We have several Alexa devices. We use them all the time and for a wide variety of purposes. By any rational, actual customer-connected metric, they are a wild success in this and similar homes.
This is an example of Amazon not actually letting the smartest people into the room. We do vast amounts of our shopping via Amazon, but that's through the app and website even when we manage the shopping lists/etc via Alexa. We're not going to do that directly through the robot. We're never going to do that directly through the robot. Anyone who proposed billions in R&D investments hanging on the delusion that we will do that through the robot, instead of paying attention to the things we are all actively actually doing every single day, should have already been moved along.
We don't need to shop like that.
We do need the hundred other things we do every day, and those are things Alexa currently does vastly better than the competition. The Prime stuff, the Kindle stuff, the dozen other Amazon-related things we do, are certainly further embedded into our lives by the fact of the Alexas.
Their real problem is the sudden closing of the gap, which is nearly certain to occur in the next year or two.
TLDR: "Amazon says you're using it wrong. Doesn't know how to count."