361–370 of 416 posts
I 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…
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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.
7-11s will be selling cheap and nasty cables and headphones at huge markups to even justify the tiny amount of shelf space they occupy.
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How did it fail? They just announced that eight stores were permanently closed after having been closed indefinitely, one of which was inside of an Amazon office that shut down last year.[1] It looks like they still have 29 Go stores open nationwide.[2] [1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2023/amazon-closing-eight-amazon-go... [2]: https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011
If you have a US-wide convenience store chain with a multi-billion-dollar company behind it, and you have 29 stores after six years, well... I mean, it's not exactly a stand-out success, is it?
I 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 was very impressed, sneaking stuff off the shelf, passing it between multiple people and a few other obvious tactics all get noticed. Only way I've found to defeat it is to throw stuff into your cart from over 3 feet away. I never repeated it after I got my free bag of chips, but it was fun breaking it
I hope this doesn't signal the end of the entire business model. I know there are still speed bumps and problems to address, but cashier in a convenience store is one of those awful jobs I don't think anyone should have to do if we can avoid it. I've had plenty of friends and family work those jobs, and briefly did it myself (at a gas station). Often these friends worked overnight, with the risk of being held up at 3…
This is easy to say from the perspective of someone making tech money, but plenty of people (immigrants, minorities, people below the poverty line, people without a high school diploma) depend on such jobs and will gladly do them. Unless you also have a solution for employment for all such groups, "let's get rid of these jobs" comes off as way too simplistic. The benefits of automation are largely enjoyed by the uppe…
The people in need get the money, but no one has to do the awful job. Win-win.
Or we could just pay them to dig holes and fill them back in again, if you demand that they must perform labor to "earn" their way.
These are needless jobs. They should be destroyed.
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No, that's the fancy part. You pick up a barcode reader at the entrance, something like [0]. When you pick something from the shelf, you scan it, and put in the cart. You don't remove the stuff from the cart until your car, so you can already fill up your bags in the cart! [0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Barcode-...
Ah! You mean "remove" as in "after you bought and paid for it" and not "if you decide not to buy it" (as you would remove an article from a online shopping cart). Gotcha.
Old method: Place items in cart -> Arrive at checkout -> Take all the items out of the cart -> Scan all the items -> Put all items back cart -> Pay -> Go to car -> Take all items out of cart.
Scanner method: Scan item -> Place in cart -> Pay -> Go to car -> Take all items of out cart
You could even set up your bags in the cart so that when you pay everything's already bagged up.
Cutting out the repeated loading/unloading saves a decent amount of time and there's usually very little wait when you need to pay. Some stores in my country support using your phone as the barcode scanning device, it's very quick. I can imagine that at some point the phone could be used to handle the payment as well, at which point it'd be very close to the Amazon pick up and go model.
I have actually had a very positive experience with cashier-less shopping – albeit not with Amazon Go and in the EU. As of now, it's been heavily benefited from never having to wait in a line (because the vast majority of people will still opt for the cashier lanes) but I actually found the UX (which in my case always included scanning of products like a cashier would) actually quite delightful and surprisingly never…
> What are other experiences? For a number of years now our local grocery/everything store has operated a cashierless option. When you enter, you grab a handheld scanner, and scan as you go. It's pretty cool. But it seems like nobody really uses it. And the two locations closest to me seem to have dropped it altogether. People are apparently more comfortable with just using old school self-checkout. Those have contin…
At least one major supermarket where I am has started allowing you to use their app on your phone rather than the pick up scanners. I found it to be much more responsive than the handhelds and easier to interact with. I'm hoping they enhance it further in future by allowing payment via the phone as well.