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Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#141

Post by ceejayoz »

jinushaun wrote: post #138
ceejayoz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Wegmans' home town, and the enshittification process has hit them hard in recent years.

No! Wegmans was amazing when in lived in NY. We would actually go out of our way to shop at Wegmans and plan our weekend around it.

Yeah, it'd be our first stop whenever we came home from a trip; we even got Christmas presents from the store one year for being (embarassingly) one of their higher-spend customers. The magic has gone; places like Kroeger and Whole Food have caught up.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#143

Post by PKop »

augusteo wrote: post #41

The "1000 people in India watching cameras" reveal was the moment the magic died. Once you know the wizard is just a guy behind a curtain, you can't unsee it. The interesting question isn't whether the tech was ready. It wasn't. The question is whether Amazon learned anything useful from the attempt. Computer vision for retail checkout is a legitimate hard problem. Occlusion, similar-looking products, people changing…

Aside from the magic dying, which I agree with, another commenter in this thread says there could be false positives (whether from Indians or AI doesn't matter) you'd have to 1) notice by studying your bill later and 2) resolve by requesting refunds online.

Knowing this, it was over before it ever started. Beyond the masses of people already having aversion to the oddness of how it worked and likely never wanting to try it, these and others would swear off the store forever the first time they ever got charged for something they didn't take. No one wants to monitor and fix erroneous purchase errors.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#144

Post by lelandfe »

randycupertino wrote: post #108
Bluecobra wrote: post #76

Doesn’t surprise me. I frequently shop at Amazon Fresh in store and it’s a mediocre experience. It’s a poorly run store with no visible manager making sure things are in order. You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders and they aren’t helpful. I always find expired groceries/produce on the shelf so I have to spend a lot of extra time inspecting each item. The only reason I put up with thei…

I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores. There were instances of their prices being lower than Walmart or other budget stores. The avocados were $0.25 each and carrots were half price of ones in Safeway, even ground beef was weirdly cheap. One time as a compa…

> operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores

Wouldn't surprise me. I know a guy who invented a device for truckers that became ubiquitous in truck stops across the US. This would've been like 2014.

He refused to sell on Amazon, so Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price, until he agreed to list (at which point they dropped their competing product)

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#145

Post by linkregister »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #88
giraffe_lady wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India specifically is in the middle of a massive years-long labor movement that is changing the terms of work there and I believe shifting the degree of alignment with western corporate outsourcing though I'm not very informed about the details. Scale is beyond comprehension though, there were 250 million people on strike one day last summer. This is not ever really covered in western media or mentioned on HN for rea…

Americans can’t afford to strike like that.

You're most likely correct; I originally started writing this comment to refute your statement, but found that my assumptions appear to be wrong.

Americans have the nearly the highest nominal and PPP income of OECD countries as of 2024, only behind Luxembourg, Iceland, and Switzerland [1].

India experiences substantially higher shelter and food insecurity and poverty rates than the United States.

However, tech workers in Bangalore are paid an order of magnitude higher than prevailing local wages in other sectors, at around ₹2M (₹20 lakh) [2]. Median annual rents for 2BHK (2 bedroom) apartments appear to be around 1/10th of that figure at ₹3 lahk in desirable neighborhoods [3].

It appears to be reasonable for a technology worker to be able to perform a sustained strike. I have never personally traveled to Bangalore, though I have lived in places where cost of living is under a tenth of median American income.

I invite correction by people with first hand knowledge about cost of living in Bangalore.

1. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/average-annual-wages...

2. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/median-te...

3. https://www.birlaevara.org.in/best-areas-in-bangalore-for-re...

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#146

Post by seanmcdirmid »

SirFatty wrote: post #31
justonceokay wrote: post #13

I’m in an interesting place. Here in Seattle I am two blocks from one of the largest Amazon Fresh stores. It was built on the former location of a local grocer. The construction was almost complete before Covid hit, but Amazon shuttered the store during that time. As a result there was no groceries in my neighborhood from 2018-2023. Now it seems Amazon is going to leave us a grocery desert yet again. They were piloti…

"non-union jobs program people at the registers because Amazon believes that cashier is a sub-human role." What grocery stores still have union workers?

Most grocery stores in the US are still heavily union. I don't think the unions ever left the grocery stores.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#147

Post by deepflow »

We have Żabka Nano which is self-serve cashierless shop in Poland. You just swipe you card at the entrance, get whatever you want and walk out. I think they use computer vision system to detect the products taken from the shelves. It kinda amazes me because it's what Amazon promised but failed to deliver.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#148

Post by AppleAtCha »

cmiles8 wrote: post #7

Their fate seemed sealed when it was revealed a bit back that the “just walk out” technology was more hype than substance. Just lots of people watching what you’re doing on camera vs an actual AI that worked well at mass deployment scale. A good idea, poorly executed. Reports said the “AI” was largely 1000+ people in India watching the cameras. If Amazon actually managed to build AI that worked well at a decent cost…

Do people really have problems with self-checkout? I use it all the time in box stores like Kroger, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. It seems to work just fine for me and doesn't add more than a minute or two vs just walking out of the store.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#149

Post by bee_rider »

moregrist wrote: post #131
PaulHoule wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wegmans opened a store at the Brooklyn Navy Yard just to show people in NYC what a real supermarket looks like. I mean, you might be impressed with Whole Foods if all you know are those bodegas that have around NYC but if you've been to a real supermarket Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and such are not impressive at all.

I don't know the Wegman's in NY at all, but the one I used to use in the Boston area was ... okay? It was a good grocery store with decent produce, a good frozen section, some nice specialty items, and some decent prepared meals. I would put it at roughly the early-2010s era of Whole Foods with slightly better prices. Now that I'm no longer working near there, I don't miss it much. So I've never understood the hype.…

If you live in MA the standard options are Star Market and Stop and Shop, right? New England supermarket chains are already perfect.

I think the comment you are replying to is playing up a specific characteristic of, like, deep-in-the-city NYC (it looks like Wegmans has a place in downtown Manhattan?). I also read it as slightly tongue-in-cheek. People in NYC know what grocery stores look like, I think. They just don’t fit in dense areas.

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