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Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle

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Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle

#321

Post by rsynnott »

Spivak wrote: post #188
bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #171

Earlier 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.

It become quite expensive for a few years, as it became popular at a greater rate than production increased. Bulk price seems to be down again now, though.

Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle

#322

Post by animex »

novok wrote: post #254
phphphphp wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if they've evolved their approach, if my local store is an outlier, or if yours was an outlier, but I live near an Amazon store and go in a few times per week: the experience you describe doesn't match my experience. Over maybe 100 visits: there's usually a few people in there at minimum, the food is pretty good (as far as convenience food store goes) and prices are the same as similar stores. I sometime…

For a convenience store, they were missing items you'd find reliably in 7-11s, like charging cables or headphones, at least when i asked the guy at the front.

If I were an automated store that relied on a charged mobile phone I wouldn't sell charging cables either! :-)

Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle

#323

Post by bobthepanda »

jarjoura wrote: post #238
jrochkind1 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment just made something click for me. CVS (a drug store) by me has also gotten rid of cashiers... but for self-checkout. So have Royal Farms, a regional gas station/convenience store chain. At both places, if you really try, you can maybe get a cashier at a single human cashier counter, but it's normally unstaffed, and everyone directed to the multiple self check out stations. (I think USA readers know what…

I too prefer human check-out lines. I always find that self-checkout system that everyone uses to be slower and clunky. The worst is at the grocery store where I have to search and find each item of produce, weigh it and then carefully place it in the bag. If any step in that flow goes slightly wrong, the system freezes and waits for an employee to come by and check what I'm doing. However, in the "fast casual" space…

Self checkout is generally annoying in a few cases:

* You use reusable bags. In general most systems I've used dislike when you put a bag in the area with the weighing things, so now I have to spend double the time moving items around because they can't just go directly into the bag

* with fresh produce, the cashier will most likely have the most common items memorized and punch in the code without a hitch, whereas I have to navigate a clunky UI to figure out which kind of green onions to charge

* anything involving an ID check is much faster; a human is legally required to be there to verify, and the cashier is already conveniently there, as opposed to a self-checkout register where I have to wait for somebody to come to me

Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle

#324

Post by joshvm »

Tade0 wrote: post #155
ddejohn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a loyalty card a non-starter?

Personally I was too stingy for the initial 25€ fee, and then forgot about it, because in the meantime self-service proliferated and lines were much shorter there. EDIT: also my experience with telecom companies in Italy made me distrustful of any sort of subscription program.

This is perhaps an Italian problem? In the UK loyalty cards are generally free, even if you were required to have one for the scan-as-you-shop systems. This used to be only Waitrose before the other supermarkets (Sainsburys, Tesco, etc) adopted them.

Same goes for Switzerland. Both Migros and Coop offer this, and both require a loyalty card (and also a payment method, obviously), but those are free too.

Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle

#325

Post by rsynnott »

Nextgrid wrote: post #118
rpadovani wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Italy, it has been years, if not decades, that in a chain of large supermarkets there is a system where, when you enter the supermarket, you can pick up a barcode reader. While you are doing your shopping, you scan your products. At the exit, you scan a QR code to end the shopping, you pay, and off you go. The huge advantage, apart from no queues, is that you don't have to remove stuff from your cart, making it wa…

Only problem is that this relies on a loyalty card, at least for the ones I've seen, which makes it a non-starter for many people.

Hmm, while I've never bothered to use it (I'm happy with the self-checkouts) I'm 99% sure that the one at my local big Tesco doesn't require you to have the loyalty card; you just bring the scanner gadget to a special automatic checkout.

Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle

#326

Post by CydeWeys »

13of40 wrote: post #222
CydeWeys wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure it actually failed. These stores work by having AI track customer actions via camera, and over the last couple of years they've gotten a ton of data and domain knowledge from them. It isn't hard to imagine that's been leveraged in whatever's watching the cameras at Whole Foods.

The point of spending this massive amount of money on an automated store is to recoup that investment by opening lots of automated stores and make money in volume, taking advantage of your lower labor costs.

If they don't actually open at least hundreds of these then they've thrown away massive amounts of money on R&D they'll never get back, and the data they did accumulate isn't even particularly useful as it's in the context of a type of store they're not running at scale.

Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle

#328

Post by rsynnott »

throwayyy479087 wrote: post #4
Laaas wrote: post #2

Is this because of shoplifting? In that case, an innovative (dystopian?) solution would be to place AI-guided water cannons to shoot thieves.

Yes. If it was anything else they’d mention it.

Eh? In principle these should be less vulnerable to shoplifting than a normal convenience store with automatic checkouts. It's more likely just because, well, it's not clearly better than a normal convenience store with automatic checkouts.

Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle

#329

Post by anaganisk »

_8j50 wrote: post #36

Amazon is such an anti-human company. From their warehouses to their tech workers they are terrible against people. That said, if people like these stores then good for them. I am honestly shocked and confused when people enjoy this. Or targeted ads or *GPT generated content. I am not anti-tech by any means. Maybe I am just not impressed and awed enough by these technologies to overlook the downsides? I don't support…

You would be so disappointed to know that people value their convenience and 5 minutes of fame more than anything. See TikTok, it captures so much data, and it's publicly known, Even TikTok doesn't deny it. Yet people dont stop using it. Companies are just taking advantage of it. See the positive comments here. It almost boils down to I hate checkout lines, so I want the convenience of being tracked, let my face expressions/action on seeing a product be allowed to train some Ad engine etc etc. We trade off a lot of personal data for transactions we conduct daily using tech, yet we are utterly surprised when that is used against us. Amazon bought One Medical. Buying cheese every day? Guess who is gonna soon get pre diagnosed with heart issues or marked with higher premiums. Others will laugh at my comment, but I won't be surprised, at least.

Re: Amazon is closing its cashierless stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle

#330

Post by TulliusCicero »

everdrive wrote: post #98
Nanana909 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't use the app So then why attempt to go to a store that’s entirely based on using the app? The store concept is based around your account - and you didn’t know your account details. The app can help avoid this, but you also refused to use the app. How is this any different than someone who refuses to use their password to sign in to Amazon.com and complains about not being able to submit a return? Or going to…

It's different because there's a long-standing precedent that you don't need to install a smartphone app to use a store.

There's a longstanding precedent that you don't need a membership to shop at stores either, but Costco is still highly successful.
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