Hacker News Reader

I don't know if they've evolved their approach, if my local store is an outlier, or if yours was an outlier, but I live near an Amazon store and go in a few times per week: the experience you describe doesn't match my experience. Over maybe 100 visits: there's usually a few people in there at minimum, the food is pretty good (as far as convenience food store goes) and prices are the same as similar stores. I sometimes have to dance through a crowd of people struggling to get in.

I wouldn't say the concept is a huge success because... it's a convenience store, and location is far more important than anything else, so there's a pretty low ceiling on what a convenience store can achieve beyond being in a good location, but it is certainly convenient.

(As far as business goes, they seem like a cute experiment that has escaped the pointless novelty stage but hasn't reached the industry disruption stage ('cause there isn't one) and so is floating aimlessly in the middle space where they probably can just about justify keeping them around.)

For a convenience store, they were missing items you'd find reliably in 7-11s, like charging cables or headphones, at least when i asked the guy at the front.

The food was good quality and very fast. It was basically a micro cafeteria for my building. I went there daily for the soda and sushi or salad until we had our catered lunches back. This is the Stewart location in Seattle... Which there isn't much food around right nowand is across the street from my office

If I were an automated store that relied on a charged mobile phone I wouldn't sell charging cables either! :-)

They aren't things people buy regularly, that's a niche thing.

7-11s will be selling cheap and nasty cables and headphones at huge markups to even justify the tiny amount of shelf space they occupy.

I think "nobody ever went there" is difficult to gauge since most purchases are very quick. Typical purchase would take 30-60 seconds for me to make. Since people are quick in/quick out it seems less people shop there.

I'm a smoker who worked next to one of these stores, so I spent a good deal of time on the curb outside. I'd see multiple people enter and exit the CVS anytime I was out there, but I'm not sure I ever saw anyone do more than stand outside the Amazon Go trying to figure out what it was before moving on.

Isn't the whole point of Amazon generally, and these stores specifically in not having staff, that it's supposed to be cheaper? I think you've pinpointed the reason it failed, but I can't imagine why they thought it was going to succeed at those prices.

Maybe they were thinking about the immediate gratification cognitive bias. You might see the price on the shelf as you take each item from the shelf, but that doesn't translate to a total expense until you actually pay the Amazon bill at the end of the month.

I'm not sure it actually failed. These stores work by having AI track customer actions via camera, and over the last couple of years they've gotten a ton of data and domain knowledge from them. It isn't hard to imagine that's been leveraged in whatever's watching the cameras at Whole Foods.

Although they've added self-checkout lanes to Whole Foods, human interaction is in its DNA and you pay for that premium.

Amazon is only able to capture your order details if you use the app at checkout.

What kind of human interaction do you get out of some bored 15 year old girl at the supermarket? For me it doesn't go beyond "hello" and "bye". Maybe it's something to do with culture.

Anyway I looked up some data and over half the customers in my country use the self checkout now.

The point of spending this massive amount of money on an automated store is to recoup that investment by opening lots of automated stores and make money in volume, taking advantage of your lower labor costs.

If they don't actually open at least hundreds of these then they've thrown away massive amounts of money on R&D they'll never get back, and the data they did accumulate isn't even particularly useful as it's in the context of a type of store they're not running at scale.

Cheaper for Amazon, yes. Why would they externalize the profit? Just maximizing extraction by eliminating the few remaining local jobs.

How did it fail? They just announced that eight stores were permanently closed after having been closed indefinitely, one of which was inside of an Amazon office that shut down last year.[1] It looks like they still have 29 Go stores open nationwide.[2]

[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2023/amazon-closing-eight-amazon-go...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011

This reminds me that the San Francisco ones, if I remember correctly, are in a part of town that's been famously devoid of foot traffic since the pandemic.

San Francisco might be receptive to the concept, but it would have to be close to where people live, rather than where office workers used to go.

The only one I know in SF was down in the FiDi, and I can’t imagine that area had much traffic during the pandemic, and I question how much it has now.

That's precisely what i was saying.

I'm also seeing this tech in some airports in basically a linear contained store. Walk in, walk down the tunnel grab what you want, walk out. Seemed very efficient and airport appropriate

Sports venues, too. They have the Amazon version installed at Climate Pledge Arena and a few baseball stadiums, but I've seen something similar at a walk-up beer fridge during a Nets game at the Barclays Center.

If you have a US-wide convenience store chain with a multi-billion-dollar company behind it, and you have 29 stores after six years, well... I mean, it's not exactly a stand-out success, is it?

well, Amazon Go isn't the only cashierless brand in Amazon's portfolio. It was the experimental small store. They're moving towards deploying the technology in Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh stores.

I assumed that every one of those stores were experiments or at least test jigs, and closing or opening them means nothing to anyone outside Amazon.

NYC is a tough market because there is so much competition. But if you're not trying to make money yet you can learn a lot. Perhaps they learnt that New Yorkers don't have the patience to install an app. You generally don't wait that long in a bodega -- I expect to wait longer inside a gas station on the Interstate!

Just because they're blowing money on it doesn't mean it's a successful concept

It could have been intentionally set to a more expensive price level, to manage the number of people using it. (To manage the "load" on the product development team, because if 2% of all users encounter some problems - or otherwise need support - then it's not scalable.)

> Isn't the whole point of Amazon generally, and these stores specifically in not having staff, that it's supposed to be cheaper?

I'm pretty sure the goal is to have a higher profit margin than competitors by leveraging technology, not lower prices.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the long-term goal but in reality it was not yet cheaper. Automation often proves more difficult than one would expect.

https://xkcd.com/1319/

This should be branded on the forehead of every CEO of a company that promises full self driving capabilities for cars before 2030 and cryptocurrency mass adoption, also before 2030.

The image caption text seems very fitting as well. Not quite the dictionary definition of auto-mation but maybe it should be.

My hunch is that the store wasn't meant to be particularly popular with lots of customers, it was meant to demonstrate technologies they wanted to sell to businesses.

https://aws.amazon.com/just-walk-out/

https://aws.amazon.com/one/

They've employed a "Amazon is the first and best customer" for most of the services they've launched. Amazon.com / AWS is an example.

Was Amazon actually the first customer for AWS (being a very early customer counts)? I've heard that they were, but I've also heard that the AWS guys designed for a different customer base first.

Like the eBay Pez story it makes sense and adds credibility for the narrative to be that Amazon was the first customer for AWS. But it feels like a very unamazon thing to do, given that so much of its customer base isn't running the kind of enterprise jobs that an Amazon scale company needs.

(Either way I imagine almost all of Amazon does run on AWS these days and I'm sure the transition took a long time)

iirc aws exists mainly because amazon kept needing capacity, and after solving that problem it then had a bunch of excess capacity

Excess capacity story is a myth. Frequently corrected/debunked by Werner Vogels.

They also recently opened cashierless Whole Food locations that use the same technology. I would not be surprised if some of these Gp stores were never intended to stay open but rather existed as a concept and to test ideas.

This will be huge rant but as someone who worked right next to one of these in San Francisco I didn’t use it because it was obnoxiously annoying.

Speaking as someone technically inclined who writes code for a living, I don’t want to have to scan a QR code or use an App to go through some weird robot gate to buy a thing from the automated store. And that’s (me), not the average Joe Blow who can’t even figure out how to open the calculator app on his phone.

It was a terrible idea from the start and 10x more convenient to walk into a corner market, grab a drink and hand the cashier a few $1’s from my wallet. All this super advanced technology and it has zero real world benefit or time savings for normal human beings.

The food was just really, really bad. The ones near me stocked a bunch of pre made meals and they were all horrible. I can't wait for this tech to get into my grocery store, but the convenience stores were not it.

My intuition tells me this is the problem. I moved away from purchasing any type of grab and go food about ten years ago and I think a lot of consumers have joined me.

it might never make it, depends on where you live. where I live, they were banned because must accept cash, and they can't sell things like booze because id checks, so you end up having a bunch of humans around anyway, which kind of defeats the purpose of installing hundreds of cameras and other expensive systems.

Automated cash registers exist and are widely used, and are much simpler technologically than a scanner-less checkout. Amazon is choosing not to use them.

Putting quinoa in everything and assuming the addressable market had more disposable income seems like one of the signs of the last bubble.

Why are people so weird about food? What about quinoa made it associated with rich yuppies? If you didn’t already know you would probably assume the main consumers would be dudes who want their chicken and carb to have even more protein.

Food choice being a proxy and signal for class/culture is nothing new. You’d be hard pressed to find a cultural tradition that doesn’t speak to it.

While everyone needs sustenance, there are often several adequate choices about how to get it and making those choices become a way of communicating to others. And communicating is an defining and seemingly valuable part of being human.

It’s not really weird and it’s not going anywhere.

Consumption of quinoa doesn't demonstrate your food choice as much as that you follow quaint trends.

I share the same concerns about quinoa as OP. My guess is that it has to be made and served fresh, and these stores have it sitting on shelves for days at a time and it tastes funny after a while.

> What about quinoa made it associated with rich yuppies?

poor people use wheat etc.

Oh the irony. Rye was poor people’s cereal back then, wheat was for the rich.

Lobster was once for prisoners and slaves or a poor mans food, while nowadays it's almost exactly the opposite. It'll be hard to find a prisoner or slave that gets to eat lobster.

That’s mostly because they didn’t really know how to prepare it back then.

Oysters were poor people food in the same era, and like now, many people ate them raw. It has less to do with culinary trends and much more to do with the relative productivity of the lobster fishery. (In recent years, the lobster fishery has been really productive, but prices have been pretty sticky[0].)

Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster has some great primary source research on the social status of eating shellfish through the years.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/us/in-maine-fishermen-str...

At the time when lobsters were fed to prisoners, they hadn’t yet figured out the boiling-them-alive trick, which is supposedly how you get lobster to taste good. I don’t know anything about oysters though.

Boiling lobster (and other things) alive is more about preventing food poisoning as bacteria appears quickly as soon as it's dead. You could kill a lobster right before cooking it (not boiled alive) and have the same flavor + reducing health risks.

It's not ironic. Agricultural methods have changed over the millennia and as a result the relative price of many foods has gone way down. See also white rice.

I don't disagree. It's the fads and narratives that come alongside which are... looking for the right word here - dumb?

I'm not aware that quinoa is expensive. Some rich yuppies have the time for following lame food/health/lifestyle trends. However, doing that is lame at any income level. A proper bro dude will never eat yogurts sprinkled with acai berries and quinoa or whatever crap.

There's reports of prisoners complaining about the torture of being fed salmon all the time, because it used to be common food. People signal their class and status through everything, also through food.

Salmon not prepared, handled or stored properly or not served fresh can taste pretty bad and smell pretty bad compared to other meats. Seafood in general goes bad fast compared to beef or pork for example.

I used Blue Apron for a while and got an unreasonable amount of salmon for some reason. It's been almost 6 years and I can still barely eat salmon after that. So I can definitely understand where the prisoners were coming from on this one.

This comment is confusing to me, because Blue Apron lets you select your own meals. Why would you continue to select salmon if you had it too often?

Things might have changed since then, but from what I recall while we had some options on what to pick, for example I could eliminate red meat entirely, there was no option to get meat and not get salmon. So pretty much every week at least one of the meals was salmon.

The lumber camp installation inside the Nordic Hertitage Museum (Seattle) shows a sample employee contract: Salmon will not be served more than 3 times per week.

At the time, salmon was the cheapest, most abundant source of protein. Poor people's food.

IIRC, lobster in New England was about the same.

Quinoa specifically: it's foreign sounding, so people were unfamiliar with it, and it was touted for being more nutritious than things like rice.

So, novelty and cool factor, plus appeal to those looking for healthy options; some overlap with the faddish nature of trends in healthy eating.

Because nobody really ate it in the US and then it was everywhere it was a fad among rich yuppies. Yeah peasants ate it in South America (there were even newspaper editorials chastising yuppies for denying poor people their quinoa supply by eating it for frivolous reasons) but so what?

It become quite expensive for a few years, as it became popular at a greater rate than production increased. Bulk price seems to be down again now, though.

> two people standing by to help people install the Go app on their phones and explain the concept

That feels like a problem with the concept, really. That's one more than you need for conventional automatic checkouts.

If you’re charging way more than surrounding stores going all-in on quinoa seems like it’s a sound strategy, or maybe would have been one in the the recent past.

There's nothing wrong with quinoa. Makes excellent insulation or packaging material. Some crazy bastards will even try and eat it.

I go to the one in Brookfield a few times a week. Its been getting busier every month, often now there are 5+ people at a time in the store.

My interpretation is the tech worked but they got greedy, and failed at supply and demand optimization. (Failed at execution.)

When I was in Seattle it was pretty cheap lunch option.

Although Whole Foods had better food for the same price tbh.

What is quinoa put in?

Mostly grab and go foods like salads. It’s terrible just like the OP said.

> nobody ever went there

As a shopper, sounds great! Not hard to understand why they’re closing, though.