https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/food/amazon-fresh-go-closures
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-to-shut-down-all-...
I used one in San Francisco once because I wanted to try it out. It was honestly a rather flawless experience for me and I liked it because the scan gate and minders (it was when it launched - I don't know if they kept them) kept the shoplifters out. Shoplifters are unpleasant to share a store with. Unsurprisingly, those who skip some social norms also skip other ones.
Anyway, I didn't go back after the first time because it was more like a corner store than a grocery store. Bags of chips and sandwiches in plastic boxes and so on. Overall, the modern Whole Foods is a much better experience. Guards at the entrance to keep unpleasant people out, a fairly quick check-out experience, and the ability to scan your palm instead of having to pull out a credit card or tap your watch.
About the only improvement that I would personally like is a Fast Shopper bonus where you scan something that maps you to your Amazon Prime profile and if you finish checking out fast you get access to a faster lane. The only downside is when people with large bags of things insist on using the self check-out counters and then stand there having mis-scanned items.
Speeding up check-out is a personal life improvement but realistically it would not cause me to shop more, so I understand discontinuing the store.
Doesn’t surprise me. I frequently shop at Amazon Fresh in store and it’s a mediocre experience. It’s a poorly run store with no visible manager making sure things are in order. You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders and they aren’t helpful. I always find expired groceries/produce on the shelf so I have to spend a lot of extra time inspecting each item. The only reason I put up with their nonsense is that some of their prices are insane and they have easy returns, for example $0.85 for a box of Barilla pasta. They actually don’t accept returns in store and just refund you automatically in the app (Returnless returns). It’s pretty silly and rife for abuse.
I also found a loophole with the Amazon.com return grocery credit. The systems are separate for the $10 off $40 coupon and you just scan a QR code in the store to get it. It turns out you can just take a photo of their QR code and reuse it over and over again.
I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores. There were instances of their prices being lower than Walmart or other budget stores. The avocados were $0.25 each and carrots were half price of ones in Safeway, even ground beef was weirdly cheap. One time as a comparison I put the same items in my cart for Amazon fresh and Walmart and it was $21 at Amazon fresh and $36 at Walmart. WAY cheaper than Instacart too.
> operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores
Wouldn't surprise me. I know a guy who invented a device for truckers that became ubiquitous in truck stops across the US. This would've been like 2014.
He refused to sell on Amazon, so Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price, until he agreed to list (at which point they dropped their competing product)
Such tactics sound… illegal
[flagged]
Why am I seeing this?
Predatory pricing is illegal in the US, but difficult to prosecute under the existing laws.
Did he have a patent?
Can you link to the patent?
Do you want to go up against whatever patent portfolio AMZN has?
I'm not aware of any Amazon product lines or organizations that specializes in devices for truckers. Can you provide a listing?
huh. What's the product listing? I don't think this story rings true.
Amazon currently sells fake fuses that have probably already killed people.
Amazon cares just slightly more about breaking the law then they about killing people.
> I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition
iirc that's exactly what Amazon did to destroy diapers.com over a decade ago
Amazon did not destroy diapers.com.
Diapers.com aka Quidsi was already operating at a loss when it was acquired by Amazon. It's whole business model was using VC-funding to offer products below sustainable costs with the goal of eventually jacking up prices once they drove out smaller/local competitors. Amazon used its own business model against it by dropping prices even lower, knowing that the VC investors couldn't afford it.
Walmart passed on buying Quidsi when Walmart was thinking about launching its own e-commerce platform because the business model was unsustainable. Walmart decided they would rather spend several hundred millions building out their own platform then to buy an existing website with millions of customers.
Walmart bought out jet.com
This is basically the playbook of every "disruptive technology" startup or FAANG initiative of a similar stripe - set prices incredibly low to bleed out competition and gain market share, then raise them once you are in the dominant market position.
At a certain point it's not about technology anymore, but access to cheap finance. See also: Uber.
Maybe the one where you flagged down a car on the street, but you could always call to book a taxi and those companies worked exactly like Uber — over the phone, because it was the pre–app era.
Nobody on this forum believes in startups or technology anymore.
Kessler syndrome, but every debris piece is a Starlink transceiver.
That's literally their MO. They've been doing that forever.
Walmart isn't a budget grocery store, though. Its prices are higher than actual grocery stores (like Safeway.) Also, everyone is WAY cheaper than Instacart.
>Walmart isn't a budget grocery store,
The answer to this is complex, it has any number of products that are cheaper than products of similar quality from any other store. Places like Safeway/Aldi typically beat on price on very generic items that may or may not have similar quality.
The biggest thing to watch for at Walmart is price discrimination dependent on location. Back in the days I used to shop with them (read made less money) picking a store in a poorer neighborhood could save $10 to $30 dollars on the same car of items.
I found Lowes (hardware) to be one of the worst about this. I lived in an area with 4 Lowes, and never shopped at my local one because of how much more expensive everything was, and never clearance. I'm not talking a couple dollars, in some cases 4x the price of one just 15 minutes away.
Not in the areas of California I frequent. Walmart is usually the cheapest around here; heck, even Target beats Safeway on some items. On the other hand, Walmart is also usually the worst at stock rotation.
Wegmans opened a store at the Brooklyn Navy Yard just to show people in NYC what a real supermarket looks like. I mean, you might be impressed with Whole Foods if all you know are those bodegas that have around NYC but if you've been to a real supermarket Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and such are not impressive at all.
This comment completely misunderstands why NYC (and the core of most major cities) is not impressed by a supermarket.
Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
You get the highest quality products from people who specialize in those products.
Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days.
Thats why Wegmans opened a store in Brooklyn Navy Yards in an area that’s close to no mass transit, because supermarkets are valuable in car centric areas and not as useful in walkable dense neighborhood.
> the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days.
Yeah, so for me that changed after having kids. Once I had to spend 30 minutes a day running around to various stores because we were always running out of everything it wasn't fun anymore.
Furthermore, specialist stores charge higher prices for the same goods because they don't have the pricing power of a large supermarket. It makes a material difference once you have a family.
Urban supermarkets are great because they give you the option of getting everything in one place when you're pressed for time, and they're usually not as large as suburban ones. Mine has a direct entrance from the subway station, so I don't even have to go aboveground.
> Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk,
Once you get used to have everything at a walking distance, you wonder how you could put up with having to drive to a supermarket.
Two are the main advantages.
The first is that you don't need to plan much in advance. Want to make hamburger tonight ? Cross the street, get meat from the butcher, get a couple of tomatoes and salad from the grocery store and the bread, and you are ready to go. I used to shop once a week and I had to have an idea of what I wanted to cook every day for the whole week.
The second is that this way you regularly eat really fresh food. My shopping list is always stuff like "two tomatoes", "three apples", "fish for tonight", "a loaf of bread". My fridge is mostly empty.
But does your drive look like this https://www.reddit.com/r/Suburbanhell/comments/13r7fd3/whats...
And can taxes from the community actually pay for the infrastructure to support this, or do they need subsidies because taxes per sqft are abysmally low and car infrastructure costs astronomically high? https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023-7-6-stop-subsidizin...
just to let you know you're not alone, i'm in the same situation. I have a Tom Thumb 5-7min away depending on if i get caught in the one stop light. It has everything I need, capers to tampons, and i have the store memorized. There's also a pharmacy inside which is convenient. This is just SW of downtown Dallas TX ( maybe 3 miles ).
I'm a Costco booster, and I have storage space. One of the greatest feelings for me is returning from a Costco and knowing I have enough in the house to last a month for a family of four.
But your second point is spot-on: this strategy has to be augmented by weekly (or more) runs to get fresh food. I like to make fried rice with vegetables, so having a local market is essential.
Small car towns are more or less the same. I drive 10 minutes to work, the stores are all on the way. It's easy to stop anytime.
The more local one is medium sized and I've been shopping there for years, so I don't really have to find anything.
I should go to the butcher that's a few blocks away more often though.
One of the things I hated most about living in NYC was grocery shopping.
Having to walk meant you could only practically buy in small quantities, and visiting different places for different things was super annoying and inefficient.
Moving out and being able to take my car to the georcery store once a week and get everything I needed was one of the best quality of life upgrades from leaving.
I did the exact opposite and and it was most impactful quality of life upgrade I've ever done. I eat fresher and healthier food, I walk more, and I'm not tempted to snack on my stockpile of accumulated food.
Again go to Queens or Brooklyn plenty of suburban size and shape supermarkets.
While that is true for the quality-based things like deli/baker, there is one advantage to massive grocery stores that the stores inside the city can't compete with: selection. Every time I leave the city, I make a point to go to a suburban grocery store and walk down their massive spacious aisles to find new/different products that simply aren't stocked inside the city because shelf space is so limited. Entire aisles dedicated to chips!
100% no subway link to Manhattan, pretty car friendly and mostly two or three family attached homes.
> all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
Is that really a thing though? I feel like arguing for quality is a strong argument, but between walking between small shops at the end of my work day and just doing one supermarket feels more efficient.
Finding stuff within a supermarket is also not hard once you've been once or twice.
It’s what I’ve done in Seattle for decades and this isn’t even a very big city
> Is that really a thing though?
You need to be able to afford it as it it is more expensive, but yes it is.
I have the luck to live in a well served area: I have a Carrefour supermarket at about 200m from home yet I have 3 small markets closer than that. If I have to buy one or two things it doesn't matter if the supermarket is cheaper, in my mind spending 10 euros instead of 9 or 8 is worth it if it takes 5 minutes instead of 15. Moreover instead of having to interact with a bored cashier or an automated checkout machine, I will have a chat with a real person (yes, a cashier is a real person too, but most of the time doesn't act like one) . He will ask me how I am doing, put my stuff in the shopping bag and gasp smile at me. I think we lost sight of how those small things makes our life better.
The interesting part is, I always have to buy just 2-3 things because if it takes 5 minutes, whenever I need I just go out and buy it, so half of my shopping is not at the "big" supermarket.
I have to add though: I work from home, so for me shopping means having to go out just for that. Maybe if I was working at an office the dynamics would be different as I could just stop at a supermarket one the way home.
That really, really depends what neighborhood you live in. Bakeries and especially butchers don't exist everywhere, and sometimes they (bakeries) suck. It's not Paris or Rome. And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn). Some neighborhoods are both densely populated and a desert for quality, leaving only bodegas and overpriced artisanal boutiques.
I'm with the original poster here about Wegmans. In London you have Waitrose, which is 10,000 times better than Trader Joe's/Whole Foods and has fresh bread, alcohol, a butcher, etc etc and way more all in one place.
NYC is gar-bage when it comes to groceries.
If you spend a few minutes in the suburbs, even a rural exoburb outside of NYC, you'll drive to the supermarket and take a deep calming breath. You're not supposed to say driving could ever be better than a walkable city, but if time is precious to you and you value not hauling bags back and forth across multiple stores, you'll be way way happier.
I predicted someone would say something about that topic, though I didn't think someone would use the term gentrified anymore. That's why I qualified it as "And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn)".
That said Flushing is not only a long commute, I don't know if it would qualify as "pre-gentrified", would it?
You aren't renting walking distance to a butcher baker and candlestick maker for less than $3K for a studio. That's an aspirational lifestyle for a few neighborhoods.
That'd be nice. Except...
I only speak for myself here, but: While it would almost certainly be very easy for a sufficiently-motivated person to track me down and knock on my front door, I don't like broadcasting the details of where I am.
I might occasionally mention something like "some small city in Ohio [of many hundreds]" when that seems pertinent to the context, but that's about the extent of what anyone will ever get out of me on a public forum.
Y'all generally seem to be rather swell here, but this is a very public place that gets crawled approximately-instantly by search engines, and the world doesn't need to know what block I live on or the name of the bodega on the corner that I might feel like writing about.
It’s normal in London to live a few min walk to bakery, grocery, deli, so on but we still have supermarkets - from smaller ones to large hypermarkets. Everyone uses them and they sell good quality products.
The same is true in every European city I’ve been to. There’s a large hypermarket a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe and you can hardly say Parisians don’t have a good choice of local bakeries, cheesemongers and butchers.
It’s true you won’t usually get something like a Target or Costco in the central area, but in the slightly further out suburbs (e.g. Z2 in London) where most people actually live, Europe is full of supermarkets.
That's the dream, but isn't currently an option for most people in the USA. And it's usually only availabil in very expensive to live areas.
If you live in a Sienfield rerun in Manhattan the city looks like your comment. There are plenty of conventional supermarkets in NYC they just don't have a huge parking lot.
> Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
Except that you don't. Typically, you have maybe one small store selling random junk reasonably close to you. At high prices, because there's no local competition.
There's a reason the current NYC mayor campaigned on opening government-run stores.
There's probably 5 CVS locations (and 3 Chase private banking lobbies) between your subway stop and your apartment :)
I don't know the Wegman's in NY at all, but the one I used to use in the Boston area was ... okay?
It was a good grocery store with decent produce, a good frozen section, some nice specialty items, and some decent prepared meals. I would put it at roughly the early-2010s era of Whole Foods with slightly better prices. Now that I'm no longer working near there, I don't miss it much.
So I've never understood the hype. But I've also been told that the Boston stores were pretty mediocre compared to the ones in NY and especially Ithaca.
If you live in MA the standard options are Star Market and Stop and Shop, right? New England supermarket chains are already perfect.
I think the comment you are replying to is playing up a specific characteristic of, like, deep-in-the-city NYC (it looks like Wegmans has a place in downtown Manhattan?). I also read it as slightly tongue-in-cheek. People in NYC know what grocery stores look like, I think. They just don’t fit in dense areas.
Was there ever good coffee in NYC? I was a kid in the 90’s so I wouldn’t remember any time before. I grew up in NE and am convinced we
1) just haven’t really ever been on the forefront of coffee
2) invented Dunkin Donuts to flip off the coffee world (I know people sometimes say it is good but I think they are just being contrarian (although I will agree it is really not much worse than, or is just as good as, Starbucks))
Anyway, I’m pretty glad for the explosion of hobbyist coffee, it is pretty easy to make a good espresso at home these days.
NY State vs NYC mismatch here. I expect nobody in NYC goes to Ithaca for groceries... :)
FWIW, I’m not confused about the two; I’m quite familiar with the NYC metro region.
I haven’t heard any Wegman’s fans comment on their NYC stores. I’ve heard multiple people wax poetic about Wegmans who frequented the Princeton-area store and the Ithaca store.
From my experience, I don’t get it, but I haven’t spent substantial time in either of those stores.
Strong disagree, and I used to go to that Wegmans regularly. It's fine. Solid market. Whole Foods is equally fine, and excels in some ways. Neither is obviously better.
Wegmans is obviously better than Whole Foods, and its not even close. You can much more easily buy normal food at normal prices at Wegmans than Whole Foods. Whole foods has very large, strange gaps in staples.
Whole Foods has always felt like Trader Joe’s - a great place to shop but few will shop only there - even for groceries.
In my experience, it's less gaps and more lack of mainstream brands. The example that comes to mind is ketchup. At Whole Foods I can get generic store brand ketchup or a variety of fancy ketchups that cost 3-10x as much, but they don't have any variety of basic Heinz on the shelf. This "mid-market" gap is common for virtually every product category.
I'm not OP, but don't go to WF looking for stuff like ibuprophen or sudafed.
I can list like five mass market supermarkets in NYC. Western Beef, Food Bazaar H Mart, City Fresh the regional chains like Stop and Shop Target.
I think this is why Lidl is taking off in parts of the US.
Wegmans is good, but I find Whole Foods to have much better quality of products. Whole Foods used to be even better, we will see how Amazon manages it.
I'm in Wegmans' home town, and the enshittification process has hit them hard in recent years.
What changes have you noticed?
In Ithaca the coffee went downhill lately, that's for sure. On the other hand, my favorite drip coffee anywhere is made by machines that brew it by the cup.
That isn't something isolated to Wegmans or even supermarkets.
This[0] image basically says it all, and quality has only further nosedived since 2020.
[0]https://i.ibb.co/Zz2Mb6rF/e0vb5drbeh0e1.jpg
In general, it seems like the pareto products dont exist anymore, the midrange has basically dropped out for daily products and it's been bifurcated. If quality is a scale from 1-100, most places sell a 1, a 10, or you go to an artisanal place for a 90, for exorbitant prices.
But in the past a supermarket or toy store would have sold you an 80 for a reasonable price.
What sucks even more is that for example due to the cacao shortage, lots of products now contain less cacao for the same price. And usually down from 500g/250g to something like 485g/235g. Shrinkflation.
But, when cacao becomes cheaper or inflation stabilizes, companies don't think "let's push the quality back up for the same price", no, they'll pocket the difference. The same is planned to happen if Trump's tariffs get struck down. Businesses will get a huge refund, but the customers that got the costs passed along won't see a penny.
No! Wegmans was amazing when in lived in NY. We would actually go out of our way to shop at Wegmans and plan our weekend around it.
Yeah, it'd be our first stop whenever we came home from a trip; we even got Christmas presents from the store one year for being (embarassingly) one of their higher-spend customers. The magic has gone; places like Kroeger and Whole Food have caught up.
What's so special about Wegmans? I have one a mile away but I almost never go there. It's a little pricey and they don't have anything particularly special. Although I pretty much never go to Whole Foods either. Amazon Fresh isn't (wasn't) near me so I only went to one once, also nothing special.
Give me a Kroger with a Murray's Cheese counter thank you!
Interestingly, we only went to our local Amazon Fresh store a handful of times but it was always a perfectly fine experience. It seemed reasonably clean, well-stocked, and well-organized. Other than those new self-checkout shopping carts (which also actually worked well, even weighing produce), it was fairly indistinguishable from other grocery stores in our area.
Amazon Go, on the other hand, always seemed like a dead man walking. It's a fun novelty to check out and grab some junk food, but it must be far more expensive to build and run than a 7-Eleven, and it's not even meaningfully more convenient.
I should also add that we've been pretty happy Amazon Fresh delivery customers for a couple of years now (we resisted regular grocery delivery for a long time...until we had a child).
You should also know that the AI that enabled the Amazon Go experience was the Actually Indians type of AI. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...
They had Amazon Go by Grand Central Terminal and it was great to grab a snack and drink on the way to the train, with no worry about being delayed by the checkout line. I figured they had people in India verifying things but saw no reason to care as a customer.
> You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders
To be fair I've noticed this in multiple supermarket chains the last few years. Although they aren't usually employees, they are instacart runners or whatever.
I go fairly often to a Sprouts grocery store and there are times I need to avoid multiple people clearly doing an Instacart run with 2+ carts full of items.
Shelves are often emptier than they used to be also at these times.
Having watched these people when I do my own shopping, it made me realise, if i ever needed get someone to shop for me, it wouldn't be on a busy weekend.
Walmart is particularly bad for this: The employees do the picking and they have giant carts that monopolize the aisle. You're stuck waiting for them to scan and bag 8-10 popular items before you can get in there and grab the one thing you need.
The delivery shoppers are especially bad at whole foods. There really must be a critical mass where having a grocery warehouse makes more sense than these people meandering around.
See Ocado, although things aren't going so well for them at the moment.
Yep, my local Amazon Fresh store felt like it was already a distribution center with the cold fluorescent lighting, gray shelves and gray concrete floors.
lol are you me? There was also a loophole with the coupons where it only used the total before discounts to validate the limit was met, so you could buy something that was $10 or 2 for $15, but the 2 would count as $20 towards your $40 limit.
I moved away from Seattle a while back so I'm not sure if they ever closed that one. I really miss getting all those cheap groceries!
For a while, they had two stackable 10-off-40 coupons, and a 2-off-10 coupon, and it activated $36, so you could buy $36 worth of groceries for $14.
I always found the "Amazon 4-Star" name funny. Presumably when it was first pitched internally it was called "Amazon 5-Star", then they realised that meant they basically couldn't sell anything, since nothing popular gets a full 5 stars. So they changed it to "4-Star", which just sounds awkward, and lacks the suggestion of top-quality that "5-Star" would. Instead, it's like the "Amazon Not-too-bad" store. I was amazed that they actually went ahead with it.
When did naming things have to reflect reality? ie it's "Burger King" and not "Bearable Burger"
It was a pretty good burger until 2013 when they changed the machine they used to cook the burgers. Now it's worse than McD's and that's saying something.
Wait that explains so much! Do you know more about the change?
I've been weirded out by the fact that their jr burger buns are now super shiny as if they are spraying something on them. I know this is processed food, but no burger bun should be able to reflect sunlight the way their burgers now do...
Yeah it used to really taste flame grilled. It's pretty low rent nowadays - to the point where I wouldn't go there even if desperate.
who is this appointed this beef monarch anyway?
The Lady of the Fry Oil?
Dairy Queen
That's pretty funny, in the old movie Coming to America there was a scene parodying something similar but it was McDowells vs McDonalds.
We had a Burger Queen in town when I was growing up. They closed in I think the early to mid 80s and became a Hardees.
I'm gonna be 90 and Burger King/Dairy Queen puns are still going to make me laugh.
Shoulda just bit the bullet and gone with "4.8-star." I'm sure they talked about it and yeah it's goofy and awkward but it would get the meaning across and maybe show a bit of a sense of humor and that's exactly why they never ever could.
Good sense of humor at Amazon... Yeah right.
They could have followed the lead of TV manufacturers and called it "5 Star Class" (4.5 star)
Yeah it’s kinda like a dollar store but instead of focusing on the upside (cost) it reminded you of the downside (quality).
Also funny because there are many product categories on amazon where if its not above 4.5 its probably shit
"'Amazon Not-too-bad' store" sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe a too-clever work around for the 5-Star problem would be to call it "100-Star," which would be 4 in binary notation. Or they could call it "5th-Star" since 4 stars is the fifth number of stars b/c the range of starts is zero indexed.
Ordinal : Cardinal
1 : 0
2 : 1
3 : 2
4 : 3
5 : 4
6 : 5The range of stars is very deliberately NOT zero indexed, you cannot rate a product below 1.
> On April 4, 2024, it was revealed that Amazon's "Just Walk Out" technology was supported by approximately 1,000 Indian workers who manually reviewed transactions. Despite claims of being fully automated through computer vision, a significant portion of transactions required this manual verification. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Go )
Wonder how much of this is due to economics since computer vision tech never reached the expected performance + outsourced workers got (relatively) much more expensive after COVID.
It's great that they faced essentially no consequences for this. A sure sign that we have a functional and sane market.
Why would they face consequences? Every store has video surveillance that can be reviewed.
They trusted their tech enough to accept the false-positive rate, then worked to determine / validate their false positive rate with manual review, and iterate their models with the data.
From a consumer perspective the point is that you can "just walk out". They delivered that.
If the stock price goes down, I won’t be surprised if there’s a shareholder lawsuit claiming that they misrepresented their level of AI achievement and that lead to this write-off by keeping operating costs and error rates high. The whole business model really assumed that they could undercut competitors by lower staffing.
Their initial advertising claimed near full automation by their "AI" system when, in reality, they had people manually handling around 70% of the transactions.
I get that this is a message board for YC, so lying about your company's tech is considered almost a virtue but that is an unreasonably big lie to tell without getting your hand-slapped by some regulatory body or investor backlash.
Well that's because, again, it was indeed algorithms doing the work, and the people were only used to verify / train the system, after the fact. People keep, intentionally, conflating the two things, doing everything in their power to say (or strongly imply), that the people involved were managing the orders in real time, which is a lie. You are the one pushing misinformation here.
That's great but they could have been honest up-front and said "The plan is that this is eventually fully-automated but we estimate that it needs supervised training for X amount of time in order to handle Y% of transactions automatically".
But this is tech and you just lie because hardly anyone in the investor class knows enough to call you out on it or they are just going with the lie to make a buck off of other rubes.
Privacy concerns aside, I thought it was a cool project. I agree that “convenience store” was probably not the best target but I think it was an effective enough proof of concept (creating a decent sized chain of them probably wasn’t the best idea) . I’ve seen the system used more effectively in smaller situations like stadium concessions, where the duration of the transactions needs to be very short to facilitate throughout.
I don’t remember Amazon claiming “near-full automation” by AI. They said that you can checkout automatically and that AI/computer vision is somehow involved.
What's the crime? If lying about AI capabilities is a crime we have some billionaires in big trouble.
If it's a publicly traded company, everything is securities fraud.
Criminally, no. In a class action? every day.
AI is not unique in this regard. We just saw the same thing with the crypto/blockchain nonsense.
Regulation lags so far behind that you can get away with bad behavior long enough that, by the time regulation catches up, you can buy your way out of consequences.
This was proven to be false on the WAN show. Only 20% of transactions were low confidence and handled by mechanical turk.
20% seems like a "significant portion" to me
20% is an incredibly high number though, if a store has 400 people/hour that means you're manually reviewing 80 transactions per hour, over one transaction per minute. That's multiple human employees.
One transaction per minute is nothing at all when the transaction can be as simple as "did the person put that back on the shelf" with a 5 seconds clip.
Proven "false." I've noticed that if one admits the truth with a dismissive or offended tone, you can just continue to claim the lie and through sheer force of will people will still go with it.
I think people just think that they must be misunderstanding something; that nobody could claim one thing while offering evidence of its opposite. 1/5 of purchases lose their significance.
Why did "outsourced workers get (relatively) much more expensive after"?
Essentially the thinking went. If everyone is remote, why not hire remote workers from countries that are a lot cheaper. Suddenly you had a hard time finding contractors and FTEs from those countries because everyone was hiring them. At the same time it got really hard for entry level developers in the USA to find work.
The supply/demand curve shifted and now those workers are becoming more expensive while domestic workers are becoming cheaper.
Great question. I'm not an economist so I have no idea why. The outsourcing rates I've all seen have gotten way higher in the past ~10 years though.
Beyond just the usual inflation?
I'm not an economist either, but I also assume that as the country attracts more local talent for local companies, the competition for outsourcing becomes harder. (i.e, you now have to pay more than the local companies).
All just speculation on my part though, I really have no clue either.
People from Bangalore were telling me it was getting crazy expensive to live there (by Indian standards) circa 2013.
India specifically is in the middle of a massive years-long labor movement that is changing the terms of work there and I believe shifting the degree of alignment with western corporate outsourcing though I'm not very informed about the details.
Scale is beyond comprehension though, there were 250 million people on strike one day last summer. This is not ever really covered in western media or mentioned on HN for reasons that are surely not interesting or worth pondering at all.
Americans can’t afford to strike like that.
> It appears to be reasonable for a technology worker to be able to perform a sustained strike.
I don't think the strikes are done by tech people at all. Just normal workers.
> However, tech workers in Bangalore are paid an order of magnitude higher than prevailing local wages in other sectors
250 million people striking in India isn't mainly “tech workers in Bangalore”, or mainly tech and other elite workers at all. It’s about 40% of Indian workers, and most articles I've seen about it centered on widespread participation of workers in coal, construction, and agricultural sectors.
No one (at a national scale) can afford to strike like that, except people who have an understanding of why they even more can't afford not to strike like that.
Can't afford not to.
Americans have chosen to learn exactly how good they have had it. You get to watch!
People don’t know what the H is in RLHF.
Another case where AI = "actually Indians". It's funny how often this has happened.
I remember this case the one who put "Actually Indians" in my mind. What other instances do you know?
(Not to refute your point, of course, I am just curious)
Builder ai
Maybe. I'd really want to know what percent of items (not transactions) needed review. 1,000 people to oversee how much revenue?
Theoretically if it was 99% computer and 1% human, that's enough to mess up the economics but it's not a bait and switch like some companies have done.
Their fate seemed sealed when it was revealed a bit back that the “just walk out” technology was more hype than substance. Just lots of people watching what you’re doing on camera vs an actual AI that worked well at mass deployment scale. A good idea, poorly executed.
Reports said the “AI” was largely 1000+ people in India watching the cameras.
If Amazon actually managed to build AI that worked well at a decent cost point it would have been great since nobody likes those silly self checkout machines.
What’s amusing about all of this is that before it got leaked that it was basically a bunch of people in India watching cameras Amazon folks spoke about the tech like there was some super secret AI they developed. Since that story broke nobody there seems to want to talk about “just walk out” anymore.
Even that didn't work well, when I was at an airport recently I had investigated 4-5 items as I had some time to kill. When I was walking out it wanted to bill me for 70 dollars even though I only had a bottle of water and a candy bar.
I have little trust that a corporate behemoth will do right by me and refund the discrepancy at an unspecified later time as it says it will on checkout.
This keeps me away from these sorts of stores if I can avoid them, which is pretty much always (so far, anyway). I would be absolutely shocked if the error rate was comparable to a normal checkout process and I don't want to waste the cognitive overhead of either wondering how much I'm getting ripped off by a corporation or having to go back and review and try to resolve overcharges.
They pay the most for human involvement. Wages, special conditions, and insurance are exponentially higher than their plans of warehouse to end-user via lockers and drones.
Yeah, we had one near us, close to the metro exit, and it was genuinely great when you needed to grab something for dinner on the way home. Once you knew where things were, you could be in and out in 20 seconds. That said, it never seemed busy compared to other grocery shops in the area, so I think a lot of people were put off by it feeling "weird" to shop without checking-out.
You can use the Apple Store app to purchase physical items at Apple retail locations (smaller items like cables or cases). I've used it a couple of times, and I feel very awkward using it, so much so that I'll walk out kinda waving the receipt/acknowledgement screen around so that staff/security can hopefully see I'm not nicking something.
AI: Actually Individuals¹
¹ Individuals manning a labyrinthine system of cameras and sensor fusion, like hawks, logging the precise moment you plop a Twix into your basket! Praise Bezos!
> Reports said the “AI” was largely 1000+ people in India watching the cameras.
This was totally fake news though. Those people were labeling training data and reviewing low confidence labels, after the fact. There wasn't ever live monitoring of shoppers.
Do people really have problems with self-checkout? I use it all the time in box stores like Kroger, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. It seems to work just fine for me and doesn't add more than a minute or two vs just walking out of the store.
Self checkout is fine, if the happy path works. If everything scans once and doesn't accidentally scan a second time, if everything scans at the price you thought it was posted for, if you don't have any controlled substances requiring approval, if the weight sensor doesn't freak out incorrectly or from putting your bags on it, if it accepts any coupons you have, if it accepts and processes your payment method correctly.
If everything goes fine, self checkout is fine. But the exception handling process for any of those is thoroughly aggravating, as you wait and try to get the attention of the one overworked attendant dealing with a dozen of these machines constantly throwing exceptions, as the computer screams at you for whatever it thought you were doing wrong.
Yeah I agree that it can potentially go wrong but in my experience here in east TN the machines have gotten better to the point that hasn't happened for me in the past few years. Also it seems like the "just walk out" process would have more potential error modes but I never visited one.
The best machine I've seen so far is one in my local gas station, where there's just a surface and a camera. Toss whatever you want onto the surface, all haphazard like, check that the screen agrees with reality (it always has so far), and bump your watch/phone/credit card and walk out. We're talking substantially less than 30s, oftentimes less than 10s.
Interesting! Thanks for the reality check. I personally like the home depot ones with the very prominent handheld scanner for big items. Hopefully it will keep improving. The days of waiting in line to check out were terrible and I don't want to go back.
If you find value in it, that's fine. I not only find value with interaction with the lovely checkout people, I dislike the cost of scanning and managing the items during checkout being my problem so a huge company can save money. If they were to implement a discount as a way to say "we'll pay you for your work to give us your money" I would consider it.
That's not to say the value of the convenience is never worth it. I exclusively use Sam's Club scan-and-go because the time I save is much larger than the publix/walmart/ect.
Yeah true. I do enjoy visiting with the cashiers but I don't love waiting in line.
I’m a bit surprised a publicly traded company is allowed to make materially false claims about their products and capabilities without getting into a major lawsuit for defrauding shareholders. Maybe Amazon is just above such trifling things such as law.
There is no difference from the customer perspective so the store failed for reasons that have nothing to do with the "just walk out" technology or lack thereof. Why spend lots of money doing R&D only to find out that the concept doesn't sell? Wait for the product to be successful before spending the money to scale it up. Same as anything else.
"Do things that don't scale."
I think the idea could work well but the execution in the field was consistently very poor. There were a few of these at airports with just an intimidating gate and generally non-engaging human standing there.
It was as if they expected everyone to know what to do, but when I’d watch 99% of people just sort of looked at the store, saw the odd gate things, and then just shrugged and walked off. The stores were almost always completely empty amidst a busy concourse.
Even if the tech worked (reports say it didn’t work well) they completely missed the boat on creating a clear customer experience that navigated the new tech.
I agree, it needed a better hook to get people in the 'gates' so to speak. I don't think I've ever waited behind like maybe a single transaction at an airport convenience store, so it's not like having to fiddle with my phone to get in beats tapping a card or phone or watch at checkout. Either way most people are buying 1-3 things so it's not like it saved time scanning.
As for the big Amazon Fresh grocery stores, I only have one out of my way so I only visited once or twice, but the big things I noticed were that it had a small selection and very average prices. Not that surprising because even after buying Whole Foods, Amazon itself has terrible prices on dry goods (meaning supermarket items besides fresh food), and relies heavily on random third-party sellers with big markups for a ton of it.
If they really wanted to get people to buy into Amazon Fresh it would have taken a lot more money (and thus pretty unprofitable for a long while): Probably one way to do that would have been making it as attractive as Costco for Prime members.
That 90s IBM commercial was pretty rad though.
A.I. = Actually Indians
AI: Actually Indians
> Since that story broke nobody there seems to want to talk about “just walk out” anymore.
Optimus and Robotaxi are just as fake and Elon Musk never shuts up about them.
I guess Amazon never learned the important lesson that the OP meta for modern technology companies is just to consistently and blatantly lie.
These were absolutely incredible when they first opened up right on until covid. The blue-apron style meal kits they had were actually really tasty and the gimmicky integration with Alexa to tell you the next step in the recipe was actually kind of useful when you were busy stirring a pot or cutting something and too busy to pull out the recipe card. It was like a 7-Eleven, but with the prices of a normal grocery store and higher quality prepared food. Not needing to deal with checkout felt freeing. I substituted many grocery store runs with a quick walk over to the original Amazon Go back in the day.
After covid, it was never the same. Open for shorter windows, closed on Sundays, reduced selection, no more meal kits etc.
I had many friends who worked on Amazon Go, so it's a bit sad to see that work come to an end.
These bastards drove out some nice stores near me (supposedly the lease ended and did not renew) and rebuilt the buildings in order to open an Amazon Fresh location. That Amazon Fresh store never opened. Now we have a giant empty storefront nobody uses.
Same here. A local grocery store and several other local businesses got bought out and demolished so Amazon could build a new Fresh store.
I guess Amazon pulled out of the project halfway through, since for the last ~2 years there's been a half-finished building just sitting there completely abandoned in our town center.
Reminds me of the time they made towns all around the US do a dog and pony show to attract "HQ2" and then just located it where Bezos wanted to be all along. I remember AOC getting it right all along, she did the most milktoast of pushback in her district and it caused Amazon to huff and puff and just walk away(causing many property speculators to lose out). She got raked over the coals but a few years later and the place HQ2 ended up didn't fare so well. AOC was vindicated.
My hope is that more towns learn from your experience and don't tolerate this nonsense anymore.
> milktoast
fyi since you may not have ever seen it spelled before it's milquetoast
It's the same story over and over again with large businesses. See Boeing and WA state as well.
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) by Thomas Frank goes into this in part of it. While a bit repetitive (because history) the book is quite good.
Thank you for the recommendation.
John Oliver analyzed state's tax rebates, 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bl19RoR7lc , he concluded that giving 1000 people Ferraris to drive around a pile of $30 million cash on fire would be more fiscally responsible...
I found it pretty funny when Mayor Mamdani of NYC pointed out that the people opposing him spent more money trying to stop him being elected than they would end up paying in increased taxes. It really is a game to those people. They can't bear to give up one cent or one ounce of control.
Another funny story was that some substack writer (whom I forget sorry) noticed that Bill Ackman subscribed to their substack and used a 30% off coupon ha ha.
Jeff Bezos in FY 2024 filed for, and received, a $2k child tax credit.
While the company he was the founder of passed over a trillion dollars in market cap.
Wait, how does a store that never opened drive out an existing store? That’s not how commercial leases work…
Given that a supermarket abandoned that location, and Amazon never opened on their either, perhaps that location or the lease price simply doesn’t work for a grocery store?
The tenants needed to vacate before the owner tore down the building.
They got word of the development and decide to not renew their commercial lease? Then you either move business somewhere where you don't have to directly complete, or shut down.
sounds like you have an opportunity to open a grocery store?
But for a brief moment there was a chance it would make the shareholders more wealthy. Surely that’s worth it. /s
Wondering what the municipality’s responsibility there wrt zoning.
These stores were solving for an Amazon problem (brick and mortar stores without the expense of workers), and not any significant customer problem.
They often put them in places, hoping that people would be attracted by marginally lower prices and brand extension, all while removing one of the primary appeals (for most people) of in person grocery shopping: impromptu community socialization, even if it is simply greeting the checkout worker.
I'm not surprised they failed.
The Amazon Go stores in San Francisco were weird. They always had no people shopping in them, which would make sense given the increased efficiency, but it amplified the "am I stealing?" vibe. And the cost of goods wasn't made any cheaper than comparable stores in SF despite the touted increased efficiency.
The pitch from Bezos -- and it's a dumb pitch -- was basically just to make checking out faster by avoiding interacting with humans (but this can be achieved by increasing the number of cashiers and baggers). The pitch was never lower prices. The combo of all the tech and the army of Indians watching video was not cheap.
And because they were relying on computer vision and Indian vision, they had to get rid of all their fresh meals because they were too hard to calculate prices for. So, it ended up being a half-assed 7-Eleven concept. The whole concept was made by someone who hates humanity.
I personally prefer stores with actual cashiers. What I don't like are lines, but that is very solvable. The organic grocer near me is super fast to check out.
The lack of people in them was the thing about going to one that always felt weird to me.
LOL, any found efficiency doesnt go to the consumer. The evidence is the widening wealth gap over the last 40 years. Its trickle up economics.
does competition not naturally drive competitors to reduce margins?
I noticed the other day the Amazon store near me has closed but it says a whole foods market is coming soon, which is another company they own. I wonder how many of them they’ll rebrand and keep in some form like that.
Amazon Fresh provided lots of good jobs in my community. Family members worked there. Good pay and they employed locally (or can walk to work). Same with whole foods. Too bad Amazon couldn't make it work. Interesting timing with their push for more online grocery offerings.
The Fresh stores are kind of a weird shopping experience with a mix of normal, overpriced and bizarrely cheap at different times.
I've gotten into the habit of stopping in to wander the aisles and check prices because of it (e.g. I stocked up on a bunch of canned soup when most (but not all) Progresso soups were $0.44 a month or two back, and I picked up some microwavable rice+quinoa pouches for my wife at $0.35 each a couple weeks ago, but the inconsistency and overall not great prices mean it can't be my go-to grocery destination.
I'm sure the one by me will be closing since there's a significantly larger Whole Foods just a few miles away.
Every time I check I am still amazed that the Amazon Hair Salon in London is still open. https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?node=26247109031
Hmm Amazon fresh was useless anyway. It was this weird niche of grocery delivery but for small urgent orders. I just don't have that need like ever, if I need a bottle of shampoo or a head of lettuce urgently I'll just go to the corner shop.
Edit: oh oops I see this is about physical fresh stores, we never had those in the first place. Here in Europe Amazon fresh is a weird service for quick small grocery orders. For the bigger ones they partner with a local supermarket ("dia" here in Spain). But I never do grocery delivery because I never make any plans, I just make my life up as I go along :)
But Amazon fresh here is expensive and still slow (2hrs) so really not good for anything.
Amazon go I'm not even sure what that is.
> Amazon go I'm not even sure what that is.
And now you don't have to!
Ba-dump-ching! I'll be here all week, folks! :)
Yeah these are all going to be wrapped up into their same day delivery service. Amazon fresh was very expensive and required a fee on top of prime which unsurprisingly nobody wants to do
What you’re talking about is the delivery product, not the brick and mortar grocery stores, which are not much different from your typical big chain standard grocery outlet.
Yeah we don't get those here, sorry. Didn't know they even existed
Amazon go I'm not even sure what that is, must be something like Pokémon go to the polls.
The headline in their corporate press release says "Amazon doubles down on online grocery delivery and Whole Foods Market expansion to reach more customers"
That's one way to spin things I guess.
The Fresh store near me that I stop in at seems to double as a warehouse for some of those delivery orders, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of them just stop having customer access and shift to entirely staffed pick-and-pack for delivery.
Has anyone used their go stores? I'm curious how the experience felt from a consumer standpoint. Do you feel welcomed or more like a thief?
I remember WAY back in the day when Arby's implemented touch screen ordering (on CRTs!) and it was a very quirky process. An Arby's employee would sit behind the counter and stare at you while you spent 5 minutes poking a CRT display. Very slow and very impersonal. They discontinued them in a short period of time.
Every time I walk into a McDonalds I see people who will rather stand 5 minutes at the counter waiting for a human cashier than use one of the available kiosks. I'm sure some are paying cash but there are certainly people who are just not comfortable with technology.
The Go stores were a great experience but they would certainly be uncomfortable for anyone other than early-adopter or tech-forward types of people. I would just walk in with my own bag, and put items directly from the shelf into the bag, and walk out the door. It was extremely convenient and fast once you got over how weird it felt.
I think they could have done a lot more in giving social clues on both the way in and way out.
McDonalds solved that problem by basically not having employees go up to the counter anymore.
Yup, they literally HIDE as far away from the counter as possible. Must make it easier to recruit Gen Z now!
A lot of people have trouble using those and it's not just tech discomfort or whatever. You have to be able to hold your arms up in front of you, touching specific points in space. The UI is not good and does not provide good moment-to-moment feedback about whether you've pressed a button or which one. You have to be moderately-to-strongly literate, you have to wrap your head around the menu organization, know what you're looking for by name and be able to guess where it is in this system.
I've watched so many people struggle to use these machines for so many different reasons. Pretty much anyone with a physical or cognitive disability will be better off with the cashier. Sucks they have to wait much longer for one now.
I think the systems are good in the context of "computer ordering systems", but not great in the context of "food accessibility". They're built with a lot of inherent presumptions that likely apply to most of the peer groups of the people designing it, but certainly do not in the field.
I am quite privileged and I know numerous people who might have trouble telling you the name of the meal they want even if presented with a hard copy of a menu.
I hate McDonald's, but I've used one at a Subway that took five seconds to respond to every button press. Useless! Feels like it was written in Electron and running on an Android tablet from 2012.
They’re fine and work as advertised. One weird thing is you don’t get the receipt for 10-20 minutes, presumably while humans are viewing the footage.
The main thing I use it for is convenient returns, which is why I’m disappointed in this news. I hardly ever buy things there other than things like gum or chips.
Loved the Go store in Chicago (Ogilvy), had some great lunch options and even a take home "dinner for two" bag of premade ingredients.
I went to the first couple of Amazon Go stores in San Francisco several times. I've also been to our local Go store a few times in LA County. The experience has always been perfectly fine, and the invoices always correct. It's basically just a small junk food and liquor store similar to a 7-Eleven.
I use the one situated in Seattle, Amazon HQ. It's just like self-checkout at a grocery store with fewer steps. The entrance/payment mechanism is Amazon One (a palm scan associated with a payment wallet). At Whole Foods, it's used as an optional payment option at checkout.
It's convenient; I only ever remember one problem where it thought I had purchased an item that I picked up and decided on something else. I disputed it online and it was resolved in a day.
> I disputed it online
Oh man this is what consumers would love to do, have to constantly adjudicate false positives online which they'd have to track to make sure didn't happen. What nonsense.
our university has been rolling out just walk out markets across campus due to rampant stealing. shopping there doesn't feel like stealing, but the store design feels oppressive with racks of cameras and thick black shelves because it's designed for sensors first not humans
one minor downside (especially since I don't live on campus anymore) is that in order to walk around and peruse the shelves, I have to give them my payment info just to enter
Here they replaced all the markets that were staffed by people with these big vending machines that are 3 or 4 refrigerated cabinets (even chips are refrigerated). You pay, wait a bit for it to process it, and then it unlocks the doors and you grab whatever. And if it gets it wrong there’s no dispute process to tell it you didn’t pick something up (I think there is an email listed but I didn’t care enough the time it messed up to send an email). And half the time when you click the pay button to finish, it’ll complain about a door not locking.
I'm probably not a typical case, but I felt like my privacy was massively invaded. The concept was cool, but I felt like every muscle twitch was being scrutinized and recorded forever. I was also in constant fear that the computer would charge me for things I didn't buy and getting it corrected would be a nightmare. I also felt like if there was a bug or malfunction in the system and it didn't charge me for something (which I wouldn't know about immediately) they would come after me as a shoplifter with the full force of a mega corporation with unlimited resources. It felt like there were a thousand high powered lawyers that I couldn't see, watching my every move waiting for some mess up (even though I have no intention whatsoever other than finding and paying for the product I wanted).
So no I didn't feel like I was a thief. But I felt like they assumed I was a thief. My guess is most stores are heavily surveilled nowadays, so it might be unreasonable for me to feel this way with Amazon but not Walmart or Target or Kroger, but that's how it felt.
Walmart and Kroger near me now have one way metal cattle gates that you have to pass through when you enter. Makes me feel like cattle and that their assuming I am a thief. Trips to those locations have dropped.
The Home Depot cameras and screens that "BING BONG" loudly as you pass by to get you to notice them showing that they are recording you are also highly annoying.
I wish there was a greater variety of hardware stores near me...
Shame, shopping there felt like magic. I hope the technology is developed in future without having to rely on remote workers validating transactions. Definitely felt like the future of shopping
Isn't the same tech used in stadiums? At least in Seattle we can just walk out without paying, even alcohol. Obviously we have to scan our CC or something similar to get in but I always thought it was using the same Amazon tech.
So even though these stores are closing, the tech is widely used and likely expanding and succeeding
In what ways?
I've only been to the Amazon Fresh in my neighborhood, haven't been to other locations, here is what my experience was like:
They resisted implementing self checkout for years before eventually folding. No digital wallets though, you have to either use plastic or link it to your Amazon account.
The whole dash cart system was a solution in search of a problem IMO. I'm already able to check out about as efficiently as possible. Frontloading the scanning time isn't really an amazing improvement. The store was never crowded enough for it to matter.
My biggest problem with the store was that it was lacking random pantry staples and supplies that you would expect from your primary grocer. Several times I showed up in desperate need of something for a recipe or household task and they just wouldn't have it.
The produce was actually decent quality and competitively priced, but my alternative (the local Ralph's) I think just had some kind of curse or something on it because the produce at that specific location was a consistent level of awful observed over 5 years.
I hope they replace it with a whole foods, much better store IMO.
I guess I am in the minority but I really liked the dash cart. Apart from the occasional niggle, it worked as advertised once I understood the system. I get my own bags to the store, so I can directly bag items as I go and just walk out when done.
The general force behind this is the expansion of sub-same-day delivery which they have been pushing hard for the last year. Amazon fresh was a more traditional model which didn't fit in well with amazon's strengths (fulfillment, automation) because they tried to enter a market they were directly competing with (in-person shopping) and charged users for delivery in addition to their existing membership.
It's a welcome change IMO, amazon groceries are super cheap online and now delivery is free. They have been removing the fresh name from products for a few months now and replacing with amazon grocery. Certainly less confusion for consumers, at least
Related: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-same-day-fres... https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-same-day-fres...
I don't live around any Amazon Fresh stores so I never saw them though I did see the technology in use at several airports (though I've never personally used it). IMO I think places like airports are the best place for something like this, people are usually in a rush so not having to wait in line to checkout is nice and you don't have to worry about security as much because everyone there is a ticketed passenger (only saw them post-security) and even if someone did try stealing they wouldn't get very far.
I saw these in several different airports. It usually had multiple people staffed at the gate to get in and out meanwhile most of the other snack vendors often only had a single person employed.
So you spend a few hundred thousand dollars extra on all the cameras, many millions on all the design, pay all the overseas contractors to manually review the transactions, and you still end up with twice the in-person staff than the average store in the airport.
not get far? at an airport?
They never made sense to have but I’m sure someone made a huge career and got lots of bonuses for this initiative
Doesn't surprise me either. Anecdotal story coming, but there is physical location on Philadelphia, and I stopped by as I needed an item for dinner that night, and it was on my way home.
Store was kind of bare, and poorly organized. But the kicker is they didn't accept any form of mobile wallet! They had an identical POS system to wholefoods which takes it just fine.
So I quickly put my items back and headed to Giant.. Haven't been back since
They have a good price on take out pizza. Unlimited toppings, and with Prime membership it's $8 something for a large pizza. It was probably their loss leader to get people in the store. I felt like the store was usually pretty empty when I was there. I wonder if Amazon will keep Whole Foods too.
I really liked the local Amazon Fresh, until they discontinued "just walk out" and replaced it with those hellish smart carts. I scanned one item successfully with the cart, got completely stuck trying to get it to scan a second one, handed the cart back to the employee, and never went back.
Amazon Fresh had no reason to exist. They closed down a great Whole Foods near me and replaced it with a store with minimal changes to safeway/albertsons. Heavy carts for automatic scanning that barely saved time at checkout.
I will miss the grab and go tech in the Amazon stores. I was hoping they would successfully manage to sell that to other stores and make the tech wide spread in bodegas, gas stations and 711s
The "1000 people in India watching cameras" reveal was the moment the magic died. Once you know the wizard is just a guy behind a curtain, you can't unsee it.
The interesting question isn't whether the tech was ready. It wasn't. The question is whether Amazon learned anything useful from the attempt.
Computer vision for retail checkout is a legitimate hard problem. Occlusion, similar-looking products, people changing their minds. I've worked on CV pipelines and the gap between "works in the demo" and "works at scale" is brutal.
My guess: they collected a ton of training data from those human reviewers. Whether they'll use it for a v2 or just write it off, who knows.
I wonder if this is what FSD really is sometimes.
You might think so because of how human-like it drives, but I’ve driven for quite a few miles out of signal range and it still works.
Aside from the magic dying, which I agree with, another commenter in this thread says there could be false positives (whether from Indians or AI doesn't matter) you'd have to 1) notice by studying your bill later and 2) resolve by requesting refunds online.
Knowing this, it was over before it ever started. Beyond the masses of people already having aversion to the oddness of how it worked and likely never wanting to try it, these and others would swear off the store forever the first time they ever got charged for something they didn't take. No one wants to monitor and fix erroneous purchase errors.
This was the more surprising bit for me: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/amazon-supersizes-its-walmart-...
Amazon straight up wants to just become Walmart. Or maybe Sears is a more apt comparison given their mail-order beginnings.
Wow, they just opened a brand new one in Philly less than two months ago. I've yet to shop there and I guess now I never will. It must have cost millions to clear that site and build a whole new building there. Just to abandon it. I wish I had money to waste like that.
Edit: it actually opened in August, so it was around for about six months instead of two.
Yeah, they've just closed the one near me. I think they underestimated how hard it would be, at least in the UK - the existing supermarket chains are already competitive, mostly pretty good, and people have surprisingly high brand loyalty to them. I don't think I've even talked to anyone who has shopped in Amazon Fresh, or even wanted to.
Not surprised. Unless the item is on sale (which can be very good deals) their pricing is no better than a standard supermarket and usually far more expensive than a Target or WalMart. And they quickly gave up on the scan and go where the smart shopping card read everything in the basket and automatically charged your Amazon account, so it was back to regular checkout.
This will forever be a masterpiece
I’m in an interesting place. Here in Seattle I am two blocks from one of the largest Amazon Fresh stores. It was built on the former location of a local grocer. The construction was almost complete before Covid hit, but Amazon shuttered the store during that time. As a result there was no groceries in my neighborhood from 2018-2023.
Now it seems Amazon is going to leave us a grocery desert yet again.
They were piloting smart carts at the location. The cart scans your items so checking out you just push the cart through a scanner that weighs it. But this invention was like a microcosm of Amazon’s whole fuckup with groceries. The problem with the store wasn’t that I couldn’t check out fast enough, it’s that it was a shit grocery store. They had popular products but they were missing all the unpopular, low margin products you need to actually cook (baking powder, shortening, tomato paste, soy sauce…). They only hire non-union jobs program people at the registers because Amazon believes that cashier is a sub-human role.
The previous store had an owner who would wander the aisles and chat with customers. The new store has Europeans with clipboards who watch you as you shop.
"non-union jobs program people at the registers because Amazon believes that cashier is a sub-human role."
What grocery stores still have union workers?
The UFCW claims they represent at least 800,000 grocery workers across the US.
I had a job as a union worker in a supermarket, and am glad that's still available to others.
https://www.ufcw.org/actions/campaign/albertsons-and-safeway...
My brother has worked as a stocker for King Kullen in New York for 20 years and is a union worker.
In the Seattle area where the poster is from, pretty much all the grocery stores are unionized. Workers at big stores like Safeway, Fred Meyer, QFC, and Albertsons, and local stores PCC, Uwajimaya are represented by UFCW3000. https://ufcw3000.org/shop-union
Additionally, Teamsters 174 organizes a lot of the grocery freight workers. https://teamsters174.net/warehouse-and-grocery/
Jewel-Osco: https://www.local881ufcw.org/about-us/#local-881 Meijer and Kroger: https://ufcw951.org/about/
Most grocery stores in the US are still heavily union. I don't think the unions ever left the grocery stores.
Literally all the grocery stores in my Northeast US city are unionized.
Not to be rude but there’s 4 Amazon Fresh locations in the greater Seattle area and each of them is next to multiple other large/small grocery options.
For instance, the one in north Seattle (Shoreline) is within eyesight of a Safeway, a Sprouts, two international markets and a chef wholesaler.
The other three locations are similarly crowded with options.
What food desert are you referring to?
Jackson St location is the only walkable option in its neighborhood. It wasn't very good (terrible selection, stocking issues, slowly increasing locked section) but it was convenient.
It's literally highlighted on the map you sent: https://postimg.cc/Cn8BGP4S
There's no walkable grocery store in that area. My friend lives in the area and uses a wheelchair, and Amazon Fresh was the only actual grocery store she could go to.
As much as I'm hoping they do, I would be very surprised if they open a Whole Foods in that area.
I wouldn’t describe central district as crowded with options…
> What food desert are you referring to?
His food desert that doesn’t exist.
Food deserts do exist, but Seattle's Central District is not one of them. This US government tool used to literally be called the "Food Desert Locator" until the current administration re-named it to "Food Access Research Atlas"
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-...
It's really the suburban areas of Seattle that develop food deserts, likely due to restrictive zoning for commercial properties and minimum lot-size requirements that make sure that every grocery store is a long SUV ride away from the cu-de-sac neighborhood.
If the term Food Desert offends you, I can gladly switch to calling it Food Apartheid instead.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/15/food-aparthe...
> Food Access Research Atlas
You just know at least five people within the administration, one of whom being Elon Musk, wanted to change "Atlas" to "Tool"
So now you are off worse than before?
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> They only hire non-union jobs program people at the registers because Amazon believes that cashier is a sub-human role.
The implication being that humans who aren't in a union are "sub-human" in your opinion? If so, that's pretty messed up man.
A giant, multinational, multi-trillion-dollar corporation that will only bargain with individual people living paycheck-to-paycheck? Huh, what a weird power imbalance!
Surely it doesn't have anything to do with their documented history of treating their blue-collar workforce like utter garbage.
I think Amazon are largely shitheads to their low level workers (and still assholes even to mid-level workers), and I am in no way defending them. I'm in fact sickened by them. I will never work for Amazon.
But the implication above was that the non-union employee is the "sub-human" option. I find that attitude pretty gross too. Humans are human whether they are union members or not.
> But the implication above was that the non-union employee is the "sub-human" option. I find that attitude pretty gross too.
Ok, fine, but the OP never said this, you are the only person talking about this.
The “implication” is that Amazon finds them ALL sub-human and thus would hire to reduce any kind of representation or organizational power.
Work on your reading comprehension dude.
I like Whole Foods because it feels warm and the food looks good. The Amazon stores felt like walking inside a vending machine and that is not how people want to buy dinner.
The technology lives on, as Amazon "Just Walk Out". But rather than general grocery stores, it is used for concessions at stadiums and places like that.
I guess it turned out that the need more human intervention than they hoped, so the cost is too high for regular stores. However at places where a premium can be charged for high throughput or a low friction experience then the cost of the human intervention can be recouped.
Just a heads up that only the Amazon Go stores did the "just walk out" shopping thing. Amazon Fresh stores were pretty much just regular grocery stores. They had shopping carts with the self-checkout built in, but that was the extent of the technology.
There was a concept Amazon Fresh store with “Just Walk Out” technology on Capitol Hill in Seattle. They closed it down a couple of years back but the brand was absolutely Amazon Fresh.
Well, that article made me nervous for a second! I love my Amazon Fresh grocery delivery. I started using it during Covid, but could never go back. It's so nice having groceries feel automated instead of a semi-daily chore. I eat much healthier and the rationale for using DoorDash evaporated.
Absolutely zero interest in a physical version that lets me check-out easier, though. So, I can see why they're making this switch.
> It's so nice having groceries feel automated instead of a semi-daily chore
One of a my previous jobs had a grocery store on the way home. I took to stopping in pretty much daily. It allowed for a bit of decompression after work before coming home. It was very convenient to always have exactly what was needed for that night while being therapeutic at the same time. After switching jobs, losing that was probably the most noticeable thing about the new job
We have Żabka Nano which is self-serve cashierless shop in Poland. You just swipe you card at the entrance, get whatever you want and walk out. I think they use computer vision system to detect the products taken from the shelves. It kinda amazes me because it's what Amazon promised but failed to deliver.
I thought they already did close them.
I know at some point they got caught basically paying people to watch cameras to figure out what products people we're grabbing. I'm sure were either at the point or very close to the point where AI can successfully do this basically 100% of the time.
So I doubt it's the tech aspect of this, more just the grossness a person feels walking into a store with Amazon's name on it. Compare this to whole foods.
I think the Go stores mostly bit the dust after that reveal, but they were also mostly small convenience store operations. I actually saw one at the airport recently, that's a situation where I can see it making sense as an option.
The Fresh stores are basically a conventional grocery store, with electronic tags for every item and quirky pricing. They also have "smart carts" with built in weight sensing and multiple cameras so you can basically put open bags in, say "ready to go" then shop by scanning a UPC before placing each item in the cart. Unscanned item? Error. Weight mismatch? Probably an error but I've never tried. The carts are running what looks like a Linux-based UI with some stuff in docker, I grabbed a picture of a shutdown screen on one not too long ago.
Coincidentally(?) they are open their first big box retail store: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/01/09/amazon-plans-first-big-b...
When I saw the picture at the start of the article, I briefly thought they would do it like IKEA and let people pick the articles directly from the Amazon warehouse...
If you've ever been in a Fresh store, that's kind of what it was as well. I saw maybe 20% off-the-street customers, the rest were AMZN workers filling delivery orders.
That will be interesting to watch.
They literally only put them in unaffordable areas. Like the only one I know is in a residential area of Southwalk in London not far from the TATE Modern museum. I don't even live in London.
Been in one once for the novelty as they've never been useful.
In my town they redeveloped an empty corner lot at a busy intersection just for the Amazon Fresh store. I guess it'll go back to being empty again...
I guess that is curtains for the Amazon Go kiosks in Seattle's Climate Pledge Arena? That whole arena was setup as a poorly veiled Amazon store...
The "just walk out" surveillance system sucked, but the Dash Cart shopping was actually pretty nice/
My wife will be heartbroken. We moved recently and she loves shopping at Amazon Fresh. (Though part of the reason was that it was never busy :)
I don't know what your life/lives are like, and far be it for me to tell you how to live, but if your schedule allows it try shopping later at night.
I show up at CostCo, on weekdays, like 30 minutes before closing time and it's _wonderful_. Few people, nobody blocking lanes while they consider their choices, etc. Same goes for Safeway, Fred Meyer, Trader Joe's, etc.
It doesn't work so great if you've got young kids, or you want to come home from work and just stay home (reasonable), but it's worth considering :)
If we lived in a high trust society, you could just trust people to scan their own items and walk out.
Human nature probably prevents that from ever being a reality, at least at scale. In a tiny tight knit community where literally everybody knows everybody else maybe you could pull that off, but even then you have to get a bit lucky.
In a world where anonymity is a thing there will always be at least one inherent shithead who ruins it for everyone. Even if you do have a community where it's true, that can change anytime someone has a kid or someone moves in.
The Dash Cart was pretty close.
Can you name some high trust societies?
For about five years an Amazon Fresh in Seattle was literally my closest grocery store but I never once set foot in there, simply because it felt icky and dystopian to let Amazon any further into my life. I wonder how many others felt similarly.
Fortunately my Amazon branded subcutaneous chip still works at Wholefoods.
this is pretty surprising. Didn't they spent a fortune on the camera tech for Amazon Go?
Did the humans pretending to be the AI unionize?
I don't know about other areas, but here in the Bay Area (or at least Silicon Valley) our Whole Foods has subsumed all the services provided by Amazon Fresh (and Go really never worked). So we're not really losing any services, just the brand name.
I miss the old Whole Foods.
I do too. Completely different vibe from when it was independent to when Bezos bought it.
Oh no! Anyway
Not surprised at all
amazon fresh never really made much sense to me alongside wfm.
It's a trap!
Once their vision for "grab and go" vanished due to technological infeasibility [1] the entire premise for the stores vanished as well.
I suspect that they wanted to take a hail marry to see if somehow it was possible to get much greater efficiency compared to standard grocers, and it looks like that failed.
[1] it may come back. The technology is rapidly improving but they have bigger fish to fry ATM.
What's interesting I know of a company in the industrial space that is trying to do this still (stuff on a shelf, grab and go, no human interaction).
I honestly thought they closed them alreay.
Disappointing. The shopping experience is mediocre and prices/quality are no better than other local supermarkets.
However, I love my local Amazon Fresh store because it's a super convenient Amazon return location...
Curious thought - will they be shutting down other “just walk out” powered stuff like Hudson Nonstops in airports?
I also know some Amazon warehouses had an entire Just Walk Out powered concessions area in their breakroom for purchasing snacks in partnership with one of their canteen vendors.
Nah, they're still actively selling/implementing the backing service/tech for other orgs.
That’s kinda what I figured. At this point it seems like they all have the same general configuration of coolers and shelves and the same cameras all angled in the same setup everywhere so I assume it’s all down to one very strict CV model or something…
I’m not surprised about Amazon Go but I’m surprised about Amazon Fresh.
They almost seemed like an extension of Whole Foods to a more mainstream suburban market, and I thought they had solid foot traffic.
I stopped into the Amazon Fresh in Broomall, PA, to check it out not too long ago. It just looks bland and dystopian from the outside, and not much about it is impressive from the inside. I've worked with computers and technology my whole life, and the entrance to the store just confused me. If I remember correctly, I had to scan the Amazon app on my phone to enter the building. Once inside, it felt like a warehouse; the aisles were too small, and the food selection wasn't even really that great. (From memory, it was a few years ago that I went)
All in all, it's a cool concept on paper with absolutely terrible execution.
Only went once, bought some snacks, and left.
Amazon keeps shutting Restaurants, their retail stores, etc., but I for one am glad they are at least trying. I agree that the fiasco around the Indians running the show was a PR nightmare for their idea, but large companies running startup like ideas should be encouraged rather than disparaged (and I am no fan of Amazon just to be clear). I think this is one of those ideas where execution failed. If you are a busy worker, it is great to just head there and grab what you need, and walk out. Just faster all around.
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