I went to one of these last year and it's was basically a gas station convenience store without the gas or convenience. Poorly stocked, weirdly expensive, and, well, shabby.
Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
191–200 of 416 posts
Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
The endgame in capitalism is something that is remarkably close to a bureaucratic all-controlling government.
Somehow comments like these are left to stand, so here's a counterpoint. Amazon has emerged as an oligarch that will be broken up like the Bell system, Standard Oil, rail monopolies, and others before it - provided it and other oligarchs haven't fully compromised the government who hosts it. If Amazon, and the other FAANGs operating predatory surveiilance bureaucracies continue to exist in their current form in 4-5 y…
>if we call [late stage capitalism] early stage socialism somehow we're conspiracy theorists
sounds good to me. over time the world's wealth accumulates with the already wealthy. this makes sense, it's much easier to make money if you already have money. under the current system, inequality inexorably, unsustainably grows
last time we were here it took a pandemic, a massive depression and two world wars for serious change to occur. and even then it only lasted 30 years or so, until the Thatchers and Reagans rolled it all back. and here we are now. late stage capitalism once again. what will be the final domino before change this time? nuclear war? some kind of AI disaster? hyperinflation? Covid clearly wasn't enough.
it seems like kind of the people that would typically be concerning themselves with this kind of societal correction have been successfully distracted by bullshit culture wars
Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
#193There’s one in Chicago downtown as well. I guess the Stores failed because it lacked warmth and any inviting vibe. I know it sounds ironic.
Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
My mother-in-law operates the self-checkout lanes at a Kroger brand store in the midwest. The honor system definitely does not work there. Shoplifting is through the roof over the past couple years. It's gotten so bad that management is debating shutting off the self-checkout lanes. A few months ago she was pepper sprayed after confronting a shoplifter who had an entire cart of things, but only scanned and paid for 3…
> $10,000 per day at her store. That seems intolerably high but I’ve never worked a day in a grocery store. Do grocery stores generate enough revenue to sustain? Fifty two-hundred dollar carts of cash is a lot to let go.
Looking up statistics, shrinkage rates at a grocery store are typically 2-3%. Theft appears to be about ⅓ of shrinkage (food spoilage is a bigger cause than shoplifting), so about 1% of revenue amounts to theft on average.
The larger supermarkets seem to pull in on the order $100-150k/day in revenues, with the median half of that.
So... yeah, the numbers don't add up. If it's $10k/day, even at an extremely large store, that's 6-7% theft rate. Given that grocers aren't high-margin, that's stark enough to wipe out any revenue. $1k/day theft rate is a more reasonable estimation.
Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
#195I used to visit one of the NYC the Go stores daily until covid happened. It was cute and surgically clean, worked wonderfully, and their inventory management was much better then CVS and Duane Reade which often sell out of things and have empty shelves for days. But nobody ever went there - no matter what time of the day I went, there would be one person doing inventory and stocking, two people standing by to help pe…
I think "nobody ever went there" is difficult to gauge since most purchases are very quick. Typical purchase would take 30-60 seconds for me to make. Since people are quick in/quick out it seems less people shop there.
Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
#196I used to visit one of the NYC the Go stores daily until covid happened. It was cute and surgically clean, worked wonderfully, and their inventory management was much better then CVS and Duane Reade which often sell out of things and have empty shelves for days. But nobody ever went there - no matter what time of the day I went, there would be one person doing inventory and stocking, two people standing by to help pe…
Isn't the whole point of Amazon generally, and these stores specifically in not having staff, that it's supposed to be cheaper? I think you've pinpointed the reason it failed, but I can't imagine why they thought it was going to succeed at those prices.
Maybe they were thinking about the immediate gratification cognitive bias. You might see the price on the shelf as you take each item from the shelf, but that doesn't translate to a total expense until you actually pay the Amazon bill at the end of the month.
Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putting quinoa in everything and assuming the addressable market had more disposable income seems like one of the signs of the last bubble.
Why are people so weird about food? What about quinoa made it associated with rich yuppies? If you didn’t already know you would probably assume the main consumers would be dudes who want their chicken and carb to have even more protein.
Food choice being a proxy and signal for class/culture is nothing new. You’d be hard pressed to find a cultural tradition that doesn’t speak to it.
While everyone needs sustenance, there are often several adequate choices about how to get it and making those choices become a way of communicating to others. And communicating is an defining and seemingly valuable part of being human.
It’s not really weird and it’s not going anywhere.
Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a tipping point where it's cheaper to employ staff to get stuff out of a cabinet than to catch all the people stealing.
Sure, but it's very strange when that threshhold seems to be in the $2-4 range. Some US cities, you show up for a conference or something, walk to the corner store across from your hotel, and find that all of the toothbrushes and bags of trail mix are locked away. How little are they paying these people who are doing the unlocking, that it's worthwhile for such small items?
You recently shopped at the Seattle Target by the market, too?
Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
#199Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle
#200There’s one in Chicago downtown as well. I guess the Stores failed because it lacked warmth and any inviting vibe. I know it sounds ironic.
I visited the store in the Ogilvie Train Station when it first opened and, honestly, I felt like I was inside a vending machine, given how everything is stocked on the shelves.