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Comment by iepathos | Hacker News Reader

This would be a good excuse for a smaller company that doesn't have the resources but amazon is literally the largest cloud provider in the world. Amazon could scale instantly to deal with queue size no problem and at cost since they own the aws services needed to do so. I don't think queue size or under-provisioning makes sense here at all. Validation and some human element checking inventory matches sales makes sense but that's essentially what the author is suggesting is going on here.

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Does Amazon Fresh lose revenue by sending receipts slowly? On demand compute is likely more valuable to sell.

It must cost them some revenue because quick receipts is a much better user experience. The receipt system will inevitably make mistakes and it's much easier for the customer to deal with those before leaving the area and getting involved in something totally different.

I see little correlation between such minor user experience quibbles and sales in US retail.

You can't even tap a MasterCard to pay in any of the top 3 brick and mortar retailers in the US. Nobody is going to walk 2 more blocks past an Amazon Go/Fresh because they want their receipt faster. Or at least, the demographic who would is likely not the demographic Amazon is targeting. These stores are going up in neighborhoods where people are relatively unlikely to look at their receipts anyway.

Prompt receipt of a receipt is valuable to the customer. It enables them to promptly dispute mistakes, submit expense reports, allows for return of purchases (valuable also to Amazon: imagine the enormous headaches adapting a system to allow for the return of an item your system doesn't currently believe someone bought yet), etc.

Amazon sends the receipt the moment they charge you. Amazon Go does not do "returns". You just click "request a refund" and they give you your money back. This is more convenient than other stores.

There’s no way I would have Amazon automatically bill me 2 days after I left the store

Why? A lot of bills I get a month after the fact.

Because if they made a mistake what evidence would I have to prove otherwise? Sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen, especially given how arcane AWS billing and Amazon account management is in general. What if they billed you for $1,000 worth of groceries?

They don’t ask you to prove anything. You click the refund button, and you get your money back.

> checking inventory matches sales

That's my guess. They wait until the end of the day and see what they have in the store, since that's got to be the easiest of all of this to automate with cameras.

Then they see how far off the AI was for the day and work on error correction and send receipts.

My understanding internally at amazon is they have the same cloud tools that smaller companies have with AWS. I seriously doubt amazon is keeping some secret AWS sauce for internal-use-only.

They do, source: I worked at Amazon.

I agree with your overall point that cloud resources probably shouldn’t be a problem for Amazon that factors into the hours of processing time. But is it true that AWS could provide at-cost resources to sister companies?

More of a legal/organizational question. But assuming Amazon Fresh is a legally-distinct entity with service agreements with Amazon Web Services, wouldn’t offering those services at below-market-rate be considered anticompetitive (and also call into question the legal separation of the two entities)?

The simplest explanation, IMO, is to look at the piece Amazon doesn't own. The bandwidth to send a continuous stream of 4K video from dozens (hundreds?) of cameras from the store to the cloud for processing. That can't be cheap.

Netflix 4K seems to be about 7GB per hour. A camera aimed at a store should be able to get away with much less, since the image is mostly static. But let’s say 7GB per hour.

If all the processing were in the cloud and the data were going in the other direction, AWS might charge 5c / GB, so 35 cents / hour. Peanuts.

But AWS owns the infrastructure, and they don’t charge for ingress anyway. A 1Gbps link might cost $2k per month (wild guess, but not far enough off to matter). That covers 64 streams. This cost is minimal.

Of course, AWS could also stick enough of their processing at the edge to essentially eliminate the bandwidth cost entirely.

My (admittedly residential) symmetric gigabit internet costs... $700/year.

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