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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

#841

Post by tgma »

Arn_Thor wrote: post #840
tgma wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, the particular retailer in question, actually offers at least "second year warranty" for free to products you purchase from them at no explicit additional cost, so you don't have to make a trade-off by summing all the halves of poor-tasting cakes. The point is there is a choice of retailers. You don't need the regulation hammer for everything.

So? You’re stuck with a warrantied product that you know has the same defect, unless they’ve changed things since last I saw it. What’s a two-year warranty on a product that breaks after three? The market is not fixing this particular issue. Sure you can choose another manufacturer next time but you’ve already been screwed by one. There was no need for that in the first place. Consumer laws are always a benefit!

I will almost always choose to buy a product if offered at a cheaper price if I can do so by declining longer warranties, so, no, it's not "always a benefit". It's not a fairy tale. Someone has to pay for things.

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

#842

Post by rickdeckard »

bombcar wrote: post #719
rickdeckard wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how true that is. The fact that the middle shelf of a supermarket is usually the first one to be empty is quite compelling evidence. > I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves. Just to validate that assumption: Would you say this is the same for toilet paper? Soap? garbage bag…

For most of the items like toilet paper and paper towels and soap, we have specific brands that we always get the only differences which size seems to be the cheapest to me at the time. The wife is very adamant about those.

This means, at one point in time these specific brands used the same techniques to turn you into their dream customer: A buyer who is loyal to them no matter what competitors and even the retailers are offering.

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

#843

Post by gambiting »

pmontra wrote: post #580
mlsu wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store Where I live price labels must carry the per liter or the per kilo price too. It's printed with a smaller font size but it's visible and it's often the only price I look at.

They have to do that in the UK too, but unfortunately the law doesn't seem to standardise the unit for these comparison values(or it does and is ignored).

If you have two packs of coke cans next to each other, and one gives you a price per 100ml, and the other per can, it doesn't help that much(yes you could multiply the value per 100ml by around 3x, but at a glance the difference isn't obvious).

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

#844

Post by epanchin »

leros wrote: post #468
8organicbits wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent, have you considered using the powder? It's much cheaper and you can pour the amount you need. The pods only come in large sizes so you're almost always going to be wasting detergent.

I've used the detergent before but I find it messy sometimes or it will clog the detergent door. I use the cheap Finish tabs now. The do just as well as the expensive pods.

I used pods for years after lots of clogged machines with powder.

Now I use powder again, cleans clothes so much better and haven’t experienced the same clogging as years ago.

I use white vinegar instead of fabric softener as I have sensitive skin, wash sheets on 90C which cleans the machine, and still use pods on short washes.

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

#845

Post by 3np »

bryananderson wrote: post #791
ysacfanboi wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be sure, it's not shadowy. You can track awarded contracts. You can track employment of persons from 3-5 letter agencies into private sector. You can look on Amazon Science page from 2019, where plans for "ambient intelligence" begin.

If you’re right, they did a stellar job of hiding it from the engineers working on the devices! Or maybe I’m one of the deep state cutouts. One never knows for sure.

Crazy true story: ANOM.

Engineers thought they were building a totally above-water secure corporate internal messaging app and service.

Actual users and customers were mostly organized crime.

Unbeknownst to anyone byut the founder and their lawyer, the whole thing was backdoored and all messages were forwarded in cleartext to the FBI (supposedly they started dark, got caught by the feds on something and struck a deal). They had an entire team of analysts with purpose-built tooling just to digest the material. Who knows what the same teams are working on today...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24163389/joseph-cox-dark-...

Put that next to the Snowden leaks and increasing global tensions - is the probability horizon widening?

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

#846

Post by d1sxeyes »

paledot wrote: post #704
pmontra wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember that around year 2000 a coworker from England told me that petrol pumps changed the prices from pounds per gallon to pounds per liter when the cost crossed the one pound mark. There is some malice in that too. Something like that could be the origin of using different units in those USA shops, not to cross some psychological threshold. It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol i…

Gallons are larger than litres, so in Canada you'll never find anything sold by the gallon. However, pounds are smaller than kilograms, so produce at the grocery store is commonly advertised with per-pound price, with the per-kilogram in small print.

Or it’s in weirdly sized containers. Like 227g of coffee, or something similar (UK, not Canada)

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

#847

Post by NotMichaelBay »

fuzztester wrote: post #815
NotMichaelBay wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IVR is not a good example because it's an annoying interface that people sometimes have to deal with when calling companies. It actually offers pretty poor UX, because users sometimes know what they want when calling but have to wait to hear the options before making a selection. But it's the best we have for over-the-phone interfaces. Are you someone who orders things using the Echo? If not, are you just playing dev…

I do know that IVR has poor UX, since I use it a good amount on my mobile phone. but did you notice that I also said: >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? above?

That already exists too, but it's also poor UX because it processes your response slower than a person would, and it sometimes misunderstands what you're saying or asks you to repeat.

For the sake of argument, we can imagine the Echo technology is advanced enough to be on par with speaking to a real person, like your own personal assistant that you trust.

I could see it being useful for recurring purchases when I run out of an item, although I (and I assume most people) get these items from the grocery store. For items you've never purchased before, I could also see it being useful if, like a personal assistant, it prepares a short list of items to choose from based on your purchasing preferences. But I would still rather see the list of the items before making the purchase.

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

#848

Post by bombcar »

hinkley wrote: post #750
bombcar wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how true that is. I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves.

Your choices are influenced by exposure, and I don’t mean Tuesday. I mean your entire childhood and adolescence as well. How did you decide on that brand, really? And what was your second choice? Even if you narrowed down to three options by pure rationalism the tiebreaker is often emotional. Then we convince ourselves the decision was objective even when it was not.

At least with TP the choice was blind, as I was buying whatever was cheapest and receiving complaints until I just started trying every brand until a specific one “won out”.

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

#849

Post by bombcar »

ghaff wrote: post #769
bombcar wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is just the group that wants them is minuscule. Nobody wants to admit it, but the smart TVs are what people want. You can buy dumb TVs that have no smart features or smart TVs with the smart feature can be completely ignored. Vizio is good for this, but nobody wants to pay for those except commercial units.

TV companies do try adding features that go beyond dumb display panels. Ask them how that worked for 3D, which people didn't adopt. Yes most TVs are "smart" but I'm pretty sure most people won't pay much of a premium and many use something like an Apple TV instead anyway.

The premium paid is the $20-50 that the TV manufacturer gets for preinstalling shit on their smart TV.

Which is why (currently) Vizio is my doge because it just turns on with ARC and shuts off when the Apple TV does so I don’t even know it’s smart.

The stupid Samsung (praise be to the toddler, destroyer of shit tech) wouldn’t even let you switch inputs without being connected to WiFi, or if it could I couldn’t figure it out.

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

#850

Post by bombcar »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #822
bombcar wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not only Instacart. The first target that I ever went to that had a grocery store had turkeys that had been labeled at $.25. Not $.25 a pound. I pointed it out to the cashier multiple times and she couldn’t understand what I was complaining about so eventually, I went home with my $.25 turkey.

I've seen fixed-price turkey before. But not 25 cents. On the flip side, many local places have gone to pricing bananas by the each.

Each has significant advantages - it means you do NOT need a state-certified scale for transactions; you just count.

It was obvious that that Target had never priced anything per pound before (it had just been remodeled to have a supermarket) and an employee fat-fingered the label. But the cashier had no recourse and I wasn't going to fight it hard.

(The same Target also had some clearance steaks for like ten cents a pound because they were close to expiration because none of the customers were expecting a supermarket in their target and weren’t buying perishables.)

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