301–310 of 769 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And they didn't just do that with AWS. They did it with ecommerce as well. Become the biggest online retailer, nail the implementation, then get everyone else to jump on your platform.
They are only good because Ebay is pathetically bad.
In terms of cost-convenience trade-off, can someone tell me how is this better for a store when compared to self-checkout counters or scan-as-you-go apps (as suggested below) ? I use these frequently at Walmart and Sams without any problems. Rarely have to deal with an actual checkout person unless I have to get a gift card. IMO you can get very far simply addressing annoying latency and UX issues with self checkout…
The first time I brought a full cart through self checkout, that's when I understood road rage, so to speak. I was never so annoyed and angry and wanted to just walk out and leave it behind so much. "Please place item in the bag... please remove item from the bag... please place..." It may well be better, or getting better, but I'm out of the experiment.
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Since then, there have been two times, I did walk out and leave my cart behind... one of those times about half a dozen others did the same. It was a Walmart, and the Friday before a holiday (Christmas was Sunday that year iirc). It was 6pm, and they had literally closed half their registers with an average of 11 carts in each line left. I had a full cart including a lot of refrigerated and frozen items. The other time was similar but less extreme at another store (not walmart).
In the end, some of us will pay a little more for actual people doing actual customer service and interaction. I tried the scan and go a couple times, and frankly it wasn't really any better. It seems that Millenials and Z are so averse to interaction, I just don't get it.
This post looked kind of weird to me so I looked up the whois, it's registered to godaddy. Which is odd because it is not the same registrar as amazon.com or aws, and aws operates a domain registration service so I can't imagine a real amazon service would use godaddy. Combined with the fact that there's no concrete plans set in place, it seems really fake.
One more step to worldwide Social Credit Score.
My biggest problem with this is that from what I can tell, the only way to know how much you're going to be automatically charged (as well as what items the tech thinks you're purchasing), is to go to a kiosk in the store and get a receipt. Which seems to completely defeat the convenience of just walking out in the first place. I wouldn't feel comfortable just walking out without knowing how much I'm going to be char…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's a lot to ask that I'm informed how much I'm going to be charged before I pay for something, which is the process for every sale I make currently works. What if the item is marked as on sale but the database hasn't been updated so I don't get the sale price? What if the price on the item is correct but someone fat fingered the price in the database? What if a different customer moved an item from on…
I bet people said the same thing about credit cards — “how do I know there won’t be an error that causes my credit card bill to be wrong at the end of the month? I’ll stick with cash thank you very much”
Plus, when credit cards were introduced, you were still given the opportunity to agree upon the total on which you'd be charged, before you were charged. That's all I'm asking for with this.
Aaaand there’s the play. Amazon wasn’t trying to compete with other retails stores by leveraging their tech edge, they were positioning themselves to becoming the single provider of retail checkout solutions for the future. You either opt-in to giving Amazon all your retail data, or you become the only old fashioned “wait in line to get served” store on the street. And where is the competition? Is there anyone at all…
Yep. I've been sitting here thinking Amazon was going to spool up tons of retail locations that leveraged their tech to create a massive moat that other Brick & Mortars couldn't possibly compete with. In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world.