Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions • Hacker News Board

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

#771

Post by kubectl_h » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:10 PM UTC

nimih wrote: post #588

swozey wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think it will do well with genz and younger millennials. I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such…

> I saw so few items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays. Costco sells a lot of junk food because Americans, as a whole, eat a lot of junk food. They also stock a lot of staples (rice, beans, flour, cooking oils, canned/frozen fruits/veggies, &c), and decent quality raw fruit/veggies/meat. Not liking the Costco shopping experience is a pretty re…

They also sell kind of strange (compared to the bags of doritos) stuff periodically, which I love. For instance the Costco in Maine (of all places) has Bird Nest Soup and NordeX PIKNIK cheese in a can. Kind of apropos of nothing. It's pretty cool.

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

#772

Post by danudey » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:11 PM UTC

swatcoder wrote: post #100

paxys wrote: post #86

The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…

> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision. This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (…

Being in Canada makes Amazon seem entirely unhinged. I'll see something on Wirecutter or some other review site, click through to Amazon.com and see that it's only $64. Great. Switch to Amazon.ca and it's $350, presumably because of some bot that sees there's no one else selling it so it lists it for some huge price to take advantage of arbitrage.

Some things will double in price, or just suddenly be out of stock for no apparent reason. They tried to push groceries but a case of Kraft Dinner came out to several dollars per box, compared to about $1.50 from my extremely expensive local grocery or half that from Costco.

They never sold those dash buttons in Canada, but I can imagine pushing the button to get more tide pods and being irate when the cost was twice as much as it was last time.

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

#773

Post by pavel_lishin » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:11 PM UTC

emj wrote: post #627

chankstein38 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people might just not want to take the time to math it out while they've got something time-sensitive on the stove. I feel like your comment doesn't really serve a purpose other than to put other people down. Congrats on your memory and math prowess but not everyone in the world has the same brain as you.

I wanted concrete examples, I see I could have been clearer on that point but I did not intend malice or to brag. I memorize because of diabetes. You need to know how much sugar you eat so you do volume -> weight * carbs/weight * portion size to calculate how much insulin you are supposed to give for a meal. That is not because of cooking and having tried doing that with voice assistant several times I know it is har…

I have no idea how many cups are in a pint. I have no idea how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, or how many tablespoons are in a cup, or frankly any of the other byzantine imperial measures.

The only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that there are four quarts in a gallon - and yet, I would only bet $10 on that, not $20.

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

#774

Post by tempodox » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:12 PM UTC

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…

Investors hallucinating large windfalls and users who want to believe in miracles and/or are just ignorant. How many people know that LLMs are just text completion engines and cannot do reasoning or math or have a concept of truth?

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

#775

Post by kubectl_h » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:12 PM UTC

dghlsakjg wrote: post #358

swozey wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think it will do well with genz and younger millennials. I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such…

I find that Costco in store generally has stuff that tends to follow local consumer preferences. It is worth mentioning that Costco.com does not stock the same things that the physical stores sell, more-so than any other retailer I know of. And different stores have a lot of latitude in what they stock. My nearest store has tons of things like sugar free sodas, pro-biotic soda, kombucha, no sugar added juices, and ju…

Oh they definitely cater to the local market. Here is a costco in Mountain View: https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/1dk2pfo/not_a_wine_...

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

#776

Post by pavel_lishin » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:12 PM UTC

emj wrote: post #624

crazygringo wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And given that there are probably 50 different common conversions you'll encounter in cooking, both between imperial units and between imperial and metric, not to mention common weight-vs-volume conversions of things like flour, good luck in not only memorizing them all but getting them exactly perfectly right every single time . You mess up a single conversion and your finished baked goods go straight in th…

I do not understand how a voice assistant help with this, it has never worked for me. Seems like pretty hard things to do on the fly with recipes. Weight to volume conversions are rare here but sure I do those on the fly so I guess it makes sense, do you really do you guys really do it that often? If you do extensive conversions of recipes you will need to get the ratios correct as well it is just not something I see…

If I have a measuring cup that maxes at at one cup, and I need to add a pint of something to a pot on the stove, being able to say "Hey Jibble, how many cups are in a pint" and getting an answer would be pretty nifty.

As things stand, I walk over to the conversion chart hanging on the fridge.

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

#777

Post by wannacboatmovie » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:13 PM UTC

Damogran6 wrote: post #740

xp84 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unit price labels here in the US are hilariously messed up. The items you want to compare will be say, a pack of 6 granola bars or a 10 pack. The unit prices will be like: #1: $0.37 / ounce #2: $6.50 / pound or even: #3: $1.82 / each (a price per item) This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but i…

Oh, they have plenty of time to do it. We have created lots of MBAs...people who want to take advantage of their education, and to do so they want to squeeze a little more profit. And they're bored. And they need to stand out from their coworkers. Therefore 'price per net weight' becomes a thing. And Surge pricing. (Peanutbutter M&Ms are an egregious example...the share bag price varies 20% depending on the calendar,…

> as does Hilshire Farm Kielbasa...which now comes in 14 oz packages

Your grievance reminds me of this classic phone call:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4RNb3tt0LM

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

#778

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:16 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #533

mattmaroon wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, and I know this is a radical idea, but I think it could work, sell the hardware for more than it costs to make. I’m pretty happy with having a speaker in one of my room that can play whatever I want, all at the same time, and some basic assistant functionality. If they cost twice as much, I would still buy them.

>sell the hardware for more than it costs to make. That probably won't work because, at least according to Wikipedia, at some point 10k (!) people worked on Alexa. I'd start at the other end, maybe don't hire an entire Death Star worth of people to develop a voice assistant. That'd probably have saved a few billion here and there.

How can one even organize 10k people adding stuff to the same product?

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

#779

Post by pavel_lishin » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:41 PM UTC

fckgw wrote: post #83

arder wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's especially not how people shop at Amazon. You could feasibly imagine a shop where there is basically 1 version of each thing. Like the low cost supermarkets in the UK, they're efficient because they have very small product inventories. In that scenario you say "I'll buy some ketckup" and they only have 1 ketchup so you don't need to see it. You know the shop, you know what you're getting. Amazon is the polar opp…

If you say "add Heinz ketchup" or "add Bounty paper towels" then it works exactly how you describe. It's not really that complicated.

Except for everyone else saying they've received counterfeit goods, or wrong items based on Amazon's commingling strategy, etc.

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

#780

Post by smt88 » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:50 PM UTC

fuzztester wrote: post #527

smt88 wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alexa shopping was intended to be voice only . Of course people order things with their voice after they've seen them or read a menu.

how about IVR? or an advanced, literally voice-only version of it, where you don't even have to press any digit keys to respond to voice menus? heh. maybe I should become a consultant to Jeff, charge him gigabucks.

> how about IVR? or an advanced, literally voice-only version of it, where you don't even have to press any digit keys to respond to voice menus?

Again, no one buys things using only such an interface. I am middle aged and have never done, not even in pre-e-commerce times.

It is a non-existent behavior, and there was no reason to think Alexa could will it into existence.