Amazon Fresh kills "Just Walk Out" shopping tech–it never worked
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The second time I went in, I tried to game it a little bit—putting items back on shelves after a while, taking two items and putting only one in my bag and the other on the shelf, that kind of thing. They still got my purchases 100% correct. I was still fairly impressed.
The most recent time I went there, I wasn’t even trying to be crafty, but they still only ended up charging me for three out of five of the things I got, and that’s when I realized that the whole thing was a facade, running on something akin to Amazon Mechanical Turk.
The problem as I see it is that the technology is working at cross-purposes with itself. On the one hand, it has to tend to err in favor of undercharging, because it won’t take many false charges that customers have to dispute to turn them off from ever wanting to come back to the store again. I suspect that’s why Amazon Go has an extremely liberal return policy—In essence, say you want to return anything and they just give you your money back, no questions asked, no need to even bring the product back. On the other hand, merchants obviously aren’t in the business of giving away free stuff, so unless this technology can have insane levels of accuracy, as in at least 99.9% accurate, there’s no way it makes financial sense for other businesses to adopt it.
It's absolutely wild, yet unsurprising, that they tried to solve it by employing less well paid people. The Amazon future is mechanical turks all the way down.
Amazon just does everything at scale. It's like they win 51% of the time, but since they place millions and billions of bets, they make oodles of money.
Amazon is still growing at a decent pace(https://www.statista.com/statistics/266282/annual-net-revenu...). AWS is thriving, Microsoft and Google are hardly able to compete with AWS.
> They still sell Kindles without USB-C.
Every Kindle(latest model) they sell now has USB-C even the basic one.
> They can barely deliver stuff that isn't scuffed up and damaged.
Get probably a dozen orders every week that are just fine
> Prime Video borders on almost unusable.
Umm, okay. Never had this problem.
> They still sell Kindles without USB-C.
Kindle oasis eh?
>> Currently unavailable. >> We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock.
> Their customer service is impossible to get a hold of now, as you are blocked by an inane "AI" chatbot. I've done their Amazon Day shipping, and they just toss a bunch of heavy stuff in a big box with (literally) a single piece of paper of "packing material".
Never really had this problem. Though when I've gotten an underpacked delivery they've fixed it.
> I'm still a bit chaffed by the interview I had with them. They acted like their principles made everything they touch turn to gold, whereas I can't name an Amazon product that I'm impressed by the technology or even process.
Did this really happen? Because there are a whole lot of reasons to hate Amazon, but EC2 really isn't one of them. And Amazon is a literal career springboard for everyone I've known.
To add to this, I made it all the way through the Canonical process. Which was a bit more involved than being “chaffed at a single interview”. Because if the first interview chaffs you, just wait until you get to 4 or 6.
I can proudly say, I know nothing more about Canonical’s overreaching principles and process than I would have had just farting around in the news. So I believe you are full of it.