Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cstoredive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 416 posts

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

#381

Post by gumby »

desiarnezjr wrote: post #339
vhold wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hunch is that the store wasn't meant to be particularly popular with lots of customers, it was meant to demonstrate technologies they wanted to sell to businesses. https://aws.amazon.com/just-walk-out/ https://aws.amazon.com/one/

They've employed a "Amazon is the first and best customer" for most of the services they've launched. Amazon.com / AWS is an example.

Was Amazon actually the first customer for AWS (being a very early customer counts)? I've heard that they were, but I've also heard that the AWS guys designed for a different customer base first.

Like the eBay Pez story it makes sense and adds credibility for the narrative to be that Amazon was the first customer for AWS. But it feels like a very unamazon thing to do, given that so much of its customer base isn't running the kind of enterprise jobs that an Amazon scale company needs.

(Either way I imagine almost all of Amazon does run on AWS these days and I'm sure the transition took a long time)

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

#382

Post by ElFitz »

ddejohn wrote: post #124
ElFitz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon Go was even more incredible than that. Walking out without even having to deal with those pesky self-service cash register, their sometimes finicky scales, and some supermarkets’ more than annoying rules, feels like a weird magic trick. You would just walk in, pick stuff up, and walk out. That’s it. Each time I couldn’t help but feel like I was shoplifting. And then the invoice came in by email, always accurat…

Wait, you don't even have to scan your items? Are they using cameras to detect the items you grab?

Cameras and other sensors. You do need to scan a QR code from the app before coming in.

Some other comments mention having trouble with it, being billed for things they shouldn’t have.

But I personally never did. Even though I enjoyed fooling around and trying to trick it by picking stuff up just to put it back. Or coming together with someone else, both using my QR code, and picking stuff up separately. Never any issue. Although, obviously, ymmv.

It’s honestly among my most memorable experiences in the past two years.

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

#383

Post by ElFitz »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #356
ElFitz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon Go was even more incredible than that. Walking out without even having to deal with those pesky self-service cash register, their sometimes finicky scales, and some supermarkets’ more than annoying rules, feels like a weird magic trick. You would just walk in, pick stuff up, and walk out. That’s it. Each time I couldn’t help but feel like I was shoplifting. And then the invoice came in by email, always accurat…

> You would just walk in, pick stuff up, and walk out. That’s it. In my friend's case it was walk in, spend a half hour working out the app issues, pick stuff up, and walk out, get charged for something you didn't take, go to Amazon to ask for a refund.

I find it amusing because I did spend quite some time trying to figure out how to get the QR code from the app.

But that’s because I usually don’t use Amazon US, and you need to change to the US store, in app, to get that qr code.

I feel like they could make things smoother, like Apple does when you go to an Apple Store. Or perhaps use a geofenced iOS wallet card? Unless the QR code is dynamic?

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

#385

Post by asveikau »

jonathankoren wrote: post #357
asveikau wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me that the San Francisco ones, if I remember correctly, are in a part of town that's been famously devoid of foot traffic since the pandemic. San Francisco might be receptive to the concept, but it would have to be close to where people live, rather than where office workers used to go.

The only one I know in SF was down in the FiDi, and I can’t imagine that area had much traffic during the pandemic, and I question how much it has now.

That's precisely what i was saying.

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

#386

Post by yukinon »

cstejerean wrote: post #295
passwordqwe wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's reports of prisoners complaining about the torture of being fed salmon all the time, because it used to be common food. People signal their class and status through everything, also through food.

I used Blue Apron for a while and got an unreasonable amount of salmon for some reason. It's been almost 6 years and I can still barely eat salmon after that. So I can definitely understand where the prisoners were coming from on this one.

This comment is confusing to me, because Blue Apron lets you select your own meals. Why would you continue to select salmon if you had it too often?

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

#387

Post by philwelch »

giaour wrote: post #350
philwelch wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s mostly because they didn’t really know how to prepare it back then.

Oysters were poor people food in the same era, and like now, many people ate them raw. It has less to do with culinary trends and much more to do with the relative productivity of the lobster fishery. (In recent years, the lobster fishery has been really productive, but prices have been pretty sticky[0].) Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster has some great primary source research on the social status of eating shellfish t…

At the time when lobsters were fed to prisoners, they hadn’t yet figured out the boiling-them-alive trick, which is supposedly how you get lobster to taste good. I don’t know anything about oysters though.

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

#388

Post by lost_tourist »

paxys wrote: post #206

The cashierless thing is fine, but is never going to be the reason people pick one store over another. The problem with Amazon Go is that they have been trying to target the "upscale convenience store" demographic which doesn't really exist. If getting rid of human labor lowers operating costs then why doesn't that reflect on the price tag on the shelf? Charging 2x what the CVS next door does defeats the purpose. Mor…

Yeah but I can't imagine a CVS/Walmart having people just walk in and pay for things with their app and happily move along. I more or less see the mass robberies that are currently happening in various metro areas, particularly in California. They'd empty the store in minutes.

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

#389

Post by stjohnswarts »

bobthepanda wrote: post #323
jarjoura wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The only issue I have with them is limited area to put your bags. Is the space made for ants? In college I was a cashier so I still have a 6th sense about where UPC/QR codes are and I can buzz through items as fast as most cashiers, however the limited bagging areas are very annoying.

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

#390

Post by WeylandYutani »

jarjoura wrote: post #248
13of40 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Although they've added self-checkout lanes to Whole Foods, human interaction is in its DNA and you pay for that premium. Amazon is only able to capture your order details if you use the app at checkout.

What kind of human interaction do you get out of some bored 15 year old girl at the supermarket? For me it doesn't go beyond "hello" and "bye". Maybe it's something to do with culture.

Anyway I looked up some data and over half the customers in my country use the self checkout now.

Post reply on HN