Amazon stops selling Dash buttons

I don't really think people ultimately care that much about turning over information about their domestic economics, if convenience trumps cost. (Have they stopped using Facebook and Google?) It simply did not in this instance.

Buying something on Amazon is easy. If I know what I want, and all my info is stored on Amazon, it takes 30 seconds tops. Shortening it to 10 seconds isn't worth it.

Now, if Amazon offered, say, a RFID scanner that could automatically reorder toilet paper or diapers or toothpaste if the number of units within 3 feet fell below a certain threshold... I would absolutely consider getting it. Delegating that decision completely so I never have to make it again sounds great.

Yes, I know they could still screw me over on price, so I'd check periodically to make sure they weren't ramping it up on me over the normal cost of the products. But even if they didn't, they'd still make more money by ensuring they sold the next units the instant they were needed, rather than whenever I remembered to reorder. Sometimes that's too late -- say, when there's a couple sheets on the last toilet paper roll and I have a near-crisis that involves crab-walking with pants down to the paper towels. Accumulated over a lifetime, those extra early days or weeks will really add up.

I think these are valuable points, but there is perhaps an even more cynical take. Dash buttons ate into the real moneymaker: product subscriptions.

Items that had a dash button were by their nature consumables that would be needed over and over again. What's better for Amazon? A button that you may or may not remember to push or giving you a dollar off today's order in exchange for them shipping you a new container of Tide Pods [1] next month with no need to think about it?

Separately: they may have also decided that voice ordering of items (via Echo) was a better or easier play than dash buttons.

1 - https://www.amazon.com/Tide-Laundry-Detergent-Spring-Meadow/...

I won't say it's the YNAB for food because I've used YNAB and it's very powerful but I LOVE Paprika. I sound like a spokesperson for them but I love their app. It's the best recipe manager, pantry manger, grocery list, meal planner, etc. It's cross platform NATIVE and their apps are very polished. I'd love it alone for sucking in recipes from cooking blogs and displaying them in a nice, standard format so I don't have to scroll past "This last weekend I was out in the yard with the kids when my husband asked to make my famous....." BS at the top of most cooking blogs.

I have used the grocery features but not the pantry management because it would require my BF also record things he used/ate and that.... is a losing battle haha.

> If you were willing to cover your store cupboards with cameras (!), you could track potentially track everything in and out. Maybe scan receipts as well. But this amounts to a lot of information about your home life and domestic economics, and I don't want to just turn that over to a company who'll exploit it. Perhaps what I want is "YNAB, but for food".

The problem with these solutions is that they'll never be close to accurate because they don't reflect how people function. We don't keep pristine pantries with nicely organized shelves and perfect containers. We don't purchase the exact same foods consistently and without variation. And there's the unpredictable nature of life.

People's pantries are a mess from an inventory perspective and it's not necessarily because people are messy. Food stuffs come in a varying array of packages from the easily tracked (e.g. soup cans) to the difficult to quantify (e.g. potato chips). You would need a dizzying array of image and weight sensors to quantify things and even then you'd run into issues with things like rice, beans, or flour which tend to be put into custom containers.

People's eating habits, tastes, and cravings change almost on a daily basis. I might go through 8 jars of salsa in a month or spend 3 weeks two bananas a day and then not touch either of them for over a year. I might start a new diet that changes how I eat and then abandon it a month or two later. Keeping track of and automatically ordering items based on ever changing habits is impossible.

The unpredictable nature of life might result in my order of 3lbs of chocolate chips because I'm baking cookies for a school function and then not using them again for half a year or more. My mother might come visit for 2 or 3 months resulting in a routine purchase of certain foods right up until she leaves. I might have to go out of town for a few weeks and so I might stop buying perishables well ahead of my departure.

The reality is that no amount of monitoring is going to be 100% perfect and at the same time it adds mental load to the consumer because they need to remember to manage the process lest the end up with 8lbs of bananas the day after their craving ceases.

Samsung is attempting this with fridges. I just got a new fridge, and I'm a gadget person, but I noped out of the camera fridge.

The optimal price will be calculated accordingly (considering "temporary local monopolies", personal profile, and purchase history), no need for the customer to deal with pesky numbers. /s

Eh, sure, they want to lower the cost of friction. But I don't think their goal is to ramp up prices. For many things (toilet paper, detergent, etc), it's really nice to not have to think about it.

I'd be okay if they redid the thing with an eInk display. You press once to activate the device and retrieves the current price, and you have to press it once more to confirm the purchase.

To be honest I'd still buy one just to tinker with it and see how far I can customize it to do something else, but Amazon wouldn't benefit from it so they'd have an incentive to block people from doing so.

This is why I rarely shop amazon now. I became an amazon customer because I am cheap and want to get the best deal. However, I have been remodeling my house for the last 8 months. I found that many things are just more expensive on amazon. People create businesses around buying cheap and reselling on amazon.

I also started to prefer actual physical stores. I am not dependent on amazons mercy when it comes to returns. Some items I can return for free at Kohls, some items I had to pay shipping and amazon customer service could not tell me WHY. Some representatives told me they no longer work with kohls, some told me "not all items are eligible", yada yada. In other words amazon is not a good company with clear guidelines.

To be honest now that I wrote this I will probably just cancel my membership.

Semi-related: Amazon price tracker camelcamelcamel is a great resource for buying more expensive items. https://camelcamelcamel.com/

The Dash buttons always sent an email with the price and a cancel button.

Price transparency seems to be a part of why they are discontinuing Dash buttons. Amazon here is recommending users swap to Alexa voice devices (and suggests many Dash users already have), which has a voice flow for checking the price before buying.

Not that Amazon is the most trustworthy company in all respects, but this announcement certainly isn't because Amazon wanting to make people avoid checking item prices.

It seriously scares you?

> Existing Dash buttons will continue to function “so long as the public keeps using them,” CNET says.

via https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/28/18245315/amazon-dash-butt...

I think another reason they are stopping is that in Germany, they lost a court battle and the court forbid them from selling the dash button to order products unless significant changes were made.

I'm completely the inverse, the ordering is the most convenience part of shopping already, the hardest bit is taking delivery.

Me. I order my Queal (powdered soylent) in massive quantities. I've actually got a year ordered already, which ships quarterly. Before I tried to order a month or two at a time, not only as it's easier to manage delivery, but you get good bulk discount deals.

So for anything I order a lot of, I'm already trying to make it easier than a button press, or I want something that fits into my schedule easier than taking delivery (EU, we don't really leave things on porches).

It's funny because I had one of these I put in my bathroom above the toilet paper to resupply bulk orders of cottonelle and wet wipes. I took it down after 2 months.

I like that it was smart enough to dedupe multiple presses. I didn't like that guests were compelled to push the button. I realized it was time to kill the experiment when I had a year's supply of toiletry.

Well I suppose if you subsist off of one product, that would work ok.

I'd need one for milk, eggs, bread, pasta, rice, cous cous, onions, peppers, etc, etc, etc.

So currently I just have a piece of paper hanging on the back of the kitchen door, that things get added to.

The first paragraph is one of the most SF things I've read in a while. Most Americans have to check their bank balance (if they have a bank) to see if they can afford to get more essential things like toilet paper and laundry detergent - it's absolutely not a micro-moment for them. Only a small subset of the population can hit "re-order" without thinking about it.

I love the way European grocery stores are set up, especially the ones I've been to in Munich, where most people stop by on their way back from work to get food just for that night's dinner and tomorrow's breakfast. Super fresh produce every day without needing to make it a multi-hour chore one day a week.

Amazon still sells the developer Dash Button as AWS IoT button. Thats probably what your friends are using. They're going to be alright anyway, because if that gets discontinued you can build your own around the ESP8266. Its just a button that makes a curl request.

... and just add that to the shopping cart (don't make an actual purchase) so I can review and click order next time I am buying stuff. May be there was such an option - don't know - never used the buttons.

Exactly, why not sell a generic version? You could limit it to products where the vendor has uploaded the appropriate logo/image that will be displayed on the Dash button but that would shift determining what products consumers would use a Dash button for onto the Vendors.

Then again, I agree that most people willing to use a Dash button are also the kind of people willing to use an Echo, save the uber privacy concious minority.

In my case even for the products they had, they didn't include the packaging size I usually order

I'm pretty certain the Dash button was what, in the grocery industry, is known as a "supplier-funded promotion", i.e. the buttons were subsidised by the supplier whose logo was printed on them.

So when you buy a $5 Dash button for Tide Pods™, Amazon spends $11 to make it and ship it to you, of which you pay $5, Amazon pays $2, and Procter & Gamble pays $4. Amazon and P&G both gamble they'll make up the loss on the button with profit on your extra purchases.

This explains a bunch of weird features:

* The reason Dash buttons were only available for some brands is because only some brands had agreed to pay the subsidy.

* The reason they ship with the logo sticker already in place, instead of a single item with a big sheet of stickers? Because the sticker is for the company that paid the subsidy.

* The reason non-Prime customers couldn't buy them? Because if you don't have free shipping, they think you won't press the button enough to make up their loss.

* The reason the AWS button costs more? Because nobody's subsidising it (plus the fact they charge what the market will bear, obviously)

* Why would they discontinue them? Because it turns out the gamble on extra sales doesn't pay off.

I think so.

Ex: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/with-push-of-butto...

> Airnoise is the brainchild of California resident Chris McCann, who repurposed the same plastic Dash Button that Amazon customers use to order toilet paper and detergent.

You can reprogram the STM32 microcontroller in them[0]. It's a fairly decent Cortex-M3 processor and it additionally has WiFi and a few other features. Some people went an easier route and just watched for the ARP request the dash button would send[1]. $5 isn't bad but when you could buy them from Amazon, you'd get a $5 credit when you used it the first time, essentially making it "free" if you needed the purchased item anyway.

[0]: https://learn.adafruit.com/dash-hacking-bare-metal-stm32-pro... [1]: https://github.com/hortinstein/node-dash-button

I've tried, it's been difficult so far. So i bought the aws button that can do anything using their serverless stuff.

You can listen to the DHCP traffic caused by the button press (the button is sleeping until pressed, so every press causes DHCP traffic) and use that to trigger any action you'd like. I wrote a simple utility[0] to do just that.

The longer term issue, since these are being discontinued, is getting your wifi credentials into the dash button. At the moment I use the amazon app to do that, but I'd guess they'll be removing that functionality. I recall reading someone reverse engineering that process, but I'm not sure what came of it.

[0]: https://github.com/joshmcguigan/dashr

The key to subscription usage is actually to buy a bit more frequently than you need, and when too much of X piles up, you skip the next subscription delivery or two for that. Ideally you still have enough subscriptions in that delivery to receive the 15% off.

I do it for a variety of vitamins that I need, so it's less of a big deal for me if I stack up a bit extra on one thing, because they're just pill-bottle sized. It's nowhere near as large as having 5 or 6 too many laundry detergent containers on hand or something.

This is still non-zero maintenance, but it's less. I don't do it for the convenience anyhow, I do it for the discounts, especially for things that I can't get locally anyhow.

100% this. I really want to take advantage of the subscriptions. But, I find it hard to "know" when I need to have something delivered. Plus, despite the very fast shipping for most things, I still need those baby wipes NOW.

Silly question but do you feel "excited" when using it? The geek in me thinks I would, but after a few uses I can see it being boring and a non-event.

"order a new EC2 small instance now"?

The richest man in the world is worthless? I don't get it.

regarding "should have called it Bezos", I think there's some subconscious sexism in home assistants that they're all female voices. We like thinking of our Google Home or Alexa as a secretary/homemaker, which have traditionally been female roles.