There was a startup, Standard Cognition, that offered the same experience, but I checked their website (https://standard.ai/) and it seems they have given up on it too.
Edit:
Looking over their marketing videos now and taking a more optimistic approach, is "just walk out" technology all that useful? It seems they pivoted to a product where is much clearer what the value add is (Predictive analytics, loss prevention, context-aware marketing). I imagine "just walk out" technology was likely pretty expensive to implement, but wouldn't have saved much more that self checkout.
Maybe the lesson here isn't that "it didn't work", and more so "it wasn't economically efficient"
Well from the article it's clear that this camera+ai based detection of purchases never worked for Amazon. They had to rely on Indian contractors watching people remotely. It never technically worked, and even if it did, then yeah I agree that it wouldn't make economic sense. Cameras with that level of fidelity and with 100% coverage, tracking N customers at once, are probably a huge capital expense. And all for slightly faster shopping.
I tried the store in Seattle in 2021 and it was a shitty experience. Overpriced, bad stock, and since few are going to actually trust Amazon to get it right, you still find yourself with the Amazon app open the whole time
Wanted to comment on this part -- Prime itself was nothing more than faster shipping, though yes the difference between 4-6 weeks standard vs 2-days was massive (not just slightly faster). But the point is, Amazon excels at identifying friction points that others have just accepted as industry norms, but which, if unblocked, could actually meaningfully shift consumer behaviors.
Go might be a failed experiment, but "slightly faster shopping" is probably an unfair trivialization of what the experiment hypothesis was really about. A core thesis of Amazon in general is basically, to fanatically remove any unnecessary extra steps/friction/bureaucracy/etc., between a consumer and their act of purchasing.
For another example, think back to why Amazon cared so much about the 1-click patent -- legal validity aside, the idea that you can have 1-click checkout, was pretty revolutionarily customer-obsessed, compared to the average online shopping experience of the early 2000s.
And in fact, the natural progression from 1-click, is of course going down to "0 clicks", which is what things like, subscribe-and-save, memberships/subscriptions, or Alexa/Echo styling clothes for you, are meant to do -- they are meant to shift the consumer's mental model of shopping away from emphasizing the build-up from browsing into the climax moment of then clicking to purchase, to instead make the actual purchase decision more of a hidden-in-the-background/automatic thing, instead of a foreground conscious choice.
The issue is that speed is not the only thing necessary. You need speed, and trust.
A cashier-less, grab and go store that works as advertised would be hugely convenient and valuable. But where we are now, people don't think it works, so they double check and get nervous.
And that goes doubly for Amazon. Amazon doesn't care about doing things right. They've shown that over and over via their (lack of) protections against counterfeit items.
Ask anyone in the eastern US, would you trust getting your eclipse glasses on Amazon?
Why would you trust them to get your grocery order right?
> But where we are now, people don't think it works, so they double check and get nervous.
Who does this? This wasn't in the article, do you mean yourself or did you read that somewhere else? I wouldn't get nervous about it.
> Ask anyone in the eastern US, would you trust getting your eclipse glasses on Amazon?
That's a real issue but it's an entirely different concept. I expect them to handle charging for the eclipse glasses just fine. Similarly, I'm not very worried about their checkout gimmick.
I don't interpret that skit as worrying about whether it's going to get the count wrong. It's about the entire concept of grabbing and walking out, in a way that exists even if the system has perfect tracking.
> But the point is, Amazon excels at identifying friction points that others have just accepted as industry norms, but which, if unblocked, could actually meaningfully shift consumer behaviors
I would pay 5% more for my groceries if I never had to wait in the checkout line. I’m a kind of customer that has tried grocery delivery, and didn’t reject it because of the cost, but instead for other reasons like I want to pick out my own food, I don’t want it left sitting when they deliver it, I can get it faster myself etc. I would definitely pay money to make grocery shopping faster and more convenient. I suspect there are a lot like me.
Edit:
Looking over their marketing videos now and taking a more optimistic approach, is "just walk out" technology all that useful? It seems they pivoted to a product where is much clearer what the value add is (Predictive analytics, loss prevention, context-aware marketing). I imagine "just walk out" technology was likely pretty expensive to implement, but wouldn't have saved much more that self checkout. Maybe the lesson here isn't that "it didn't work", and more so "it wasn't economically efficient"