Amazon Prepares to Launch Its Physical Store [Amazon Go] With No Cashiers [uses computer vision/AI]

[Hamartia Antidote]

400+ Whole Foods Market stores are in the US, Canada, and the UK.

http://fortune.com/2017/11/15/amazon-prepares-to-launch-its-physical-store-with-no-cashiers/

Amazon is preparing to launch Amazon Go, an ambitious and experimental retail concept that uses sensors and other technology, not cashiers, to identify and automatically charge customers.

For the past year, Amazon employees have been testing, and trying to trick, the technology in its 1,800-square foot shop Amazon Go store in downtown Seattle. Now, the tech is apparently close to being ready for the public, Bloomberg reported. For example, employees dressed up in bright yellow Pikachu costumes to try and fool sensors and cameras that identify when someone is trying to buy products at an Amazon Go marketplace. Amazon’s tech wasn’t fooled.

However, some kinks remain to be worked out such as accurately charging people in groups.

In practice, Amazon Go customers would be able to walk into the store, grab the products they want, and walk out without waiting in line for a cashier. If the idea is a success it could help Amazon reach even more consumers and disrupt the traditional brick-and-mortar retail business—again.

Amazon unveiled its plans for Amazon Go last December. The location offers prepared food, grocery staples like bread, cheese, and milk. Amazon is expected to sell its own meal kits too.

What’s not clear is if branded items from Whole Foods, which Amazon acquired in August for $13.7 billion, will also be in the Amazon Go stores.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

43 Years of UPC codes coming to an end...

1974 first UPC item scanned in a aupermarket

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/who-made-that-universal-product-code.html

On a Sunday afternoon in 1971, an I.B.M. engineer stepped out of his house in Raleigh, N.C., to consult his boss, who lived across the street. “I didn’t do what you asked,” George Laurer confessed.

Laurer had been instructed to design a code that could be printed on food labels and that would be compatible with the scanners then in development for supermarket checkout counters. He was told to model it on the bull’s-eye-shaped optical scanning code designed in the 1940s by N. Joseph Woodland, who died last month. But Laurer saw a problem with the shape: “When you run a circle through a high-speed press, there are parts that are going to get smeared,” he says, “so I came up with my own code.” His system, a pattern of stripes, would be readable even if it was poorly printed.

That pattern became the basis for the Universal Product Code, which was adopted by a consortium of grocery companies in 1973, when cashiers were still punching in all prices by hand. Within a decade, the U.P.C. — and optical scanners — brought supermarkets into the digital age. Now an employee could ring up a cereal box with a flick of the wrist. “When people find out that I invented the U.P.C., they think I’m rich,” Laurer says. But he received no royalties for this invention, and I.B.M. did not patent it.

Photo

As the U.P.C. symbol proliferated, so, too, did paranoia about it. For decades, Laurer has been hounded by people convinced that he has hidden the number 666 inside the lines of his code. “I didn’t get the meat,” Laurer said ruefully, “but I did get the nuts.”

CODE BREAKER
Bill Selmeier runs the ID History Museum, an online archive dedicated to the bar code.

You worked at I.B.M. in the 1970s and then helped promote the U.P.C.?
Yes, I started the seminars where we invited people from the grocery and labeling industry into I.B.M. We were there to reduce their fear.

What were they afraid of?
They were afraid that anything that didn’t work right would reflect badly on them — particularly if it was only their own package that wouldn’t scan. The guy from Birds Eye said, “My stuff always has ice on it when it goes through the checkout.” So we put his package in the freezer and took it out and showed him how it scanned perfectly.

Why are you still so interested in the history of the U.P.C.?
Let me put it this way: What bigger impact can you have on the world than to change the way everyone shops?