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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

#171

Post by esseph »

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.

Can't afford not to.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#172

Post by Cornbilly »

colinplamondon wrote: post #84
Cornbilly wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great that they faced essentially no consequences for this. A sure sign that we have a functional and sane market.

Why would they face consequences? Every store has video surveillance that can be reviewed. They trusted their tech enough to accept the false-positive rate, then worked to determine / validate their false positive rate with manual review, and iterate their models with the data. From a consumer perspective the point is that you can "just walk out". They delivered that.

Their initial advertising claimed near full automation by their "AI" system when, in reality, they had people manually handling around 70% of the transactions.

I get that this is a message board for YC, so lying about your company's tech is considered almost a virtue but that is an unreasonably big lie to tell without getting your hand-slapped by some regulatory body or investor backlash.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#173

Post by polshaw »

adolph wrote: post #128
nayroclade wrote: post #20

I always found the "Amazon 4-Star" name funny. Presumably when it was first pitched internally it was called "Amazon 5-Star", then they realised that meant they basically couldn't sell anything, since nothing popular gets a full 5 stars. So they changed it to "4-Star", which just sounds awkward, and lacks the suggestion of top-quality that "5-Star" would. Instead, it's like the "Amazon Not-too-bad" store. I was amaze…

"'Amazon Not-too-bad' store" sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe a too-clever work around for the 5-Star problem would be to call it "100-Star," which would be 4 in binary notation. Or they could call it "5th-Star" since 4 stars is the fifth number of stars b/c the range of starts is zero indexed. Ordinal : Cardinal 1 : 0 2 : 1 3 : 2 4 : 3 5 : 4 6 : 5

The range of stars is very deliberately NOT zero indexed, you cannot rate a product below 1.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#174

Post by AppleAtCha »

vikingerik wrote: post #167
AppleAtCha wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Self checkout is fine, if the happy path works. If everything scans once and doesn't accidentally scan a second time, if everything scans at the price you thought it was posted for, if you don't have any controlled substances requiring approval, if the weight sensor doesn't freak out incorrectly or from putting your bags on it, if it accepts any coupons you have, if it accepts and processes your payment method correc…

Yeah I agree that it can potentially go wrong but in my experience here in east TN the machines have gotten better to the point that hasn't happened for me in the past few years. Also it seems like the "just walk out" process would have more potential error modes but I never visited one.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#175

Post by g947o »

happyopossum wrote: post #98
g947o wrote: post #39

These bastards drove out some nice stores near me (supposedly the lease ended and did not renew) and rebuilt the buildings in order to open an Amazon Fresh location. That Amazon Fresh store never opened. Now we have a giant empty storefront nobody uses.

Wait, how does a store that never opened drive out an existing store? That’s not how commercial leases work… Given that a supermarket abandoned that location, and Amazon never opened on their either, perhaps that location or the lease price simply doesn’t work for a grocery store?

The tenants needed to vacate before the owner tore down the building.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#177

Post by esseph »

happyopossum wrote: post #98
g947o wrote: post #39

These bastards drove out some nice stores near me (supposedly the lease ended and did not renew) and rebuilt the buildings in order to open an Amazon Fresh location. That Amazon Fresh store never opened. Now we have a giant empty storefront nobody uses.

Wait, how does a store that never opened drive out an existing store? That’s not how commercial leases work… Given that a supermarket abandoned that location, and Amazon never opened on their either, perhaps that location or the lease price simply doesn’t work for a grocery store?

They got word of the development and decide to not renew their commercial lease? Then you either move business somewhere where you don't have to directly complete, or shut down.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#178

Post by belter »

cmiles8 wrote: post #166
lelandfe wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Such tactics sound… illegal

The password is Melania...

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/07/when-billionaire-go...

https://pagesix.com/2026/01/27/hollywood/inside-melania-trum...

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#179

Post by dragonwriter »

linkregister wrote: post #145
givemeethekeys wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worker…

> However, tech workers in Bangalore are paid an order of magnitude higher than prevailing local wages in other sectors

250 million people striking in India isn't mainly “tech workers in Bangalore”, or mainly tech and other elite workers at all. It’s about 40% of Indian workers, and most articles I've seen about it centered on widespread participation of workers in coal, construction, and agricultural sectors.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#180

Post by justonceokay »

belval wrote: post #160
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment completely misunderstands why NYC (and the core of most major cities) is not impressed by a supermarket. Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket. You get the hi…

> all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket. Is that really a thing though? I feel like arguing for quality is a strong argument, but between walking between small shops at the end of my work day and just doing one supermarket feels more efficient. Finding stuff within a supermarket is also not hard once you've been once or twi…

It’s what I’ve done in Seattle for decades and this isn’t even a very big city
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