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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

#191

Post by ecshafer »

mgce wrote: post #159
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.

Strong disagree, and I used to go to that Wegmans regularly. It's fine. Solid market. Whole Foods is equally fine, and excels in some ways. Neither is obviously better.

Wegmans is obviously better than Whole Foods, and its not even close. You can much more easily buy normal food at normal prices at Wegmans than Whole Foods. Whole foods has very large, strange gaps in staples.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#192

Post by simulator5g »

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

Haven’t you heard? Laws don’t apply to companies

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#193

Post by PaulHoule »

ceejayoz wrote: post #121
tmoertel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What changes have you noticed?

My store used to have a big bread oven, desserts made in-house, fresh prepared food made in woks etc. right next to the buffet table, etc. All gone now; the coffee shop got replaced by robots, they tried to close the seafood counter (with enough negative feedback they reversed it), etc. It's all made centrally now, for 3x the price and half the taste. All the kids went and got MBAs and the third generation family bus…

In Ithaca the coffee went downhill lately, that's for sure. On the other hand, my favorite drip coffee anywhere is made by machines that brew it by the cup.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#194

Post by xp84 »

bluedino wrote: post #109
kube-system wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I walk into a McDonalds I see people who will rather stand 5 minutes at the counter waiting for a human cashier than use one of the available kiosks. I'm sure some are paying cash but there are certainly people who are just not comfortable with technology. The Go stores were a great experience but they would certainly be uncomfortable for anyone other than early-adopter or tech-forward types of people. I w…

McDonalds solved that problem by basically not having employees go up to the counter anymore.

Yup, they literally HIDE as far away from the counter as possible. Must make it easier to recruit Gen Z now!

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#195

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

craftkiller wrote: post #153
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…

While that is true for the quality-based things like deli/baker, there is one advantage to massive grocery stores that the stores inside the city can't compete with: selection. Every time I leave the city, I make a point to go to a suburban grocery store and walk down their massive spacious aisles to find new/different products that simply aren't stocked inside the city because shelf space is so limited. Entire aisle…

Do you consider Red Hook to be suburban? Because the Fairway there is one of the best supermarkets I've ever been inside of in the USA ...

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#197

Post by PaulHoule »

bee_rider wrote: post #149
moregrist wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well I dunno to what extent the NYC lifestyle distorts the perception of stock market analysts. Do they think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast?

I used to joke that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC in the 1990s because there were 2 or 3 Starbucks on every block to fool stock market analysts that the country was saturated with them -- thus driving out the independent espresso bars that you'd find in flyover states that had better coffee and leaving only the completely-indifferent-to-quality bodegas.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#198

Post by cyberax »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #140
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.

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…

> 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.

Except that you don't. Typically, you have maybe one small store selling random junk reasonably close to you. At high prices, because there's no local competition.

There's a reason the current NYC mayor campaigned on opening government-run stores.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#199

Post by jandrese »

wagwang wrote: post #150

If we lived in a high trust society, you could just trust people to scan their own items and walk out.

Human nature probably prevents that from ever being a reality, at least at scale. In a tiny tight knit community where literally everybody knows everybody else maybe you could pull that off, but even then you have to get a bit lucky.

In a world where anonymity is a thing there will always be at least one inherent shithead who ruins it for everyone. Even if you do have a community where it's true, that can change anytime someone has a kid or someone moves in.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#200

Post by neilc »

Cornbilly wrote: post #172
colinplamondon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t remember Amazon claiming “near-full automation” by AI. They said that you can checkout automatically and that AI/computer vision is somehow involved.
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