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Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

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Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#551

Post by theshrike79 »

pjc50 wrote: post #244
textlapse wrote: post #225

If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite consumer interest, but just like ‘kitchen timers on Alexa’ what if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and the most basic RAG? How does this manifest into a tri…

> how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? It replaces all the David Graeber "bullshit jobs". As well as about 90% of the education system. It's not replacing them with something better , but it is cheaper.

> As well as about 90% of the education system.

There are multiple stories from actual teachers about kids and teens doing this today.

They don't use search engines or books, they ask an LLM.

Then 20 students get 20 different answers of varying quality and do ZERO validation that the answer they got is real, they trust the LLM implicitly.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#552

Post by doubtfuluser »

smart-home stuff was always a bit „off“ to me and. Why would I want to control light by voice? It’s much better to do this by motion detection. Same for shutters: time + light detection is much better than saying anything. I want the smart-home to automatically do stuff not just a different „switch“

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#553

Post by mlsu »

dsclough wrote: post #520
crazygringo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a million times. I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster. Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list. It works. But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's utter chaos. Multiple listings…

The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine. How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically…

It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store or online.

I try to do the calculation nonetheless. But every time I just need to buy some ordinary staple, I’m up against the Relentless Spirit of Pure Deception, who attempts an ever evolving and always brand new form of trickery, at every engagement.

Sometimes, I simply make the $1.00 donation to P&G or whoever just to avoid having to think of strategies to outsmart. This too feels terrible and exhausting in a different way.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#554

Post by camkego »

senderista wrote: post #543
jonhohle wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Amazon when Fresh was rolling out in Seattle. A coworker thought he was ordering 10 bananas but when his order arrived he received 10 bunches of bananas. Generously, he brought them in to share along with the story. I’m sure they made a lot of banana bread the following week.

Was that the origin of the banana stand?

For a little context, Amazon has one or more “community banana stands”

For more info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Banana_Stand

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#555

Post by silisili »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #110
bluSCALE4 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any of that is true. If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it. Why? Because Costco has proven itself trustworthy of a blind repeat purchase. You could trust the price you're paying is typical and fair. Amazon on the other hand...

To build on the Costco analogy: for any given product category they typically only have three specific options: good, better, best. I could tell Costco bot that I need AA batteries and it would ask me if I prefer Duracell, Kirkland brand, or cheapest. I trust that either of them will be plenty good, so I would say cheapest. Amazon has a vastly different experience with thousands of indistinguishable Chinese knockoffs…

I've never used Alexa, and hardly use Amazon anymore, but this kinda gave me an idea.

Is it possible to ask Alexa to add generic items to a list, then be able to iterate said list as Amazon searches? That seems kinda useful, if it exists.

Maybe I'm not the every man, but I price shop. If All free is on sale half of Tide free, I'm ordering that, and so on.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#556

Post by doubtfuluser »

francisofascii wrote: post #96

We pay $179 a year for Amazon music. We use Alexa all the time to play music. How is that not a huge revenue success? It sounds like they are not properly factoring that in as a downstream impact.

But the question you must ask is: how much of the fact that you pay for music can be attributed to Alexa?

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#557

Post by newzisforsukas »

Arrath wrote: post #407
fbdab103 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredibly common in the US as well to use different units per item. All the better because our garbage measuring system can make unit switches significantly trickier.

I had to do a double take a few weeks ago when I found the price/unit to be drastically different for the name brand to the store brand of something, until I realized they strategically switched the (# to oz I think it was) to make the store brand look astronomically cheaper instead of just slightly cheaper.

> strategically

More like deceptively...

If a person did that, I would consider the behavior antisocial.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#558

Post by gessha »

wombatpm wrote: post #531
jonhohle wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Amazon when Fresh was rolling out in Seattle. A coworker thought he was ordering 10 bananas but when his order arrived he received 10 bunches of bananas. Generously, he brought them in to share along with the story. I’m sure they made a lot of banana bread the following week.

All stores have problems with produce. Is that 2.99 a pound for peaches, bag or each?

They typically list out the unit but what ticks me off is when adjacent items have different units. One is in ounces, the second is per unit, their third one is per bag.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#559

Post by dchftcs »

maccard wrote: post #332
linsomniac wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a price per quantity, though that can vary between "each", "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods", so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure what you'll get, what quantity, or what price. Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization. It is true that if you go into a grocery…

The big difference with a store is that if tide pods should be ~$8 for a pack, the dtore is incredibly unlikely to have one pack of tide pods on the shelf for $70

In some cases the retail store just doesn't list the price and the store owner may just come up with a highly marked-up price when asked. 10x would be very rare though indeed.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#560

Post by Hextinium »

toasterlovin wrote: post #538
ryandrake wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you search for the exact item, including the brand name and the size, you get pages and pages of choices, many of them just wrong. I just did a search for "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack". This contains all the information you need to uniquely identify a single product. Brand, Product, Size, Quantity. Yet Amazon returns 3 pages of crap , including Wrong Brand, Wrong Product, Wrong Size, and Wrong Quantit…

Their search result page is just a ranking of whatever they predict will sell best based on your query (based on units, not dollars). It’s stupidly simlistic, actually: if we sell more for a given search term because we’re advertising hard on that search term, our organic ranking for that term will rise almost immediately. So in your case, what’s going on is that basically other people who search with the same term e…

But think about the corollary where places like McMasterCarr have exact products in known quantities, types and breakdowns because they used to be a catalogue. I will go to McMaster 9/10 times because it's just easy to find exactly what I want and so they get my money.

Amazon seems hostile to this very idea, that I know what I want, will spend 15% more to have it tomorrow and will not by the random stuff it smashes in the search results because I know what I want.

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