Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by imglorp on Sunday March 05, 2023 @12:56PM (#35032087)

Maybe they were thinking about the immediate gratification cognitive bias. You might see the price on the shelf as you take each item from the shelf, but that doesn't translate to a total expense until you actually pay the Amazon bill at the end of the month.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by 13of40 on Sunday March 05, 2023 @01:27PM (#35032421)

I'm not sure it actually failed. These stores work by having AI track customer actions via camera, and over the last couple of years they've gotten a ton of data and domain knowledge from them. It isn't hard to imagine that's been leveraged in whatever's watching the cameras at Whole Foods.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by jarjoura on Sunday March 05, 2023 @02:11PM (#35032845)

Although they've added self-checkout lanes to Whole Foods, human interaction is in its DNA and you pay for that premium.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by WeylandYutani on Monday March 06, 2023 @07:02AM (#35040007)

What kind of human interaction do you get out of some bored 15 year old girl at the supermarket? For me it doesn't go beyond "hello" and "bye". Maybe it's something to do with culture.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by CydeWeys on Sunday March 05, 2023 @04:08PM (#35033940)

The point of spending this massive amount of money on an automated store is to recoup that investment by opening lots of automated stores and make money in volume, taking advantage of your lower labor costs.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by andrei_says_ on Sunday March 05, 2023 @01:30PM (#35032454)

Cheaper for Amazon, yes. Why would they externalize the profit? Just maximizing extraction by eliminating the few remaining local jobs.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by __derek__ on Sunday March 05, 2023 @01:45PM (#35032615)

How did it fail? They just announced that eight stores were permanently closed after having been closed indefinitely, one of which was inside of an Amazon office that shut down last year.[1] It looks like they still have 29 Go stores open nationwide.[2]

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

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by asveikau on Sunday March 05, 2023 @03:14PM (#35033489)

This reminds me that the San Francisco ones, if I remember correctly, are in a part of town that's been famously devoid of foot traffic since the pandemic.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by jonathankoren on Sunday March 05, 2023 @05:25PM (#35034804)

The only one I know in SF was down in the FiDi, and I can’t imagine that area had much traffic during the pandemic, and I question how much it has now.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by asveikau on Monday March 06, 2023 @12:24AM (#35037778)

That's precisely what i was saying.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by grogenaut on Sunday March 05, 2023 @03:40PM (#35033719)

I'm also seeing this tech in some airports in basically a linear contained store. Walk in, walk down the tunnel grab what you want, walk out. Seemed very efficient and airport appropriate

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by __derek__ on Monday March 06, 2023 @10:26AM (#35042091)

Sports venues, too. They have the Amazon version installed at Climate Pledge Arena and a few baseball stadiums, but I've seen something similar at a walk-up beer fridge during a Nets game at the Barclays Center.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by rsynnott on Sunday March 05, 2023 @03:54PM (#35033819)

If you have a US-wide convenience store chain with a multi-billion-dollar company behind it, and you have 29 stores after six years, well... I mean, it's not exactly a stand-out success, is it?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by cowsandmilk on Sunday March 05, 2023 @06:22PM (#35035319)

well, Amazon Go isn't the only cashierless brand in Amazon's portfolio. It was the experimental small store. They're moving towards deploying the technology in Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh stores.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by gumby on Sunday March 05, 2023 @10:32PM (#35037244)

I assumed that every one of those stores were experiments or at least test jigs, and closing or opening them means nothing to anyone outside Amazon.

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!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by sentientslug on Monday March 06, 2023 @01:13PM (#35045047)

Just because they're blowing money on it doesn't mean it's a successful concept

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by pas on Sunday March 05, 2023 @02:00PM (#35032740)

It could have been intentionally set to a more expensive price level, to manage the number of people using it. (To manage the "load" on the product development team, because if 2% of all users encounter some problems - or otherwise need support - then it's not scalable.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by jedberg on Sunday March 05, 2023 @02:17PM (#35032910)

> Isn't the whole point of Amazon generally, and these stores specifically in not having staff, that it's supposed to be cheaper?

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by emodendroket on Sunday March 05, 2023 @03:03PM (#35033382)

I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the long-term goal but in reality it was not yet cheaper. Automation often proves more difficult than one would expect.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by oblio on Sunday March 05, 2023 @03:38PM (#35033692)

https://xkcd.com/1319/

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by mjevans on Sunday March 05, 2023 @08:31PM (#35036441)

The image caption text seems very fitting as well. Not quite the dictionary definition of auto-mation but maybe it should be.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by vhold on Sunday March 05, 2023 @03:52PM (#35033808)

My hunch is that the store wasn't meant to be particularly popular with lots of customers, it was meant to demonstrate technologies they wanted to sell to businesses.

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

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by desiarnezjr on Sunday March 05, 2023 @04:25PM (#35034115)

They've employed a "Amazon is the first and best customer" for most of the services they've launched. Amazon.com / AWS is an example.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by gumby on Sunday March 05, 2023 @10:36PM (#35037273)

Was Amazon actually the first customer for AWS (being a very early customer counts). I've heard that they were, but I've also heard that the AWS guys designed for a different customer base first.

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)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by fire on Monday March 06, 2023 @07:53AM (#35040379)

iirc aws exists mainly because amazon kept needing capacity, and after solving that problem it then had a bunch of excess capacity

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by Delphiza on Monday March 06, 2023 @08:37AM (#35040782)

Excess capacity story is a myth. Frequently corrected/debunked by Werner Vogels.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Closing Its Cashierless Stores in NYC, San Fran... by bestnameever on Sunday March 05, 2023 @04:19PM (#35034042)

They also recently opened cashierless Whole Food locations that use the same technology. I would not be surprised if some of these Gp stores were never intended to stay open but rather existed as a concept and to test ideas.

[ Parent | on HN ]