231–240 of 769 posts
I find it interesting that they are making this available to the public before doing a major rollout at Whole Foods. Or maybe they're doing both?
It's a website with an email address on it. My guess is that it is intended to gauge demand as a standalone service.
Seeing a few negative comments here; I think these are short-sighted in the extreme. Labor is a major cost for retail; anything that massively reduces labor costs is going to be hugely game changing. Combined with amazon promises that it takes only a few weeks to integrate (seriously??) if this works at all, this is going to be a super fast growth group at Amazon. For reference think back to how many stories you’ve r…
At least it used to be true that self checkout systems are not primarily sold with the promise of reducing labor costs, but primarily that they take up so much less space. If I remember correctly, six self checkouts take up as much floor space as one manual given the longer queues of the latter. That's why they first were sold in the cities where space is at a premium.
You still need some employees around the check out area anyway, and even if one employee can serve several you also suddently have many more of them. The manned check out was never the most labour intensive part of running a store anyway so it wasn't the best selling point anyway.
This walk-out concept has to compete with the various self scanning schemes that already exist, not with the manned check outs of old. It will be interesting to see if they can offer a cheaper and more reliable experience to shoppers.
It can have other benefits like stealing alerts or whatever, but those I think minor. One problem I see is that Amazon is a retailer so many of the potential customers for this would be reluctant to do business with a major competitor. I'm still waiting for this to be implemented in WF.
Twenty years ago this web site would 100% have looked like an April Fool's joke.
Don't know what to make of that. Maybe it's that although retail feels almost exactly the same as it always has, under the hood lots of parts have really been moving, and I just haven't noticed?
The parallel observation is that when Gmail was announced it totally did seem like a prank. You're offering how much storage for free? for everyone? How?.
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This is the "lame - no wireless, less space than a nomad" take. Are the prices not listed on the individual items? Purchasers make decisions on a product by product basis, not based on the total. How often are you at the checkout and say "Wait, HOW MUCH is my bill? never mind then, going to go put some things back." Sure, it happens, but it's a 0.0001% use case. edit: OK, fair play to everyone who responded and said…
Yeah - actually, it does happen often enough... I'd say it's much higher. I know a lot of HN is full of people who don't pay attention to prices (for whatever reason - probably the inordinate amount of obscenely high incomes) - but it's really common outside of this crowd. When I was poor - I thoroughly examined prices and only bought things that were on sale. If it rang up and wasn't the price that it said it was -…
I would bet that the money maker isn't the actual technology. The data they could collect on consumer shopping habits, tied automatically to a cross-store profile + an expanded Amazon SSP/DSP would create huge value to Amazon and brands. Added onto their already fast growing advertising business. If this is in fact their revenue play they could even sell this at a loss just to build up the ecosystem, get a unmovable…
I hate the no people future, therefore, I hate this service. Unfortunately for me, that means nothing. I see this service taking over, at the very least, a large percentage of the 7/11 bodega type of stores. I see a future where the corner store will return. Over the last few years, companies have gone large so they can take advantage of the economy of scale. This service will reduce labor costs and have costs fall r…
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I was a cashier in college for several years. Your scenario happens far more than 0.0001% of the case. It's fairly common amongst poor people. Then there are items that aren't acceptable for use by food stamps and must be paid for separately. Then there is WIK and trying return WIK items for cash refunds. You also have people who misread the labels. Then there are items that aren't in the right place and the label sa…
> It's fairly common amongst poor people. Are these people shopping at Amazon boutiques?