It ended up being Kindle ads for Amazon Local, the now defunct Groupon clone. So anti-climactic after all the cloak and daggers theatrics. At least Amazon Go is a much bigger deal with interesting tech behind it.
Might be wrong, this is just my observation in SEA/what I recall.
On the other hand, maybe that's the real lesson of Grocery Gateway and "dot coms" who tried to do a hard burn on this back in the day— it's a really hard thing to get right, and getting it right requires an extremely long horizon of slow and steady growth.
The goal of Amazon fresh was to say "hey UPS! Looks like we can do deliveries all by ourselves without you! Give us a better deal or we'll become your competitor". Because all those deliveries were on Amazon trucks.
Then one day Amazon's delivery needs scaled beyond what UPS was willing to take on. And so Amazon Logistics became a major thing.
Resistance is futile.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/technology/whole-foods-am...
(Sorry for paywalled article)
From what I've read, today it's so expensive in terms of hardware that it's probably a money pit. But hardware gets cheaper, software gets more efficient, and eventually this stuff will just be in every store.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-07-18/amazon-s-...
(not true)
The biggest "risk" for my use has been that Ocado's predictive pre-filling of my weekly order is just good enough that I've gotten complacent about checking the orders, but it's not quite perfect, so if I miss the deadline, I might occasionally get stuff I didn't need (this is optional functionality - you can just place orders when you need them too and you can tweak what is included to have more control).
Ocado, the company in question is licensing various parts of their tech stack. E.g. in the US they've licensed to Kroger (which also took a 5% stake): https://www.businessinsider.com/ocado-kroger-amazon-online-g...
Between that, and the option of (more expensive) rapid deliveries from takeaway delivery companies like Deliveroo, or from the multiple different 15-minute grocery delivery companies, grocery stores just seems like a nuisance to me at this point. Of course my judgement is influenced by the fact that I don't have a car so not needing to drag shopping on foot or bus makes the leap in convenience far more significant than for a lot of people.
What I knew: these particular people had left for this project. The head of it was the guy who had lead the Kindle project- he had rejoined Amazon allegedly because Jeff asked him to lead this project. And for whatever reason, this JIHM org had all these new physical book store managers reporting up to them.
Over lunch one day, I proposed a theory to my coworker: "they're going to make that IBM commercial from the 90s, where the sketchy dude grabs a bunch of stuff and puts it in his pockets, then just walks out the door and gets a receipt". It was a fun idea, and given the CV people they had pulled it may have even made sense. "What about the book stores?" My friend asked "It's a smoke screen. That same guy leading JIHM is legendary for leaking false reports that Amazon was going to build a PC to cover him hiring hardware engineer for the Kindle."
6 months later, Amazon Go with it's 'Just Walk Out' technology was publicly announced. The CV guy I knew was even in the commercial ("Holy shit, is that Danny?!").
Maybe this is the final conclusion that those stores were just a cover.
(Caveat: this is all wild speculation, rumours, and probably bad memory on my part, but it's a great story and I swear it's all true!)