I used to visit one of the NYC the Go stores daily until covid happened. It was cute and surgically clean, worked wonderfully, and their inventory management was much better then CVS and Duane Reade which often sell out of things and have empty shelves for days.
But nobody ever went there - no matter what time of the day I went, there would be one person doing inventory and stocking, two people standing by to help people install the Go app on their phones and explain the concept, and myself. Occasionally one other person being helped to install the app.
I think the issue was that everything there except Coca-Cola and Arizona tea cost significantly more then any of the surrounding stores, and if you hate quinoa you were SOL because it was in everything except drinks and sushi. If you are paying two thirds of your income or more on a Manhattan apartment you probably couldn’t afford to eat routinely from the Go store. Then Covid happened.
I really hate the guy who decided to put quinoa in everything. Because of that I only ever bought drinks there.
I don't know if they've evolved their approach, if my local store is an outlier, or if yours was an outlier, but I live near an Amazon store and go in a few times per week: the experience you describe doesn't match my experience. Over maybe 100 visits: there's usually a few people in there at minimum, the food is pretty good (as far as convenience food store goes) and prices are the same as similar stores. I sometimes have to dance through a crowd of people struggling to get in.
I wouldn't say the concept is a huge success because... it's a convenience store, and location is far more important than anything else, so there's a pretty low ceiling on what a convenience store can achieve beyond being in a good location, but it is certainly convenient.
(As far as business goes, they seem like a cute experiment that has escaped the pointless novelty stage but hasn't reached the industry disruption stage ('cause there isn't one) and so is floating aimlessly in the middle space where they probably can just about justify keeping them around.)
For a convenience store, they were missing items you'd find reliably in 7-11s, like charging cables or headphones, at least when i asked the guy at the front.
The food was good quality and very fast. It was basically a micro cafeteria for my building. I went there daily for the soda and sushi or salad until we had our catered lunches back. This is the Stewart location in Seattle... Which there isn't much food around right nowand is across the street from my office
I think "nobody ever went there" is difficult to gauge since most purchases are very quick. Typical purchase would take 30-60 seconds for me to make. Since people are quick in/quick out it seems less people shop there.
I'm a smoker who worked next to one of these stores, so I spent a good deal of time on the curb outside. I'd see multiple people enter and exit the CVS anytime I was out there, but I'm not sure I ever saw anyone do more than stand outside the Amazon Go trying to figure out what it was before moving on.
Isn't the whole point of Amazon generally, and these stores specifically in not having staff, that it's supposed to be cheaper? I think you've pinpointed the reason it failed, but I can't imagine why they thought it was going to succeed at those prices.
How did it fail? They just announced that eight stores were permanently closed after having been closed indefinitely, one of which was inside of an Amazon office that shut down last year.[1] It looks like they still have 29 Go stores open nationwide.[2]
If you have a US-wide convenience store chain with a multi-billion-dollar company behind it, and you have 29 stores after six years, well... I mean, it's not exactly a stand-out success, is it?
I assumed that every one of those stores were experiments or at least test jigs, and closing or opening them means nothing to anyone outside Amazon.
NYC is a tough market because there is so much competition. But if you're not trying to make money yet you can learn a lot. Perhaps they learnt that New Yorkers don't have the patience to install an app. You generally don't wait that long in a bodega -- I expect to wait longer inside a gas station on the Interstate!
well, Amazon Go isn't the only cashierless brand in Amazon's portfolio. It was the experimental small store. They're moving towards deploying the technology in Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh stores.
This reminds me that the San Francisco ones, if I remember correctly, are in a part of town that's been famously devoid of foot traffic since the pandemic.
San Francisco might be receptive to the concept, but it would have to be close to where people live, rather than where office workers used to go.
The only one I know in SF was down in the FiDi, and I can’t imagine that area had much traffic during the pandemic, and I question how much it has now.
I'm also seeing this tech in some airports in basically a linear contained store. Walk in, walk down the tunnel grab what you want, walk out. Seemed very efficient and airport appropriate
Sports venues, too. They have the Amazon version installed at Climate Pledge Arena and a few baseball stadiums, but I've seen something similar at a walk-up beer fridge during a Nets game at the Barclays Center.
My hunch is that the store wasn't meant to be particularly popular with lots of customers, it was meant to demonstrate technologies they wanted to sell to businesses.
Was Amazon actually the first customer for AWS (being a very early customer counts)? I've heard that they were, but I've also heard that the AWS guys designed for a different customer base first.
Like the eBay Pez story it makes sense and adds credibility for the narrative to be that Amazon was the first customer for AWS. But it feels like a very unamazon thing to do, given that so much of its customer base isn't running the kind of enterprise jobs that an Amazon scale company needs.
(Either way I imagine almost all of Amazon does run on AWS these days and I'm sure the transition took a long time)
I'm not sure it actually failed. These stores work by having AI track customer actions via camera, and over the last couple of years they've gotten a ton of data and domain knowledge from them. It isn't hard to imagine that's been leveraged in whatever's watching the cameras at Whole Foods.
The point of spending this massive amount of money on an automated store is to recoup that investment by opening lots of automated stores and make money in volume, taking advantage of your lower labor costs.
If they don't actually open at least hundreds of these then they've thrown away massive amounts of money on R&D they'll never get back, and the data they did accumulate isn't even particularly useful as it's in the context of a type of store they're not running at scale.
What kind of human interaction do you get out of some bored 15 year old girl at the supermarket? For me it doesn't go beyond "hello" and "bye". Maybe it's something to do with culture.
Anyway I looked up some data and over half the customers in my country use the self checkout now.
It could have been intentionally set to a more expensive price level, to manage the number of people using it. (To manage the "load" on the product development team, because if 2% of all users encounter some problems - or otherwise need support - then it's not scalable.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the long-term goal but in reality it was not yet cheaper. Automation often proves more difficult than one would expect.
This should be branded on the forehead of every CEO of a company that promises full self driving capabilities for cars before 2030 and cryptocurrency mass adoption, also before 2030.
They also recently opened cashierless Whole Food locations that use the same technology. I would not be surprised if some of these Gp stores were never intended to stay open but rather existed as a concept and to test ideas.
Maybe they were thinking about the immediate gratification cognitive bias. You might see the price on the shelf as you take each item from the shelf, but that doesn't translate to a total expense until you actually pay the Amazon bill at the end of the month.
This will be huge rant but as someone who worked right next to one of these in San Francisco I didn’t use it because it was obnoxiously annoying.
Speaking as someone technically inclined who writes code for a living, I don’t want to have to scan a QR code or use an App to go through some weird robot gate to buy a thing from the automated store. And that’s (me), not the average Joe Blow who can’t even figure out how to open the calculator app on his phone.
It was a terrible idea from the start and 10x more convenient to walk into a corner market, grab a drink and hand the cashier a few $1’s from my wallet. All this super advanced technology and it has zero real world benefit or time savings for normal human beings.
The food was just really, really bad. The ones near me stocked a bunch of pre made meals and they were all horrible. I can't wait for this tech to get into my grocery store, but the convenience stores were not it.
My intuition tells me this is the problem. I moved away from purchasing any type of grab and go food about ten years ago and I think a lot of consumers have joined me.
it might never make it, depends on where you live. where I live, they were banned because must accept cash, and they can't sell things like booze because id checks, so you end up having a bunch of humans around anyway, which kind of defeats the purpose of installing hundreds of cameras and other expensive systems.
Automated cash registers exist and are widely used, and are much simpler technologically than a scanner-less checkout. Amazon is choosing not to use them.
Why are people so weird about food? What about quinoa made it associated with rich yuppies? If you didn’t already know you would probably assume the main consumers would be dudes who want their chicken and carb to have even more protein.
Because nobody really ate it in the US and then it was everywhere it was a fad among rich yuppies. Yeah peasants ate it in South America (there were even newspaper editorials chastising yuppies for denying poor people their quinoa supply by eating it for frivolous reasons) but so what?
Food choice being a proxy and signal for class/culture is nothing new. You’d be hard pressed to find a cultural tradition that doesn’t speak to it.
While everyone needs sustenance, there are often several adequate choices about how to get it and making those choices become a way of communicating to others. And communicating is an defining and seemingly valuable part of being human.
It’s not really weird and it’s not going anywhere.
I share the same concerns about quinoa as OP. My guess is that it has to be made and served fresh, and these stores have it sitting on shelves for days at a time and it tastes funny after a while.
It become quite expensive for a few years, as it became popular at a greater rate than production increased. Bulk price seems to be down again now, though.
There's reports of prisoners complaining about the torture of being fed salmon all the time, because it used to be common food. People signal their class and status through everything, also through food.
Salmon not prepared, handled or stored properly or not served fresh can taste pretty bad and smell pretty bad compared to other meats. Seafood in general goes bad fast compared to beef or pork for example.
I used Blue Apron for a while and got an unreasonable amount of salmon for some reason. It's been almost 6 years and I can still barely eat salmon after that. So I can definitely understand where the prisoners were coming from on this one.
Things might have changed since then, but from what I recall while we had some options on what to pick, for example I could eliminate red meat entirely, there was no option to get meat and not get salmon. So pretty much every week at least one of the meals was salmon.
The lumber camp installation inside the Nordic Hertitage Museum (Seattle) shows a sample employee contract: Salmon will not be served more than 3 times per week.
At the time, salmon was the cheapest, most abundant source of protein. Poor people's food.
Lobster was once for prisoners and slaves or a poor mans food, while nowadays it's almost exactly the opposite. It'll be hard to find a prisoner or slave that gets to eat lobster.
Oysters were poor people food in the same era, and like now, many people ate them raw. It has less to do with culinary trends and much more to do with the relative productivity of the lobster fishery. (In recent years, the lobster fishery has been really productive, but prices have been pretty sticky[0].)
Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster has some great primary source research on the social status of eating shellfish through the years.
At the time when lobsters were fed to prisoners, they hadn’t yet figured out the boiling-them-alive trick, which is supposedly how you get lobster to taste good. I don’t know anything about oysters though.
Boiling lobster (and other things) alive is more about preventing food poisoning as bacteria appears quickly as soon as it's dead. You could kill a lobster right before cooking it (not boiled alive) and have the same flavor + reducing health risks.
It's not ironic. Agricultural methods have changed over the millennia and as a result the relative price of many foods has gone way down. See also white rice.
I'm not aware that quinoa is expensive. Some rich yuppies have the time for following lame food/health/lifestyle trends. However, doing that is lame at any income level. A proper bro dude will never eat yogurts sprinkled with acai berries and quinoa or whatever crap.
If you’re charging way more than surrounding stores going all-in on quinoa seems like it’s a sound strategy, or maybe would have been one in the the recent past.
The cashierless thing is fine, but is never going to be the reason people pick one store over another. The problem with Amazon Go is that they have been trying to target the "upscale convenience store" demographic which doesn't really exist. If getting rid of human labor lowers operating costs then why doesn't that reflect on the price tag on the shelf? Charging 2x what the CVS next door does defeats the purpose.
Moreover, if having an Amazon account is a requirement for entering the store then they are effectively targeting people who'd rather order stuff online. Their focus shouldn't have been on Amazon users but the rest of the world.
The funny thing is, I never got the impression it had less employees than a typical CVS. They were just either in the back keeping the items stocked on the shelves, helping customers feel comfortable with the the idea they just walk out, or keeping an eye on theft.
Actually, I'd be curious to know what the hiring situation looked like. Good employees would only stick around if they felt valued and paid fairly, otherwise they'd turn over. So you'd be left with the worst of the bunch. Since Amazon would have to find ways to keep retention up, they would likely have to pay market rate, or slightly above to attract willing people. That extra cost is definitely passed on to the customer.
Disregarding the prices for the sake of argument, I still prefer CVS as it just feels easier to navigate. CVS accumulated a half century of tiny little details that Amazon Go just doesn't have figured out yet.
> but is never going to be the reason people pick one store over another.
speak for yourself. I commonly wait in line at the walgreens near me for longer than I was shopping for. If I had the choice between walgreens and the exact same store with cashierless tech I'd never go to walgreens.
> The cashierless thing is fine, but is never going to be the reason people pick one store over another.
There is a Go-style Amazon Fresh very near my house. There are 4 other grocery stores roughly the same distance away. I find myself going to Amazon Fresh more often than not because of how easy it is to walk in, grab something, and walk out. They even put your shopping time on the emailed receipt - and I've made it through in less than a minute on more than one occasion.
Not sure if it's the same in the US but in Canada the convenience store is already inherently an upscale destination because of how much more everything costs compared to a supermarket.
Not sure about Canada, but in the US all convenience stores I've been to (except Amazon) sell a very narrow subset of goods found in a supermarket: mostly shitfood, cigarettes, booze and lottery tickets, maybe a small shelf with emergency supplies or a brown-looking banana. This attracts the type of crowd that enjoys consuming these goods.
Amazon, as I agree with the parent, was neither here nor there, not as well stocked as the CVS, and too weird/too hip for a 7-11.
> If getting rid of human labor lowers operating costs then why doesn't that reflect on the price tag on the shelf
Are they getting rid of human labor? Who is doing stocking, as needed cleanup, opening/closing, and overseeing all that?
I'm guessing humans are doing that. And as a customer. It seems to be most of what the people who also work as cashiers are doing, outsidd of a few rush periods where those other tasks, except emergency safety-necessary cleanup, aren’t happening or are deferred.
Seems to be its more likely Amazon is adding tech (which has a cost) which mainly serves to enable less efficient use of human labor.
CVS (a drug store) by me has also gotten rid of cashiers... but for self-checkout. So have Royal Farms, a regional gas station/convenience store chain. At both places, if you really try, you can maybe get a cashier at a single human cashier counter, but it's normally unstaffed, and everyone directed to the multiple self check out stations.
(I think USA readers know what i mean by self checkout station, but it's, where you can items yourself, and place them in bags yourself, and it yells at you if it doesn't detect the right weight of items placed in bags on a platform, and the whole thing is video taped).
Amazon's stre isn't really an alternative to cashiers, it's an alternative to universal self-checkout that everyone else is moving to -- accelerated by the pandemic, but still relatively early on the adoption curve.
I assume universal self-check-out does reduce staffing needs, which is why they are all moving to it?
I suspect the Amazon cashierless stores won't really take off until all their competition is universal self-checkout. (Which may never happen in say NYC, where you have so many independent very-low-overhead bodega-type stores. But in most places, the competition is more like CVS or Royal Farms).
Although I dunno, maybe I'm unusual in prefering human contact to self-checkout, something about the choices being self-checkout with a line or walk out of the store without checking out -- starts to make the Amazon option actually look like something you would want.
I always find that self-checkout system that everyone uses to be slower and clunky. The worst is at the grocery store where I have to search and find each item of produce, weigh it and then carefully place it in the bag. If any step in that flow goes slightly wrong, the system freezes and waits for an employee to come by and check what I'm doing.
However, in the "fast casual" space, where I'm able to order food items on a touch screen system, or a mobile website, I have actually become much happier to do that. Sometimes it takes me a while to know what I want and having access to pictures or longer descriptions helps me on my journey.
I'm not too worried about systems like completely replacing human contact though. I've seen similar attempts at sit-down restaurants and bars fail, likely because people go to those places expecting to interact with another human.
Self checkout is generally annoying in a few cases:
* You use reusable bags. In general most systems I've used dislike when you put a bag in the area with the weighing things, so now I have to spend double the time moving items around because they can't just go directly into the bag
* with fresh produce, the cashier will most likely have the most common items memorized and punch in the code without a hitch, whereas I have to navigate a clunky UI to figure out which kind of green onions to charge
* anything involving an ID check is much faster; a human is legally required to be there to verify, and the cashier is already conveniently there, as opposed to a self-checkout register where I have to wait for somebody to come to me
The only issue I have with them is limited area to put your bags. Is the space made for ants? In college I was a cashier so I still have a 6th sense about where UPC/QR codes are and I can buzz through items as fast as most cashiers, however the limited bagging areas are very annoying.
There are sit-down restaurants near me that now the only way to order is by scanning a QR code, which identifies your table, and ordering on a website. Someone drops your food off when it's ready, you've already paid with a credit card on the website. (You can add a tip).
Started during the pandemic, pretty sure it's never going away. (The folks who made those apps bet right).
I try to avoid them.
But in the area of CVS (USA-style drug stores) or Royal Farms (chain convenience store, often attached to a gas station) -- as well as grocery stores in general -- self-check-out is already predominant around me, and I also don't see it going away. I suspect you're right it will never totally win in the restaurant space, but in the grocery store and convenience store space, it pretty much already has over here.
> I assume universal self-check-out does reduce staffing needs, which is why they are all moving to it?
My grocery store has 8 self-checkout stations overseen by one employee, and like 10 or so regular checkout lanes. Advantages of self-checkout:
* Less employees to manage it (regular checkout usually has the cashier and a bagger, so we're looking at 1 employee vs 16 for the same number of open registers).
* A single entry line, so if one customer gets stuck the rest of the customers behind them aren't just standing there waiting, so as long as you know how to use self-checkout it's going to be faster.
* The conveyor belts on regular checkout are often pretty gross (dried sticky pop for example), while at self checkout you're putting your items directly into the bag after scanning them.
Yeah but I can't imagine a CVS/Walmart having people just walk in and pay for things with their app and happily move along. I more or less see the mass robberies that are currently happening in various metro areas, particularly in California. They'd empty the store in minutes.
I have actually had a very positive experience with cashier-less shopping – albeit not with Amazon Go and in the EU. As of now, it's been heavily benefited from never having to wait in a line (because the vast majority of people will still opt for the cashier lanes) but I actually found the UX (which in my case always included scanning of products like a cashier would) actually quite delightful and surprisingly never had any issues.
I can totally see this scaling quite nicely, considering stores will have to employ less personal, even if it it requires some additional store space, and I would be mildly surprised if cashiers were still a thing in 10 years. It increasingly seems like a job no one should be doing, in a combination of "bad for your health", "a waste of of human resources in a world where they are becoming rapidly scarce" and "boring" and I don't think they will, in the not so far future.
Walking out without even having to deal with those pesky self-service cash register, their sometimes finicky scales, and some supermarkets’ more than annoying rules, feels like a weird magic trick.
You would just walk in, pick stuff up, and walk out. That’s it.
Each time I couldn’t help but feel like I was shoplifting.
And then the invoice came in by email, always accurate.
Correct. It's pretty amazing when it works. I used to try and speedrun the Go store and see how fast it worked. My fastest visit was 9 seconds, receipt was 100% accurate.
Interesting. Another commenter made the point that retail stores already have massive surveillance systems in place, and that it was a good thing that they're being used non-punitively for once.
Me, I'm not so sure. I don't think I'd like being reminded that my every movement is being watched. At least when I go to a store, I completely forget about security because I'm, you know, not there to steal something. It doesn't even cross my mind.
Or maybe it's a good thing to remind people that they're constantly under surveillance? I dunno.
The Go stores completely hide the technology. All the cameras and sensors are tucked away behind shelves or painted black and mounted on the blacked-out ceiling.
I mean, with the Go stores there really is no concept of shoplifting since you need a payment method to walk in. Shoplifting would involve fooling the sensors and I suppose Amazon takes that as a cost of training their systems. There are many videos of people trying things to fool the system but I don't know how successful that is.
On a philosophical level I don't see any difference between this and, say, an employee following you with a clipboard and marking down everything you do. You're a customer in a private business and they can make any rule they want. Short of anonymous bartering for goods and services in an outdoor setting you really don't have much of a say. If Amazon hides the surveillance is it a trap, or just a way of making you feel more comfortable making impulse purchases?
> At least when I go to a store, I completely forget about security because I'm, you know, not there to steal something. It doesn't even cross my mind.
Have you never been to a store that occasionally plays an announcement saying "Security to section 3" or some such nonsense? Those are the best, because that is 100% BS. It's theater, designed to make the people who do shoplift think they're going to be caught. And a lot cheaper than actual security when you're operating a grocery store on tight margins.
Cameras and other sensors. You do need to scan a QR code from the app before coming in.
Some other comments mention having trouble with it, being billed for things they shouldn’t have.
But I personally never did. Even though I enjoyed fooling around and trying to trick it by picking stuff up just to put it back. Or coming together with someone else, both using my QR code, and picking stuff up separately. Never any issue. Although, obviously, ymmv.
It’s honestly among my most memorable experiences in the past two years.
> You would just walk in, pick stuff up, and walk out. That’s it.
In my friend's case it was walk in, spend a half hour working out the app issues, pick stuff up, and walk out, get charged for something you didn't take, go to Amazon to ask for a refund.
I find it amusing because I did spend quite some time trying to figure out how to get the QR code from the app.
But that’s because I usually don’t use Amazon US, and you need to change to the US store, in app, to get that qr code.
I feel like they could make things smoother, like Apple does when you go to an Apple Store. Or perhaps use a geofenced iOS wallet card? Unless the QR code is dynamic?
In Italy, it has been years, if not decades, that in a chain of large supermarkets there is a system where, when you enter the supermarket, you can pick up a barcode reader.
While you are doing your shopping, you scan your products. At the exit, you scan a QR code to end the shopping, you pay, and off you go.
The huge advantage, apart from no queues, is that you don't have to remove stuff from your cart, making it way, way quicker.
You can have a “random” check where everything will be scanned again by a real cashier.
No, that's the fancy part. You pick up a barcode reader at the entrance, something like [0]. When you pick something from the shelf, you scan it, and put in the cart. You don't remove the stuff from the cart until your car, so you can already fill up your bags in the cart!
Ah! You mean "remove" as in "after you bought and paid for it" and not "if you decide not to buy it" (as you would remove an article from a online shopping cart). Gotcha.
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you here but he probably meant that you don't need to remove the items from your cart in order to pay for them.
Old method: Place items in cart -> Arrive at checkout -> Take all the items out of the cart -> Scan all the items -> Put all items back cart -> Pay -> Go to car -> Take all items out of cart.
Scanner method: Scan item -> Place in cart -> Pay -> Go to car -> Take all items of out cart
You could even set up your bags in the cart so that when you pay everything's already bagged up.
Cutting out the repeated loading/unloading saves a decent amount of time and there's usually very little wait when you need to pay. Some stores in my country support using your phone as the barcode scanning device, it's very quick. I can imagine that at some point the phone could be used to handle the payment as well, at which point it'd be very close to the Amazon pick up and go model.
Hmm, while I've never bothered to use it (I'm happy with the self-checkouts) I'm 99% sure that the one at my local big Tesco doesn't require you to have the loyalty card; you just bring the scanner gadget to a special automatic checkout.
Personally I was too stingy for the initial 25€ fee, and then forgot about it, because in the meantime self-service proliferated and lines were much shorter there.
EDIT: also my experience with telecom companies in Italy made me distrustful of any sort of subscription program.
This is perhaps an Italian problem? In the UK loyalty cards are generally free, even if you were required to have one for the scan-as-you-shop systems. This used to be only Waitrose before the other supermarkets (Sainsburys, Tesco, etc) adopted them.
Same goes for Switzerland. Both Migros and Coop offer this, and both require a loyalty card (and also a payment method, obviously), but those are free too.
Not being snarky, I'm genuinely asking. What are the privacy concerns here? That your name is associated with the store you shop at? Wouldn't one also get that from their debit or credit card that most people use to pay for things nowadays?
At least in Europe, you need a suitable legal basis for processing under the GDPR, at least in theory (we do know however that GDPR enforcement is significantly lacking so this might be just a false sense of security as there are no consequences to breaching the regulation).
Signing up for a loyalty card would give them that legal basis, where as merely using your payment card wouldn't, so they theoretically shouldn't be stalking you. In practice, not giving them your name/contact details also means there's no chance of spam arriving from them. There's was never a moment I said "I wish my supermarket would contact me out of the blue for any reason" and I'd like to keep it that way.
There is exactly one reason why I wish a supermarket would contact me out of the blue: a recall, since they would in theory know what I purchased if I used the card, so no need to first hopefully hear about the recall, then try to figure out if it applies to me.
That said, I've never heard about that as a benefit from a market in the US, just discounts on food items (or put differently, upcharges if you don't use a card).
Not that we have GDPR-level protections here either.
For a number of years now our local grocery/everything store has operated a cashierless option. When you enter, you grab a handheld scanner, and scan as you go. It's pretty cool.
But it seems like nobody really uses it. And the two locations closest to me seem to have dropped it altogether. People are apparently more comfortable with just using old school self-checkout. Those have continued to proliferate, and account for way more than half the available checkout options.
Man, the old ones were better than the new ones my local Kroger has.
The new ones are like they took an old checkout stand and just put a self checkout kiosk in it, so you place your items on a belt...that moves them 5 feet away after you scan them.
So the flow is scan everything, checkout, then bag everything while people stare at you figuring out how to avoid doing what you're doing (and are angry at you for "wasting their time"), only for them to do the exact same thing.
I think it might be an issue of people not being used to the availability. They tend to only be available in bigger stores and you need to remember to pick them up when you start your shop.
At least one major supermarket where I am has started allowing you to use their app on your phone rather than the pick up scanners. I found it to be much more responsive than the handhelds and easier to interact with. I'm hoping they enhance it further in future by allowing payment via the phone as well.
You're right, but it's weird for such a tech-focused company to close stores in such a fashion, because we're used to the giant margins of tech. Apple has never closed that many stores that quickly.
Apple stores are famous for being some of the most profitable stores mankind has ever created. And there aren't that many of them.
These Amazon stores are just local convenience stores. They're selling candy bars. And Amazon is a much more "experimental" company than Apple -- they launch and shut down stuff all the time to iterate and learn. This isn't about penny-pinching or margins, it's about finding product-market fit.
It's a loss of 8 Go stores, but Amazon has been ramping up the Amazon Fresh grocery stores over the last 2 years. There are 33 Amazon Fresh stores from my count.
Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh are two distinct and different retail entities. The subject of the post is specifically Amazon Go. That being said, on the most recent earnings call Amazon also announced that they were "pausing" the rollout of Fresh stores.
“We’ve decided over the last year or so that we’re not going to expand the physical Fresh doors until we have that equation with differentiation and economic value that we like, but we're optimistic that we're going to find that in 2023,” [1]
And the 2 “closed” in seattle have been boarded up for some time, they are in an area that became even higher crime during Covid and never really recovered.
More accurately: they are in an area that dropped to zero foot traffic during covid and never really recovered. I think the literal number of people that go past the store on 6th is lower than the number of crimes committed in most areas.
I had to go to one to return a package. I couldn't get past the turnstiles because I don't use the app and don't know my password because I use a password manager. This meant I couldn't hand my parcel in at the counter.
The woman on the turnstile wouldn't let me in even when I explained the situation. So she went off and got a scanner to take my package. She didn't offer a receipt, and when I asked for one said it wasn't possible to give me one. I checked my email, and nothing there either. So I had no evidence I'd actually returned my item and she just said something like "It's in the system and never makes a mistake" or some similar rubbish.
While I was in there I saw several people walk just inside, faff around on their phones for 5 minutes then either give up or eventually get past the turnstiles. There's literally no benefit for customers unless you're shopping at busy times.
So then why attempt to go to a store that’s entirely based on using the app?
The store concept is based around your account - and you didn’t know your account details. The app can help avoid this, but you also refused to use the app.
How is this any different than someone who refuses to use their password to sign in to Amazon.com and complains about not being able to submit a return?
Or going to a store and not having your credit card but being annoyed that you can’t use your credit card?
It’s listed as a drop-off location when you’re returning a traditional web order. There’s no warning about it being an innavigable dystopia in the return flow. I had the same experience.
Is that an issue with the store concept, or an issue with not making it clear to users that it’s a non standard drop off location? I don’t see the lack of a warning reflecting on the actual store itself very strongly.
Also- why even bother with Amazon and trying to return packages etc if you have no easy way of getting your password? If this is too much of a hassle just use in person stores..
I’ve had drop off at mail shops locations be unexpectedly closed which is objectively worse than having a bad but possible return experience…..and never once claimed that “mail shops are an unmitigated failure”
Well it's definitely a failure of the Amazon cashier less store concept if they railroad you into doing your returns there but then it doesn't even work.
Sounds more like a failure on the returns drop off location listing. It seems that improving the filters and visibility of what you'll need to have to drop off returns in each location is a far less drastic solution than dropping some stores because otherwise it messes the website lists.
Amazon gives you very few choices on how to return items, oftentimes just 1 (and it'll be something bad like UPS pickup or Kohl's dropoff). They would need to change this too. The problem really is with the overall experience.
That's the experience with the Amazon website though, not the cashierless store. That's the point.
I personally don't like the website too much. Full of fakes, bad quality items everywhere. I only use it for cheap stuff I wouldn't return anyway. I do get that. Amazon go and whole foods are good though. Amazon go is very convenient and whole foods often have brands which I like and I don't easily find elsewhere. I also enjoy their fruit.
> Is that an issue with the store concept, or an issue with not making it clear to users that it’s a non standard drop off location?
It's a flaw with how Amazon communicated drop off locations for returns.
You would say, "I want to return this." And they would respond with, "Take it here!" no additional information about having to have an app.
If you take a return to The UPS Store, for example, you just bring the item you're returning and a little QR / UPC code they scan and you're done.
If you take a return to the Amazon store... they won't even let you get to the point where you can return without having an app on your phone. It was annoying.
Especially if you were taking someone else's package back with your own. Or... more accurately, returning something for your girlfriend since she bought 3 tops with the intent of only keeping one and had to do a return like every 3 days because of her shopping habits. And she just assumed it worked the same as returns at The UPS Store... and then when you got there to drop off the package you couldn't even sign in as her. Ha.
I feel the original posters frustration around this. For a company that has always said, "It's all about the customer experience..." it was REALLY BAD customer experience. And, because it wasn't me setting up the original returns, I got sent to the dumb little "make you log in before you can enter" store a few times by mistake.
I mean, I agree with you; it’s incomprehensible to me someone would go there without an app or at least their device logged into the Amazon website.
…but, let’s be charitable and say some has lost their phone or whatever; it’s not totally unreasonable to expect some kind of special process for it.
…turns out, there was a special process for it. Without a receipt. Oh well…
/shrug
Some people are just weird about it. Live and let live I say.
Lesson learnt I hope: next time, I hope they go somewhere else and let other people get on with their perfectly mundane shopping.
Just wait until they have facial recognition stores, and you’ll find people complaining they couldn’t get in while wearing high powered IR leds all over their heads. You just can’t win in some of these arguments.
It's somewhat unclear to me what you have to lose here. You're going to their retail store that is littered with cameras as a feature they heavily advertise. You're returning a package with your name and address on it. If typing your password into the turnstile is the last straw, that just seems weird to me.
But even that wasn't required. OP did their return successfully.
The loss of privacy comes not from actions taken at the Amazon store, but from having the app installed on the phone 24/7, including when you’re not at the Amazon store.
A somewhat similar example would be using Facebook purely through its Tor onion address, while simultaneously blocking facebook.com on your home network. The point is not to keep Meta from having any information about you, but to limit Meta to information it can acquire from your direct interactions, as opposed to the piles of unrelated browsing history it normally acquires through IP address correlation and Like buttons.
The situation has gotten better over time as the OS manufacturers have locked down permissions and made background operations more visible. But many privacy leaks have been only recently fixed or remain unfixed—for instance, it was only in 2021 that Android removed the ability for apps to collect the full list of installed apps. And there have been some real stinkers in the past, like when Facebook used its app to modify people’s contacts lists to make @facebook.com email addresses the primary. Companies that make money from aggregating data will always be on the cutting edge of these techniques compared to ordinary people. The app that’s not installed leaks no data at all, and I don’t blame anyone for avoiding apps that aren’t absolutely necessary.
The whole point of the go stores was to do retail in a different way, where you had to conform to their way or it wouldn't work. Yes, it was limiting for people that didn't have a phone with them or account info. Do all of these people befuddled by the phone/app requirement for go stores struggle when they go to pick up something at an amazon locker? It's basically the same thing, you can't "talk to someone" to get your locker opened that is on the back wall of the drugstore.
He was trying to return a package, not shop at the store. You can return Amazon packages at WholeFoods, Kohl’s and the UPS Store using the Amazon website on your phone — app not needed. I do it all the time because I refuse to use their app.
Never been that way for me. If I need to return something, they email me a QR code. The cashier at the UPS store scans that and takes my item, gives me a receipt, and I leave. I don't log into Amazon to get it.
Sure, but Amazon Go is, as the comment you replied to states, a store which literally is built to require an app to use. This argument is thrown out the window when you shop at a store which explicitly and from its inception has required this.
As the commenter stated,
> So then why attempt to go to a store that’s entirely based on using the app?
So let's say I don't shop at Amazon Go because I just never cared and had no idea what it was. But I am a frequent Amazon.com shopper. I return an Item and it tells me a list of places I can take it. I see Amazon Go listed just like the UPS store. Or just like any other drop location. So I go to the Amazon Go store just assuming it's like every other store in the entire world. Only to find it's closed to me because I didn't bring the app with me. Does that make any sense to people? Why is this so hard to figure out why someone might be confused when they get there to just drop off a goddamn box?
Why don't the people in the store have some flexibility to let you in? God forbid someone besides a computer has to make a decision.
Because if they do they'll probably get in trouble. There are cameras everywhere being monitored by computers and the incident will definitely be flagged somehow. If you steal something, then it's even worse. Why would they risk that? I think that's a minor issue with their drop off listings, which I suspect they will eventually fix.
Because it wasn't clear I needed to use an app (and therefore would require access to my password which I didn't have on my phone) since I was just trying to return a product.
Amazon lists lockers in buildings with controlled access as drop off points as well. It’s up to you to confirm you have access to the locker.
If you need an app to enter that store and you need to enter the store to return an item, then it’s pretty clear you need an app to return an item at that store.
> If you need an app to enter that store and you need to enter the store to return an item, then it’s pretty clear you need an app to return an item at that store.
You don't need an app to enter the store. You need an app to shop at the store. Presumably many classes of person enter the store for various non-shopping reasons without needing the app. It's not beyond the bounds of reason to imagine that for the non-shopping purpose of returning an unrelated item you may not need the shopping app to enter the store -- or, indeed, to imagine that for the product return flow the shoppers' entrance may not factor into the equation at all.
(I don't have a horse in this race, I just don't think you can usually apply the transitive property to the real world.)
> Amazon lists lockers in buildings with controlled access as drop off points as well. It’s up to you to confirm you have access to the locker.
I don’t think this makes the point you think it makes.
> If you need an app to enter that store and you need to enter the store to return an item, then it’s pretty clear you need an app to return an item at that store.
“Excuse me, you need to install the app on your phone to enter the store”, the store manager said to the paramedic responding to a call of an unconscious senior citizen on the floor of the Amazon Go store.
I think a big problem is that it shouldn't require an app to use.
There are plenty of cashierless stores which work just like any other store. They aren't exactly doing anything groundbreaking when it comes to that. They could also just put a regular payment terminal at the exit - the whole magic camera stuff would work just fine with it.
The end result is that they created an artificially cumbersome store concept, which does not provide a real benefit to the user. No wonder it isn't popular.
> I think a big problem is that it shouldn't require an app to use.
That’s not the issue that’s being discussed though. It’s a fair criticism, but that’s still irrelevant to the topic of Amazon Go stores requiring them and that you should therefore expect to need one if you want to enter a store.
> No wonder it isn't popular.
I wouldn’t deduce popularity from the closure of the stores. In Seattle at least, the stores had already been “temporarily” closed for a while and are in a fairly high-crime area of the city. [0] At the same time, they’re actively building larger suburban stores [1] which indicates a pivot, but that the format itself is still popular.
They’ve also added it to other venues like Climate Pledge Arena and Lumen Field in Seattle in the form of “Just Walk Out” [2]. You still need an Amazon One account to use it.
To just do a drop off requires all of that? That is quite simply dumb to the nth degree. I get not having the app would make a shopping experience difficult, but that's not what the op was attempting to do. So your whataboutism is just tone deaf
Or, just log in to your account in the browser and the return page has a QR code for the store employe to scan. I did a return a few weeks ago and I was in and out in 30 seconds, even though I don't use the app.
I always return/drop off at UPS. In and out in 5 minutes generally. But I guess UPS has been in the business of the extremely complicated "scan preprinted return label with hand held laser" game longer than Amazon.
Is the app required for a return or can you use your credit card to enter? I've always just used my credit card to enter but have never done a return at one.
The turnstiles are unfortunate. They send the wrong psychological messages -- complexity, exclusion, a barrier to entry. I can't imagine that they stop any actual thieves, considering how brazen shoplifters are these days.
And they really aren't necessary. The Amazon app has location services permission; it knows when I'm in the store. That's apparently enough to track me along with my purchases, and to flag anyone who tries to enter the store without the app. So what's the point of the turnstiles, exactly?
To keep people who don’t have a means to pay at that store by having the app installed and configured with their account away from the sales floor.
It’s one thing to stop a shoplifter at a normal store. Turnstiles reinforce the notion that this facility actively enforces access control.
This is similar to Passport Control line at the airport. If I have Mobile passport (MPC) app installed, I use a dedicated and usually empty lane. The same is true if I have my Global Entry card. It takes a couple of minutes to setup MPC while walking, but most people choose to wait in the main line.
I've been in the Aldi version of this. By scanning an app qr code at the barrier I am associating my appearance with that account at that time. I can also bring someone into the store with me on my account (by the slightly clunky process of passing my phone back over the barrier to them).
It's just the normal Amazon app, not anything special. And not to judge, but I think a password manager is really beneficial. You can even self-host it if you're concerned about security.
Well since the return process took the best part of 15 minutes for this state-of-the-art store, and I would have had no recourse if the refund didn't go through (since I had no proof I'd returned it), I won't be rushing back in a hurry. So in that respect it was a failure.
15 minutes to return something honestly seems… fine? Like I’ve gone to brick and mortar stores to return things and had it take upwards of an hour for the overworked customer service folks to make it through the line of folks
Only if monopolies are allowed to flourish, because, that's what the government basically is - a monopoly on all services for which there's no private counterparts.
You could always go for a US federalism type deal (but made more extreme), where you try and make the Federal government as minimal as possible and cities/towns as in in control as possible. Then there would be competition between cities for tax payers, with the ability to move limiting monopoly.
But that would probably be a negative for the same reason that bigger companies inevitably swallow smaller companies without government intervention: in the modern day economies of scale are everything. 10 companies that make 10,000 of something will generally lose to 1 company that makes 100,000. Monopolies will inevitably flourish without a strong government controlling them. (And moreover, in a globally connected world, if you kill all your monopolies it’s very possible another state that allowed their’s to flourish will have companies that can outcompete yours)
I’m not exactly going anywhere with this, I don’t have a great answer to what the best option is. You can try and force there to be 2-3 companies in every sphere…but that’s barely competition. You can try and regulate the massive companies…but almost inevitably large cash-rich employers end up with sway over the government. You can try for lots of local competition and shut out foreign companies…and lose out on the many benefits of free trade. You can try and cut a balance between all of the concerns, but it seems that whenever government tries for nuance it ends up creating a very expensive bureaucracy.
government is an organisation of humans within a geographical region that work for the benefit of all the other humans within that region. it's as simple as that. it's the exception not the rule for there to be no private competition; unless you live in Cuba, in which case you're describing communism, not government
Incorporation is just governments franchising. Before you have a massive central administration, you use "tax farmers" to collect revenue. Before you have the technical ability for a total centralization of surveillance and control, you have corporations.
can we infer from this that you believe there's some kind of central government conspiracy that never changes and is always pushing ahead with the exact same very specific plan?
Somehow comments like these are left to stand, so here's a counterpoint.
Amazon has emerged as an oligarch that will be broken up like the Bell system, Standard Oil, rail monopolies, and others before it - provided it and other oligarchs haven't fully compromised the government who hosts it. If Amazon, and the other FAANGs operating predatory surveiilance bureaucracies continue to exist in their current form in 4-5 years, we will know for sure the US is irrepairably compromised and once again, a generation will need to reckon with whether their self determination and survival is worth accepting sacrifices for.
Late stage capitalism is indeed dystopian, but if we call it early stage socialism somehow we're conspiracy theorists. The failure mode of the principled civilization created by the founders of the US reverts to the eurasian continential cultures and systems its citizens escaped. Those were pretty brutal, so much so that their own colonists revolted against them and achieved independence, and that's why american values are important to teach.
Every human endeavour fails without maintenance and upkeep. Being on the side of the forces of failure isn't the right side of history, it's forfeiting your humanity to the currents of inevitability.
If we're going to let tedious, low-effort tropes about "capitalism" stand, consider this one rebutted.
>if we call [late stage capitalism] early stage socialism somehow we're conspiracy theorists
sounds good to me. over time the world's wealth accumulates with the already wealthy. this makes sense, it's much easier to make money if you already have money. under the current system, inequality inexorably, unsustainably grows
last time we were here it took a pandemic, a massive depression and two world wars for serious change to occur. and even then it only lasted 30 years or so, until the Thatchers and Reagans rolled it all back. and here we are now. late stage capitalism once again. what will be the final domino before change this time? nuclear war? some kind of AI disaster? hyperinflation? Covid clearly wasn't enough.
it seems like kind of the people that would typically be concerning themselves with this kind of societal correction have been successfully distracted by bullshit culture wars
Seems like a very weird way of blaming a well defined system for your unwillingness to meet its prerequisites. It would take approximately a few minutes to discover that you need the app to get into the store and get that sorted. You are capable of this, just apparently too lazy or unwilling for some unclear reason. The return experience seems entirely orthogonal to the rest of the story here, and I'm not sure why you included it.
For those of us who managed to download the app and login to it, walking into the store, grabbing something off a shelf and walking out was extremely convenient in a way unmatched by any other store. Calling it an unmitigated disaster in your situation is like calling a movie a failure because you couldn't be bothered to go to a theater and see it. Just bizarre.
> Seems like a very weird way of blaming a well defined system for your unwillingness to meet its prerequisites.
> just apparently too lazy or unwilling for some unclear reason.
> Just bizarre.
This is a very emotionally manipulative and accusatory comment that certainly does not meet HN's guidelines, and doesn't actually address any of the problems that the GP stated.
No, I don't agree. I directly address the problems by arguing that they aren't actually problems. I feel I plainly stated the reality of the situation as it was described, and was not manipulative and accusatory in any way. I do not appreciate your characterization however.
I will likely not respond further as this will quickly become non constructive.
> I will likely not respond further as this will quickly become non constructive.
It was non-constructive from the moment you made your comment with highly manipulative phrases like "Seems like a very weird way of blaming a well defined system for your unwillingness to meet its prerequisites", "You are capable of this, just apparently too lazy or unwilling for some unclear reason", "For those of us who managed to", and "Just bizarre." Your comment does not meet the HN guidelines, was not constructive, and was downvoted and flagged accordingly.
> No, I don't agree. I directly address the problems by arguing that they aren't actually problems. I feel I plainly stated the reality of the situation as it was described, and was not manipulative and accusatory in any way. I do not appreciate your characterization however.
You can't argue that something isn't a problem when it is self-evident. Trying to do so is manipulative, regardless of whether or not you appreciate that fact.
This sounds like something I would expect to hear from an MBA, not an engineer.
> Seems like a very weird way of blaming a well defined system for your unwillingness to meet its prerequisites. It would take approximately a few minutes to discover that you need the app to get into the store and get that sorted. You are capable of this, just apparently too lazy or unwilling for some unclear reason.
Reread what you wrote, but this time try to think of a UI/UX issue that this comment _does not_ cover. Indeed, if we can start blaming the user for every UX trouble, this world would be a very different place, and not a place I would rather live in.
I shopped at their location at 30 rock. It was a mixed bag feeling. I was in awe of the technology, but at the same time I felt like I was being overly observed like in a prison.. I never went back, even though I work in the building.
In basically every retail store, and especially grocery/convenience stores, you are being observed by security cameras at literally every second. In every aisle.
This has been the case for decades. It's how they catch shoplifters.
I rather like the fact it can be used for customer convenience now, rather than just punitively.
I was on a jury for larceny from a Target. The footage they showed from so many points around the store made me feel creeped out with every store I go into now.
Target has a very impressive security system. There is a uuid on your receipt that can be used to track your movement within the store beginning from when you walked in
They also have a top forensic lab that some smaller law enforcement units rely on, and they do it for free!
Target's procedure is that they don't bother with small shoplifters, but they track the value of the items stolen. Once you hit the felony limit, they go into action and provide all the evidence to law enforcement.
In high school my friend was caught and arrested for stealing a bottle of luxury cosmetic shampoo (dumb teenager brain). Not cheap but certainly not felony limit
They track how much you've shoplifted over time and once it hits felony level amounts, then they charge you. From the below articles:
> "[If] you take a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff, they're gonna be like 'Bye gorgeous. You have a great day.'"
> However, the self-identified ex-employee said that there is a catch - if the shoplifting becomes a pattern, Target allegedly takes action, as they track stolen items.
> Hannah claimed that the company waits "until you're thousands and thousands of dollars in debt" to "put you behind bars."
> This would generally make the stealing a felony-level charge.
I guess you mean in any jurisdiction in the US. Where I live, jury trials are for the highest level of crimes (the translation would be felony I guess).
I'm not sure this clarification is necessary as we're in a discussion about NYC, on a US-based website, and the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution obviously applies within the US but not to other countries.
Maybe I've been living in California for too long, but I'm kind of shocked/confused at how someone stealing from a Target would go all the way to a jury trial. Surely the amount stolen was less than the cost of the police's time, the legal system, judges, attorneys, clerks, jurors, and so on. It would be more cost effective to simply have the local government reimburse Target for the loss.
That's not really how criminal justice works. If someone murders you, no money is lost. They aren't trying to figure out who killed you so they'll pay what you would have paid in taxes. They investigate and prosecute murders to discourage murder.
The same is mostly true for every crime. If you steal something of value and the insurance company gets reimbursed, that's just a bonus.
In CA, it's not shoplifting but rather "grand theft" after $950. Based on [1], target tracks you throughout the "shoplifting" to accumulate total losses and only goes after you once you hit "grand theft", where presumably the cost/benefit works out in their favor.
This lines up with what I've heard on TikTok and from in person conversations with kleptomaniacs. (It's not uncommon for folks to go on thieving sprees throughout a mall. They think they're getting off scott-free, but are being secretly followed by security. Once they hit $950 the big guns come out.)
Preventing crime isn't about cost-effectiveness in individual instances, it's about deterrence. Which is necessary for safety, but which is also "cost-effective" when you account for all the crime that has been deterred, if you tried to measure that in dollars somehow.
But people also have rights, including the right to a trial with a jury of peers. Innocent people can be wrongly accused of stealing large amounts. It's worth the expense of a jury trial to force the prosecution to justify their case and give the innocent the change to defend themselves. And cost effectiveness plays no role here.
I'd heard that they wait until losses reach above the felony threshold before prosecuting, documenting what particular individuals are stealing. Several videos about this had gone viral, and I'd heard about it from a friend but never looked into it until now.
From the Business Insider interview with several anonymous employees, though, the intent of the surveillance is more to catch high volume thieves, employees stealing, and career shoplifters, rather than folks stealing a few necessities. I could see most of their prosecutions rising to the felony threshold because of this tactic, since high volume is likely to cross the dollar amount for a felony. In other words, the intent is not being punitive for the sake of it, but actual loss prevention.
I tend to believe the anonymous sources, because they have nothing to gain from talking anonymously with the reporter, versus the influencers who are trying to accumulate followers. It's not a Les Miserables type situation.
A lot of the commenters on one particular video linked from the article seem to be pro-shoplifting, even without need, so there is to some extent people believing what they want to believe: https://www.tiktok.com/@jodessy/video/6899962247590743301
Examples:
"All I'm hearing is I have $499 in store credit" - 1700 likes
"I'm sorry but what?? I've stolen CELL PHONES from target" - 242 likes
"I def stole over $20k including but not limited to laptops, jbl speakers, ... only got probation so jokes on them!" - 103 likes
Anyway, I just thought I'd share this even though it's only tangentially related to the story since I'd just previously believed the viral rumor without really looking into it.
The constant filming from every angle is what makes me even more confused when you need to personally tell employees that something is broken somewhere, or the queue for the cash register is miles long, or some sales point isn't staffed and has people waiting. Everything is being watched, why aren't they reacting proactively?
Cameras film, people watch. They're not willing to pay more cashiers, they're certainly not willing to pay a bunch of people to stare at cameras all day. Instead it's zero, one or two people. They have enough on their plate just virtually following visually suspicious people through the store.
edit: I include zero because a lot of it is seeing that a "suspicious type" has entered the store, and running to the back room to watch their every move until they leave.
Large corporations assign people roles. The person watching the cameras is there to detect shoplifting. They have no stake in the success of the store.
If you want to see a shopkeeper care about that sort of thing, patronize an owner-operated small business.
I don't know about small, but the store I usually shop at is owner-operated (though part of a owner-coop in Germany), but they don't do it.
I get the point of shoplifting watchers not caring about queues, but am I just naive that this should be easy enough to solve with tech? You have lots of images from multiple directions, you know how the store looks empty, you can probably do a decent-enough image discovery to find out roughly where people are. If there are 15 people in front of the checkout, ring a small bell somewhere and have a person check whether it's time to open another checkout.
I can shop, scan the products while I walk through the shop with my phone, pay with the app and open a gate to bet let out with my purchased goods, but the computer can't use the camera signal to figure out how where people are?
The tech is redundant. The people working in the store can see with their eyes how long the queue is. They don't need a machine to ring a bell. They have a brain.
If you go into one of the Amazon grocery stores there's cameras literally every foot, possibly less. Way more than a traditional grocery store.
I don't know what exactly Amazon is trying to do though. Their prices aren't competitive and the "don't mess around with checking out" benefits aren't exactly a huge time saver, self checkout is a solved problem and doesn't take a ton of time.
Not being able to immediately see your receipt on exit is also a big downside - they charged me for something I put back on the shelf which makes me not want to go there either, I need to remember to check my receipt at some unknown later point in time and try to match it up with stuff that has probably already been put away.
All around IMO it's a worse grocery store to go to.
In typical stores (e.g. Walmart, Target, etc), most of those cameras housings don't contain cameras.
The main issue isn't that cameras are expensive, it is that monitoring that many cameras is expensive/impractical, and automated theft detection systems are still in their infancy. So they just target high value/common areas, and rely on deterrents (like people believing they have a lot of cameras, off-duty cops at the door, and PR around some super secret new technology).
Quite seriously: Stores really need to look into vending machines for certain items. In particular with how advanced Gift Card Theft-Clone-Return Activation fraud is. Thieves have message-boards not dissimilar to this where they can share "pro-tips," and things have become quite sophisticated.
> most of those cameras housings don't contain cameras
Do you have a source for that?
Because at my local grocery store for example, above the customer service area they have a whole wall of TV's showing the live camera feeds. They're all working.
My local convenience store has the live TV's too, by the cashier.
Your average Walmart has hundreds of camera housings. Every single aisle has a couple. The amount of cabling alone to populate them all simply doesn't exist (as you can often see, it is an open-box ceiling), and monitoring that many cameras is impractical (in particular for a store staffed at BARELY sustainable levels).
Just look at how understaffed the floor of these stores are, then ask yourself why they'd have a disproportionate number of loss-prevention staff working relative to the floor staff. A big store absolutely will have tens of cameras, but even all those may only have a single person for all (or zero persons depending on shifts/staffing).
That being said: Some stores have legitimately rolled out facial recognition to pick up known thieves as they enter the store. But that requires four-ish cameras and the technology is pretty turn-key.
Regardless of how many there are, I believe the point is not to monitor them live but to have recordings if the store wants to bring charges for something.
There are systems to follow the subject. I configured my work’s cameras to show a few key cameras on the live feed, but several more are quietly recording. When we review the footage, I can follow a subject across my entire array of cameras. I can track someone from the point they enter the parking lot with a plate camera.
I had facial recognition in a nightclub over a decade ago. Modern cameras’ capabilities are scary.
> Because at my local grocery store for example, above the customer service area they have a whole wall of TV's showing the live camera feeds.
Right, but is it recording, and does the camera feed go anywhere other than just up to the little monitor showing you the video?
It's like the recording they play once in a while over the PA that says "security to section 3" or whatever. It's theater. Because actual security costs real money and grocery stores are tight margins.
I mostly ignore such things, but Home Depot annoys me. I guess they have a more significant problem with theft, because some aisles have cameras with monitors and a bell that goes DING-DONG when you walk by, just to remind you they think you're a criminal. A few miles away there's even a Home Depot that has a portable tower-of-cameras out in the parking lot with bright lights and flashing blue lights on it, so you can further feel like a criminal. Luckily my local location doesn't feel the need to do that.
> In particular with how advanced Gift Card Theft-Clone-Return Activation fraud is
Completely self-inflicted problem, happy to see such schadenfreude unfold. There's already a gift card that's pretty much immune to fraud (or at the very least makes fraud the bank's problem): money.
Gift cards are horrible waste and scam and ultimately only benefit the store at the expense of the buyer or the recipient of the card - you're turning good, actual cash, in something that's less valuable because now it has usage restrictions on them.
From what I've read of Amazon Go's technology, literally every square inch of ceiling in them is occupied by some piece of technology to implement the cashierless checkout.
The liability equation is massively different on the pharmacy side where there are strict penalties involved with distributing controlled OTC meds even, let alone prescriptions and controlled prescriptions.
Nobody is going to come down and slap a fine on you for having a dozen cameras stolen. They very certainly will if that cough syrup wasn’t distributed correctly.
If they already lock up regulated medicine, then it costs them next to nothing to add high-value items to it. They have the space and the staff to handle it already.
Sure, but it's very strange when that threshhold seems to be in the $2-4 range.
Some US cities, you show up for a conference or something, walk to the corner store across from your hotel, and find that all of the toothbrushes and bags of trail mix are locked away.
How little are they paying these people who are doing the unlocking, that it's worthwhile for such small items?
I'd speculate they are doing some balance of what gets stolen the most, and price. But I'm in the UK and I mostly see higher priced items like brand name razor blades getting locked away.
it's interesting yea, they keep track of what you pick up and put back and sell that data to the company of the product you decided not to buy, its an opt out program thats really hard to find.
I hope this doesn't signal the end of the entire business model.
I know there are still speed bumps and problems to address, but cashier in a convenience store is one of those awful jobs I don't think anyone should have to do if we can avoid it.
I've had plenty of friends and family work those jobs, and briefly did it myself (at a gas station). Often these friends worked overnight, with the risk of being held up at 3am when no one is around. Usually it's just standing around waiting for a customer, with occasional chores to be done.
This is easy to say from the perspective of someone making tech money, but plenty of people (immigrants, minorities, people below the poverty line, people without a high school diploma) depend on such jobs and will gladly do them. Unless you also have a solution for employment for all such groups, "let's get rid of these jobs" comes off as way too simplistic. The benefits of automation are largely enjoyed by the upper classes, not the people who are displaced.
Who exactly is going to "just give" them this money? Big corporations? Why would they do that exactly? Under some law? What would the law say? That each company has to give some random people money? Or is it the government handing out the cash? Who all will they pay? Where will this money come from? What are the chances any of this actually gets voted for and enacted? How will it be enforced?
It's easy to create these fantasies in one's head, but think about it realistically for 5 seconds and it all breaks down.
Cashier jobs are entry level positions. As such they are also a means of advancement to other roles in retail. Countless people started as cashier and worked their way up to roles like customer services, buyer, store manager etc.
These jobs are also an opportunity for students to earn money and get work experience. But yes, "Let's destroy this job" simply because you don't like it?
Since your profile states you are a staff developer at Shopify, here's a Shopify link that outlines the value that the role of cashier brings to a retail environment:
This is a fallacy imo. The less mundane, mindnumbing and highly automated jobs we have, the better.
There is a reason why for example living human beings do not manually switch phone lines anymore when you make a phone call - you could rationalize it as much as you can, but frankly humans we born for better stuff.
If you are going to state something is fallacy then you might want to substantiate the fallacy. Instead all you provide is your opinion that the elimination of a class of jobs is for "the better."
What I have stated is that entry level positions are a means of advancement in retail environments. This based on empirical fact.
>"There is a reason why for example living human beings do not manually switch phone lines anymore when you make a phone call"
No, the reason "human beings do not manually switch phone lines anymore" is because the growth of subscriber lines exceeded the capacity for manual switching in Central Offices. It had nothing to do with nature of the job.
This is significant in that the HQ2 bidding process was basically a competition by local governments to see who could give Amazon the largest tax breaks and other incentives so that Amazon would choose their city as the site its location. See:
They just opened an Amazon Go store in LA (Woodland Hills) at the beginning of the year. From my unscientific sample of personal visits it seems to be getting decent traffic, is well run, and is a much nicer place to quickly grab something on a walk over a gas station or a market that only takes cash.
For whatever reason there's also a Whole Foods and an Amazon Fresh near by as well. Woodland Hills is well stocked with Amazon retail!
I think these were some of the first, smaller stores from Amazon Go and probably very expensive to operate. It makes sense the the larger stores with newer hardware would be better financially.
I do not like Amazon, but I absolutely loved the Amazon Go stores. When I worked in the city, it very quickly became part of my routine to stop by to pick up breakfast or a snack. Being able to walk in and walk out reduced an enormous amount of friction and I honestly wish this experiment worked.
Amazon is such an anti-human company. From their warehouses to their tech workers they are terrible against people. That said, if people like these stores then good for them.
I am honestly shocked and confused when people enjoy this. Or targeted ads or *GPT generated content. I am not anti-tech by any means. Maybe I am just not impressed and awed enough by these technologies to overlook the downsides?
I don't support "all progress is good progress" mentality with tech. I find these cashierless stores lazy and needlessly compromising on privacy. Just have a man-trap (locking revolving door for the unaware) that lets you in after you scan a card or speak/type your amazon id and give shoppers a smart cart thay detects what you put in and use cameras only to enforce all items you take are put in the cart. That and facial recognition privacy protection will get me to go there (but hey, i order everything for delivery anyways).
They can do better while protecting consumers but choose not to because of the precedent set allowing them to track movements on a store as a feature. So why can't this be used to keep you safe in apartment complexes, parking lots (car theives),etc... soon facial recognition will be id'ing me everywhere I go! The laws to protect people are nowhere near where they should be. So what are my choices? Move to the arctic and build an igloo?
Much to my surprise, I genuinely loved the experience im the Amazon Go stores. I was super skeptical, but it is really convenient. I didn’t know how much I hate checkout lines or self-service checkout counters until I visited an Amazon Go store.
Amazon also owns Ring which can be used to protect your home (although it’s certainly less sophisticated). I own a Ring home security system and I’m very fond of it. Same for my parents when they go for their vacation home - big game changer for their ease of mind. Now, I’m not super fond of how Ring shared footage without consent in some countries with authorities; but it’s probably the company I trust most with my personal data footage etc. And I deem them more capable in protecting my data.
You would be so disappointed to know that people value their convenience and 5 minutes of fame more than anything.
See TikTok, it captures so much data, and it's publicly known, Even TikTok doesn't deny it. Yet people dont stop using it.
Companies are just taking advantage of it. See the positive comments here. It almost boils down to I hate checkout lines, so I want the convenience of being tracked, let my face expressions/action on seeing a product be allowed to train some Ad engine etc etc.
We trade off a lot of personal data for transactions we conduct daily using tech, yet we are utterly surprised when that is used against us.
Amazon bought One Medical. Buying cheese every day? Guess who is gonna soon get pre diagnosed with heart issues or marked with higher premiums.
Others will laugh at my comment, but I won't be surprised, at least.
>I am honestly shocked and confused when people enjoy this. Or targeted ads or *GPT generated content. I am not anti-tech by any means. Maybe I am just not impressed and awed enough by these technologies to overlook the downsides?
Some people believe these are amazing things. They tell other people that these are amazing things, so more people believe it, or at least accept it as default. Whereas I look at these things and think I live in bizarro-world with how much other people seem to enjoy them.
When the Go store first opened local to me, I had a go at trying to steal from it.
I was very impressed, sneaking stuff off the shelf, passing it between multiple people and a few other obvious tactics all get noticed. Only way I've found to defeat it is to throw stuff into your cart from over 3 feet away. I never repeated it after I got my free bag of chips, but it was fun breaking it
Amazon Go seems incredibly overengineered. Why is this superior than a portable scanning plus toggleable RFIDs that disable items on scan and alarm gates? Cameras everywhere and computer vision seems overkill.
The Decathlon (sporting equipment stores like REI or MEC) stores in Spain (and other countries, I’m sure) have RFID self checkout and it works way better than the type where you scan everything yourself. There’s a big “basket”, you put in your items, and they’re just detected as they are put in. Then you just pay and go. They have the little barcode scanner guns for the bulky items that don’t fit in the “basket”.
In the midwest we have a giant store called Woodman's that just does low-tech self-checkout lanes and 24-hour stores... Self-checkout is just you doing the scanning and paying yourself... Aside from a high-precision scale and one worker for all of the self-checkout lanes (to assist in errors), it's more or less honor system that just works for the most part.
My mother-in-law operates the self-checkout lanes at a Kroger brand store in the midwest. The honor system definitely does not work there. Shoplifting is through the roof over the past couple years. It's gotten so bad that management is debating shutting off the self-checkout lanes.
A few months ago she was pepper sprayed after confronting a shoplifter who had an entire cart of things, but only scanned and paid for 3.
Then last month, someone came in and just wheeled out the entire tobacco shelving unit with a dolly.
These are just a couple egregious examples. We hear other shoplifting stories from her every week.
The police don't respond to shoplifting calls anymore, and the thieves know it. Employees are now instructed to not confront shoplifters in any way after she got pepper sprayed.
It's a total free for all. My mother-in-law estimates the theft to be $10,000 per day at her store.
That's not really a self-checkout problem though is it. I mean, SF has stores that don't have self-checkout but the thieves that come in and wheel out a tobacco shelving unit are not taking advantage of "self-checkout"... they are taking advantage of the fact that 1) there is no proper security and 2) the police don't respond.
My point is that anywhere that unmanned stores with cameras can work, so would self-checkout.
I think there's an important difference between unmanned and self checkout which you missed from the post you replied to: the person who scans a few items but steals others at a self checkout. In a no checkout store you already identified yourself in order to get inside and the store knows what you picked up and took out.
Their high precision scale works remarkably well for this though. It forces you to put all your stuff on the scale and so it becomes obvious to the one store clerk if you leave stuff in your cart that means you haven't scanned/paid for them.
That seems intolerably high but I’ve never worked a day in a grocery store. Do grocery stores generate enough revenue to sustain? Fifty two-hundred dollar carts of cash is a lot to let go.
Looking up statistics, shrinkage rates at a grocery store are typically 2-3%. Theft appears to be about ⅓ of shrinkage (food spoilage is a bigger cause than shoplifting), so about 1% of revenue amounts to theft on average.
The larger supermarkets seem to pull in on the order $100-150k/day in revenues, with the median half of that.
So... yeah, the numbers don't add up. If it's $10k/day, even at an extremely large store, that's 6-7% theft rate. Given that grocers aren't high-margin, that's stark enough to wipe out any revenue. $1k/day theft rate is a more reasonable estimation.
A lot of people seem to have been raised with this attitude that pretty theft from a ruthless retail corporation is some kind of unthinkable sin.
My mom and dad regularly lifted from wally world to make sure our family had enough. Always taught my siblings and I that stealing from regular people or small local/ethical businesses is wrong, but against enormous manifestations of brazen greed it was was open season. As I grow older and more crotchety old person assertive I realize it's more true than ever, and much more even than when I was in need of baby food 40 years ago.
Trusting customers to key in the correct product code when using the scale is foolish though. Supposedly there's a store out there that sold more bananas in weight through the self-checkout than they had shipped in.
>Cameras everywhere and computer vision seems overkill.
If the goal is cashierless, why not just have a store full of vending machines? You pick what you want, tap your card or phone, then you get it, then walk out.
This might generate more buyer friction[1]. Grabbing an item from a shelf is very easily reversible. But when you push a button for a vending machine to dispense something, it's not obvious how to undo that. So you will hesitate more.
Also, when people change their minds about buying something, stores need to re-shelve that product. That's probably more labor intensive for vending machines than for regular shelves. For that matter, stocking it in the first place is probably more labor intensive.
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[1] Every obstacle you encounter, even a tiny inconvenience, will reduce the odds that you go through with a purchase.
I'm guessing the longer term interest Amazon has is to use these stores to generate a dataset for their computer vision system, which they could license as a loss prevention technology to other stores
That hasn't been true in a very long time. A walk through any major airport shows otherwise. The Best Buy Express vending machine is 10 years old at this point and that is just one of many brands now that have similar offerings. See:
Those are all uniform packages that meet strict requirements. Grocery stores, including Amazon cashierless stores, sell things like produce.
Picking an apple, banana, or bunch of grapes off a shelf is more difficult for a machine. The items are not uniform in size or shape. For a lot of produce, no mechanized handling system exists for quantities smaller than a bushel.
If you look at the photo at the top of the first link you can very clearly see that almost every single row has different size package footprints, not only from row but even between packages in the same row. There is no uniformity present. Further from the second link, there is no uniformity from machine to machine which is fundamentally no different the variation and shelf configuration from from shelf to shelf or aisle to aisle in a traditional brick and mortar retail store.
Having a package is a significant uniformity. Having a conveyable shape is a significant uniformity. Produce is often packaged only in bushel quantities, which are not the quantities that shoppers purchase.
"Vending machines you can walk into" is, amusingly, how I describe them to folks.
There is a bit of a misunderstanding on staffing, though. There are still about as many people as you would need for a grocery store of that size, from what I remember. They just don't work the checkout line. So, you get all of the restocking and similar capabilities that machines just can't do, yet.
That would be way less convenient than Amazon stores, having to pick what you want on a screen and then wait for it is much slower than just grabbing it off a shelf.
At that point, a self checkout machine is probably better in every way.
Cost. RFIDs have to be manufactured and I think those add up fast. The antenna can be made of etched copper, but with prices as they can be, it might aslo be in aluminum or conductive ink. That many tags on that many products day after day.. I would imagine the commodity prices would deeply impact their use.
I find it nice that you don't have to scan anything, use a shopping cart or even move items from one place to another. Just grab it from the shelf, put in your backpack and go. Sure you have to scan your phone when you come in but you'd have to do that when you pay anyway.
So, it's much more convenient, you'd never be embarrassed because you forgot to scan something or the scan didn't work properly. Security guards won't be profiling you as you walk around. I find it great.
It provides value that less sophisticated solutions don't. So, I'd consider it well engineered.
I always find app-based stuff like this odd. It adds a level of completely unnecessary friction to the process. I drove an EV for a while and the same issue came up - none of them had card/cash payments. It was a significant contributor to me giving it up.
They could just as easily have set it up such that I could walk in and they could figure out what I've bought and just let me tap a card or put cash/coins into a self service machine at the end to open the turnstile. No tappy tap = no open turnstile.
But they don't, because... I dunno. Less data? I mean, they could facially recognise me and track me that way if they really wanted.
If Amazon the website required an app then I wouldn't use it. I bet they'd lose out on a significant number of customers.
My experience as a non local is that the stores are impossible to enter with an international Amazon account. The Austrian app store only gives you the amazon.de app which doesn’t have the code to enter the store.
I vividly recall seeing a feature on TV in the mid 80s where they were discussing future technologies for the year 2000. One of them was the cashier-less store: We'd all put in our grocery items in the carts and then the payment would be automagically calculated, no cashier or manual scanning necessary. They assumed it would be microchip based, the chip embedded in packaging. What ever happened to this? Why did this idea fail?
We have the tech to do this. They library system where I am put RFID tags in all the books. You put the all books you want in a special tray at checkout. (There is still a checkout counter with a machine.) The computer will instantly display all the books you have on the tray. You touch the screen to confirm all the books and it will check them out and print a paper receipt.
They can probably eliminate the checkout too, maybe. I imagine that they do it so that the user (you) can confirm what items the computer thinks they wanted to check out.
Once you want to checkout, you drop everything you bought into a big bin near the checkout area - it calculates the total based on all RFID tags, you pay, take everything and leave.
Imo this is better than checkout in the carts - don't need to attach a payment POS and carry bags to every single cart lol.
It didn't: Uniqlo and Decathlon, to name a few, use exactly this concept at their self checkouts.
However, because RFID chips are too weak to be reliably read in bulk and at a distance, you need to deposit your items one by one in a special trough that scans them. And this is only possible because both Uniqlo and Decathlon are 100% house brand and can thus ensure the chips are present in everything, which is why random corner stores or supermarkets can't copy them.
Uniqlo stores are doing this, when you check out, you just put all the stuff you grabbed into a bin and the system will tell you the total price right away.
Decathlon does this (at least in the stores near me). You put the items into a bin at the self-checkout and everything is recognized.
My guess is that that the time savings aren't large enough to offset the cost for stores with lower-cost goods (especially since most time-intensive products in a supermarket are things like produce that needs to be weighed and self-service pastry).
This actually exists. There is a pilot Aldi in the Netherlands.
The idea does not fail in countries with labour shortages. Even with increased shoplifting- it is simply too asinine employing people sitting on their ass all day scanning groceries. Labour costs real money here.
I know this is about the Amazon Go stores, but there's a "Just Walk Out Shopping" Amazon Fresh store near me. Before I went it sounded like something I would like. But no.
I could give a list of different features I disliked, but in the end, it kind of comes down to the fact that the overall vibe is "The Opposite of Trader Joe's".
I used one of these stores often in Chicago. The very very frustrating part for me was their limited hours. It seems like if you only have 1-2 staff members you could stay open very late and still be profitable. I'm pretty sure the loop store I went to often closed at 7.
A better approach could be to mimic Japan and install vending machines. You walk into the store and see walls of vending machines. Shrink goes to zero. Restocking the machines becomes the only job. They can augment their Whole Foods chain first.
I've always wondered: Do we really need to put people in shops?
We have had vending machines for centuries, most kinds of shops (that don't need a social aspect) could easily just be sealed warehouses with product dispensers dotted outside the walls.
There are very few items I would ever buy from such a store. You can't really get a good look at the items in a vending machine, and you can't put an item back.
There’s at least one item I look at the nutrition facts for every time I go to the store. Even if the vast majority of my items are the same, it only takes one item where I have not memorized the nutrition facts to make that an inconvenience. Or any produce, where people like to judge quality and ripeness. And also, many people like to browse for new products.
I guess it is possible, but it sounds like it’s all the disadvantages of Instacart with all of the disadvantages of going to the store.
I don't want to buy bruised apples or cracked eggs or overripe melons. I'm not going to go to a second store just for, I don't know, milk and dish soap.
I'm really bummed about this! I wanted to be able to just go in a store and grab a juice or an apple and then leave the store. I don't live in NYC or San Fran or Seattle, but I'd hoped these stores would spread.
I never went into one of those stores, but I'm down in Florida, and my apartment building has what they call a "sundry shop". It's connected to the main office but it's 24 hours - you get in with an electronic key. It's like a little convenience store, like a corner store in NYC. But the checkout is self-service, and there's a camera.
My grandparents used to live in a small village (rural U.K.). The village shop was tiny, just a few shelves and a fridge with basics. No checkout, no cameras, often no volunteer (definitely no paid staff). They just wrote down what they took in a little book and paid at the end of the month.
In small enough groups where there is a good sense of community it’s amazing what can work.
It doesn't really even have to be all that small, just high trust. There are road-side produce stands that run on the honor system all over the rural American southeast. They have no idea who will show up. Many are on country highways, even.
after going to one quite regularly its quite funny when people don't know whats happening. they scan their amazon app, grab something, then walk out and look super confused where they're supposed to pay for what they've grabbed
A vending machine for an apple is a bad idea. Apples rot, especially in enclosed spaces. Customers want to be able to pick the best looking apple from a pile of apples.
They don't want to fiddle around with a payment system that might reject their five dollar bill for being too wrinkled, or fail to accurately read their card, just to be served a bruised apple at the end of it.
Think about other even more perishable items, like seafood. Do you want a fish vending machine? Or do you want to be able to examine your food before you decide to purchase it?
Vending machines work well for nonperishables. Grocery stores work well for perishable items.
Grocery stores have a massive time cost for picking up your items, so it makes sense to get a lot of things at once, which only compounds the waiting problem for other customers.
Amazon's solution gets rid of that time cost. The only part you have to worry about is the trouble of getting in the door, and that takes the same amount of time no matter how many items people are buying. The barrier to entry would be being technologically sophisticated enough to download an app on your phone. Some people don't want to do that, and they're free to shop at other stores.
The Amazon Go stores aren't expensive over-engineered vending machines. There's still a time cost to using a vending machine. The innovative part is saving people time.
Vending machines offer some overhead of horizontal space for the payment system over store refrigerators, but if you want to stock many products you can just put several vending machines next to each other.
Maybe the largest extra expense of vending machines is that store refrigerators are _deeper_ which means they need to be restocked less, or that the most popular products can take up less 'slots' because the total number of drinks per slots is larger.
I walk past an amazon go store on my way to work. It's super convenient if I need something, I can be in and out within less than 30 seconds. The problem is I rarely have anything I need to buy on my commute.
It's a cool and useful technology but limited if they cannot expand it to Whole Foods stores (in terms of size and inventory). That's usually where the long lines are.
Used one of these in an airport and it was fine. Felt like a novelty in that instance. I didn’t need a particular app but they did employ a person to explain and help… but it was a small enough booth he could’ve just been the cashier.
Probably 20-30 seconds faster than a normal place? I actually do like the idea in general but the implementation is ok at best and I didn’t even have to use yet-another-proprietary-app
I hope a similar style store opens in my area. I stop by a CVS nearby decently often but the self checkout counters are a pain. I wonder if it could be made into an optional system though where if you don't identify on entry then it assumes you want a traditional shopping experience. Otherwise existing chains are going to find it hard to switch to this type of model if they wanted to.
I've always found the concept of these puzzling; I find interacting with the folks in stores, even if it's merely exchanging a smile and a friendly word with the cashier, to be a joy in the day to day chores; from the first I heard of these, I thought it tragic that some would want to go there. Horn&Hardart left a lasting memory, but I haven't felt it was nostalgia.
On the other hand, I detest waiting in line for 5 minutes to pay, as happens frequently in e.g. CVS. Or 10 minutes at the supermarket.
It's not worth 5-10 minutes of my time for small talk with a cashier, especially when half the time the cashier isn't even in a social mood. (I'm sure I wouldn't be either half the time if it were my job.)
What I don't get is that Amazon Go stores are closed on weekends (at least in Seattle). Seems like they're going for the in-office workers, I guess that would be a reason start closing them.
I had a really positive experience visiting when they first opened up in Seattle. Felt like the future. Wish they started to outfit the Whole Foods all over more with them.
I visited the store in the Ogilvie Train Station when it first opened and, honestly, I felt like I was inside a vending machine, given how everything is stocked on the shelves.
Perhaps people in NYC and SF are opting more for cash. I lived in both cities and would walk right past these and into the good old bodegas that prefer cash which is all I would ever pay with.
I went to one of these last year and it's was basically a gas station convenience store without the gas or convenience. Poorly stocked, weirdly expensive, and, well, shabby.
If there are three cities in America where you don't want cashierless anything that is NYC, San Francisco and Seattle. Unless you want to test your insurance policy.
I don't have the stats, but seems to me that majority of purchases at convenience stores is alcohol.
In CA, you cannot buy alcohol at self-service POS.
That spells doom for Amazon Go.
So they are closing all 4 stores in San Francisco. Makes sense given how downtown where all 4 were has turned into a ghost town, and the generalized lawlessness and pillage with impunity by shoplifters can't have helped.
They built a Go store into their office in Bellevue,WA - it's got the freezers and shelves but it hasn't opened. They built a Four Star store into their HQ in Seattle, and they closed it a year later. There's several Amazon Books stores in the area, GONE.
It's like their push for retail is a total dead-end.
Despite these closures,the company will continue to open new Amazon Go stores,
When asked why Amazon has decided to shutter the eight stores in Seattle, New York City and San Francisco, the spokesperson said that like with any retailer, Amazon periodically assesses its portfolio of stores and makes optimization decisions along the way.
I went to one in SoCal and was terrified.
the entrance they asked me you to scan my prime membership, and told me that I can then fill out my basket - and basically walk out with my stuff without checkout - just moving it into a bag on the way out.
I asked how they know what’s in my basket to charge me for it and they said that there are cameras watching me the whole time and noting what I take off the shelf and put in it.
I was beyond creeped out by the whole experience. Never went to that store again.
Knowing that they not only watch what I’m buying but also recording and analyzing my gate, motion, gaze, microecpressions etc freaked me out.
Amazon’s vision to cattle-ize humanity for profit is not attractive to me.
One thing to note is that other retailers do that too - track people around stores with Bluetooth and I assume other methods, noting where shoppers linger, what they buy and what they hesitate on. But they don't tell us they do this.
Not that you're wrong, but there's definitely a huge perceptual difference when one method is done visually and another is done anonymously.
Amazon Go's system knows who I am, what item I grab off the shelf, put back and then what I ultimately leave with. There's so much personal information they gather from that order and it shows up downstream across their other products.
Bluetooth tracking can't attach a face to that and that is a far more appropriate use of tracking. It aids restocking decisions, promotions, etc, that I have no problem participating in.
My point is, if I like a particular item, I don't mind the store knowing that and keeping it stocked, and paired with other items I buy together with it. I just don't want the store to know my emotional state, confusion, and speed at which I grabbed an item.
Sure, that's true, but we don't know that the other stores aren't also using visual tracking and analysis. Also, it's not anonymous since they match shoppers to real world identities with store apps, wifi, shopper loyalty cards and probably payment methods.
Indeed, it makes you wonder why this is not the case already. It does not seem like an especially hard thing to do.
It makes you wonder why they decided this was a good idea in the first place. Seemed sort of obvious that they'd have a shoplifting problem in a region where it's already not too uncommon.
Perhaps they assumed the surveillance would deter thieves, but surveillance is only a deterrence if the local police can afford to enforce the law effectively.
Eh? In principle these should be less vulnerable to shoplifting than a normal convenience store with automatic checkouts. It's more likely just because, well, it's not clearly better than a normal convenience store with automatic checkouts.
But nobody ever went there - no matter what time of the day I went, there would be one person doing inventory and stocking, two people standing by to help people install the Go app on their phones and explain the concept, and myself. Occasionally one other person being helped to install the app.
I think the issue was that everything there except Coca-Cola and Arizona tea cost significantly more then any of the surrounding stores, and if you hate quinoa you were SOL because it was in everything except drinks and sushi. If you are paying two thirds of your income or more on a Manhattan apartment you probably couldn’t afford to eat routinely from the Go store. Then Covid happened.
I really hate the guy who decided to put quinoa in everything. Because of that I only ever bought drinks there.