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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

Does the app show you what you're buying and what it costs before you exit?

No, it does not. There was a lot of latency (~2 hours) before I saw what I was charged for.

In that case I would be unwilling to use it. A normal checkout provides a point in time and space when what you are buying is reviewed and you become aware of the total and any errors. If someone says there will be no errors, I just roll my eyes.

I have no idea how many other people are like this, but I already don't look at my receipts when I'm in a grocery store. If I do, it's because I realized I forgot something and want to know if I actually forgot something. So for me, the experience ends up being the same.

Sure, I often don't pay attention either. But once in a while, I notice something wrong anyway, and also I'm free-riding on the fact that some people pay more attention.

A store that is arranging things so that there are no checks is a store that is going to profit from its own mistakes. Impersonal forces will drive it to do so regardless of particular human intentions.

There’s an old joke about a guy making money downtown exchanging $5 bills for five $1 bills. When asked how makes money the response is, “Well, I never make a mistake...”

I know a couple people who have reported mistakes, and they were refunded with no questions asked. I have used it dozens of times with 100% accuracy so far

LinusTechTips, when Amazon’s store first opened, visited and “returned” something they grabbed, and they just refunded them. They called Amazon and were told there’s no way to process returns outside of a refund (for the store)

People have been buying things and only getting an invoice at a later time for millennia, and managed fine.

Interesting you should mention invoices. I got my car repaired recently, and the invoice was about $1,000 more than expected. They assured me there would be no problem with the insurance, but obviously if they and the insurance company had their shit together, then it would have been reviewed and approved before doing the work. The insurance company may have eventually approved it and I hope to be getting a check soon, but the fact is, I paid them up front and have been left hanging for two weeks now. Neither business answers emails, calls me back, or does anything in a reasonable amount of time (it's been months since the claim). One told me that the delays of the other are in fact violating state regulations. Yet both companies are well-known and often recommended - I didn't choose them at random.

This is the sort of relationship I do not want to get into for ordinary purchases. It demands too much trust, which is hard to build and unnecessary for most things.

Name and shame, please!

Not when payment is extracted in real time.

Isn’t payment by credit card in almost all cases? You can view a statement before paying it a month later. How’s that in real time?

The vendor payment commitment is immediate. The cardholder is a borrower from the issuer standpoint.

No, again the vendor and payment providers settle at a later time.

I wonder if the system couldn't reliably identify what you bought and queued the footage for human review.

I wonder if they're using Mechanical Turkers to review the video footage.

It's a variable latency of 15 minutes to 2 hours to get the receipt, so that's certainly my assumption.

High latency can just mean Amazon is processing video in batches. It doesn’t imply Turk.

Another datapoint: about 5 minutes for the one in Seattle last month

You get a receipt after you exit. And from the receipt there's an option to notify of a mistake. I've never had to use it yet, and I haven't had a mistake happen yet so I can't comment on how smooth that would be.

I've heard that the process for contesting charges is simple and high-trust.

Perhaps, perhaps.

The issue I have is that once you add the friction in, it prevents errors from being corrected, and that reduces the incentive to prevent them. It's not about whether I can get a problem fixed when I notice it. It's that the number of problems will be higher because on average fewer will be noticed and fixed. Furthermore, whenever the rate of problems seems a little too high, the easy "fix" is to add a little more friction.

If items aren't priced, that should be illegal in CA.

Of course the items are priced.

visibly priced, as in marked on the item, the location, or both.

Of course they are "priced" in the sense of the vendor assigning a price to deduct, but transparency to the purchaser is legally required.

I’ve been to multiple locations in person and can confirm there’s a very visible price tag below each product on the shelf. Search Google images and you’ll see plenty of examples.

Yes, folks, the prices for items are indeed on display to shoppers!

https://learn.g2.com/hs-fs/hubfs/IMG_20181101_131335763.jpg

There’s shelf tags just like every other store you’re used to.

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