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this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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It turns out that paying people to observe every second of a shopping trip is a lot more expensive than paying people just to check customers out.
It's trivially obvious that that would be the case. Paying people to do the checkout costs maybe 5 minutes per customer, total. Paying them to constantly watch the customer is going to be 20–40 minutes per customer.
I'm guessing that they thought they could develop the technology to remove the need for people to observe constantly, and have just now decided that it's impractical.
What they thought was that they had come up with a way to move the checkout cashier job to people in India so they wouldn't have to pay minimum wage workers in the U.S.
Pretty stupid idea, but it seems to me that it was just Amazon trying to ship jobs overseas to cut labor costs. Perhaps they thought eventually they'd be able to use AI to screw over the Indian workers too.
It's also cheaper to just pay someone to work IN the store than hiring people outside of the country watching video feeds.