Comment by ChuckMcM
6 years ago
I love this story, especially about ordering dough pizzas.
It reminded me of this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/meslin/status/1225834920611848192?lang=e...
In which the author tries to order the Uline "box of boxes", a box of twenty-five (25) 6" x 9" x 6" boxes, only to have Amazon deliver a 6" x 9" x 6" box containing some random product. The collection product from Uline has the same bar code as the box itself, so the pick up robot would scan the shelf for the box, find something that SOME OTHER VENDOR had put into a 6x9x6 Uline box, and pick that to satisfy the query.
Adding automation to a process that any human with visibility to the whole process would say, "Wait, that can't be right." ends up in misbehavior.
The automated system should say "weight, that can't be right". Works fairly reliably in supermarkets, especially if you allow a bigger margin of uncertainty on sku weight. Or verify the volume/shape - or both, like volumetric weight that shipping companies use. I'm guessing amazon has some system to automatically assign boxes based on the dimensions of stuff that's being picked.
> Works fairly reliably in supermarkets
No it doesn’t.
Not just because they can be badly calibrated, but also because the range of weight they have to deal with must make it hard to manage any sane range.
The only SCO I’ve seen doing a decent job at dealing with weight use a binary check (“was there any product at all added to the to total weight of the basket ?”) and they still miss products like lollipops or anything too light to pass the range.
Sure much more reliable system could be built, especially at Amazon’s engineering scale. But so far supermarkets are mediocre at best at this game.
Works great in any supermarket I've been to with a self-scanning systems and that's been the standard in my country for many years now.
9 replies →
For vast majority of things amazon sells, a system checking if the weight is within a pound or 25%, whichever is greater, would almost never have a false positive.
4 replies →
I just had a package from Amazon that literally weighed less than the product that was supposed to be in it. I peeled off the shipping label and found another one underneath that was labeled "weight error". Someone had apparently intercepted it, overridden whatever check was going on, and sent it out anyway.
Weirdly, Amazon still made me mail back the underweight one (I would happily have paid the correct amount for the smaller quantity to save the trouble of remailing) and a few days later sent out the correct one. You'd think in this case they have a record of the actual weight of the package and could sort things out instantly, but apparently not.
A couple of months ago Amazon shipped me a completely empty, sealed envelope labeled as 1 pound. At least Amazon support immediately shipped me the correct item.
Weight can easily be gamed by adding a bag of water.
Verifying shape would be difficult without knowing what to expect beforehand, but can also be gamed.
You won’t get the precision of supermarket weighting if you are dealing with diverse restaurants with a dynamic menu.
Unless I'm missing something, this thread is talking about the automated system making a mistake on its own. No one is trying to game the system.
Not all distribution centers validate weight, don't recall if Amazon does but I would be surprised if they don't. High speed scales are expensive.
A few people got a box of rocks instead of a $4k camera awhile back, one guy got two boxes of rocks after returning the first.
Thinking about this more, I'm surprised this couldn't be caught when the items got delivered to Amazon. I find it extremely unlikely that a picking robot accidentally found an item with the same barcode if they weren't already in the wrong place.
Seems like when the items arrived at the fulfilment centre, they got mis-scanned and ended up comingled. Presumably that's the stage where you can check weight and volume - eg does this item fit with the known dimensions.
This check must be made somewhere otherwise people wouldn't bother returning high value electronics with rocks inside (presumably someone does a cursory check of weight before the inventory gets comingled again).
3 replies →
Hah that box story is hilarious.
The actual automated fix should be during stock intake I assume. We ship international parcels with DHL etc and it's a clear stipulation there are NO BARCODES at all on the box apart from the mailing barcode that we generate. Being Amazon, nothing probably happened because they have more money than they need, but I assume they have similar rules and would be justified to ding the suppliers for this cost.
But Amazon isn't intentionally trying to lose money here.
I hadn't realized that cardboard boxes were that expensive!