The arrogance is not that they think they're the center of the universe. It is much worse.

I hear a lot of talk about how much pain you can inflict on people and how to extract the most value from that. Last I heard it was from a couple of media types discussing radio commercials. No care for their actual product for the end user - but an evaluation of how much people would suffer before tuning away.

Actual professional pride and care is sooo last century.

I think of a friend who worked at a bank, and a colleage decided to show him "how the world really worked"

He got out a big printout and started showing the different demographics and their habits.

"<ethnic> woman, with a little bit of college" - she will get a credit card, charge it up to the limit, then make the minimum payment... forever.

"<ethnic> man, no college" - he will get a credit card, charge it up to the limit, might make one payment, never make another payment ever.

Then he went on to say, corporations will slant their advertising to target demographic #1 with credit card advertisements. They will make their advertisements disappear from view from demographic #2.

I kind of wonder if the whole vending system is slanted around these kinds of things. Sports fan, uses phone indiscriminately for everything, sell him an impulse snickers bar with an app, then load him down with ads for payday loans.

In Germany this has gone much worse lately.

We had a card for earning points across multiple brands of supermarkets and other kinds of consumer shops.

One of those chains, Rewe, decided they didn't want to share the points with the others and went ahead, creating their own mobile app for consumer points.

The remaining chains, not wanting to stay behind, decided to do exactly the same.

Now almost every chain has withdrawn from the card program, moved into their own little app, and expect every customer to install all their apps.

I refuse to follow along, and get into interesting discussions, because employees naturally following orders that they have to nag everyone, cannot understand that I rather pay more than installing and giving my data to every chain in exchange for a few euros in discounts.

I believe vending machine operators that take card payment have to deal with a lot of charge-backs. Perhaps this is a workaround?

It's all about the pop-ups & tracking. The same reason that McDonald's wants you to install their app.

Lumen Field in Seattle just installed some Amazon Just Walk Out vendors this year. I'm happy to report you don't need to be logged into Amazon or have an app. I double clicked my phone to swipe my Apple Pay before I walked in, grabbed a beer and walked out.

It was fantastic.

It's not tech related. Previously, they all did this with various cards. People were walking around with a giant stack of loyalty or store credit cards in their wallet with a rubber band wrapped around it.

There is a store I shop at where every purchase, they ask every single customer if they "have a phone number with them", which they can type in on the point of sale device. I've waited behind people trying to remember their old phone number.

replaced all of their vending machines with machines that require me to install an app(!) to purchase a product

I saw this at a Simon mall recently.

I took a picture of the machine. Across the front of the door is a banner which reads:

  1. Scan the QR code
  2. Create profile
  3. Scan again to unlock door
  4. Close the door
  5. You're one drink closer to a free drink!

I agree with the arrogance. I am just so tired of poor software consuming hours to troubleshoot. technology was supposed to makes things easier, not turn every interaction into a chore or a debug session.

> Maybe we're just calling all forms of automation and computer vision "AI" these days because it's sexy.

Funny thing is, at first it was the other way around! 'Computer Vision' has always been a sub-field of AI, but the term was more widely used by academics during a previous AI winter as a way to avoid the tainted 'AI' label.

They do that at Circle K[0] today using the same tech from Mashgin. It's meant to be a self-checkout, but you literally have one employee standing and watching this one checkout (sometimes 2-3, but usually 1-2). It's not always accurate, requires some hand-holding at times, and slows down the already slow lines at Circle K. It's a bit faster than the article implies and does not require a staff member, but still slower than a human would be.

Meanwhile over at QuikTrip, there's one person checking out two people at a time. Suffice to say, if both stores are available, I will always choose the QT.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c1kbWAttus

> any automation that requires a human staff member to intervene to complete every run is not automation

Not strictly true. Barcode readers are used by humans and are definitely automation. The ironic part though is that the automation going on here is literally object classification, which humans are good at.

The play may be to collect data and make their system better.

I've used one of these at Lihue airport. It was slightly finicky, but fine and required no staff member assistance.

I came here to paste that quote. It sounds like a disaster of poor HCI around not-ready-for-prime-time tech implementation. That's not even a great PoC demo to get funding, much less deploy into production.

Maybe they were emboldened because many companies still can't even do decades-old UPC barcode scanner self-checkouts well?

The closest self-checkout to working reasonably well I see regularly would be at Whole Foods Market, at least just using the low-tech UPC and scale. I only have a few nits about it.

(Though, within the last week, the usual duct-taped-on off-the-shelf hand scanner apparently saw the wrong barcode on the front of the product label (yes, some brand did that), which wedged the station, and the employee who came over seemed like they might think I was trying to defraud the store. I've coded for a few of those scanners before, and they provide a mix of automagical easy high-value behavior and major pitfalls. There are a few kinds of interfaces, and a large fleet of settings, and you really have to wrestle the device to the ground, to make every scenario bulletproof. If the integrator wasn't careful, for some of them, you can even reprogram or brick them with an in-band barcode, and disabling this feature is buried among the numerous settings.)

The worst self-checkout I'm currently exposed to is the dumpster-fire of a major chain, which goes out of its way to fill the UI with garbage, and then doesn't do even basic sensing and state flow right. They really need to look at WFM design, and then go even further in that direction, and get the state model right. While making sure that no one's bonus is tied to garbage and dark patterns on the screen.

(Also, for return customers who nope right out of the self-checkout headache, and go to the human checkout, or get directed to it by the attendant who's glaring at all the self-checkouts, they need clean their CC terminal keypad that's visibly caked with crud, like maybe it hasn't been disinfected in a year. Especially since they mandate repeated use of it when it should default to working with just a card tap/swipe, for a high-traffic location for many sick people.)

> Imagine if each grocery store self-checkout required a human staff member to scan items, re-arrange things, and confirm checkout.

They always have at least one person going between each self-checkout kiosk helping confused and upset customers. Meanwhile, 1 traditional checkout lane is open with a long line. Self checkout is great to use if you know how and have a handful of items, but it sucks with a full cart due to space constraints and the bag scales being finicky.

> It's just adding unnecessary technology and making the process worse.

Oh it's not JUST that, I'm sure it's also a data-harvesting scheme, because what isn't these days?

Back in the olden times overcharging like that would be dealt with the same way as theft would. I'm not entirely convinced it's the wrong way to go about things. It's how the concept of a bakers dozen came to be. Better give everyone 13 in a dozen, just in case you ever miscount.

And that wasn't really AI, it was more like automation.

Was hoping the article would be about stadium experiences like the announcer, jumbotron, etc. all being AI-driven. When I judge the experience of gameday, concessions are like third on that list. Disappointed with the content.

Circle K in Chicago has them too. Employees are constantly needed to monitor things at checkout. If items aren't clearly separated (which is easy to do out of haste, not malice) it will under-count. The same cashiers at the same store were much faster at checkout than these machines are.

In this particular case, it seems mostly use cases that were solved some decades ago with _barcodes_, so it's not even cheaper or more profitable. There's already an alternative to human labour which works for better for this sort of application.

Computers can do some things better than humans; recognize and generate speech, when accents are involved at either end.

Except there's still a human that has to confirm everything the computer did

You should've read further.

In reality, when getting out first to market, it might be difficult for "AI" to decipher if a user added 1 of 5 available sauces to their chicken wings, so to reduce the likelihood of this error, you remove it until the technology is more mature. Speculative sure, but a strong assumption, and I doubt Mashgin would confirm this.