<story><title>Amazon ditches &apos;just walk out&apos; checkouts at its grocery stores</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Johnny555</author><text>Lots of services would be phenomenal when you can offload much of the cost to run them to cheap offshore labor.&lt;p&gt;Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when much of the cost of operating was offset by underpaid workers and VC funds? Now that they don&amp;#x27;t have unlimited piles of money and cities&amp;#x2F;states are making them pay more fair wages, the cost-benefit of those services has diminished. I was ok paying $5 for $20 of food to be delivered, but now it&amp;#x27;s more like $10 - $15 in fees&amp;#x2F;tip, plus fees hidden in menu prices making that $20 food cost $27.50.</text></item><item><author>bilalq</author><text>This is pretty sad to read. Before Covid, the Amazon Go store experience was phenomenal. All the convenience of a 7-Eleven but with the pricing of a normal grocery store. The food options were really good and the BlueApron style meal-kits were amazing. The Alexa integration was also nice for being able to just verbally ask what&amp;#x27;s the next step on a recipe while you&amp;#x27;re busy stirring or chopping things.&lt;p&gt;When it rolled out to Amazon Fresh stores, it was a breadth of fresh air. The painful clunkiness of self-checkout was gone. The slow and pointless exercise of unloading and reloading your cart was gone. You could just bring your reusable shopping bags, throw stuff in, and walk home. By far the most hassle-free shopping experience to be had.&lt;p&gt;Scan as you shop is a big step backwards and feels like you&amp;#x27;ve got the annoying self-checkout experience looming over you the entire time you&amp;#x27;re there.&lt;p&gt;The selection and operating hours both took a hit during covid and never recovered.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ryukoposting</author><text>From my point of view, Uber and DD were always going to head in that direction because by any objective measure, they are worse than the solution that already existed. The introduction of a middleman created new costs for drivers, customers, and restaurants alike, yet it&amp;#x27;s actually worse at delivering food than the conventional &amp;quot;drivers work for the restaurant&amp;quot; model. Sure, you get one website where you can see all the delivery options in the area, but the cost is making all of those options &lt;i&gt;shittier&lt;/i&gt;. I could rant about how stupid that industry is for hours, but I digress.&lt;p&gt;What Amazon is doing is different because they&amp;#x27;re actually doing something that adds value, and they&amp;#x27;re solving a problem that actually exists. Maybe I&amp;#x27;m naive for believing any of this matters.&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I never thought much about how the whole system worked. I&amp;#x27;ve only been in an Amazon Fresh twice. It had the &amp;quot;just walk out&amp;quot; thing but I don&amp;#x27;t have a Prime account so I never used it. I just figured it was UHF RFID. Seems like an obvious solution, but I&amp;#x27;m not the engineer responsible for figuring out what to do if you put two exits next to each other.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon ditches &apos;just walk out&apos; checkouts at its grocery stores</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Johnny555</author><text>Lots of services would be phenomenal when you can offload much of the cost to run them to cheap offshore labor.&lt;p&gt;Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when much of the cost of operating was offset by underpaid workers and VC funds? Now that they don&amp;#x27;t have unlimited piles of money and cities&amp;#x2F;states are making them pay more fair wages, the cost-benefit of those services has diminished. I was ok paying $5 for $20 of food to be delivered, but now it&amp;#x27;s more like $10 - $15 in fees&amp;#x2F;tip, plus fees hidden in menu prices making that $20 food cost $27.50.</text></item><item><author>bilalq</author><text>This is pretty sad to read. Before Covid, the Amazon Go store experience was phenomenal. All the convenience of a 7-Eleven but with the pricing of a normal grocery store. The food options were really good and the BlueApron style meal-kits were amazing. The Alexa integration was also nice for being able to just verbally ask what&amp;#x27;s the next step on a recipe while you&amp;#x27;re busy stirring or chopping things.&lt;p&gt;When it rolled out to Amazon Fresh stores, it was a breadth of fresh air. The painful clunkiness of self-checkout was gone. The slow and pointless exercise of unloading and reloading your cart was gone. You could just bring your reusable shopping bags, throw stuff in, and walk home. By far the most hassle-free shopping experience to be had.&lt;p&gt;Scan as you shop is a big step backwards and feels like you&amp;#x27;ve got the annoying self-checkout experience looming over you the entire time you&amp;#x27;re there.&lt;p&gt;The selection and operating hours both took a hit during covid and never recovered.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bombcar</author><text>I wish it could all be managed intelligently; I&amp;#x27;m hungry but I can wait, let orders collect and make them all at once or something.&lt;p&gt;Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive?</text></comment>