This was the more surprising bit for me: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/amazon-supersizes-its-walmart-...
Amazon straight up wants to just become Walmart. Or maybe Sears is a more apt comparison given their mail-order beginnings.
Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
221–230 of 572 posts
Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
When did naming things have to reflect reality? ie it's "Burger King" and not "Bearable Burger"
It was a pretty good burger until 2013 when they changed the machine they used to cook the burgers. Now it's worse than McD's and that's saying something.
Yeah it used to really taste flame grilled. It's pretty low rent nowadays - to the point where I wouldn't go there even if desperate.
Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
#223> 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
20% seems like a "significant portion" to me
Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That isn't something isolated to Wegmans or even supermarkets. This[0] image basically says it all, and quality has only further nosedived since 2020. [0] https://i.ibb.co/Zz2Mb6rF/e0vb5drbeh0e1.jpg In general, it seems like the pareto products dont exist anymore, the midrange has basically dropped out for daily products and it's been bifurcated. If quality is a scale from 1-100, most places sell a 1, a 10, or you go…
I know it's widespread, I just would've thought Wegmans would be one of the last to do it. The premium vibes have long been their thing, and it was part of their secret sauce to vastly larger per-square-foot sales in their stores.
Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
#225I 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…
Shoulda just bit the bullet and gone with "4.8-star." I'm sure they talked about it and yeah it's goofy and awkward but it would get the meaning across and maybe show a bit of a sense of humor and that's exactly why they never ever could.
They could have followed the lead of TV manufacturers and called it "5 Star Class" (4.5 star)
Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 think investors like Amazon taking shots like this? It was never a broad roll-out, 43 stores is micro-scale for Amazon. Still, would love to see a breakdown of why it didn't improve. Regardless of the accuracy at launch, I'd think that advances in AI would have been massively to their advantage. I wonder if security degradation hit them hard. The entire system depends on a level of social trust that doesn't exist i…
That's great but they could have been honest up-front and said "The plan is that this is eventually fully-automated but we estimate that it needs supervised training for X amount of time in order to handle Y% of transactions automatically".
But this is tech and you just lie because hardly anyone in the investor class knows enough to call you out on it or they are just going with the lie to make a buck off of other rubes.
Privacy concerns aside, I thought it was a cool project. I agree that “convenience store” was probably not the best target but I think it was an effective enough proof of concept (creating a decent sized chain of them probably wasn’t the best idea) . I’ve seen the system used more effectively in smaller situations like stadium concessions, where the duration of the transactions needs to be very short to facilitate throughout.
Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
#227Earlier 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 really, really depends what neighborhood you live in. Bakeries and especially butchers don't exist everywhere, and sometimes they (bakeries) suck. It's not Paris or Rome. And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn).
Some neighborhoods are both densely populated and a desert for quality, leaving only bodegas and overpriced artisanal boutiques.
I'm with the original poster here about Wegmans. In London you have Waitrose, which is 10,000 times better than Trader Joe's/Whole Foods and has fresh bread, alcohol, a butcher, etc etc and way more all in one place.
NYC is gar-bage when it comes to groceries.
If you spend a few minutes in the suburbs, even a rural exoburb outside of NYC, you'll drive to the supermarket and take a deep calming breath. You're not supposed to say driving could ever be better than a walkable city, but if time is precious to you and you value not hauling bags back and forth across multiple stores, you'll be way way happier.
Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
#228Doesn’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.
I can list like five mass market supermarkets in NYC. Western Beef, Food Bazaar H Mart, City Fresh the regional chains like Stop and Shop Target.
Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
#229Earlier 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…
You aren't renting walking distance to a butcher baker and candlestick maker for less than $3K for a studio. That's an aspirational lifestyle for a few neighborhoods.
In all these discussions it would be really nice to have actual addresses and locations because the dream is obviously desirable but I just don’t know how often it occurs in actuality.
Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
#230> 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
20% is an incredibly high number though, if a store has 400 people/hour that means you're manually reviewing 80 transactions per hour, over one transaction per minute. That's multiple human employees.