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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

#451

Post by lopis »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #444
jzymbaluk wrote: post #432

I live right down the street from an Amazon Go store, and I like it because it's convenient when it's open, but the hours on this store stunk: it closed at 4pm sometimes. I found it very funny that this store advertised itself as a fully automated experience, when in fact there needs to be a worker/manager there all the time for it to be open. If it were actually automated, it could've been open 24/7

Meanwhile in East Asia they have no problem with tons of 24/7/365 stores, even fully vending machine stores. Heck even Europe has vending machine stores that are constantly open without even a door that could be closed, selling grocery basics.

And wasn't it revealed some time ago that Amazon Go stores were not really that automated to begin with, because they heavily relied on off-shore cheap human labor?

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#452

Post by bushbaba »

giaour wrote: post #352
twoodfin wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is “predatory pricing” vs. “pricing”?

Selling items for less than they cost to produce is known as "dumping" in international trade (where it is generally disallowed by trade organizations) and can be illegal in the US if the intent is to eliminate competition [0]. That last factor can be hard to prove, and I don't think the FTC is doing much about anticompetitive behavior these days. [0]: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

Selling it at cost though isn’t. And the cost to make a good is often less than 50% retail

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#453

Post by bushbaba »

wolvoleo wrote: post #33

Hmm Amazon fresh was useless anyway. It was this weird niche of grocery delivery but for small urgent orders. I just don't have that need like ever, if I need a bottle of shampoo or a head of lettuce urgently I'll just go to the corner shop. Edit: oh oops I see this is about physical fresh stores, we never had those in the first place. Here in Europe Amazon fresh is a weird service for quick small grocery orders. For…

Amazon fresh in the Bay Area was equivalent to Safeway but for better price/quality

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#454

Post by dns_snek »

nebula8804 wrote: post #125
PaulHoule wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait that explains so much! Do you know more about the change? I've been weirded out by the fact that their jr burger buns are now super shiny as if they are spraying something on them. I know this is processed food, but no burger bun should be able to reflect sunlight the way their burgers now do...

I haven't seen them in person but a simple egg wash will make any baked product very shiny.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#455

Post by londons_explore »

davidst wrote: post #449
mjr00 wrote: 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…

I left the following comment some months ago, duplicating it here: [Disclaimer: Former Amazon employee and not involved with Go since 2016.] I worked on the first iteration of Amazon Go in 2015/16 and can provide some context on the human oversight aspects. The system incorporated human review in two primary capacities: 1. Low-confidence event resolution: A subset of customer interactions resulted in low-confidence c…

As soon as you get to ~99% accuracy, you probably don't need to go further.

If the customer is accidentally billed for an orange instead of a tangerine 1% of the time, the consumer probably won't notice or care, and as long as the errors aren't biased in favour of the shop, regulators and the taxman probably won't care either.

With that in mind, I suspect Amazon Go wasn't profitable due to poor execution not an inherently bad idea.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#456

Post by Slartie »

londons_explore wrote: post #455
davidst wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left the following comment some months ago, duplicating it here: [Disclaimer: Former Amazon employee and not involved with Go since 2016.] I worked on the first iteration of Amazon Go in 2015/16 and can provide some context on the human oversight aspects. The system incorporated human review in two primary capacities: 1. Low-confidence event resolution: A subset of customer interactions resulted in low-confidence c…

As soon as you get to ~99% accuracy, you probably don't need to go further. If the customer is accidentally billed for an orange instead of a tangerine 1% of the time, the consumer probably won't notice or care, and as long as the errors aren't biased in favour of the shop, regulators and the taxman probably won't care either. With that in mind, I suspect Amazon Go wasn't profitable due to poor execution not an inher…

Actually, discount grocers operate on razor-thin margins of 2-4%. If your inaccuracy is geared to the benefit of your customer (because otherwise you'll be out of business due to the regulatory bodies) and thus removes just one percent of that, you suddenly lose a quarter to half of your earnings! And that goes ON TOP of the additional cost incurred with all that computer vision tech.

In addition to that, you'll have the problem of inventory differences, which is often cited as being an even bigger problem with store theft than the loss of valued product. If the inventory numbers on your books differ too much from the inventory actually on the shelves, all your replenishment processes will suffer, eventually causing out of stock situations and thus loss of revenue. You may be able to eventually counter that by estimating losses to billing inaccuracies, but that's another complexity that's not going to be free to tackle, so the 1% inaccuracy is going to cost you money on the inventory difference front, no matter what.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#457

Post by BoredPositron »

davidst wrote: post #449
mjr00 wrote: 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…

I left the following comment some months ago, duplicating it here: [Disclaimer: Former Amazon employee and not involved with Go since 2016.] I worked on the first iteration of Amazon Go in 2015/16 and can provide some context on the human oversight aspects. The system incorporated human review in two primary capacities: 1. Low-confidence event resolution: A subset of customer interactions resulted in low-confidence c…

I get being proud of the work done but if they scrapped the project after 10 years because of feasibility I don't think the tech rolled out at the start was "working" as intended.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#458

Post by davkan »

lmm wrote: post #429
NickC25 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Bezos in FY 2024 filed for, and received, a $2k child tax credit. While the company he was the founder of passed over a trillion dollars in market cap.

If it's a good tax credit, incentivising something society wants to incentivise, then everyone it applies to should get it; that helps social cohesion. If you make billionaires ineligible for tax credits they'll oppose them (and why shouldn't they?)

I’m all for universal benefits and doing away with means testing but doing so without fixing our regressive tax system it truly is just a gift to the wealthy.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#459

Post by davidst »

londons_explore wrote: post #455
davidst wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left the following comment some months ago, duplicating it here: [Disclaimer: Former Amazon employee and not involved with Go since 2016.] I worked on the first iteration of Amazon Go in 2015/16 and can provide some context on the human oversight aspects. The system incorporated human review in two primary capacities: 1. Low-confidence event resolution: A subset of customer interactions resulted in low-confidence c…

As soon as you get to ~99% accuracy, you probably don't need to go further. If the customer is accidentally billed for an orange instead of a tangerine 1% of the time, the consumer probably won't notice or care, and as long as the errors aren't biased in favour of the shop, regulators and the taxman probably won't care either. With that in mind, I suspect Amazon Go wasn't profitable due to poor execution not an inher…

I don't have insight into what ultimately transpired at Amazon Go so take the following as speculation on my part.

It is unlikely the tech would be frozen when an acceptable accuracy threshold is reached:

1. There is a strong incentive to reduce operational costs by simplifying the hardware infrastructure and improving the underlying vision tech to maintain acceptable accuracy. You can save money if you can reduce the number and quality of cameras, eliminate additional signal assistance from other inputs (e.g., shelves with load cells), and generally simplify overall system complexity.

2. There is business pressure to add product types and fixtures which almost always result in new customer behaviors. I mentioned coffee in my prior post. Consider what it would mean to add support for open-top produce bins and the challenge of complex customer rummaging. It would take a lot of high-quality annotated data and probably some entirely new algorithms, as well.

Both of those require maintaining a well-staffed annotation team working continuously for an extended time. And those were just the first two things that come to mind. There are likely more reasons that aren't immediately apparent.

Re: Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

#460

Post by davidst »

BoredPositron wrote: post #457
davidst wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left the following comment some months ago, duplicating it here: [Disclaimer: Former Amazon employee and not involved with Go since 2016.] I worked on the first iteration of Amazon Go in 2015/16 and can provide some context on the human oversight aspects. The system incorporated human review in two primary capacities: 1. Low-confidence event resolution: A subset of customer interactions resulted in low-confidence c…

I get being proud of the work done but if they scrapped the project after 10 years because of feasibility I don't think the tech rolled out at the start was "working" as intended.

The first iteration of the tech reached the accuracy needed to support just-walk-out for a small-format store. It did achieve that goal. I left the project before it went further.

I imagined, at the time, future goals would be to scale store size and product variety while reducing the cost of the technology, but I have no insight into how that progressed. I am sorry to learn it's been shut down.

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