Amazon Fresh Opens in London | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Fresh Opens in London

fruitnet.com

21 pointsadrian_mrd52 comments

The branding is so confusing - in the US, Amazon Fresh is grocery delivery (or used to be), and Amazon Go are the checkout-less convenience stores.

Even more confusing is that Amazon Fresh in-person "stores" are only in California and regular Amazon Fresh is still delivery/pickup in Washington. There also seems to now be an "Amazon Go Grocery" along with the existing Amazon Go.

I'll patiently wait for Fred Meyer stores to adopt this. (probably never). Amazon Fresh/Go prices are way too high for me.

Amazon is following in the tracks of Google Play Music All Access I'm Feeling Lucky Radio (no joke, this was the actual product name)

The branding seems mostly pretty consistent to me.

Amazon Fresh is just their standard groceries. Whether you buy online for delivery or visit in-person.

To me it would be more confusing if they had different names.

And Go is a totally different type of store, an automated convenience store. (I'll admit Go Grocery seems confusing together with Fresh but maybe that's a regional branding thing?)

Are Fresh prices really that high at their physical locations? I'm in NYC and order Fresh online because it's sooo much cheaper than local grocery stores, usually by 30% or more.

The Amazon Fresh in London is a Go store - with the cameras etc. There's no Go branding/mention and the store doesn't appear in the Go app.

Apparently in the US, there are non-Go Amazon Fresh stores?

Yup they're just regular grocery stores. Not with Go cameras or anything. Regular checkout line.

They've also introduced "Dash Carts" to skip the checkout line but they're optional and also a different technology from Go AFAIK.

Yeah to be honest this is just classic Amazon really. Even this new "Amazon Fresh" Go store in the UK is clearly unconnected from the original "Amazon Fresh" delivery service, and the "Amazon Fresh" non-Go stores in the US.

Similar problems of brand confusion existed between Amazon's Pantry, Fresh, Prime Now, Morrisons, restaurants, some wine thing, Prime Air etc etc. They did eventually clean it up into pretty much just one product, but they seem to make these messes pretty willingly

Everything is wrapped in plastic, most of it non-recyclable. This is not progress.

That's typical for London IME.

In a supermarket, yes (but they're moving away from this). Local shops tends to be better.

Local shops tend to be considerably more expensive and offer a much narrower selection of goods.

Plus I’ve seen small stores in London restocking loose fruit by breaking down small multipacks quite often, at least here in the center around lancaster gate/bayswater.

When fruit is sold loose, people will pick individual fruits up and select them; at the end of the days, there will be much more ruined fruit and general leftover.

I've seen middle grounds where the box itself was made with waxed cardboard (with wrapping). Not sure if this is necessarily better. Only few items I've seen are sold in unwaxed cardboard (and I suppose it depends on the food contained).

I don't know how to calculate which alternative is the least polluting, but it's not obvious at all that lack of wrapping implies less pollution in the big picture.

I feel like delivery has the promise of better packaging alternatives than in-person shopping ever will. It'd be easier to have more bulk/unpackaged items, less packaging, less attention-grabbing packaging/displays, and less wasted "impulse buy purchase" space, if no non-professionals were allowed in the store. Professional shoppers aren't going to mishandle bulk items (or lick them and put them back, which I have seen happen with kids in grocery store bulk-goods sections).

It's better to have leftover fruit than to use plastic. Solve the leftover fruit problem with marked down bags if they can't be put to some other purpose.

> It's better to have leftover fruit than to use plastic.

As I wrote, this is not obvious. Leftovers require energy and resources to produce, transport, and possibly destroy. Energy and resources imply pollution.

This is very similar to the plastic vs. glass problem. One intuitively thinks that glass is better, but when transport pollution is included in the equation, glass is not necessarily better anymore.

I would agree it’s not necessarily obvious, but the solutions to use all food transported are local, and consistent traits that cause produce to degrade over, over time, identified earlier so those pieces can be diverted to byproducts more cheaply. Additionally, there’s that hands-on produce sells better which achieves public health goals and arguably reduces consumption of more environmentally damaging foods. There are multiple layers of misleading intuition to consider.

The wasted fruit has already been thrown away by the store in the case of Amazon.

Fruit and veg just doesn't need wrapping - but you do want a way to keep stuff you're going to eat raw from touching gross stuff.

Would it be possible for the camera tracking to confuse 2 people, if there is a toilet/obstruction which means the cameras can't always determine who is who? (It does seem to say in some articles that it doesn't use facial recognition)

Interesting, I wonder what European country could follow next?

So many European countries are hell-bent on paying with cash, even for transactions like supermarkets. I wonder if the idea will translate to somewhere like Germany, since the whole point is not having to stop and interact with a checkout point, but Germans want to pay with cash (for some reason).

Netto in Denmark recently introduced something called Scan-N-Go, which is a "low-tech" alternative to the walk-out shopping from Amazon.

Netherlands it is then they had their special chip and pin wallet since the 2000’s if anything going without it was quite hard before contactless became prevalent.

But how does it work?

The article only mentions that you scan your phone at the entrance. The tags don't seem to be RFID or anything special neither.

a bit of googling found a better article thats shows the cameras and sensors on the ceiling do the work.

https://www.google.fr/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-...

Is that a critique of the article or are you unable to find that out online?

I just found it, see sibling.

Not a critique, honest curiosity.

I wrote about it back when they showed off the first one here in Seattle. Not sure how much they've updated it but it's largely RGB cameras in the ceiling and weight sensors in the shelves:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/21/inside-amazons-surveillanc...

Closer inspection of the shelves in the London store shows regular cheap steel shelving units with no weight sensors visible anywhere.

Either the weight sensors are very well hidden, or there aren't any.

Amazon claims cameras automatically track what you take and put back. But if that's the case, then I'm left confused as to why receipts take so long (15-20 mins+ sometimes) to be generated after leaving the stores?

Is it possible it's actually a manual process of people watching the videos, or more likely identifying what happened at each "take off shelf/put on shelf" point?

They're still just building up the customer base, training data and models and it's not as magical as it all seems?

They need to wait till not only you leave the ship, but also all people who were near you when you picked or returned any item. Then they can use that to resolve ambiguities ("one of these 3 people took this item which is now missing from the shelf, who was it")

Is your observation based on multiple samples? Or just a couple of casual visits? Would be interesting to know their real median receipt generation time.

Their patent [1] describes how it works. A nice summary is provided in [2].

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10001402B1/en [2] https://www.geekwire.com/2018/fresh-patents-served-smart-she...

In the UK Amazon has a deal with supermarket chain Morris ons for groceries orders and deliveries through the Amazon website. My understanding is that a significant portion of the groceries sold at this new store are Morrisons'.

I don't know if this is just a coincidence but there's a Morrisons supermarket almost opposite this new store in Ealing. They could wheel the stock over the road in a trolley if they wanted!

And it costs significantly more to get the exact same egg box from Amazon than from Morrisons... (They have slightly redesigned labels)

wow, plastic everywhere

Unfortunately that's normal in British supermarkets

Selling fresh Chinese knockoff vegetables?

If it’s like their Morrisons service it’ll all be bashed to shit and half of it missing.

Somewhat true but they refund you easily, the substitutions are more annoying TBH because often they are very weird since they are done by the shopper rather than by the distribution center.

Half the people in a given Morisons in London are now Amazon shoppers, I’m not sure what’s Morrisons plan with this colab is I would guess that the Amazon shoppers piss off the regular shoppers quite a bit because they are everywhere pushing huge trollies with like 20 Amazon bags to fill and Amazon will dump Morrisons the moment their grocery supply chain will be strong enough and they’ll have enough repeating customers.

I wonder why they could write "Fruit" as a complete word, but "Vegetables" was too long? It appears a few times in a few images. If it was shortened to be 'hip' you'd expect "Fru" and "Veg".

It's odd to see certain words being dumbed down in other countries, be it 'trimming' or using a version you'd use when communicating with children (as per usage presented in popular media, i.e. saying "eat your veggies" to a child).

Fruit & Veg is a common expression in the UK.

Local thing. Fruit and Veg is a common colloquialism around the UK.

“Fruit and veg” is absolutely standard British English idiom.

As an American who lives in the UK, here are some of the daily things that you might think are someone being cute but are 100% proper and accepted speech, even in a formal BBC news story:

- Vegetables are just called 'veg'.

- You don't get a shot, you get a 'jab'.

- You say 'whilst' instead of 'while'

- You don't get a turn, you 'have a go'.

- Band-aids are called 'plasters'.

- Many vegetables have different names. Eggplants are 'aubergines'. Cucumbers are 'courgettes'. Pickles are 'gherkins'.

So a headline like "To Promote Veg And Vaccines, Boris Johnson Has A Go With COVID Jab Whilst Eating A Gherkin and Walks Away With A Plaster" is maybe a little silly, but totally proper.

They also write 'Mr Johnson' without the '.' after 'Mr' - and they call the '.' a 'full stop'. Basically it's a real nightmare over here.

tl;dr - You should localize your US software for the UK market if you want to fit in. It's more different than you think. Even street addresses work differently here.

I don't think we care that much about localisation in software. Or rather we're very used to not having it. So as a native I recommend not spending that much effort on it.

A lot of the above will make you fit in better, but some are kind of colloquial and the standard 'international' ones work fine. Nobody will find it unusual if you use 'while', for example, or ask for your 'turn'. True enough though, 'shot', 'band-aid', and probably 'eggplant' will mark you as an outsider. Some of them are also class-based, which is a whole other thing that I'm happy to say Americans suffer much less from.

Also, when in the US, I feel weird calling a band-aid a band-aid because it feels like corporate subservience. A bit like I feel a pang of rebellious disgust when using the word 'hoover' in British company.

Courgettes (from French) are zucchini (from Italian). Cucumbers are cucumbers but I understand that commonly not the same ones.

> Pickles are 'gherkins'

Only pickled cucumbers are gherkins.

You wouldn't call a pickled egg or onion or whatever else a 'gherkin'.

While this is correct, in American vernacular 'pickle' without qualifications is precisely a gherkin.

My understanding was different. In the US, if you ask for a "pickle", what you'll get is about 3-4 inches long. If you ask for a gherkin, it's likely to be more like 1-1.5 inches long.

The "-kin" suffix is diminutive. Etymology isn't destiny, but I think most American speakers think of gherkins as smaller than pickles.

Wikipedia is a little confusing on the subject. It confirms that gherkins are small, but also "up to five inches". Which is indeed small for a cucumber, but cucumbers bigger than 5 inches are rarely pickled (they get mushy).

So the notion of gherkins as "small pickled cucumbers" seems vague, and I think people disagree, but I don't know the geography of that disagreement.

The small ones we call "cornichons" but they're a "pickle", "pickled cucumber" is a redundancy you would seldom hear.

And yes, if you get a "gherkin" in the USA it will be on the small side, but "gherkin" in the Commonwealth is just any (cucumber) pickle.

If pickles are called gherkins, what are gherkins called? Or is there no separate word for them?

(In the US, a gherkin is a small pickled cucumber. A cornichon is a type of gherkin, but there are other types.)

> In the US, a gherkin is a small pickled cucumber

That's exactly what a gherkin is in the UK.

What is 'a pickle' to you?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com