and creates firesale auctions for assets that wealthy people take advantage of.
To make matters worse, the "forced equality" economics of communism are only feudalism in disguise (which is hidden on the balance sheet of the State and Feudal Lord). The closer that the working class gets to forced economic equality, the closer that they get to slavery.
The storm that's coming is a cyclical return to various feudalists battling it out for workers who are paid the lowest possible wages and who have no labor protection. But on a wider scale than we are used to seeing.
The problem with wage debates is that there is no solution aside from a delicate balance that is easily corruptable. In fact, its natural state is corrupt imbalance.
This problem is unsolveable because it is inherent in the system of money.
This isn't what they meant apparently but in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value, i.e. making more money from selling the product of labor than you pay for that labor.
If I pay a worker $20 per hour to make 20 doodads an hour in my doodad factory and then sell those doodads for $5 a piece, I make $5 for every $1 pay my worker. Of course that extra $4 per doodad has to account for the cost of the doodad factory itself (initial investment, maintenance, material) and the literal cost of doing business (taxes, permits, fees, paying an accountant) and of course market fluctuation (warehousing, building a financial buffer to remain solvent if sales lapse or production has to stop) but if the business is meant to be successful, that needs to add up to less than the extra $4 I'm making. And the bigger that difference is, the more profitable my company becomes and the more spare money I have to expand my business and get ahead of my competition up to the point where I can sell shares in my business to other people and pay dividends from my profits to them.
So in other words not only can't you pay workers exactly "enough" (i.e. 100% of the value they contribute to the company) but you're actively incentivized to pay them as little as you can get away with (and perversely, paying them more by reducing your profit margin may actually be worse for them by making your company less competitive and less resilient). This is before we even get into the politics of what work is overvalued or undervalued (e.g. the idea that CEOs should receive massively disproportionate compensation for their labor, which again creates pressure to compensate for this by underpaying lowly workers).
This, by the way, is why collective bargaining matters. No matter how cool and nice your employer is, the market actively incentivizes them to do the least for you they can get away with and punishes them for doing more. So by not taking advantage of collective bargaining (i.e. using the pressure of all employees to your advantage rather than just yours individually) you're leaving money on the table. Note that is still true if your role is proportionally overpaid relative to other workers in your company unless you literally co-own the company.
> pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value
That's a silly definition of "enough" to label as a fact.
I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect, I think most people will agree that the worker getting 90% of the surplus value is "enough". (just as an example percent) There's no reason the bar should be the absolute extreme.
> That's a silly definition of "enough" to label as a fact.
There's no "factual" definition of "enough" as "enough" is subjective.
I'm also not sure what you're trying to argue. I already said that it can't be 100% for practical reasons and that the market actively incentivizes companies to aim for as close to 0% as possible instead. You pick 90% as an arbitrary percentage. So it might be 99% or 50% or 1%. But you're still agreeing that the measure for "enough" in this case is in relation to what the product of that labor can be sold for (after deducting the various costs). In reality that percentage is often much closer to 50% than to 90% - in many cases (especially so-called unskilled labor) it is closer to 1% than 90%.
A better rebuke would be that "enough" is normally about need, not revenue. Especially because it's nearly impossible to value the relative contribution to the bottom line for all labor involved (and in fact trying to minimize "cost centers" can lead to a rude awakening about this).
So if we define "need" as "enough to sustain a healthy existence in society and access to moderate leisure activities" (i.e. having a roof over your head, food in the fridge, access to medical care and transportation and enough spare change to spend on things like streaming services, books or the occasional trip to a nearby cinema, amusement park or restaurant) we can define a minimum monthly income and if we assume a 40 hour work week (which should be uncontroversial given that overall productivity has only gone up since its introduction and we need to provide some leisure time to accommodate family formation and the aforementioned leisure activities) we can translate that into a minimum hourly wage. Something tells me that this minimum hourly wage would be significantly higher than the legal minimum wage in the US, even if we don't actually consider the lackluster state of medical care affordability (note that I didn't assume public single-payer healthcare so Medicare/Medicaid is just a crutch to account for medical care being unaffordable otherwise at that level of income).
But of course the system is not set up that way. It's not about needs, it's about paying as little as you can get away with and this means that pay is proportional to power (i.e. C-level execs are paid a lot because they have a lot of control over the company and therefore "deserve" more even if all the value they "create" relies on the actual labor and competence of others) and the floor is theoretically infinitely low (i.e. you could realistically charge people to do labor for you, e.g. as a "training opportunity" to earn a meaningless qualification required to access other jobs) and ultimately the company needs to produce a lot of waste money (profits that are not re-invested in the company) that can be drained by its shareholders/owners (who ideally contribute literally no labor in return).
> There's no "factual" definition of "enough" as "enough" is subjective.
I agree. Which is why "enough" is not an objective threshold of 100% of surplus value.
> I'm also not sure what you're trying to argue.
I'm arguing that "less than 100% means not enough" is an incorrect statement. That's all. The bulk of your post isn't relevant to what I was saying.
(To be extra clear, that's my paraphrase of this line: "in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value, i.e. making more money from selling the product of labor than you pay for that labor.")
> But you're still agreeing that the measure for "enough" [...] A better rebuke would be that "enough" is normally about need, not revenue.
But I did address that. "I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect,"
That is because I have not given a definition for it. I don't have a specific one in mind.
I just think "100% of surplus value" is a wrong definition, so using that definition to argue that "in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough" is a very flawed argument.
I don't think I need to offer my own definition to claim that, do I? They later said it's subjective, which seems to favor my claim.
Does that clear things up? Is there a reason you thought I was trying to give a definition, and failing? Is there something wrong with my argument?
Luckily we live in a society with at least some degree of freedom, enough to where if a worker is convinced that they are entitled to 100% of their self-percieved value of their contribution then they can and should start their own company. As what you are referring to is ownership compensation. Many workers do this.
Unfortunately, much if not most of the time this calculation by the worker will be in error. As they tend to exclude the company scaffolding that they are not responsible for but that enables them to make their contribution.
Either way, its amazing that there is so much legal opportunity today for anyone to build an asset (eg: business) that they own. Asset ownership being the key to legal and ethical economic success in this world. I feel like more children should be taught as much at an early age, with less emphasis on the "nobility of work" that tends to exclude the importance of assets.
If group ownership is important, workers can certainly begin a business with that in mind.
Last, stock is sometimes sold publicly (direct ownership of the asset).
> Unfortunately, much if not most of the time this calculation by the worker will be in error. As they tend to exclude the company scaffolding that they are not responsible for but that enables them to make their contribution.
I literally addressed that "company scaffolding" in more detail than you do here (second sentence of the second paragraph). There's no error here though as running the company and owning the company are two different things and while there are plenty of business owners who need to work for their own company to keep it running, we're specifically talking about surplus value after the cost of paying all labor (including your own, at market rate), i.e. what ends up either being reinvested at the end of the fiscal year or drained by the owners/shareholders as dividends. You may need someone to run the business side of things, you don't need that person to also own the company, be able to drain any profits and fire you at will.
> If group ownership is important, workers can certainly begin a business with that in mind.
We like to proudly talk about individualism when it comes to seeking praise for personal achievements but times like this demonstrate how it can blind us to systems thinking. Yes, you can create a worker cooperative. And yes, you can be a business owner who tries to be "fair" to their workers. But you exist in competition with other businesses who don't engage in such "waste" and you compete in a system where the "benefits" of such an approach are considered externalities and have no direct value (even if you try to argue it's "positive PR" that will only get you so far). In other words, the system disincentivizes and actively punishes redistributing surplus value to your (co-)workers - because it's literally based on profit-seeking (i.e. maximizing that surplus).
> Asset ownership being the key to legal and ethical economic success in this world.
Yes, and asset ownership is only attainable if you have the necessary capital to buy assets. Being self-employed won't get you far because you're still selling your labor for money (just with fewer middlemen but in practice not really) and if everyone owned their own business that's all they'd accomplish. If you want to be economically successful from asset ownership rather than labor, you want your "asset" to "do the work for you" (i.e. passive income). But in real-world terms this ultimately means you need to get a cut (i.e. profit) from someone else's labor (and they therefore can't take this advice or else they wouldn't be in that position for you).
I'm a business owner. I've been at various stages self-employed, an employer and a business owner using external freelancers and subcontractors. But I have no illusions that essentially the easiest "legal and ethical" economic success I've seen involved little more than either rent seeking (i.e. being paid for continuous usage of something you already built/bought) or scalping (i.e. selling something someone else made/did at an inflated price and pocketing the difference).
I mean it becomes a myth when you define it out of existence; I normally don't like semantic arguments but you're arguing against an idea of "underpaid" that means something different than what the people who say it are trying to convey. The notion of underpaid isn't weighed against the value of one's labor, it's weighed against cost of living and the value of one's time.
We've generally decided it's unreasonable for someone to need to work more than 40 hours a week so the minimum pay for 160 hours of labor had better be enough to live on without being on welfare or other government assistance. It might not be a glamorous life but you at least have to be able to make rent, pay for heat, AC, food, clothes, water, toilet paper, health insurance, a cheap cell phone, transportation to and from work, and some basic possessions like a bed. And if it's not then you're being underpaid. I think that's a pretty fair measure, it roughly represents the cost of a person's undivided labor.
And I think it's fair to say that for almost all Americans that cost has gone up and not insignificantly over the past 5 years. Folks that make good money by can take the hit but people on the bottom rung have nowhere to go. And people will given the opportunity begrudgingly sell their labor for unsustainable prices because it's better than nothing but that road leads to the record scratch in the economic game of musical chairs we're playing when money stops moving.
And that's when Socialist-inspired policies we have kick in and gov't has to forcibly redistribute wealth through higher taxes and even greater government spending to start the motor again. We've done it before and I'm sure we'll do it again. But I'm of the opinion that a little regulation to keep us out of the death spiral and letting the market allocate resources is better than when the government has to step in and do it.
The local Starbucks over the years has had many turnovers in the staff. It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job.
That makes it unskilled labor.
Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the instruction booklet and fly an airplane.
It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job.
Starbucks hires juniors and trains them to be good baristas. That takes a long time. Just because someone is able to work a coffee machine after a few days doesn't mean they're not skilled eventually. Your argument is like saying 'it only takes a few days for junior devs to be onboarded, so there's no real value in senior devs'.
It doesn’t take a phd to make a coffee, no matter how fancy the cinnamon/cocoa heart is.
All you're saying here is that you've failed to see the value in customer service, hospitality, speed, accuracy, politeness, etc that go with a retail coffeeshop job. The coffee is the same in pretty much every Starbucks, but the experience can vary wildly depending on how good the baristas are at everything else besides making coffee. Those skills take years to master.
Yes, that’s what I’m sort of saying. I haven’t failed to see any of that. But it doesn’t take a phd to make coffee politely or less politely. All I want is the coffee. Don’t ask me what my name is. I don’t care about the „experience”.
You do care about the experience though. Everyone does. If you have a bad experience you'll complain, or stop going to that Starbucks, or moan to your friends. To you, by the sounds of things, a good experience consists of asking for your order, paying, and getting out fast. An experienced retail worker will be able to read all that from your cues - not engaging in small talk, having your payment ready, moving along quickly, etc. They'll factor those things into their interactions with you, they'll remember you next time, and they'll make the experience what you want. All that takes time to learn, and few retail workers get good at it. I will concede that it doesn't require a PhD though. Few jobs do.
I don't go to Starbucks anyway because they just keep that stupid ritual of "what's your name" and they can never understand what I'm saying so we are just standing there on the opposite side of the counter exercising our knowledge of the military alphabet. If that's the sort of skill required, sorry, anyone can do it. Tell me - how long does it take to serve your first coffee at Starbucks as a barista?
Just sell me the damn coffee and bugger off with "experience". It doesn't require a "skilled" person to politely serve me a coffee. Just make sure the coffee doesn't taste like shit and I'll come back to you unless you spit at me or offend me. Again - no need to be "skilled" to not do that.
I think people talk past each other because one side takes "unskilled" to mean basically "anyone could do it with some training" (I can't run an espresso machine anymore, but I learned how in a few hours when I needed to). You get better at unskilled labor (anyone knows this, there are baristas who are much faster than others; able to run the entire shop which normally takes two).
The other side takes "unskilled" to be a derogatory term that means the worker isn't a human being with thoughts and wants and needs, and deserving of a wage.
How could you possibly know that it takes “3 days” to get good at being a barista? You should try it out sometime, with a 50 person line. I’m sure it’ll be a cake walk and your labor will be fairly compensated. I’ll even give you a 3 day head start just to be fair!
You can do the basic job after 3 days and after a month rush hour won't be a problem either. I've done similar jobs, the skill cap is not that high.
My labour won't be fairly compensated which is why i don't do jobs like that anymore, but they're not hard to learn.
To be fair, Starbucks purchases machines that are automated to a much higher degree than your standard high end espresso machine you'd find in a local shop. It's a lot more button pushing in the correct sequence, a lot less art. This is standard procedure for a multinational fast food service company: they want things automated and streamlined not only for speed of service and easy training, but consistency of the product.
From what I heard from a former Starbucks barista, the biggest challenge was to not scald the milk during steaming (which is not very difficult, basically just requires holding it at the correct angle to induce a whirlpool effect and keep things moving).
The skilled aspect is dealing with customers efficiently and pleasantly, and all the nuance/craziness that can entail.
They likely meant that onboarding takes three days. As there is no meaningful metric for competence beyond that (or at least no metric that is measured and used) "good" doesn't apply.
There are of course tons of ways a good, seasoned barista distinguishes themselves from a trainee with 3 days of onboarding but those are externalities. The difference between skilled and unskilled labor is not whether competence and experience can make a difference but whether that difference is measured as performance or only affects externalities.
I.e. "unskilled labor" is not about the worker but about the company. Notably these often do involve skill that directly contributes to performance but because the job is considered unskilled, it's instead treated as some nebulous a priori form of intelligence and personal aptitude. What's more, beyond a certain point skill is often actively punished (e.g. by raising quotas to take advantage of higher productivity, resulting in more work for the same pay).
>> I.e. "unskilled labor" is not about the worker but about the company
That part really stood out to me.
While a lot of us can agree that barista is an unskilled job, I heard people call barmen labor a skilled labor.
Which is crazy, because it's essentially the same job (mix stuff up and serve in a cup). But it makes sense if "unskilled labor" is a function of an employer not an employee
Knowing professional welders myself, and trying my hand at welding, it takes a lot more than 30 days to get good at it. A welder also needs to learn some chemistry, all kinds of techniques, the strengths and weaknesses of various kinds of welds, how to prep the weld, etc.
A good weld is a thing of beauty.
Welding is also pretty dangerous. It takes a good welder to do it safely, and do it without ruining very expensive parts.
There's good reason that competent welders get paid a lot of money.
In 30 days, the new welder probably has learned how not to set himself on fire, blind himself, fill his lungs with poisonous gasses, etc.
In any job there is a spectrum from bare minimum to a master. This goes for welding and baristas. Is someone who pushes a button on a Nespresso a barista? If I go get a soldering iron am I a welder?
You overlay the normal distribution of all baristas and welders and look at the difficulty in learning various skills. I'm sure they are not exactly equal.
That sounds like a fun idea in theory, but in practice that distribution would require hours of research per job, or more, and I'm not aware of any source that publishes that sort of information. So it doesn't give me a way to sort jobs into "skilled" and "unskilled". Or to give them a reliable 1-10 rank on how skilled they are.
I can be pretty sure welder beats barista, but by how much, how it relates to other jobs, how we set various bars, that's all a lot more difficult.
I actually doubt there's a neat defineable ceiling for the skill of a welder nor a barista so it also comes down to where you make the cut-off because any improvements beyond that become negligible in terms of ROI. But that would also require being able to actually quantify that vague notion of "skill" which in turn would require an honest assessment of the actual real-world exhaustive job description of both jobs including all implicit, unstated and culturally expected parts (e.g. barista is a service job so customer service can be as big a factor as the actual coffee-making but we don't think of social skills as actual skills or emotional labor even if it's obvious when they're inadequate or badly performed).
So in other words, we could have an objective, empirical look at whether welders or baristas actually need "more skill" and which skillset is easier to master for the average person (which is its own rest nest of considerations again) but if we did the necessary (if not impossible) prep work to even get started on that, we'd have to already agree that "unskilled" is a descriptor for jobs that has very little to do with the actual skill requirements and more with attitudes towards those skills or the people doing those jobs.
Sure but unless you're Tesla, welding quality is more relevant to your bottom line than coffee making quality (yes, I'm aware there's more to being a good barista than just making the coffee).
> You can onboard welding in less than 30 days too.
You can be doing useful work as part of a welding group in 30 days, but you will not be a master. Grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't and all that.
I couldn't reliably tell you the difference between a $30 bottle of wine and a $300 bottle of wine but that's why I don't claim to be an expert on wine.
Also, there are other coffee places than Starbucks. Saying barista is an unskilled job because Starbucks coffee is particularly bad is like saying programmer is an unskilled job because all Squarespace websites are equally bad.
> How could you possibly know that it takes “3 days” to get good at being a barista?
Because I have gone to the same Starbucks every day for many years, and see many new hires as the staff turns over. It takes about 3 days to go from "cannot operate the cash register" to "efficiently fulfills customer orders".
Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs where any specialized skills required can be learned on the job in a short period of time, usually less than 30 days.
It doesn't literally mean the workers don't know how to do anything. It's certainly not a myth - it's a classification of work, at least in the US.
> Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs where any specialized skills required can be learned on the job in a short period of time, usually less than 30 days.
You're not going to learn welding in 30 days. Nor are you going to learn how to design a bridge. Or program in C++. Or diagnose a patient. Or be a lawyer. Or drive a race car. Etc.
I didn't say all jobs, did I? You successfully listed (some) jobs that might take longer than 30 days to learn.
The thing about "unskilled" jobs, everyone seems to look down their noses at, is that they facilite the people doing the lofty jobs of: lawyer, doctor, c++ programmer, etc. Without them getting done for you you couldn't do what you're doing.
Can the brickie work without their "unskilled" laborer? Sure, but good luck getting you house built in a reasonable time.
I don't understand your point. Yes, there's a lot of unskilled jobs, possibly a majority of jobs. Far from everyone looks down on unskilled jobs, and nobody is saying they're not important.
The brickie's "laborer", I literally said it in the post you replied to; the person who moves bricks, makes up the muck, generally keeps the brickie supplied with materials.
Credentialism has certainly gone too far in many fields, but I’d still like my doctors, lawyers, and engineers to have more than 30 days of training in their field.
Where are all these js devs on minimum wage going paycheck-to-paycheck?
I think everything is easy, given the right approach and mindset, or everything is approachable given the right approach and mindset and will to put enough effort to get to a given outcome.
The concept of "underpaid" and "fair" wages is fundamentally subjective. Is a burger flipper underpaid because he cant raise a family a buy a house on that wage, "underpaid"? Or is his labor simply not that valuable? Is a techbro making $300k "underpaid" because his employer is making $500k off his work?
On the other hand skilled vs unskilled labor, as well as the concept of human capital are well recognized concepts in economics.
That's just playing with words. Putting Gordon Ramsay in the same bucket as "burger flipper" makes as much sense as putting Linus Torvalds in the same bucket as "keyboard monkey".
Why are you pivoting to "value"? The original discussion was about skilled vs unskilled labor and whether that assessment is subjective vs objective. You might think that accountants are useless paper pushers whereas burger flippers are Hard Working People That Get Actual Things Done™, but that's orthogonal to how much skill[1] is needed to flip burgers vs be an accountant.
So you're trying to derail the discussion to something about "value", because the page I linked about "skill" has a passage about how skilled laborers were historically important to the economy? What does this have to do with the subjectivity/objectivity of "underpaid", "unfair wages", "unskilled labor", or whether a burger flipper is more "skilled" than an accountant? As I said earlier, even if you think that accountants are useless paper pushers, the fact that they're pushing papers in a very specific way that takes years to learn, makes them more skilled.
First I'm pivoting now I'm trying to derail, when all I've done is answer you question; but to make it plain: yes, it's subjective. How else are certain skills valued more that others? There's no objective measurement to these. Comparing the skills of one disapline to another doesn't work, like apple to oranges.
The objective measurement for "skill" is how much training/experience/talent is required to carry out a particular job. Sure, there might be some fuzziness/ambiguity to this, and there's various degrees of freedom to how you compute a "skill score" or whatever (eg. what's more skilled an accountant or an auditor?), but it's hard to argue that a burger flipper is more skilled than an accountant. You can make the argument that the value of a burger flipper vs an accountant is subjective, but that's irrespective of the skill required.
Whether someone is getting "underpaid" or a "fair wage" on the other hand is entirely subjective, and you can come to whatever conclusion you want depending on your politics. On one side of the spectrum you could argue any sort of situation where the employer is capturing surplus value from the employee is inherently exploitative[1] and therefore "underpaid" and a "unfair wage". On the other end of the spectrum you argue that supply and demand curves are the ultimate arbiter of what's "fair", and any wage that is determined by the free market can't by "underpaid" or "unfair" by definition.
Yeah I don't think we're going to agree about skills in this, especially since I'd consider usefulness as a main objective measurement of skill. Using your "objective" measures could lead to a juggler of knives having the same level of skill as your accountant.
> With the two examples you chose, I‘d say there is not much of a skill gap.
Unless we're talking about really high end burgers, you can take almost anyone off the street and train them to flip burger patties within a day. They might not willingly do it on account of it being boring/tiring/poorly paid work, but it's not exactly hard to learn either. I doubt you can do the same for an accountant, unless your idea of an accountant is something like "manually copying entries into a ledger". Even teaching excel to someone who hasn't used excel ever, to a capacity where they can do meaningful financial reporting probably can't be done within a day.
On a relative scale, I agree with you that the amount of training involved differs for accountants and burger flippers, thus this is a good example.
On an absolute scale, comparing skills of burger flippers, accountants, aeronautical engineers and surgeons, the first two basically lump together.
I look at skill gap more in terms of „how hard is it to completely automate/autonomize this job“. Which is fiercely easy both for the burger flipper and the accountant, yet a bit harder (though not impossible) for the other two.
With all the increased productivity and advances if we can't support decent living for every person then what's the point? Work yourself to death to make some motherfucker rich?
> "Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market.
No, and I'm guessing you're just under the spell of market fundamentalism. An unfair wage is something like when the worker either
1. can't achieve a socially-acceptable living standard with the job,
2. when there's too-great of a mismatch between the labor-theory-of-value price and the market-theory-of-value price for their labor, or
3. or when the wage is below the actual the market price.
I made those up on the spot, so there may be some holes, bit it gets the gist.
> Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact.
Being underpaid is different than "wants more money."
> It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion.
No. I'd never talk about a fortune 500 CEO or a FAANG engineer as being underpaid.
> Yet the same people who demand that everyone earn a living wage, sometimes punctuating their points with riots, tend to be the same crowd who wants to import unskilled workers by the millions.
I see what you're saying, but the real world is a lot more morally complicated that the single-axis world where your comment here makes sense.
Your "guess" before your arguments is a pointless jab and ploy to win a point without having yet said anything.
If you think that accusing me of "being under the spell of market fundamentalism" is a succesful rhetorical strategy, then you neither understood my post nor are you worth arguing with.
My comment was made in the context of mentioned complex factors that you are ommitting.
Your 1 and 2 numbered responses are pure nonsense. Response 1 reveals to me who I am dealing with. This is going to go nowhere. Response 2 is ideological hand waving. 3 is true, but I included points that addressed it in my post.
There is zero political (effective) difference in the labor market between being underpaid and wanting more money, if the ask is for more money.
If they are truly underpaid, then they should ask for more money and get it. If they are not underpaid and ask for more money lest penalty x, then the market effect for employers is the same.
A further problem, as illustrated by your definitions of underpayment with which I disagree, is who is to decide what being underpaid means?
The answer to that question is that what constitutes underpayment will always be murky as far as the market is concerned and therefore, again, my point stands. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact.
>No. I'd never talk about a fortune 500 CEO or a FAANG engineer as being underpaid.
"Never". That's a perfect example of the self-centered view of much of labor advocacy. Not only do they publicly only take the other side of the market into account when it opportunistically suits them (ie: when bucking for asset ownership or when owning assets themsevles), they have trouble comprehending how their own principles might scale to different skill levels in the labor pool.
> I see what you're saying, but the real world is a lot more morally complicated that the single-axis world where your comment here makes sense.
I disagree with your single-axis categorization. I disagree with the implication that this is largely a moral argument.
I disagree with the assumption you would be able to make moral assertions that had any impact on the economic forces that determine pay and job availability, given the mentioned constraint (mass immigration). My original point is that the labor market will not be able to have it all. It has to choose, and clearly it has made its choice.
But in its defense, the pro-labor market was co-opted generations ago by Business. That dissonance that you percieve and interpret as "moral complexity" is exactly their influence.
Problem is, when you get an economy acclimated to false prices set by adversarial “business” “strategy”, the only logical result is depression when it’s time to actually create money for investors
Fair warning to all who come after - the children comment for a decent distance below are a battle based on correct/ incorrect/ technical/ personal definitions of skilled labor.
Does that warrant a warning? That's just a natural occuring discussion, and selecting threads to follow is basic forum-reading skill. The rare gems of surprising insight are often found in the depths of slightly off-topic discussions.
Previously I've noticed another kind of meta-comment, the top level complaint by a self-appointed moderators about the overall shape of the discussion elsewhere, instead of engaging directly with the actual posts in question.
With intellectual pursuits, you can always find diamonds in the rough. Simply due to the effort YOU are putting in, given your then state of mind, knowledge and experience.
You can wade through a conversation on creationism and evolutionary denial and understand humanity or even deepen your skills.
However that's you - your unique circumstances bringing more to the table.
Others would very much appreciate a warning, because they already have working definitions, have seen this argument before and would prefer spending their time on other pursuits.
With a little forum experience, who has trouble scanning a thread and seeing it meander away from their interest? So I question the need.
Even if there is the need, who should be the judge for others over the quality of a subthread? I would feel presumptuous to pass judgement beyond my vote for each comment.
Aren't those diamonds all that matter anyway? Recently I increasingly find new and curious beginnings dampened and limited by intellectually lazy attitudes, by comments that start with "I mean...", that reiterate the default state rather than entertaining a new thought. Inadvertently, well-meaning soft-moderation like yours might steer even more people away from interesting topics.
wrt DoorDash (and Instacart etc), along with this squeeze I’ve observed the quality of service decrease severely. Could just be that my sample of a now wider employee pool is crappy, or workers are trying to “scale” to make a living wage with many concurrent orders, but I believe it’s part of the race to the bottom. I love the convenience, but the experience is worsening. How can these vendors continue to profit when lower quality leads to increased refunds?
Well in my observation people keep adjusting lower quality of service. I mean it is not going to be the case that people will start shopping in stores and/or cooking in kitchens.
How can you tell that it's wasteful? Seems to me that pointing at activities and saying they're wasteful is exactly the central planning you mentioned. Everything "decadent" looks suspiciously wasteful. Stage shows, exotic fruit, ball games, wedding photography, hats, flowers, songs, pets, tourism, novels, hobbies, diamonds ... it often puzzles me how economic activity makes a country wealthy when only a tiny part of it is efficiently providing health, nutrients and shelter. And in fact maybe 90% of it is wasteful, but nobody has the magic ability to identify exactly which 90%, and that's why central planning wrecks wealth, and VC funding apparently thrown down the toilet may in some mysterious way be beneficial to us.
Yeah, I plan on paying approximately double (100% markup) if I'm ordering delivery on an app. That's why I only do it when I'm in a hotel room on a work trip and I don't have the rental car keys. Hotel food is not cheaper, not tastier, and I have way less options (I am a vegetarian).
> 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. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
Wow - I did not know this. This makes it all a whole lot less impressive and interesting that it was just people off shore watching you.
Apparently this news came out in May 2023. I also was bamboozled into thinking that sophisticated computer vision algos -- that worked -- were doing this.
I'm now picturing the remote workers constantly switching between cameras, studying: Did he put down the can of kidney beans or the can of corn there? Wait, the man picked up the bananas, but then he handed them to the woman in the white shirt. Let's charge them to her account. Wait, she handed them back at 14:42 in aisle 16. Going to switch them back to the man.
All day long, day in day out, for years. I am the last to criticize 'low wage jobs' paternalistically, because I know they may be much better than what the workers might otherwise be doing: perhaps just toiling in the fields for 16 hours a day (or worse: something like 'melting down discarded PCBs to recover trace metals'). But still, I do not think I would want to do this job nor that it was worth it. I get that they were supposedly trying to train an algorithm to do it. I'm glad that they aren't keeping at it any longer though now that it's proven so unworkable.
Edit: On thinking about this tangent, it seems that if global regulation is the only solution, it would make sense to enforce regulation from the ship building side (in western countries), rather than the wrecking side (in developing countries) which will only displace the bad practices to less scrupulous countries. A solution might be sizable amount of money that had to be paid to escrow that could not be released back to the owner until the ship has been disposed of in an environmentally sound manner, incentivizing and funding the proper scrapping of ships. Or perhaps a levy which funds safety practices and equipment for scrapping companies
Uh, really? I was certain that the aftermath of WWII was responsible for establishing a form of global governance (by consensus) via the UN, and then there’s the benefits of free trade agreements that drove economic globalization.
The free trade agreements came after the environmental movements. Claiming environmental movements caused this is too strong a claim. But it is not entirely a coincidence that one followed the other.
Specifically what movements and when? It’s a strange claim that globalization was caused (or even accelerated) by environmental movements. Certainly the UN came before the environmental movements of the 60s/70s. The World Bank and IMF were also established soon after the conclusion of WWII. The wiki article for globalization makes just a couple of off hand mentions of environmental issues. I’ve only ever heard of globalization in an economic context, and I think by convention this is the lens most people view it by
When Americans clamored for rivers that didn’t catch fire and for smog in LA to go away it became clear to corporations that it would be much cheaper and better for profits if they setup factories in poor countries that didn’t require them to stop egregiously polluting. Thus began the momentum for free trade agreements and breaking down of trade barriers.
I used the term “globalization” as a proxy for free trade. That was bad on my part.
I can see how environmental policy could accelerate this phenomena, but surely the asymmetry of labor costs and cheaper/faster shipping is reason enough to offshore labor? Economical shipping seems to be the enabler, and miserly humans, as ever, the cause
The ownership structure for ships used in international shipping is anything but straightforward. For instance, for the the MV Dali (the ship that crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge) you might think we can go after Maersk, but in reality they're only chartering it. It was actually built by Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea for a Greek company but later sold to a Singaporean company, operated by a different Singaporean company, and crewed by 20 Indians and 1 Sri Lankan. In this complex web of ownership/relationships how do you exactly "enforce regulation from the ship building side "?
Well as I (naively) suggested whoever owns the actual ship (and thus disposes of it) can claim on an escrow that isn't released until the ship has been verifiable disposed of in an environmentally sound fashion. So if the ship ever is sold to another party, that would be built into the purchase cost (that they could claim this money), even to the final purchaser (the wreckers). Probably some huge loophole or perverse incentive that I haven't thought of, but that's at least one suggestion.
Due to heavy regulations on the shipbreaking industry in Western countries, > 50% of ships worldwide are (or were, when the documentary was made) dismantled in Alang, India.
The industry is extremely polluting (to the environment and the workers) and the working conditions (incl. safety) are dire to put it nicely.
If you did some kind of shell game with 5 different people all passing around their items, then you don’t get charged correctly is it theft? Did anyone ever try that?
I worked for Amazon in Seattle when Amazon Go first launched. As you'd expect, lots of SDE teams made games out of trying to fool the thing in various ways.
A few attempts were successful early on (passing items back and forth, one person moving something to the wrong shelf and another person picking it up, people dressing in identical outfits, etc), but the success rate in fooling the system was very very low. No method of trying to trick it that I ever heard of worked consistently, and it definitely seemed to get harder to fool the longer the store was open.
At the time I thought that whatever algos were being run on the camera feeds were getting better. Knowing that it was basically all manual, I'm not sure what the explanation is for the store seemingly getting harder to fool over time. Possibly just placebo, or people lost interest in trying so hard to fool it.
Probably fewer patrons and similar number of employees in the sweatshops. More eyes per patron leads to fewer errors. Or maybe they trained the best grocery cv model around from having a big high quality dataset, and you were fighting it. But then I'd think the tech would've been passed to whole foods instead of packing up shop, so final guess is sweatshop singularity theory.
> If you did some kind of shell game with 5 different people all passing around their items, then you don’t get charged correctly is it theft?
IANAL but I'm confident the legal answer is "yes", the same as if someone was using sleight-of-hand with objects at a cashier-and-conveyor-belt checkout station.
Whether charges are brought and how easily the case can be proved is another matter, but the intent is what makes it a crime.
It sounds different to me because each person can say they were just trying to buy the items they walked out with and didn’t get charged. Like if you scan an item at self checkout and the machine says it’s free, that’s not going to be theft. At least I sure hope not.
I thought one of the marketing lines was that Amazon was so confident/comfortable in their implementation was that they assumed all liability for mistakes (though as I type this I realise they may have worded it to encapsulate only honest mistakes rather than people trying deliberately to break the system).
To get a little pedantic, assuming such a promise existed, it actually doesn't mean as much as most people think.
A merchant saying "we won't sue you in civil court for the missing money" does not prevent the local government from criminally prosecuting that same person for theft.
American TV dramas often show the police asking people "Do you want to press charges?", but the idea that the question matters is a myth, since victims of crime don't get to decide that. At best, it's a terribly misleading shortening of: "Just for my own private curiosity, do you plan to lobby or press upon your local government officials into pressing charges?"
>though as I type this I realise they may have worded it to encapsulate only honest mistakes rather than people trying deliberately to break the system
Exactly. Retailers generally assume liability for honest mistakes made by their system/employees and sometimes even their customers. However, when people knowingly exploit a loophole for financial gain it becomes fraud. Here's a real example - https://www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/local/greensboro-woma...
> the workers might otherwise be doing: perhaps just toiling in the fields for 16 hours a day
That is robber barron propaganda to make you believe their enslavement of people (by creating the right situation where the people have no choice) is actual good for them.
I originally wrote a long reply, but I'll just say that I don't buy your framing, and I don't think the people who depend on that foreign money flowing in to pay them for their work at the prevailing wage where they live agree with you either.
Right... so the line goes. They're free to go to any neighbouring city that will do the same to them now that we've destroyed the village (by poaching young people in various ways. There are many ways to destroy a city if you are strategic and have financing.)
In these countries the cities are created around the factories etc and planned as part of the development.
You're not free once your subsistence relies on this corporation. It's slavery but because some tokens are being transferred (the food supply is probably also corp. owned--especially in the early stages of the development) it is possible to fool the naive / stupid into think this is not slavery.
What if the alternative to these jobs is not other jobs, but no jobs? If working in such a job is considered slavery, then most of the west also employs slaves in the form of "simple, low skilled" jobs, such as cashiers. Many people don't have many options, and losing even such a job could mean unemployment.
Pratchett really got technology, imo. Sometimes it really is high energy magic, but most of the time it's just labourers you can't see being exploited. I especially enjoyed the line "money dangled is far more effective than money given" or something like that... it's true.
> 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. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
Reminds me of the "delivery robots" that weren't really automated after all, they were remotely navigated by cheaper workers on playstation controllers in Brazil and the Philippines driving them on the streets through cameras.
It's just a tech-illiterate journalist who can't seem to understand the difference between "annotators watching and labeling videos to validate the model" vs "people watching the videos live to remotely decide the cost of every user's purchase".
Or maybe they do know the difference, but wanted to bait audience.
If you required a high accuracy like 99.9% to charge a customer, you could have a system that was mostly automatic but still needed human review when the model isn’t confident enough. It’s hard to know exactly what this means without a lot more details, which Amazon is unlikely to provide.
Wonder if that 30% include the cases where someone walks in, strolls around, and walks out without buying something? Which I see people do all the time, interested in the concept.
If it was just a matter of building up a large enough training set and corresponding model do you really think Amazon would be abandoning a technology they spent so much time, money and resources on, in a somewhat embarassing manner?
Sounds like fake-it-till-you-make-it stuff right? This is exactly how I would bootstrap a startup that wanted to do this. Kind of impressed with their scrappiness to be honest.
What I think is funny is that circa 2008 I had a manager who used to work at Amazon who told me that "a surprising amount of Amazon artificial intelligence is artificial artificial intelligence, low paid workers".
I heard this was behind mechanical turk. Sounds like the playbook remained the same.
I'm pretty sure this idea has been kicked around, and is generally seen as not-super-useful because it requires a perfectly reliable low-latency connection.
Phantom Auto did this. They had cars ferrying people around CES 2018 in Vegas driven by remote drivers in LA. Apparently the company folded just a few weeks ago.
Regular grocery stores have really gone downhill as well. Whenever I shop, there’s at most 1 cashier doing checkout and usually 0 (only self-checkout being open). I consider myself pretty proficient about knowing what sets off the machine but still set it off 60% of the time (about some weight imbalance etc) that requires an attendant to come fix manually. I’ve gotten to dread the grocery store trips as they require so much overhead time. I really wish the “just walk out” could’ve been popularized and caught on at more stores.
I live in Western Europe and the self checkouts don’t have scales, except for weighing produce, and even for buying alcohol, they trust you to say you’re over 16. It’s always fast because you wait in one line for 4-8 self checkouts and take the first free one.
On the other hand, using the cashier is often frustrating. You have to self-bag anyway and the cashier won’t start scanning your items until the person in front of you has bagged all of their stuff, had a chat about the weather and counted their change. The bagging area is always way too small, making all of this take a while. A few times I’ve even waited while one cashier counts their float, leaves, and a new one comes and counts their float.
I travel extensively, and I think attitudes towards self-checkout vary heavily depending on what preceded it where you are.
In some places, you had smoke-stained cashiers throwing your groceries to their side without so much as looking at you, except to complain you're not bagging fast enough. I think it's fair to say that in those places, self-checkout is a huge improvement.
In other places though, where cashiers have traditionally been more friendly and expected to bag your groceries, it feels like a less obvious improvement. Whereas before you had chipper high school kids working their first job bagging your groceries, now you have menacing terminals accusing you of being a criminal every time their scales misalign.
Self-checkout is a convergence on mediocrity: some places are going to get dragged up, and others down.
Great point, I’m from Canada and lived in Japan for a decade, in those two places I would say it’s a downgrade. Especially Canada where there is usually a scale.
> the cashier won’t start scanning your items until the person in front of you has bagged all of their stuff
What happens every now and then to me is that the person in front watches open mouthed as their shopping gets scanned and piles up in the bagging area, then they pay and fuck around with their purse (honestly idk what they’re doing) then take forever to pack, while the cashier starts scanning my stuff and mixes it into theirs.
I don’t love self-checkout, it can be annoying when something doesn’t scan and I don’t have the ability to manually input the bar code like a normal cashier does. And sometimes there can be errors (“place the item into the bagging area” - when I already did), but I’m overall glad to have the option for self-checkout.
I've been to quite a few supermarkets where they have like a plank that separates the new shopping from the previous shoppers. Maybe advanced plank technology will spread and deal with this issue.
Honestly I think we’ve all been there at some point - just switching off for a few seconds when we’re stressed or distracted by other things in life. If not at the checkout then somewhere else.
But yeah when you’re the other person in this scenario it’s irritating as hell :-D
Damn I’m in Southern California and y’all have really bizarre checkout experiences to me
- I never have to weigh anything except produce
- I rarely have to wait on an attendant except for something like spray paint
- I rarely have been to a store with absolutely zero cashiers, especially for a grocery store
- Usually the cashier will bag for me
I’ve had similar experiences whether I’m in an urban part of LA or some rich Orange County suburb.
My only two complaints are (1) finding parking at like a Trader’s Joes or Tokyo Central and (2) when the store is super busy, there are a bunch of cashiers, and yet there are still long lines
There is one grocery store near me that always has at least two staff members ready to work the checkout and no self checkout at all. There are virtually never lines more than two persons deep. The only time I ever go anywhere else is when I absolutely have to. Vote with your wallet.
Two of the main grocery stores in my area, one of which has sufficient cashiers, are trying to merge in order to make a worse shopping experience for everyone -- at least I assume that's the goal. The third, the only real alternative, is Walmart. Sucks.
Yeah, the "if anything goes wrong you now stand around with your thumb up your ass while one employee makes their way from broken kiosk to broken kiosk to manually resolve the problems" model has soured me on self-checkout. I find I have a very low "dealing with this bullshit" limit, to the point that if I have trouble I'm likely to just say fuck it and walk out of the store without completing my purchase.
Having used the UK/US type self checkout machines while travelling, I must say it is so nice to live in Northern Europe where the self checkout machines are largely just based on trust, with randomly sampling ~five items of every 100 shoppers. There is no weighing at any of the stores.
If you don't get randomly selected for inspection, there is nothing stopping you from just walking out with groceries you didn't pay for worth a hundred dollars easy. People just don't. Another benefit of having a proper social safety net I guess.
Social safety net is more than just being able to afford it. It's a combination of not being able to afford it and general erosion of social values leading to "take what you can get away with" mentality. So even those that can afford it will still try to get more since it's everyone for themselves.
Instead of cooperation under a system with a social safety net, we get a game theoretic weighting on defection without a social safety net.
> Social safety net is more than just being able to afford it. It's a combination of not being able to afford it and general erosion of social values leading to "take what you can get away with" mentality.
There's a causal arrow in the other direction, IMHO: People like to believe in the 'law of the jungle' mentality and thus vote to cut the safety net. IME it's especially wealthy people for whom it's a kind of game, not trauma, deprivation (of education, health care, food, housing, safety) and survival, and who also get to pay lower taxes, Didn't Jamie Dimon talk about how he liked how 'animal spirits' have been awakened?
> Instead of cooperation under a system with a social safety net, we get a game theoretic weighting on defection without a social safety net.
There is a safety net. Here's how I'd describe the situation:
There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was good that they were helped.
There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was not good that they were helped.
Most of politics around this topic is people's differing beliefs in the proportions of the above, and how bought in they are to minimising the latter count because they pay taxes.
> who almost everyone would say it was not good that they were helped
I'm sorry, what? Only in the US helping someone can be sold as a bad thing. It's better to help a few more people that may not really need it than help a few fewer that actually did.
> I'm sorry, what? Only in the US helping someone can be sold as a bad thing. It's better to help a few more people that may not really need it than help a few fewer that actually did.
I think it's worth reading the complete comment and you'll see where what you said fits my wider point.
That's because all of the self checkouts in the US use the weight change to match against the scanned item and any discrepancy leads to having to wait for a self-checkout attendant to manually override to let you continue. That manual override is equivalent to the inspection you're talking about not seeing. And I in the US get blocked needing an attendant 60%+ of the time at some point in the process. Usually up front with the bags I brought from home.
That's happened maybe 4 or 5 times to me in the 200 trips or so (estimated, once a week for years) I've made since I started using the self-checkout every time. It's so reliable and fast for me (store: Jewel-Osco), I just don't have the problems others here are seeing. Usually while waiting in line I don't see anyone else have issues either.
Remove from basket, scan, put in bag. Remove from basket, scan, put in bag.
The scale is the entire bagging area, and it detects when things were removed or added without being scanned, as far as I know that's all it does here. No specific weights.
At the Target next to where I live, the self checkouts don't weigh anything at all. I just scan something and put it in my backpack on the floor most of the time. And this is a Target where the toothpaste is locked up! I've never needed help from an attendant, and I've never been inspected either.
>That's because all of the self checkouts in the US use the weight change to match against the scanned item
Objectively false. Some stores in some areas do that. Most don't.
At Walmart if I only have a few items (most of the time I go to Walmart) I'll just grab the scan gun and scan everything without taking anything out of my cart. I'll bag when I get to the car.
They recently installed a little door at my self checkout. I cannot even walk out of my grocery store without scanning a receipt or flagging an employee to open the door. It’s frustrating.
I know that Krogers has cameras that use some sort of intelligence. I held an object in my hand as I moved other items across the scanner, it set of an alarm and a bunch of still images of my checkout process came up with colored shapes highlighting different on screen items
Might be your neighborhood -- stores with a low shrink rate might be more lax about inspections. I've only encountered it a few times myself but I'm also not the primary shopper in my household.
You can't makes broad, sweeping generalizations like "UK/US type self checkout." It varies so much.
I live in the US and the only place I ever go to where they weigh the items you scanned is Costco. Everywhere else I go (my local Walmart, Target, Aldi, two local grocery stores, and CVS) the self checkout is mostly based on trust with maybe one employee somewhat monitoring some machines. No random sampling.
The only issue I ever run into with the self checkouts is double scanning the product. You do need employee to void items.
Is it a social safety net or stronger legal protections for retailers? In the USA the store has no legal right to detain you and spot check your receipt. Membership stores can revoke your membership for noncompliance and then not let you in anymore without a membership, but that is the closest you’ll find here.
A lot of the waiting is for age restricted items or machine errors rather than trust issues. I have never once been randomly sampled after self surface purchase in either the UK/US.
Without trust issues there would be no machine errors in my experience. Anytime there's an issue it's because I'm scanning too fast for the machine and it can't figure out how the weights work. Or I selected the wrong type of garlic and only the associate is allowed to remove items (why would you not let me remove items I personally added??).
Fair, the inability to remove your own items seems maybe a hang-up from an older view of privileged cashiers. The store I currently use doesn’t have weight checks except for weighed produce. You can leave your stuff in the cart and with the wireless scanner and a bit of forethought everything can stay in there. Different trust models makes things interesting. I have never been checked leaving the store and I don’t think social safety net or otherwise is the driving factor
Yeah, the not being able to remove items grinds my gears.
It's especially annoying when I am waving an item furiously, trying to get the poorly printed barcode to scan, and when it finally accepts it, it double scans the item.
Then when I have to stand there waiting for someone to remove the item is usually where I get disgusted with the process and give up on shopping, especially when it happens multiple times.
The weighing thing seems to be an adjustable feature: in my /extremely/ low-trust Safeway in San Francisco, they started with narrow weight limits that were super-frustrating. Now that misfeature is turned off completely (but they have a little gate you need to wave your receipt at).
I imagine everyone is still playing around to get the optimum ease-of-use vs shoplifting ratio right.
Mandatory item weighting was standard procedure in many western europe self-checkout kiosks for years. The experience sucked and the solution felt over-engineered. They just dropped it recently and moved to a trust-based model overseen by a single employee. Now it's much faster.
I was disappointed when my Waitrose at Kings Cross London got rid of the non weighing machines and replaced them with regular ones. I think the non weighing ones end up costing the store more either through people nicking stuff or having to have staff watch them.
Where I live most stores started off in fort Knox mode but had to tone it down. The bagging area was usually miniscule and trying to fit all the groceries of even a medium grocery list on there without locking the system was nigh impossible
The Whole Foods location nearest to me has self-checkout stations that don't even have a scale under the bagging area. You just scan, put it in your bag and go. I assume they can afford to tank the shrinkage that results from this due to their high profit margins, or they just don't consider the costs associated with the scales to be worth it.
There was a news story a while back about how some chain stores were not going after most shoplifters directly but would keep the recordings on file and press felony charges once a certain total had been exceeded, so instead of getting a slap on the wrist for a few dollars of shrinkage here or there they'd drop the entire weight of the law on shoplifters once those few dollars added up to an amount that qualified for felony theft.
Given that "just walk out" apparently means "replace cashiers with offshore video analysts" I'd wager Whole Foods might do something similar and policing shrinkage in self-checkout is too expensive compared to just keeping track of cheats and throwing the book at them if they make a habit out of it.
That’s how the popular grocery chains in the Netherlands all work. You just scan a few things, put it in your bag, and leave. I almost never interact with anyone.
It uses your rewards card to determine your “risk”, I think. Just a theory. But whenever I’ve gotten a new card, they come check my bag a lot. Then after a dozen successes or so, they stop checking so often. Then hardly at all.
One of my friends forgot to scan an item once when they checked, and he had someone come to check his bag way more often for a while.
And it almost always DOES go wrong. Seriously 75% of the time when I'm done scanning and I press "pay now," it inexplicably says "calling for assistance" and refuses to do anything until an employee comes over. WHY?
And now assholes are intentionally taking alcohol through the self-checkout, deliberately taking up that one employee's time making him or her perform the workaround to check the items out.
And the 20+ years of "unexpected item in the bagging area" bullshit... just get rid of it.
Strangely that issue has almost vasnished for me in the last couple of years, here in New Zealand at least across the several supermarket chains I frequent (although they all seem to use the same self service POS supplier). Sure it was a big issue when these first came into stores but I think they've realised they need to increase the tolerances a bit (e.g. accept even if the weight is <1% off) and it all just works close to 100% of the time for me. I do however generally avoid adding bags to the weight area (as I've found these to trigger false warnings) and just load my shopping directly onto the weighted area and then once I've paid I'll just bag my shopping then. Works like a charm.
I do that, too (scan, pay then bag), but it's a tradeoff - you get smoother checkout experience in exchange for some speed. If everyone was throwing all their scanned stuff in a bag immediately, the checkout would be a lot faster.
What never made sense to me with their go stores was why a store that only needed 1-2 people max to operate had such bad hours. Hearing now that getting the bill is a mainly manual process i guess their hours had to line up with their data entry team in india so people could get their recipes quickly. insane to think about
They didn't even agree with the 700 out of 1000 trips needing review figure
> According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.
Even if the system was fairly accurate, if the vendor is charging Amazon too much for it, it can still be financially worthwhile for Amazon to switch to scanners in their carts.
"inaccurate" can mean lots of things here, from "actually it was 690 out of 1000" to some other minor technicality. Note that Amazon did not provide a figure of its own.
Large corporations tend to tell the truth, but push it as far as they can.
Might be "700 manual reviews per 1000 trips" getting misinterpreted as "700 out of 1000 trips needed manual reviews". If some trips were pathological edge cases that required near-constant reviews and a substantial majority took zero reviews, I could understand why Amazon would keep trying to fix its system.
If my memory serves me right, when I last visited the US right before COVID (SF) I wanted to see an Amazon Go convenience store but it closed down at 16:00 or 17:00.
That was quite unacceptable for a convenience store and it was then I got the feeling Amazon Go was still an experiment rather than a mature technology.
I'm glad it's gone for good, if the process really works like how it's described in the article. Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout (eww- the horror!). The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.
It wasn’t pointless, they were training an AI that never fully worked. It’s ultimately the same kind of thing as people monitoring self driving cars, a boring task that may be pointless or possibly remove a lot of drudgery longer term.
According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.
That sort of thing seems to improve over time. The USPS has had automatic sorting machines for a long time. At first they could only read pre-barcoded mail. Humans had to key in zip codes. Then character recognition got good enough that printed and typed addresses could be read automatically. Some items were still rejected, and they went through manual stations that added a bar-code sticker.
Then manual reading was made remote. There were about 20 USPS remote envelope reading centers at peak. As the vision systems got good enough to read handwriting, then bad handwriting, those were cut back. Now there's only one remote envelope reading center in the US, and what gets there is really bad.
> Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout
Wanting to make your life more convenient and pleasant isn't "entitled".
99% of jobs are things people would rather not be doing (otherwise you wouldn't be getting paid for it). The point is that we can allocate this work in a way that minimizes the amount of time everyone has to spend doing undesirable work.
Are you mad that I sometimes pay "poor souls" to do the "menial work" of cooking me food so I can avoid doing it myself?
> The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.
A very bizarre response to "darn, this was so convenient" - I wonder if this is a troll.
> The point is that we can allocate this work in a way that minimizes the amount of time everyone has to spend doing undesirable work.
1. Not all work is equally undesirable and the way people are paid is not related to that in any way (in fact isn't usually inversely related)
2. Minimising the undesirable work done in total means some people end up doing almost all of it and some basically none (or, if you consider all work undesirable, some people do only the worst and some only the least bad work).
If before, for example, everyone would spend half an hour of their day to cook for themselves, which might be inconvenient but is overall not a big impact on your quality of life, now we have overworked and underpaid restaurant and related staff doing intense work for crazy hours, which is is a devastating hit to their (and their families') quality of life.
The sum of human effort spent on cooking may have gone down in this example, but instead of everyone being a little annoyed by it, some people are living like kings and some are slaving away for their convenience (obviously this wording is exaggerated, but if we look globally, this is basically what's happening).
Sure but you seem to ignore that we don't exist in a socialist society.
Cashiers may have an undesirable job and self-checkout may distribute this undesirable labor among the many instead of burdening a single person with it but those people don't get paid for doing that job whereas the cashier did get paid. Self-checkout is also often slower than checkout at a cashier (it has to be because the cashier is trusted to ring up items correctly whereas the customer has a huge incentive to cheat).
The desirability of being a cashier also isn't inherent to the job. It has more to do with attitudes towards the person doing the job, both from customers and from their employer. Service staff often act as a lightning rod for all frustrations and disdain targeted at their place of work, i.e. they frequently get punished for things completely out of their control. They're also often seen as unskilled labor by their employers so they are treated as easy to replace meaning there is very little incentive to invest in their job satisfaction.
In other words, we have systems that not only require people to work even if the jobs they end up doing are undesirable and undervalued but also actively makes certain jobs undesirable by undervaluing them. If you want to change that, you need to change the system that makes those jobs undesirable, not just do away with the undesirable jobs. People seem to have fewer problems grasping this when talking about the virtues of overseas sweatshops (where changing the system is presumed impossible because the implication is that the system arises from a lack of economic development or cultural inferiority).
This is a great additional perspective, but we seem to be mostly in agreement.
I am quite aware (and rather disappointed) we don't live in a more socialist system, but as we seem to be pretty much stuck under particularly nasty version of capitalism at least for the near future. So unless someone finds a way to turn the whole system around any time soon, I still think at least trying to make some of the worst parts of capitalism somewhat less unbearable is a good thing.
If you don't like going to the grocery store pay someone to go get them for you. Thousands of people remotely "following" you around and scanning things for you, just so that you can avoid using self checkout sounds ridiculous and excessive.
Is it more ridiculous than having someone standing at a cash register in the store doing the same task, while also having to bag for you and pretend to smile?
I don't see where you're getting the impression that 1,000 workers are monitoring every single individual that walks into the store. The figure used was the total amount for the whole program (many locations), only one person was reviewing each case, and they were only even reviewing 70% of cases. Your argument is no different than saying that every time you go to McDonald's, you're entitled for expecting the hundreds of thousands of McDonald's employees globally to band together to make you your burger.
So does having somebody sitting next to the checkout machine watching me (directly or through security camera) while I finish my groceries ?
I fail to see the major difference with somebody working physically in the shop that makes it ridiculous and excessive.
One may even argue that remotely it could opens the job to more people (one could do that from home in their wheelchair while their baby is taking a nap )
There is a difference. In a typical grocery store, people only have to tally what you bought only once at the end during checkout. Where as in this "walk out" system someone has to follow you around "virtually" and keep track of everything you do in the store.
I've adressed that point with the security camera (or adequatly positionned mirror in old-fashion store)
And the workers just sit idle when there is no customer and you have to physically go there. So I dont see the clear advantage, i see it more as a "choose your poison"
An important question to ask is how many minutes of camera-viewing there were per customer. Let's not assume too hard before we judge the level of wastefulness.
The point of the store was to provide the appearance of conventional retail while being exclusive to "members". This would theoretically cut down on shoplifting and boost profits at the expense of shutting out marginalized people.
My first thought is that this was an attempt at satire, but now I realize it's a privileged Western person who has never traveled to a poor country and thinks that if these workers weren't labeling data they'd be self-actualized DJs or crypto investors.
I think your first instinct is the correct one. But I don't buy the argument that these jobs are somehow empowering them.
My criticism is towards the entitlement of shoppers who think self checkout is too clunky and having to interact with a cashier is too annoying but expect an army of people to work behind the scenes (be it anywhere in the world) to make it easy for them.
"Amazon Go stores will still use Just Walk Out technology, and the company will continue to license it to other retailers. Smaller stores in the UK also will keep using the system."
Compared to simply walking out, packing everything into your bags right away without needing to scan with either a hand terminal or "repacking" at self checkout is a lot more friction. Didn't really think it would be until I tried a couple of times in a row and it was incredible.
> The painful clunkiness of self-checkout was gone.
It could be worse. Imagine a smart gate that refuses to open for wheelchair users, or claims the child in your arms is an unpaid item - something that is getting rolled out in many Australian supermarkets.
Shopping there always felt supremely weird to me. Scanning in, getting stuff, and walking out, but I always felt incomplete without a receipt being right there in my email, wondering if I'd done something wrong and had just inadvertently shoplifted.
I shop more often at Walmart, which has recently increased the number of manned checkout lanes and restricted their self-checkout to 15 items or less.
The local Walmart expanded self-checkout and it works surprisingly well (the bag scale seems to be very loosely calibrated or off). I wonder if they're doing things differently depending on how much product walks out the door.
Just in the past month or two, in my (low-crime suburban) area, Walmart appears to have closed the two large self-checkout areas entirely and replaced them with a (relative to before) army of cashiers. I have always found their machines to be very hassle-free, but the shockingly-adequate level of cashier staffing made my last visit surprisingly quick and convenient. I could live with this.
> Scan as you shop is a big step backwards and feels like you've got the annoying self-checkout experience looming over you the entire time you're there.
How do the Amazon "Dash Carts" actually work though? If it were a traditional bar code scanner, I'd agree with you. But reading up on the tech makes it sound like you just place the item in your cart and that's it. If it worked like that I don't see at all what the problem would be.
But this was an obvious sham and a fraud that couldn't scale. I don't think its demise is sad at all.
What's sad is putting cashiers out of work, and even worse is replacing them with outrageously piss-poor alternatives. Self-checkout is a clinic on incompetent system design, and has been for DECADES now. It's mind-bogglingly bad, all to take jobs away from people. Fuck that.
Why is it a fraud? Did they ever tell you it was entirely computer-driven? I thought their value proposition was you could just ... walk out. This feels pretty inescapably the future. Why have people do bad jobs like cashier work when computers could do them instead? This is why UBI is going to be critical. We're moving to a world where we'll have more people than work, and that's not just ok - it's fantastic.
They're not wrong, they're just early. Which you could argue is the same thing on a micro scale, but not on a macro.
> Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out Technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you're done shopping, you can just leave the store. A little later, your receipt will be available and we will charge your payment method.
When it rolled out to Amazon Fresh stores, it was a breadth of fresh air. The painful clunkiness of self-checkout was gone. The slow and pointless exercise of unloading and reloading your cart was gone. You could just bring your reusable shopping bags, throw stuff in, and walk home. By far the most hassle-free shopping experience to be had.
Scan as you shop is a big step backwards and feels like you've got the annoying self-checkout experience looming over you the entire time you're there.
The selection and operating hours both took a hit during covid and never recovered.