Doesn’t surprise me. I frequently shop at Amazon Fresh in store and it’s a mediocre experience. It’s a poorly run store with no visible manager making sure things are in order. You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders and they aren’t helpful. I always find expired groceries/produce on the shelf so I have to spend a lot of extra time inspecting each item. The only reason I put up with their nonsense is that some of their prices are insane and they have easy returns, for example $0.85 for a box of Barilla pasta. They actually don’t accept returns in store and just refund you automatically in the app (Returnless returns). It’s pretty silly and rife for abuse.
I also found a loophole with the Amazon.com return grocery credit. The systems are separate for the $10 off $40 coupon and you just scan a QR code in the store to get it. It turns out you can just take a photo of their QR code and reuse it over and over again.
I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores. There were instances of their prices being lower than Walmart or other budget stores. The avocados were $0.25 each and carrots were half price of ones in Safeway, even ground beef was weirdly cheap. One time as a comparison I put the same items in my cart for Amazon fresh and Walmart and it was $21 at Amazon fresh and $36 at Walmart. WAY cheaper than Instacart too.
> operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores
Wouldn't surprise me. I know a guy who invented a device for truckers that became ubiquitous in truck stops across the US. This would've been like 2014.
He refused to sell on Amazon, so Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price, until he agreed to list (at which point they dropped their competing product)
It's good to ask for a link (although not good to give one if this is your friend and it may affect their relationship with Amazon that you're talking about this in public), but you can't expect people to waste time thinking about your ringing ears.
> I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition
iirc that's exactly what Amazon did to destroy diapers.com over a decade ago
This is basically the playbook of every "disruptive technology" startup or FAANG initiative of a similar stripe - set prices incredibly low to bleed out competition and gain market share, then raise them once you are in the dominant market position.
Walmart isn't a budget grocery store, though. Its prices are higher than actual grocery stores (like Safeway.) Also, everyone is WAY cheaper than Instacart.
The answer to this is complex, it has any number of products that are cheaper than products of similar quality from any other store. Places like Safeway/Aldi typically beat on price on very generic items that may or may not have similar quality.
The biggest thing to watch for at Walmart is price discrimination dependent on location. Back in the days I used to shop with them (read made less money) picking a store in a poorer neighborhood could save $10 to $30 dollars on the same car of items.
Interestingly, we only went to our local Amazon Fresh store a handful of times but it was always a perfectly fine experience. It seemed reasonably clean, well-stocked, and well-organized. Other than those new self-checkout shopping carts (which also actually worked well, even weighing produce), it was fairly indistinguishable from other grocery stores in our area.
Amazon Go, on the other hand, always seemed like a dead man walking. It's a fun novelty to check out and grab some junk food, but it must be far more expensive to build and run than a 7-Eleven, and it's not even meaningfully more convenient.
I should also add that we've been pretty happy Amazon Fresh delivery customers for a couple of years now (we resisted regular grocery delivery for a long time...until we had a child).
Wegmans opened a store at the Brooklyn Navy Yard just to show people in NYC what a real supermarket looks like. I mean, you might be impressed with Whole Foods if all you know are those bodegas that have around NYC but if you've been to a real supermarket Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and such are not impressive at all.
This comment completely misunderstands why NYC (and the core of most major cities) is not impressed by a supermarket.
Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
You get the highest quality products from people who specialize in those products.
Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days.
Thats why Wegmans opened a store in Brooklyn Navy Yards in an area that’s close to no mass transit, because supermarkets are valuable in car centric areas and not as useful in walkable dense neighborhood.
> the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days.
Yeah, so for me that changed after having kids. Once I had to spend 30 minutes a day running around to various stores because we were always running out of everything it wasn't fun anymore.
Furthermore, specialist stores charge higher prices for the same goods because they don't have the pricing power of a large supermarket. It makes a material difference once you have a family.
Urban supermarkets are great because they give you the option of getting everything in one place when you're pressed for time, and they're usually not as large as suburban ones. Mine has a direct entrance from the subway station, so I don't even have to go aboveground.
> Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk,
Once you get used to have everything at a walking distance, you wonder how you could put up with having to drive to a supermarket.
Two are the main advantages.
The first is that you don't need to plan much in advance. Want to make hamburger tonight ? Cross the street, get meat from the butcher, get a couple of tomatoes and salad from the grocery store and the bread, and you are ready to go. I used to shop once a week and I had to have an idea of what I wanted to cook every day for the whole week.
The second is that this way you regularly eat really fresh food. My shopping list is always stuff like "two tomatoes", "three apples", "fish for tonight", "a loaf of bread". My fridge is mostly empty.
It's a 4-minute drive for me to get from my present house to the nearest grocery store (a Kroger of decent size).
I don't plan much for this journey. I don't bundle up on clothes or lace on a pair of stout boots first. I just kind of set forth (in my loafers) and drive over there -- even as everything is covered in snow, muck, and it it is 2 degrees (F) outside.
I went there last night for two tomatoes, a head of lettuce, and some cheese because those were the ingredients I was missing to make some tacos last night. While I was there, I remembered that I was running out of green tea at home and picked some of that up. I also grabbed a box of Barilla pasta because I walked by a display of it where it was on sale for 99 cents (oh noes they successfully upsold me on pantry supplies!).
There was no great investment of time or planning needed to accomplish this. I just went to the store for some odds and ends, and that was that. I might go back (or hit some other store) on my way home from work this evening -- since you mentioned apples, I kind of want one. (And I might buy exactly 1 apple. I can do that. It's Kroger, not Costco.)
I need to have the car anyway because it is necessary for me to own one in order to make money to stay alive in my environment. As long as this necessity remains, I might as well also use it for other things.
(I looked at some other addresses I've lived at, and their drive time to the local grocery store, on Google Maps. Despite "distance to grocery store" having not ever been on my radar at all when selecting a place to live, most of the places I've lived were a reported 2 minute drive to the local supermarket. The furthest was just 5 minutes out. I was pretty surprised by this at first, but looking back: That's actually a pretty fair estimate.)
And can taxes from the community actually pay for the infrastructure to support this, or do they need subsidies because taxes per sqft are abysmally low and car infrastructure costs astronomically high?
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023-7-6-stop-subsidizin...
One of the things I hated most about living in NYC was grocery shopping.
Having to walk meant you could only practically buy in small quantities, and visiting different places for different things was super annoying and inefficient.
Moving out and being able to take my car to the georcery store once a week and get everything I needed was one of the best quality of life upgrades from leaving.
I did the exact opposite and and it was most impactful quality of life upgrade I've ever done. I eat fresher and healthier food, I walk more, and I'm not tempted to snack on my stockpile of accumulated food.
While that is true for the quality-based things like deli/baker, there is one advantage to massive grocery stores that the stores inside the city can't compete with: selection. Every time I leave the city, I make a point to go to a suburban grocery store and walk down their massive spacious aisles to find new/different products that simply aren't stocked inside the city because shelf space is so limited. Entire aisles dedicated to chips!
That really, really depends what neighborhood you live in. Bakeries and especially butchers don't exist everywhere, and sometimes they (bakeries) suck. It's not Paris or Rome. And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn).
Some neighborhoods are both densely populated and a desert for quality, leaving only bodegas and overpriced artisanal boutiques.
I'm with the original poster here about Wegmans. In London you have Waitrose, which is 10,000 times better than Trader Joe's/Whole Foods and has fresh bread, alcohol, a butcher, etc etc and way more all in one place.
NYC is gar-bage when it comes to groceries.
If you spend a few minutes in the suburbs, even a rural exoburb outside of NYC, you'll drive to the supermarket and take a deep calming breath. You're not supposed to say driving could ever be better than a walkable city, but if time is precious to you and you value not hauling bags back and forth across multiple stores, you'll be way way happier.
Maybe if you only shop at the mass market chains in the gentrified central part of the city. Go to Flushing and tell me that or just go to a Western Beef.
> all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
Is that really a thing though? I feel like arguing for quality is a strong argument, but between walking between small shops at the end of my work day and just doing one supermarket feels more efficient.
Finding stuff within a supermarket is also not hard once you've been once or twice.
You need to be able to afford it as it it is more expensive, but yes it is.
I have the luck to live in a well served area: I have a Carrefour supermarket at about 200m from home yet I have 3 small markets closer than that. If I have to buy one or two things it doesn't matter if the supermarket is cheaper, in my mind spending 10 euros instead of 9 or 8 is worth it if it takes 5 minutes instead of 15. Moreover instead of having to interact with a bored cashier or an automated checkout machine, I will have a chat with a real person (yes, a cashier is a real person too, but most of the time doesn't act like one) . He will ask me how I am doing, put my stuff in the shopping bag and gasp smile at me. I think we lost sight of how those small things makes our life better.
The interesting part is, I always have to buy just 2-3 things because if it takes 5 minutes, whenever I need I just go out and buy it, so half of my shopping is not at the "big" supermarket.
I have to add though: I work from home, so for me shopping means having to go out just for that. Maybe if I was working at an office the dynamics would be different as I could just stop at a supermarket one the way home.
You aren't renting walking distance to a butcher baker and candlestick maker for less than $3K for a studio. That's an aspirational lifestyle for a few neighborhoods.
In all these discussions it would be really nice to have actual addresses and locations because the dream is obviously desirable but I just don’t know how often it occurs in actuality.
If you live in a Sienfield rerun in Manhattan the city looks like your comment. There are plenty of conventional supermarkets in NYC they just don't have a huge parking lot.
> Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
Except that you don't. Typically, you have maybe one small store selling random junk reasonably close to you. At high prices, because there's no local competition.
There's a reason the current NYC mayor campaigned on opening government-run stores.
I don't know the Wegman's in NY at all, but the one I used to use in the Boston area was ... okay?
It was a good grocery store with decent produce, a good frozen section, some nice specialty items, and some decent prepared meals. I would put it at roughly the early-2010s era of Whole Foods with slightly better prices. Now that I'm no longer working near there, I don't miss it much.
So I've never understood the hype. But I've also been told that the Boston stores were pretty mediocre compared to the ones in NY and especially Ithaca.
If you live in MA the standard options are Star Market and Stop and Shop, right? New England supermarket chains are already perfect.
I think the comment you are replying to is playing up a specific characteristic of, like, deep-in-the-city NYC (it looks like Wegmans has a place in downtown Manhattan?). I also read it as slightly tongue-in-cheek. People in NYC know what grocery stores look like, I think. They just don’t fit in dense areas.
Well I dunno to what extent the NYC lifestyle distorts the perception of stock market analysts. Do they think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast?
I used to joke that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC in the 1990s because there were 2 or 3 Starbucks on every block to fool stock market analysts that the country was saturated with them -- thus driving out the independent espresso bars that you'd find in flyover states that had better coffee and leaving only the completely-indifferent-to-quality bodegas.
FWIW, I’m not confused about the two; I’m quite familiar with the NYC metro region.
I haven’t heard any Wegman’s fans comment on their NYC stores. I’ve heard multiple people wax poetic about Wegmans who frequented the Princeton-area store and the Ithaca store.
From my experience, I don’t get it, but I haven’t spent substantial time in either of those stores.
Strong disagree, and I used to go to that Wegmans regularly. It's fine. Solid market. Whole Foods is equally fine, and excels in some ways. Neither is obviously better.
Wegmans is obviously better than Whole Foods, and its not even close. You can much more easily buy normal food at normal prices at Wegmans than Whole Foods. Whole foods has very large, strange gaps in staples.
In my experience, it's less gaps and more lack of mainstream brands. The example that comes to mind is ketchup. At Whole Foods I can get generic store brand ketchup or a variety of fancy ketchups that cost 3-10x as much, but they don't have any variety of basic Heinz on the shelf. This "mid-market" gap is common for virtually every product category.
Wegmans is good, but I find Whole Foods to have much better quality of products. Whole Foods used to be even better, we will see how Amazon manages it.
My store used to have a big bread oven, desserts made in-house, fresh prepared food made in woks etc. right next to the buffet table, etc. All gone now; the coffee shop got replaced by robots, they tried to close the seafood counter (with enough negative feedback they reversed it), etc.
It's all made centrally now, for 3x the price and half the taste. All the kids went and got MBAs and the third generation family business curse hit hard as a result.
I've heard locals say "Bob Wegman loved people, Danny Wegman loves food, and Colleen Wegman loves money".
In Ithaca the coffee went downhill lately, that's for sure. On the other hand, my favorite drip coffee anywhere is made by machines that brew it by the cup.
Honestly, it's not even about the coffee. The lady working there would see me, greet me by name, ask after my kids, and start making my drink without me having to tell her my order. That was part of the Wegmans magic for a long, long time.
(Same reason closing the seafood counter got a big backlash. There's a similarly awesome guy working there. For now.)
In general, it seems like the pareto products dont exist anymore, the midrange has basically dropped out for daily products and it's been bifurcated. If quality is a scale from 1-100, most places sell a 1, a 10, or you go to an artisanal place for a 90, for exorbitant prices.
But in the past a supermarket or toy store would have sold you an 80 for a reasonable price.
What sucks even more is that for example due to the cacao shortage, lots of products now contain less cacao for the same price. And usually down from 500g/250g to something like 485g/235g. Shrinkflation.
But, when cacao becomes cheaper or inflation stabilizes, companies don't think "let's push the quality back up for the same price", no, they'll pocket the difference. The same is planned to happen if Trump's tariffs get struck down. Businesses will get a huge refund, but the customers that got the costs passed along won't see a penny.
I know it's widespread, I just would've thought Wegmans would be one of the last to do it. The premium vibes have long been their thing, and it was part of their secret sauce to vastly larger per-square-foot sales in their stores.
Yeah, it'd be our first stop whenever we came home from a trip; we even got Christmas presents from the store one year for being (embarassingly) one of their higher-spend customers. The magic has gone; places like Kroeger and Whole Food have caught up.
> You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders
To be fair I've noticed this in multiple supermarket chains the last few years. Although they aren't usually employees, they are instacart runners or whatever.
I go fairly often to a Sprouts grocery store and there are times I need to avoid multiple people clearly doing an Instacart run with 2+ carts full of items.
Shelves are often emptier than they used to be also at these times.
Walmart is particularly bad for this: The employees do the picking and they have giant carts that monopolize the aisle. You're stuck waiting for them to scan and bag 8-10 popular items before you can get in there and grab the one thing you need.
The delivery shoppers are especially bad at whole foods. There really must be a critical mass where having a grocery warehouse makes more sense than these people meandering around.
Yep, my local Amazon Fresh store felt like it was already a distribution center with the cold fluorescent lighting, gray shelves and gray concrete floors.
I always found the "Amazon 4-Star" name funny. Presumably when it was first pitched internally it was called "Amazon 5-Star", then they realised that meant they basically couldn't sell anything, since nothing popular gets a full 5 stars. So they changed it to "4-Star", which just sounds awkward, and lacks the suggestion of top-quality that "5-Star" would. Instead, it's like the "Amazon Not-too-bad" store. I was amazed that they actually went ahead with it.
It was a pretty good burger until 2013 when they changed the machine they used to cook the burgers. Now it's worse than McD's and that's saying something.
Wait that explains so much! Do you know more about the change?
I've been weirded out by the fact that their jr burger buns are now super shiny as if they are spraying something on them. I know this is processed food, but no burger bun should be able to reflect sunlight the way their burgers now do...
I lived in Quito Ecuador back in the late 70s/ early 80s. There was a hamburger place called "Burger Queen"--the name was in English, presumably to attract people who knew about Burger King. They had a sign that read "Casa del Whooper" (not Whopper).
Shoulda just bit the bullet and gone with "4.8-star." I'm sure they talked about it and yeah it's goofy and awkward but it would get the meaning across and maybe show a bit of a sense of humor and that's exactly why they never ever could.
"'Amazon Not-too-bad' store" sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe a too-clever work around for the 5-Star problem would be to call it "100-Star," which would be 4 in binary notation. Or they could call it "5th-Star" since 4 stars is the fifth number of stars b/c the range of starts is zero indexed.
> On April 4, 2024, it was revealed that Amazon's "Just Walk Out" technology was supported by approximately 1,000 Indian workers who manually reviewed transactions. Despite claims of being fully automated through computer vision, a significant portion of transactions required this manual verification. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Go )
Wonder how much of this is due to economics since computer vision tech never reached the expected performance + outsourced workers got (relatively) much more expensive after COVID.
Why would they face consequences? Every store has video surveillance that can be reviewed.
They trusted their tech enough to accept the false-positive rate, then worked to determine / validate their false positive rate with manual review, and iterate their models with the data.
From a consumer perspective the point is that you can "just walk out". They delivered that.
If the stock price goes down, I won’t be surprised if there’s a shareholder lawsuit claiming that they misrepresented their level of AI achievement and that lead to this write-off by keeping operating costs and error rates high. The whole business model really assumed that they could undercut competitors by lower staffing.
Their initial advertising claimed near full automation by their "AI" system when, in reality, they had people manually handling around 70% of the transactions.
I get that this is a message board for YC, so lying about your company's tech is considered almost a virtue but that is an unreasonably big lie to tell without getting your hand-slapped by some regulatory body or investor backlash.
I think investors like Amazon taking shots like this? It was never a broad roll-out, 43 stores is micro-scale for Amazon.
Still, would love to see a breakdown of why it didn't improve. Regardless of the accuracy at launch, I'd think that advances in AI would have been massively to their advantage. I wonder if security degradation hit them hard.
The entire system depends on a level of social trust that doesn't exist in American cities today. Similarly, the "Dash Cart" seems like a cheaper and easier way to accomplish the same thing.
At the end of the day, there's also a mismatch in the use case. If I'm going to a smaller format store, like they had, I'm not buying a ton of stuff. Self checkout is great, and minimal friction.
I'd think that improving the UX of self-checkout gets 80% of the way there with way less fraud, way less theft, and way less technology.
Still, I think it's wicked cool they took a big shot.
I know someone that worked on the project in the early days. It was always incredibly difficult technology, they were always behind on their accuracy targets, and the solutions were increasingly kludgy as they layered more and more complex systems on top. An honorable failure.
A lot of smart people really tried to make it work.
That's great but they could have been honest up-front and said "The plan is that this is eventually fully-automated but we estimate that it needs supervised training for X amount of time in order to handle Y% of transactions automatically".
But this is tech and you just lie because hardly anyone in the investor class knows enough to call you out on it or they are just going with the lie to make a buck off of other rubes.
Privacy concerns aside, I thought it was a cool project. I agree that “convenience store” was probably not the best target but I think it was an effective enough proof of concept (creating a decent sized chain of them probably wasn’t the best idea) . I’ve seen the system used more effectively in smaller situations like stadium concessions, where the duration of the transactions needs to be very short to facilitate throughout.
I don’t remember Amazon claiming “near-full automation” by AI. They said that you can checkout automatically and that AI/computer vision is somehow involved.
AI is not unique in this regard. We just saw the same thing with the crypto/blockchain nonsense.
Regulation lags so far behind that you can get away with bad behavior long enough that, by the time regulation catches up, you can buy your way out of consequences.
20% is an incredibly high number though, if a store has 400 people/hour that means you're manually reviewing 80 transactions per hour, over one transaction per minute. That's multiple human employees.
Proven "false." I've noticed that if one admits the truth with a dismissive or offended tone, you can just continue to claim the lie and through sheer force of will people will still go with it.
I think people just think that they must be misunderstanding something; that nobody could claim one thing while offering evidence of its opposite. 1/5 of purchases lose their significance.
Essentially the thinking went. If everyone is remote, why not hire remote workers from countries that are a lot cheaper. Suddenly you had a hard time finding contractors and FTEs from those countries because everyone was hiring them. At the same time it got really hard for entry level developers in the USA to find work.
The supply/demand curve shifted and now those workers are becoming more expensive while domestic workers are becoming cheaper.
I'm not an economist either, but I also assume that as the country attracts more local talent for local companies, the competition for outsourcing becomes harder. (i.e, you now have to pay more than the local companies).
All just speculation on my part though, I really have no clue either.
India specifically is in the middle of a massive years-long labor movement that is changing the terms of work there and I believe shifting the degree of alignment with western corporate outsourcing though I'm not very informed about the details.
Scale is beyond comprehension though, there were 250 million people on strike one day last summer. This is not ever really covered in western media or mentioned on HN for reasons that are surely not interesting or worth pondering at all.
You're most likely correct; I originally started writing this comment to refute your statement, but found that my assumptions appear to be wrong.
Americans have the nearly the highest nominal and PPP income of OECD countries as of 2024, only behind Luxembourg, Iceland, and Switzerland [1].
India experiences substantially higher shelter and food insecurity and poverty rates than the United States.
However, tech workers in Bangalore are paid an order of magnitude higher than prevailing local wages in other sectors, at around ₹2M (₹20 lakh) [2]. Median annual rents for 2BHK (2 bedroom) apartments appear to be around 1/10th of that figure at ₹3 lahk in desirable neighborhoods [3].
It appears to be reasonable for a technology worker to be able to perform a sustained strike. I have never personally traveled to Bangalore, though I have lived in places where cost of living is under a tenth of median American income.
I invite correction by people with first hand knowledge about cost of living in Bangalore.
> However, tech workers in Bangalore are paid an order of magnitude higher than prevailing local wages in other sectors
250 million people striking in India isn't mainly “tech workers in Bangalore”, or mainly tech and other elite workers at all. It’s about 40% of Indian workers, and most articles I've seen about it centered on widespread participation of workers in coal, construction, and agricultural sectors.
No one (at a national scale) can afford to strike like that, except people who have an understanding of why they even more can't afford not to strike like that.
When India "shut down" for Covid, day labourers suddenly had no income, and no government support - they had to walk all the way to their home province (can't remember if the trains were even running).
But oh well, Uberizing employment means the run-of-the-mill American worker can also live like that in the future... progress!
Maybe. I'd really want to know what percent of items (not transactions) needed review. 1,000 people to oversee how much revenue?
Theoretically if it was 99% computer and 1% human, that's enough to mess up the economics but it's not a bait and switch like some companies have done.
These stores were solving for an Amazon problem (brick and mortar stores without the expense of workers), and not any significant customer problem.
They often put them in places, hoping that people would be attracted by marginally lower prices and brand extension, all while removing one of the primary appeals (for most people) of in person grocery shopping: impromptu community socialization, even if it is simply greeting the checkout worker.
These bastards drove out some nice stores near me (supposedly the lease ended and did not renew) and rebuilt the buildings in order to open an Amazon Fresh location. That Amazon Fresh store never opened. Now we have a giant empty storefront nobody uses.
Same here. A local grocery store and several other local businesses got bought out and demolished so Amazon could build a new Fresh store.
I guess Amazon pulled out of the project halfway through, since for the last ~2 years there's been a half-finished building just sitting there completely abandoned in our town center.
Reminds me of the time they made towns all around the US do a dog and pony show to attract "HQ2" and then just located it where Bezos wanted to be all along. I remember AOC getting it right all along, she did the most milktoast of pushback in her district and it caused Amazon to huff and puff and just walk away(causing many property speculators to lose out). She got raked over the coals but a few years later and the place HQ2 ended up didn't fare so well. AOC was vindicated.
My hope is that more towns learn from your experience and don't tolerate this nonsense anymore.
John Oliver analyzed state's tax rebates, 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bl19RoR7lc , he concluded that giving 1000 people Ferraris to drive around a pile of $30 million cash on fire would be more fiscally responsible...
I found it pretty funny when Mayor Mamdani of NYC pointed out that the people opposing him spent more money trying to stop him being elected than they would end up paying in increased taxes. It really is a game to those people. They can't bear to give up one cent or one ounce of control.
Another funny story was that some substack writer (whom I forget sorry) noticed that Bill Ackman subscribed to their substack and used a 30% off coupon ha ha.
Wait, how does a store that never opened drive out an existing store? That’s not how commercial leases work…
Given that a supermarket abandoned that location, and Amazon never opened on their either, perhaps that location or the lease price simply doesn’t work for a grocery store?
They got word of the development and decide to not renew their commercial lease? Then you either move business somewhere where you don't have to directly complete, or shut down.
The Amazon Go stores in San Francisco were weird. They always had no people shopping in them, which would make sense given the increased efficiency, but it amplified the "am I stealing?" vibe. And the cost of goods wasn't made any cheaper than comparable stores in SF despite the touted increased efficiency.
The pitch from Bezos -- and it's a dumb pitch -- was basically just to make checking out faster by avoiding interacting with humans (but this can be achieved by increasing the number of cashiers and baggers). The pitch was never lower prices. The combo of all the tech and the army of Indians watching video was not cheap.
And because they were relying on computer vision and Indian vision, they had to get rid of all their fresh meals because they were too hard to calculate prices for. So, it ended up being a half-assed 7-Eleven concept. The whole concept was made by someone who hates humanity.
I personally prefer stores with actual cashiers. What I don't like are lines, but that is very solvable. The organic grocer near me is super fast to check out.
Amazon Fresh had no reason to exist. They closed down a great Whole Foods near me and replaced it with a store with minimal changes to safeway/albertsons. Heavy carts for automatic scanning that barely saved time at checkout.
I will miss the grab and go tech in the Amazon stores. I was hoping they would successfully manage to sell that to other stores and make the tech wide spread in bodegas, gas stations and 711s
I've only been to the Amazon Fresh in my neighborhood, haven't been to other locations, here is what my experience was like:
They resisted implementing self checkout for years before eventually folding. No digital wallets though, you have to either use plastic or link it to your Amazon account.
The whole dash cart system was a solution in search of a problem IMO. I'm already able to check out about as efficiently as possible. Frontloading the scanning time isn't really an amazing improvement. The store was never crowded enough for it to matter.
My biggest problem with the store was that it was lacking random pantry staples and supplies that you would expect from your primary grocer. Several times I showed up in desperate need of something for a recipe or household task and they just wouldn't have it.
The produce was actually decent quality and competitively priced, but my alternative (the local Ralph's) I think just had some kind of curse or something on it because the produce at that specific location was a consistent level of awful observed over 5 years.
I hope they replace it with a whole foods, much better store IMO.
Hmm Amazon fresh was useless anyway. It was this weird niche of grocery delivery but for small urgent orders. I just don't have that need like ever, if I need a bottle of shampoo or a head of lettuce urgently I'll just go to the corner shop.
Edit: oh oops I see this is about physical fresh stores, we never had those in the first place. Here in Europe Amazon fresh is a weird service for quick small grocery orders. For the bigger ones they partner with a local supermarket ("dia" here in Spain). But I never do grocery delivery because I never make any plans, I just make my life up as I go along :)
But Amazon fresh here is expensive and still slow (2hrs) so really not good for anything.
Yeah these are all going to be wrapped up into their same day delivery service. Amazon fresh was very expensive and required a fee on top of prime which unsurprisingly nobody wants to do
What you’re talking about is the delivery product, not the brick and mortar grocery stores, which are not much different from your typical big chain standard grocery outlet.
The general force behind this is the expansion of sub-same-day delivery which they have been pushing hard for the last year. Amazon fresh was a more traditional model which didn't fit in well with amazon's strengths (fulfillment, automation) because they tried to enter a market they were directly competing with (in-person shopping) and charged users for delivery in addition to their existing membership.
It's a welcome change IMO, amazon groceries are super cheap online and now delivery is free. They have been removing the fresh name from products for a few months now and replacing with amazon grocery. Certainly less confusion for consumers, at least
I don't live around any Amazon Fresh stores so I never saw them though I did see the technology in use at several airports (though I've never personally used it). IMO I think places like airports are the best place for something like this, people are usually in a rush so not having to wait in line to checkout is nice and you don't have to worry about security as much because everyone there is a ticketed passenger (only saw them post-security) and even if someone did try stealing they wouldn't get very far.
I saw these in several different airports. It usually had multiple people staffed at the gate to get in and out meanwhile most of the other snack vendors often only had a single person employed.
So you spend a few hundred thousand dollars extra on all the cameras, many millions on all the design, pay all the overseas contractors to manually review the transactions, and you still end up with twice the in-person staff than the average store in the airport.
Wow, they just opened a brand new one in Philly less than two months ago. I've yet to shop there and I guess now I never will. It must have cost millions to clear that site and build a whole new building there. Just to abandon it. I wish I had money to waste like that.
Edit: it actually opened in August, so it was around for about six months instead of two.
Yeah, they've just closed the one near me. I think they underestimated how hard it would be, at least in the UK - the existing supermarket chains are already competitive, mostly pretty good, and people have surprisingly high brand loyalty to them. I don't think I've even talked to anyone who has shopped in Amazon Fresh, or even wanted to.
Not surprised. Unless the item is on sale (which can be very good deals) their pricing is no better than a standard supermarket and usually far more expensive than a Target or WalMart. And they quickly gave up on the scan and go where the smart shopping card read everything in the basket and automatically charged your Amazon account, so it was back to regular checkout.
We have Żabka Nano which is self-serve cashierless shop in Poland. You just swipe you card at the entrance, get whatever you want and walk out. I think they use computer vision system to detect the products taken from the shelves. It kinda amazes me because it's what Amazon promised but failed to deliver.
The technology lives on, as Amazon "Just Walk Out". But rather than general grocery stores, it is used for concessions at stadiums and places like that.
I guess it turned out that the need more human intervention than they hoped, so the cost is too high for regular stores. However at places where a premium can be charged for high throughput or a low friction experience then the cost of the human intervention can be recouped.
Just a heads up that only the Amazon Go stores did the "just walk out" shopping thing. Amazon Fresh stores were pretty much just regular grocery stores. They had shopping carts with the self-checkout built in, but that was the extent of the technology.
There was a concept Amazon Fresh store with “Just Walk Out” technology on Capitol Hill in Seattle. They closed it down a couple of years back but the brand was absolutely Amazon Fresh.
Doesn't surprise me either. Anecdotal story coming, but there is physical location on Philadelphia, and I stopped by as I needed an item for dinner that night, and it was on my way home.
Store was kind of bare, and poorly organized. But the kicker is they didn't accept any form of mobile wallet! They had an identical POS system to wholefoods which takes it just fine.
So I quickly put my items back and headed to Giant.. Haven't been back since
They have a good price on take out pizza. Unlimited toppings, and with Prime membership it's $8 something for a large pizza. It was probably their loss leader to get people in the store. I felt like the store was usually pretty empty when I was there. I wonder if Amazon will keep Whole Foods too.
Shame, shopping there felt like magic. I hope the technology is developed in future without having to rely on remote workers validating transactions. Definitely felt like the future of shopping
Isn't the same tech used in stadiums? At least in Seattle we can just walk out without paying, even alcohol. Obviously we have to scan our CC or something similar to get in but I always thought it was using the same Amazon tech.
So even though these stores are closing, the tech is widely used and likely expanding and succeeding
Well, that article made me nervous for a second! I love my Amazon Fresh grocery delivery. I started using it during Covid, but could never go back. It's so nice having groceries feel automated instead of a semi-daily chore. I eat much healthier and the rationale for using DoorDash evaporated.
Absolutely zero interest in a physical version that lets me check-out easier, though. So, I can see why they're making this switch.
> It's so nice having groceries feel automated instead of a semi-daily chore
One of a my previous jobs had a grocery store on the way home. I took to stopping in pretty much daily. It allowed for a bit of decompression after work before coming home. It was very convenient to always have exactly what was needed for that night while being therapeutic at the same time. After switching jobs, losing that was probably the most noticeable thing about the new job
They literally only put them in unaffordable areas. Like the only one I know is in a residential area of Southwalk in London not far from the TATE Modern museum. I don't even live in London.
Been in one once for the novelty as they've never been useful.
Human nature probably prevents that from ever being a reality, at least at scale. In a tiny tight knit community where literally everybody knows everybody else maybe you could pull that off, but even then you have to get a bit lucky.
In a world where anonymity is a thing there will always be at least one inherent shithead who ruins it for everyone. Even if you do have a community where it's true, that can change anytime someone has a kid or someone moves in.
I’m in an interesting place. Here in Seattle I am two blocks from one of the largest Amazon Fresh stores. It was built on the former location of a local grocer. The construction was almost complete before Covid hit, but Amazon shuttered the store during that time. As a result there was no groceries in my neighborhood from 2018-2023.
Now it seems Amazon is going to leave us a grocery desert yet again.
They were piloting smart carts at the location. The cart scans your items so checking out you just push the cart through a scanner that weighs it. But this invention was like a microcosm of Amazon’s whole fuckup with groceries. The problem with the store wasn’t that I couldn’t check out fast enough, it’s that it was a shit grocery store. They had popular products but they were missing all the unpopular, low margin products you need to actually cook (baking powder, shortening, tomato paste, soy sauce…). They only hire non-union jobs program people at the registers because Amazon believes that cashier is a sub-human role.
The previous store had an owner who would wander the aisles and chat with customers. The new store has Europeans with clipboards who watch you as you shop.
My brother has worked as a stocker for King Kullen in New York for 20 years and is a union worker.
In the Seattle area where the poster is from, pretty much all the grocery stores are unionized. Workers at big stores like Safeway, Fred Meyer, QFC, and Albertsons, and local stores PCC, Uwajimaya are represented by UFCW3000. https://ufcw3000.org/shop-union
Not to be rude but there’s 4 Amazon Fresh locations in the greater Seattle area and each of them is next to multiple other large/small grocery options.
For instance, the one in north Seattle (Shoreline) is within eyesight of a Safeway, a Sprouts, two international markets and a chef wholesaler.
The other three locations are similarly crowded with options.
Jackson St location is the only walkable option in its neighborhood. It wasn't very good (terrible selection, stocking issues, slowly increasing locked section) but it was convenient.
Food deserts do exist, but Seattle's Central District is not one of them. This US government tool used to literally be called the "Food Desert Locator" until the current administration re-named it to "Food Access Research Atlas"
It's really the suburban areas of Seattle that develop food deserts, likely due to restrictive zoning for commercial properties and minimum lot-size requirements that make sure that every grocery store is a long SUV ride away from the cu-de-sac neighborhood.
If the term Food Desert offends you, I can gladly switch to calling it Food Apartheid instead.
A giant, multinational, multi-trillion-dollar corporation that will only bargain with individual people living paycheck-to-paycheck? Huh, what a weird power imbalance!
Surely it doesn't have anything to do with their documented history of treating their blue-collar workforce like utter garbage.
I think Amazon are largely shitheads to their low level workers (and still assholes even to mid-level workers), and I am in no way defending them. I'm in fact sickened by them. I will never work for Amazon.
But the implication above was that the non-union employee is the "sub-human" option. I find that attitude pretty gross too. Humans are human whether they are union members or not.
I don't know what your life/lives are like, and far be it for me to tell you how to live, but if your schedule allows it try shopping later at night.
I show up at CostCo, on weekdays, like 30 minutes before closing time and it's _wonderful_. Few people, nobody blocking lanes while they consider their choices, etc. Same goes for Safeway, Fred Meyer, Trader Joe's, etc.
It doesn't work so great if you've got young kids, or you want to come home from work and just stay home (reasonable), but it's worth considering :)
I don't know about other areas, but here in the Bay Area (or at least Silicon Valley) our Whole Foods has subsumed all the services provided by Amazon Fresh (and Go really never worked). So we're not really losing any services, just the brand name.
Curious thought - will they be shutting down other “just walk out” powered stuff like Hudson Nonstops in airports?
I also know some Amazon warehouses had an entire Just Walk Out powered concessions area in their breakroom for purchasing snacks in partnership with one of their canteen vendors.
That’s kinda what I figured. At this point it seems like they all have the same general configuration of coolers and shelves and the same cameras all angled in the same setup everywhere so I assume it’s all down to one very strict CV model or something…
I stopped into the Amazon Fresh in Broomall, PA, to check it out not too long ago. It just looks bland and dystopian from the outside, and not much about it is impressive from the inside. I've worked with computers and technology my whole life, and the entrance to the store just confused me. If I remember correctly, I had to scan the Amazon app on my phone to enter the building. Once inside, it felt like a warehouse; the aisles were too small, and the food selection wasn't even really that great. (From memory, it was a few years ago that I went)
All in all, it's a cool concept on paper with absolutely terrible execution.
Amazon keeps shutting Restaurants, their retail stores, etc., but I for one am glad they are at least trying. I agree that the fiasco around the Indians running the show was a PR nightmare for their idea, but large companies running startup like ideas should be encouraged rather than disparaged (and I am no fan of Amazon just to be clear). I think this is one of those ideas where execution failed. If you are a busy worker, it is great to just head there and grab what you need, and walk out. Just faster all around.
I also found a loophole with the Amazon.com return grocery credit. The systems are separate for the $10 off $40 coupon and you just scan a QR code in the store to get it. It turns out you can just take a photo of their QR code and reuse it over and over again.
reply