Live data from Hacker News

Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

finance.yahoo.com

201–210 of 572 posts

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#201

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…

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.

Wegmans is good, but I find Whole Foods to have much better quality of products. Whole Foods used to be even better, we will see how Amazon manages it.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#202

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…

> 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

iirc that's exactly what Amazon did to destroy diapers.com over a decade ago

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#205
post #18

> On April 4, 2024, it was revealed that Amazon's "Just Walk Out" technology was supported by approximately 1,000 Indian workers who manually reviewed transactions. Despite claims of being fully automated through computer vision, a significant portion of transactions required this manual verification. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Go ) Wonder how much of this is due to economics since computer vision tech ne…

This was proven to be false on the WAN show. Only 20% of transactions were low confidence and handled by mechanical turk.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=433kipkEERY&t=8479s

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#206
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you share some examples in gaps of staples?

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#207

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…

That's the dream, but isn't currently an option for most people in the USA. And it's usually only availabil in very expensive to live areas.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#209

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.…

NY State vs NYC mismatch here. I expect nobody in NYC goes to Ithaca for groceries... :)

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#210
post #186

The technology lives on, as Amazon "Just Walk Out". But rather than general grocery stores, it is used for concessions at stadiums and places like that. I guess it turned out that the need more human intervention than they hoped, so the cost is too high for regular stores. However at places where a premium can be charged for high throughput or a low friction experience then the cost of the human intervention can be r…

Just a heads up that only the Amazon Go stores did the "just walk out" shopping thing. Amazon Fresh stores were pretty much just regular grocery stores. They had shopping carts with the self-checkout built in, but that was the extent of the technology.

There was a concept Amazon Fresh store with “Just Walk Out” technology on Capitol Hill in Seattle. They closed it down a couple of years back but the brand was absolutely Amazon Fresh.
Post reply on HN