While everyone needs sustenance, there are often several adequate choices about how to get it and making those choices become a way of communicating to others. And communicating is an defining and seemingly valuable part of being human.

It’s not really weird and it’s not going anywhere.

poor people use wheat etc.

Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster has some great primary source research on the social status of eating shellfish through the years.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/us/in-maine-fishermen-str...

At the time, salmon was the cheapest, most abundant source of protein. Poor people's food.

IIRC, lobster in New England was about the same.

So, novelty and cool factor, plus appeal to those looking for healthy options; some overlap with the faddish nature of trends in healthy eating.

Amazon is only able to capture your order details if you use the app at checkout.

Anyway I looked up some data and over half the customers in my country use the self checkout now.

If they don't actually open at least hundreds of these then they've thrown away massive amounts of money on R&D they'll never get back, and the data they did accumulate isn't even particularly useful as it's in the context of a type of store they're not running at scale.

[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2023/amazon-closing-eight-amazon-go...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011

San Francisco might be receptive to the concept, but it would have to be close to where people live, rather than where office workers used to go.

NYC is a tough market because there is so much competition. But if you're not trying to make money yet you can learn a lot. Perhaps they learnt that New Yorkers don't have the patience to install an app. You generally don't wait that long in a bodega -- I expect to wait longer inside a gas station on the Interstate!

I'm pretty sure the goal is to have a higher profit margin than competitors by leveraging technology, not lower prices.

This should be branded on the forehead of every CEO of a company that promises full self driving capabilities for cars before 2030 and cryptocurrency mass adoption, also before 2030.

https://aws.amazon.com/just-walk-out/

https://aws.amazon.com/one/

Like the eBay Pez story it makes sense and ads credibility for the narrative to be that Amazon was the first customer for AWS. But it feels like a very unamazon thing to do, given that so much of its customer base isn't running the kind of enterprise jobs that an Amazon scale company needs.

(Either way I imagine almost all of Amazon does run on AWS these days and I'm sure the transition took a long time)

I wouldn't say the concept is a huge success because... it's a convenience store, and location is far more important than anything else, so there's a pretty low ceiling on what a convenience store can achieve beyond being in a good location, but it is certainly convenient.

(As far as business goes, they seem like a cute experiment that has escaped the pointless novelty stage but hasn't reached the industry disruption stage ('cause there isn't one) and so is floating aimlessly in the middle space where they probably can just about justify keeping them around.)

7-11s will be selling cheap and nasty cables and headphones at huge markups to even justify the tiny amount of shelf space they occupy.

That feels like a problem with the concept, really. That's one more than you need for conventional automatic checkouts.

Although Whole Foods had better food for the same price tbh.

Speaking as someone technically inclined who writes code for a living, I don’t want to have to scan a QR code or use an App to go through some weird robot gate to buy a thing from the automated store. And that’s (me), not the average Joe Blow who can’t even figure out how to open the calculator app on his phone.

It was a terrible idea from the start and 10x more convenient to walk into a corner market, grab a drink and hand the cashier a few $1’s from my wallet. All this super advanced technology and it has zero real world benefit or time savings for normal human beings.