Comment by joshvm
6 years ago
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.
I hated the weight check at Tesco when I lived in the UK. It unnecessarily locked up my self service checkout a few times per week and in general made things slower.
Compared the AH in the Netherlands where you just scan the barcode on all your things and they really don't care about the weight or where you put them after scanning.
I'm sure there will be a tiny percentage extra fraud that Tesco may catch with this, but given the choice I don't shop there due to the shitty user experience. That's got to cost them more in lost revenue than the fraud they stop.
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“Unexpected item in bagging a area” gets me every time.
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Speaking for France, a lot of supermarket who introduced self-checkouts have further invested in developing scanning apps operated by the client on their phone as a parallel solution. Basically a low-tech amazon-go solution, where the client is its own casher.
Those bring their own set of issues, can be difficult to understand and use from the customer, yet they still felt way easier to deal with than the SCO experience.
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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.
So a pound is 453g.
I checked my order history and my last orders are around:
- 350g
- 600g
- 200g
- 500g
- 5kg
- 120g
a box with empty packing would fit within a pound for most of these. I don't intend to nitpick your back of the enveloppe calculation, just that it's not as simple as it seems.
I don't know if I am the typical amazon shopper, but on my 35 orders in the last 6 months the above pattern is repeating with mainly very small items (like cables, dongles etc.) and one big heavy package from time to time.
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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).
It's not unusual for warehouses to deal with items with multiple barcodes.
For a technology example, you might get a network card with a UPC barcode, but also a MAC address barcode, and a manufacturer's part number barcode. A wholesaler/ manufacturer sells boxes of 20 items to resellers? The outer box will have a barcode. That box got sent by courier? Three barcodes on some mailing labels.
So at a goods-in station, the usual response to "multiple barcodes, some don't make sense" is "Keep trying until you find one that does make sense"
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