This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (rightly or wrongly), blind ordering might be more tenable.

But some other head on the beast wants to keep Amazon shaped like an unmonitored digital marketplace where orders are fulfilled dynamically by bidders and algorithms, so your Tide Pods could be anywhere from $6.99 to $64.99, and you might get anywhere between 10 and 100, and they might arrive tomorrow or next week, and they might come in retail packaging or as a bag of tide-pod-resembling-mystery-objects, etc.

Of course blind ordering won't work when you can't give your customers any assurances (let alone guarantees) about price, quality, volume, etc

And I'm not certain, but I believe that sellers game this system- you can see certain things that make sense to order on a recurring schedule have unconscionable prices. Once you have a certain threshold of recurring orders, why not increase the price 10x? Especially because Amazon puts so many dark patterns in the way of a user canceling a "subscription".

Now I have to be paranoid about checking product details like if there are 3rd party sellers using FBA which potentially signals fakes. There’s no longer blind trust in Amazon for a lot of customers. I can’t just mindlessly buy stuff with the hope that Amazon customer service can take care of anything going wrong like they did years ago.

Never occurred to me before that vertical integration can be a positive factor in consumer trust. Usually I see myself girly in the camp of "oh noes! Sooner or later they will use it against us!"

That’s not to say that it isn’t useful, but it doesn’t do anything against the narrative that Amazon is not trustworthy like it used to be. It’s a common theme in the comments here. When I think about it, it’s been a common theme on HN for years now, ever since commingling destroyed Amazon’s reputation

The problem isn’t that I don’t want to blind order it, it’s that I don’t trust blind ordering it from Amazon.

To be clear, these are minor complaints, but they are the things that asking Alexa to order should solve

I would consider (something equivalent to) what Amazon envisions if it was products from my local grocery store, at the prices of that specific store. But Amazon? I can't trust they'll be any of: in stock, with the exact same product, at basically the same price.

I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster.

Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list. It works.

But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's utter chaos. Multiple listings for the same item, sizes and quantities that mysteriously move from one listing to another, prices that vary 10x or more...

It's utterly baffling to me why Amazon created this consumer-hostile nightmare. I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but everything home and toiletries I buy from Target online, simply because the listings and prices are totally consistent. Even though I have Prime! I don't understand why Amazon doesn't figure out that Prime consumers like me buy from Target instead because Amazon's household supplies listings are such utter unpredictable garbage, while Target just works like a normal store.

Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3 instead of 1 30x package.

In my last apartment, I used Method's pump-dispenser laundry detergent and their basil-scented kitchen hand soap.

Amazon is selling the laundry detergent for $75 and the hand soap for $15. I'm guessing Method discontinued the SKUs I was used to, and there's some leftover stock on Amazon with crazy prices.

People sometimes want whatever they want, and some people are willing to pay a lot for whatever that is. That is not necessarily abusive.

eg, I like sardines, and there's some very particular sardines that I'm rather fond of. I'd love to pay $1 or $2 per tin for them, but I'll also pay $6 per tin for them if I must when they just aren't available otherwise for whatever reason.

Much of this can be explained with just supply and demand.

Don't even ask me about the price of Heinz canned beans in tomato juice or bottles of HP Sauce in grocery stores in my part of Ohio. They're inexpensive staples in some parts of the world, but if I can even find them here they're ludicrously expensive.

Amazon (and third-party sellers using Amazon) are no different than my local grocer is in that particular way.

Back in context of TFA: The problem isn't that things can be expensive; the problem is primarily that one must be able to easily compare prices and products, and an Alexa device is presently a terrible interface for letting that happen. (The Amazon website is also sometimes not very good at this, even on a real computer.)

Although I detect it’s starting to drift as they switch to a “marketplace” approach similar to Amazon.

If Target is out of the brand of paper towels I like I don't go to the next store and buy them no matter the price, I get a different brand or skip it. If I had a human shop for me, they would also get a different brand of skip it. But that logic doesn't work with Amazon so it's not safe to trust it.

Ofc what inevitably happened: same product from same company had two codes because because. Heinz Ketchup in Germany is not the same as Heinz Ketchup in Australia...and no one can tell you why.

Different recipe? Labeling? Different sizes... 160ml vs Country Z standard of 13.2oz, etc.

Oh and different codes for different groupings. Pack of 6 somethings got a new code VS the item itself as the barcode.

Not sure if you encountered the same shenanigans but I just stayed away. This is ultimately a people co-ordination problem and everyone thinks they're special. Meanwhile China spams all our market places with "Wish Wonder Elements Store" sellers that sell "40mm 1/2/6 pack of nail screws, woodworking, drill, conical shape, amazing product $1.22" and 5000 variations across all their sellers.

The Guiding Principles are:

* Is a consumer and/or trading partner expected to distinguish the changed or new product from previous/current products?

* Is there a regulatory/liability disclosure requirement to the consumer and/or trading partner?

* Is there a substantial impact to the supply chain (e.g., how the product is shipped, stored, received)?

- from https://www.gs1.org/1/gtinrules/en/guiding-principles

Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it.

Fun fact, that piece of legislation significantly contributed to Brexit propaganda, the campaign was based on "the EU wants to take away our pints/stones/pounds/whatnot".

Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization.

It is true that if you go into a grocery store, you're literally presented with a whole aisle of detergent, and even if you are as the section for "Tide Pods" there may be quite a few options (larger/smaller, "stain blaster", "fresh", whatever), you very quickly get a pretty good view of what the options are and their differences, plus prices and things like "on sale" cards.

The shopping experience is absolutely inferior with Amazon for things for which there are many alike products.

One could even imagine some sort of mega page for "slim network cables" where you'd select the standard and color and length and be presented with a few options. They try this with things like screws, though I can't believe they have one option for star drive 5/8" wood screws...

I just did a search for "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack". This contains all the information you need to uniquely identify a single product. Brand, Product, Size, Quantity. Yet Amazon returns 3 pages of crap, including Wrong Brand, Wrong Product, Wrong Size, and Wrong Quantity. I can't make the query any more specific, Amazon, what the hell is your problem? This query should return one and only one result.

When I specify what I want I want the search to return what I searched for, not a lot of kinda similar junk. I've tried to explain the concept of fuzzy search to my girlfriend a few times and she still gets annoyed when a search for "24"x24" shadow box" returns a whole bevy of standard picture frames at an utterly random spread of sizes, for example.

my guess is sheer incompetency hidden by sales volume.

at some point they had the idea of translating the search to categories and showing alternatives. it got both unmaintained and other products teams added their own self interest on top of the algo and now you have the worst search on the planet which nobody have the political power to fix because it touches everyone revenue, even if for worse

Amazon seems hostile to this very idea, that I know what I want, will spend 15% more to have it tomorrow and will not by the random stuff it smashes in the search results because I know what I want.

I think you’re missing how crucial Amazon’s algorithmic model has been as a way to connect shoppers with 2 day delivery for an unimaginably long tail of products. We sell a technical product that would be at home on McMaster. On the 2nd largest retailer in the US. It’s incomprehensible that our products would ever be in Target or Walmart stores. Yet we have access to the same customer base at the same place where they can buy Tide. Amazon’s purely algorithmic approach is what allows companies like us to do product/market discovery for them (and their customers).

Payola.

I think the only real fix here would be for Amazon to separate out brand, product, size (or sizes in a few cases) and quantity. And the parser needs to attach numbers to the following word if that word is a unit word.

While I've never done it at any real scale I have done a routine that predicts what's related to what. It required giving it a fair understanding of the data (for example, Xabcde is probably related to X despite the distance between them) to get it to quit spewing out whoppers. It's hard even in my case where I could afford to run the test against all reasonable candidates. Amazon simply can't do that. (My routine runs in length * length * table size. You simply do not implement anything that even resembles O(n^3) at scale.)

Trying your search, I'm not seeing a pile of crap.

First hit differs from your search term only in 2 vs 1. I believe Amazon doesn't consider numbers as as much of a mismatch as other things.

The third hit is obviously what you want, but it doesn't have the commas and the unit is "1 pack (packaging may vary)". Apparently that makes it score slightly less. Going down the page I find it in 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 packs, fresh scent vs unscented and there's also "blue". There's one clear typo of 15 oz, and you get a bunch of things where it's a multi-pack bundled with some other cleaning item.

Farther on down I start seeing different sizes and related products. Is there any harm to it displaying lesser matches farther on down??

Anyway, it's expected that you'll ask for the price and may go away after hearing it. So crazy mark-ups are risky business.

"The same order of Tide Pods as last time?"

But Amazon can't.

“Try” being the key word, because it is useless. It maybe could work if vendors populated the metadata correctly, but they don’t, and amazon put far too many similar categories into it, so you can’t actually filter on most of the parameters without filtering out most of the options you wanted to see, or selecting dozens of options.

If you do both, at least one will fail. Every time.

You can probably mangle one of those concepts enough for them to become compatible. But you'll end up with something very different.

This is one of the biggest food chains in Sweden.

More like deceptively...

If a person did that, I would consider the behavior antisocial.

This is sneaky as hell.

I’d much rather transact in the US than Europe. The entire retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched. The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe.

Are you aware that Europe has a mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period on consumer purchases? A mandatory 14-days no-questions-asked return window on all purchases?

In the US, AFAIK you're fully at the mercy of whatever the vendor so graciously offers you.

[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...

Such regulations make products more expensive.

I'm constantly offered warranties when I buy online. I don't want to be forced to buy them, as I don't need them.

Today, the price difference is negligible on most hardware (smaller than $50 on MSRP on an iPhone if you compare New York to Paris for example)

I have returned half eaten cake that I did not like the taste to Costco and didn’t have to face a weird looking employee. No law and regulation necessary just capitalism.

In any case, the overall retail experience is much better on west side of the Atlantic and prices are generally better too, without the need of too many "customer protection laws" so I don't think a good case is to be made to copy from a failed continent.

Think about it, for example the TV sector: All companies colluded to reduce the selection of TVs to "Smart" TVs only. I can't just go and buy from a competitor, because it simply does not exist!

Which is why (currently) Vizio is my doge because it just turns on with ARC and shuts off when the Apple TV does so I don’t even know it’s smart.

The stupid Samsung (praise be to the toddler, destroyer of shit tech) wouldn’t even let you switch inputs without being connected to WiFi, or if it could I couldn’t figure it out.

You really think "Smart TV" is some collusion/conspiracy and not emergent from the market behavior? The most malicious theory I can come up with is that Smart TV makes more money for the manufacturers due to the ad opportunity, therefore they sell an inferior product to the consumer —in our minds— similar to bundling crapware in Windows laptops, but that still does not make it collusion or market distortion.

Under that theory, it just means dumb TV would have to be a comparatively more expensive product and I am willing to bet even the nerds who care about dumb TV will be buying the smart one, airgap it, and connect an Apple TV. Effectively no one would be paying even $50 more for dumb version of a TV.

In reality, I believe the average Joe & Jill actually strongly prefer Smart TV.

The reason is simple: the companies have a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money for shareholders as possible, and if it's marginally cheaper to shorten the warranty period (whithouth seeming out of touch with the rest of the market), the bulk will choose that. Whereas the aim of regulation is always to secure the interest of the consumer. I say "always", but there are exceptions in cases of regulatory capture, which admittedly is much of the US...

Consumer laws are always a benefit!

The person you’ve replied to has stated a concrete (what they perceive to be) benefit of consumer protection regulation. One that doesn’t seem to limit choice at all, but rather improves visibility.

I’m also inserting my own personal experience here. The country I live in, which isn’t in Europe, has similar regulation in place.

In response you’re throwing around some vague notion of “freedom” and vague implication of a “better experience” without really explaining how mandatory unit pricing is a bad thing for you as a consumer.

Has John Gruber got you all upset about the EU?

I’m currently booking a trip to the US and the consumer experience is absolutely terrible. Tax-exclusive “totals”? Resort fees? Give me a break.

It sounds like the US consumer experience is more aligned to your obvious libertarian ideology, and that’s the end of it.

Tax inclusive total means government can screw the business and the end user and hide behind the tax inclusive price tag. Jack up the tax it seems the business is doing it.

In NZ the price you see is the price you pay. The sales tax amount is always clearly stated on receipts, invoices, checkouts, online carts, etc. (by law) and the rate has changed twice in history, so everyone knows when it happens and who is responsible. Everything is explicit and nothing is or can be hidden (we don't do tipping either). In comparison when I visited the USA I never knew how much I would be paying for things, which felt fundamentally unfair and customer-opposed.

Seriously. I don't care if the total price consists of 100% tax or 0% tax. I care only what it is. I don't ask to know how much you pay the cleaners, how much it costs to operate the pool, how much corporate profit you're booking, or how much the CFO is embezzling. The amount of tax is equally useless to me. I care what it costs me.

Look at us poor Europeans with our metric-system money-math

Not if you are voting someone in a political office in the next election.

This is because employers have no interest in what your paycheck amount is. They care about "total compensation", which is what it costs the employer to employ you. Seattle added some "payroll taxes" and successfully sold the fiction that it was the businesses paying it. The businesses did indeed write the check, but it was the employee's money.

In the US, a lot of people think of tax day as a "good day" because they get a refund from the government! Psychologically it is very different if you steal the money before they even see it than take it from them once they have felt it under their tongue.

Plus, I think the OP is referring to money that is technically paid by the employer but effectively passed through to the employee, because that's what happens, not some item on their payslip.

I care about what effects the policies are having, not how much I pay in taxes. The impact of the policies is what actually matters. The tax rate is one tiny detail. I'm not wired to automatically assume collective action is evil, so I only care about it in the context of the effects of all policies combined.

I would very much blame the business for leaving out tax, concealing how much I'll need to pay to try to get me to overspend. Businesses claiming they don't want to be blamed for sales tax existing seems like misdirection from the real reason: it makes it look like you're spending less.

When a tax hike happens, businesses don't automatically have to increase prices they charge by the same amount: they can take a hit to their margin instead. So, the price they choose to charge is not "price + tax". It is "supply-and-demand price, of which we pay X to the state in taxes".

> they can take a hit to their margin instead

Not for long. Low margin businesses tend to go out of business. And if you can earn 5% buying bonds, why run a business that has an ROI of 4%?

Of course, if businesses actually set prices as cost + margin, then it does make sense to separate tax from the price, as the value "price before tax" is a meaningful part of the price setting algorithm.

And lowering your margin is not the same thing as running a low margin business. If your margin was 20% at a tax level of 10%, and taxes go to 15%, then reducing your margin to 18% doesn't make you a low margin business now. Regardless, if you believe in supply and demand as the sole mechanism for price setting, this is all moot: the state increasing taxes won't increase demand or reduce supply with the exact same level as the tax increase, so the price can't move the exact same as the tax increase in this model.

I'd also note that it's not strictly true that taxes are completely decoupled from supply & demand. States do compete on attracting businesses through lower taxation.

That's correct.

> So the tax level is irrelevant to the value of the market price, if you believe in supply & demand as the price setting mechanism.

Taxes raise the price, which reduces demand. If the prices don't rise, then the margins decrease, which reduces the incentive for the business owners to continue.

> doesn't make you a low margin business

It makes you a lower margin business. It reduces the margins on all the businesses, and the marginal (!) ones are no longer viable, and a new set of businesses become at the edge.

This was on top of renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours.

    > renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours

- Any regulation needs to be written, read, analyzed, made sure to comply with, defend in court, etc. which costs money.

- I might want to be very generous and voluntarily take back items from my legit customers because I find out it was good for business, but also have mechanisms in place to prevent abuse by a small minority of bad customers (restrict a subset of products, limits on the number of purchases you can return, etc). Once you codify it in law, it forces my hand in many ways, increasing prices making experience worse for my good customers.

- The regulation may change and the retailer may need to suddenly adapt to comply.

- It may not hurt those particular stores, but prevents cheaper competitors from emerging, which is a bad thing.

To show this whole thing is kind of stupid, where does "two years" come from? Some asshat in European parliament? Why not twenty years? Why not two months?

Maybe it's great in the US, I don't know, but it far from sucks in Europe. Amongst other things for returns policies you have a guaranteed 14 day return period for online orders even if there's no issues. Plus there's a minimum 2 years warranty, and a few years more if there's a reasonable expectation for the item in question to last longer. I'm not seeing the issue.

That's pretty irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's about blind ordering without worrying about the price.

No one complained that Amazon was hiding prices or making price per quantity hard to discover.

Even with the legislation you suggest, wild price swings are still entirely legal.

It does seem to be less than consistent about the units, though. $/count, $/oz, $/g, $/lb, all on the same search page? Yes, and more :)

Generously, he brought them in to share along with the story. I’m sure they made a lot of banana bread the following week.

For more info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Banana_Stand

I once ordered qty. 6 bananas from Instacart, expecting one fairly-medium bunch of bananas to show up with about 6 fruits in that bunch. The listing clearly showed that it was for "quantity", not "weight."

But I got 6 pounds of bananas, which is a ton for a single person living by themself. [And I don't bake, so I got plenty of fresh potassium that week.]

It only happened once. After that, I started leaving careful notes that describe each item where quantity/volume/weight might be confusing and things have been fine.

(I could have complained and Instacart would have rubber-stamped a refund for that part of the order without discussion, but it wasn't worth that much effort.)

On the flip side, many local places have gone to pricing bananas by the each.

It was obvious that that Target had never priced anything per pound before (it had just been remodeled to have a supermarket) and an employee fat-fingered the label. But the cashier had no recourse and I wasn't going to fight it hard.

(The same Target also had some clearance steaks for like ten cents a pound because they were close to expiration because none of the customers were expecting a supermarket in their target and weren’t buying perishables.)

before you had .8/lb and 1.2/lb true organic from south America. after you had both bins failed with the the same Asian chiquita, but the fresher ones labeled organic and they cost .8 and .6 per lb.

https://cheezburger.com/12444421/twitter-thread-frustrated-h...

I don't keep a spreadsheet. I find that when I buy a thing enough times (a particular size of a particular shampoo, say), I get a vague feel for what it "should" cost, and I definitely have a range of values around that expected cost that may be acceptable to me. I don't need a spreadsheet for this. (A spreadsheet wouldn't hurt at all, but it just isn't necessary for me; I don't want to spend the time to get that level of accuracy since the return on my time isn't there for me.)

But sometimes, an item is relatively unfamiliar or the price "feels" somewhat high or low -- whether at Amazon or locally.

When this happens, I comparison shop. I've gotten pretty quick at it.

Charts of historic Amazon pricing for things -- often pretty good but sometimes with large granularity -- are available at camelcamelcamel.com, which scrapes Amazon pricing and has done so for quite a long time.

So I look there to see if Amazon's price is good, relative to Amazon's previous pricing.

And then, if I still haven't found clear direction, I fire up Instacart's website. This lets me search many local stores all at once. (Their prices are often [but not always] inflated, but that's easy to get a feel for as well.)

After that, I have enough vaguely-accurate data to say to myself "Self, this shampoo is a terrible deal at Amazon and I'll just pick some up at the store," or "Self, this shampoo is a fantastic deal at Amazon, and I should order one or two extra bottles while it is cheap."

I wish Amazon's prices were more consistent (why is it $13 this week for a 24-pack of cans of V8 juice delivered to my door, and $60 the next week?), but meh. I can deal with it, as long as I have a real computer or time to fiddle with my pocket supercomputer. It's not so different from conventional "shopping."

I just can't deal with it using an Echo speaker and the limited interactions possible with Amazon's broken Alexa "AI". That's a non-starter, as things are today.

---

In terms of quantities, I don't think I've ever been surprised by Amazon. I do not think I've never experienced a thing on Amazon like my parents once did, where they bought mustard at a wholesale club ("Wow, 208 ounces [or whatever] of mustard! What a great price!") and wound up with several hundred individual packets of Heinz mustard loose-packed in a cardboard box.

They were pretty surprised by this. Discussions were had. "What will we ever do with these mustard packets? Should we take it back? What if they refuse to accept it? Is it even worth the money to drive over there again just for this? We still need mustard right now, too..."

They elected to keep it, and that wasn't the end of the world at all: We had plenty of mustard for a very long time, and it was indeed priced right; it just wasn't packaged in a particularly good way for what we were using it for.

(But then, maybe that experience when I was a kid made a lasting impression on me. And perhaps this was reinforced every time I went to retrieve some mustard from that huge box, wherein: I looked at that box. And when I looked at that box, I could always see that it was neatly labeled from the factory and that the contents wouldn't be surprising at all to anyone who was actually paying enough attention.

It is entirely possible that I might automatically scrutinize the offerings at Amazon, and also at the local grocery store, more than others do.)

The multi vender estore offers something different. The low prices, large selection more supplied inventory are some benefits.

Coca Cola I can understand, but those are all franchisees and the parent company watches them like a hawk. Mostly what they make is purified water to mix with the syrup they got from corporate to reduce shipping costs and losses.

Then you have Apple and Amazon creating the brand Amazon renewed to sell watches.

There’s a CS book I want to read but because the author self published I can only find it on Amazon. I need to try the book store at his university, and I’m not going to buy from Jeff until I’ve tried that avenue.

Amazon is, originally and primarily, a bookstore. Amazon has long-established direct contracts with all book publishers (and in fact, a stranglehold over those publishers.) Any time you see a book listed on Amazon, it's a book sold by Amazon, attained directly from one of these publishers.

AFAIK no third-party sellers are even allowed to sell "books" Fulfilled By Amazon; if you see a third-party FBA "book" on Amazon, it's because the seller slipped it in under some category other than "books." (The "novelties" and "calendars" sections are often abused for this.)

But for categories other than books, Amazon never built up this same direct logistical pipeline to suppliers, let alone the sort of stranglehold over suppliers in other categories that they have over book suppliers. So Amazon doesn't have the ability to force constant, even, predictable supply with contractually-set pricing in other categories, the way they can with books.

Often, this means that Amazon's first-party supply chain for something, might just run out of that thing entirely.

Part of the reason the FBA program exists is that it allows Amazon to take advantage of third parties' connections to suppliers to compensate for their own supply-chain deficits. Amazon-the-asset-holder might have run out of e.g. Kleenex, but that doesn't mean that Amazon-the-site or Amazon-the-pool-of-warehouses has run out of Kleenex, because Amazon has allowed some third-party FBA seller to stock stuff in their warehouses, and that seller happens to have brought in some stock that have the UPC code for Kleenex. So hey, there you go, we have Kleenex after all! Only now Amazon has to follow the seller's dictates on pricing and discounts — and your experience on availability (unless/until first-party supply comes back) will be dictated by the seller's (usually much-less-predictable) ability+desire to resupply.

There are situations where this model actually makes sense! Some mid-sized OEMs that Amazon doesn't feel are worth their while to engage with directly, instead sell their products directly through Amazon as FBA sellers. In these cases, buying the product on Amazon is just like buying the product through the seller's website, but you get it faster because it's already in an Amazon warehouse.

That said, despite FBA having times where it makes a lot of sense, I also find Amazon Marketplace distinctly baffling. A thing sold by a third party, shipped by that third party, with returns handled by that third party, shouldn't be able to be conflated with an Amazon.com/Amazon FBA listing just because of a shared UPC code! Those are two very distinct experiences and are not fungible, and it's bizarre to pretty much everyone I know that Amazon has tried to conflate them.

Source: I've self-published books and sold them on Createspace, KDP, Amazon Advantage, and all of their old systems before switching to using my own local printer and shipping the books to FBA.

These days, I'm not sure books are much different from any other good.

How exactly does Spooky23 have the buying power to price competitively with a major retailer? The answer is pretty obvious. It’s cheaper to pay crackheads to loot CVS than to troll for clearance blowouts.

Is that where all the crazy stuff on Amazon is coming from?

https://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/

Charles Dickens should be the top match on the actual author, or at the very least biographies. But no. Amazon want us to go to "in the style of" or "related to a series which tangentially discussed Oliver twist" linkages "for your convenience"

Amazon will no doubt have A/B testing which shows net beneficial to revenue overall.

How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically listed price per volume labels? These things are all labeled specifically to fool people who are alive but not conscious. Again, we are just a rounding error to these monoliths

I try to do the calculation nonetheless. But every time I just need to buy some ordinary staple, I’m up against the Relentless Spirit of Pure Deception, who attempts an ever evolving and always brand new form of trickery, at every engagement.

Sometimes, I simply make the $1.00 donation to P&G or whoever just to avoid having to think of strategies to outsmart. This too feels terrible and exhausting in a different way.

Where I live price labels must carry the per liter or the per kilo price too. It's printed with a smaller font size but it's visible and it's often the only price I look at.

#1: $0.37 / ounce

#2: $6.50 / pound

or even:

#3: $1.82 / each (a price per item)

This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but it stretches my belief that they have the time to get it so wrong intentionally.

Customer-friendly regulation sure feels nice.

Lol... Meta is doing a huge campaign here in Brazil about how they won't provide us their AI services because they are annoyed by that entity.

It has been quite a help to the government popularity.

And sadly, it seems they found some audience...

If you had to convert from arms to legs or feet like in certain areas of the world, that might be much harder, of course.

Comparing Smarties to M&Ms is super easy if both have to use price per pound, price per oz, price per g or price per kg. Who cares if the price per kg would be $0.031.as long as I can see it's $0.028 for the other for the same unit without doing math.

Non-metric units are just icing on the cake.

It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol is really sold by the liters there. Maybe somebody from the UK could confirm or refute the tale. Anyway it's probably way more than one pound per liter now.

This Energy Institute statistical series - https://knowledge.energyinst.org/search/record?id=58969 - says that their records changed from "new pence per gallon" to "new pence per litre" at the start of 1989. That seems late for my recollection.

Looking back at historical data from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/oil-and-..., it appears that the average price for "4 star" petrol (97 RON) crossed the £1 per gallon threshold some time in 1979 (Table 4.1.3, and multiply by 4.54609). I'm not old enough to remember that!

By 1989, prices were at 168.8 pence per litre (i.e. £1.68). So I think the story about the change being because it had gone over £1 per gallon has to be a myth. However, retailers certainly weren't complaining about the price displayed being less than one quarter of what it had been! In contrast, they were much less happy about prices per kilogram being more than twice the price per pound (weight).

Prices crossed £1 per litre for 'Premium Unleaded' (95 RON) in November 2007. They fell back below this level in November 2008 but went back up over it in June 2009.

Simply - they were only designed to show 2 numbers so when the price-per-gallon exceeded 99 pence many had to stick a static "1" in front, and many point-of-sale terminals and cash registers couldn't handle it.

Since there are ~4.5 litres in a British gallon displaying pence-per-litre brought the displayed prices back to 2 digits and allowed for a gradual transition to 3 and 4 digit displays.

And yes, at the time the switch from pence-per-gallon to pence-per-litre occurred some retailers did take advantage to 'add some profit margin' but it wasn't universal.

There's an effort to switch car efficiency from mpg (higher is better) to "l/100km" (smaller is better), because the latter has more intuitive scaling as well as being properly metric.

There were definitely people complaining about the price hike when the currency changed, but that was back in 1971 so it's only boomers who'll bring it up.

Gas pipes are imperial. I think they never changed to metric because of safety concerns or because the number of meters sold is lower than water pipes (gas pipes last forever) and it's not worth splitting the market in two. But it's just my suppositions.

The absolute dream would be to price it like health care. You only find out the price months or years after buying the item and multiple phone calls to clear up errors. And for one person it would be 50 cents and for another person 200 dollars.

EDIT: I see esmifra on Reddit said this six years ago... but not sure "esmifra's razor" would catch on either. https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/8itqf5/comment/d...

And I see there is a similar but less catchily-worded concept, "Hubbard's corollary" from 2020 mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Hanlon's razor... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

(Peanutbutter M&Ms are an egregious example...the share bag price varies 20% depending on the calendar, as does Hilshire Farm Kielbasa...which now comes in 14 oz packages...which is a choice and means a family of 4 needs to buy two of them now to make a meal.)

Your grievance reminds me of this classic phone call:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4RNb3tt0LM

At my Ralph's (=Kroger), all the large bags dissappear minutes after getting loaded into the shelf.

My store has a few different brands of coconut milk. Some of the unit prices are per pound, while others are per quart. I make the approximation that coconut milk has the same density as water, which is two pounds per quart. The unit prices are all odd three digits numbers. It's a pain.

You could have one person who works in an office somewhere who's responsible for itemizing inventory for the whole grocery chain. They could solve this problem (maybe automatically!) with a spreadsheet. They could also solve the problem of tomatillos not being registered in the self-checkout catalog. But what is that person's salary paying for in the company's eyes?

To be fair, maybe the real explanation is "lots of stuff, shit happens." And it's only a factor of two (for watery goods, anyway).

But they don't keep the denominator consistent, even across the same category of product.

So I get to compare a price/oz, versus a price/lb versus a price/serving and all the while, I contemplate why nobody's interested in burning the whole store down.

If you have two packs of coke cans next to each other, and one gives you a price per 100ml, and the other per can, it doesn't help that much(yes you could multiply the value per 100ml by around 3x, but at a glance the difference isn't obvious).

So I guess I’m sticking to Aldi.

(Other than biases, them AI's being "mindless" might be an advantage here ...)

  PS. Until we go so so multimodal that they start to be influenced by packaging size, bright colors, rounding, and big breasts.-

  PSS. Heh. Perhaps the ultimate Turing test is when them AI's start to be influenced by marketing, and shady practices thereof.-

The company would have to make a compelling case of not selling itself to brands, and I am not sure such a company exists. Maybe we need an open source project, but it will be constant battle as with ad blockers.

The base features we need are: 1) price comparison: scan all unit prices of products on the shelves, compare and covert, then use AR to superimpose the comparison charts/prices.

2) filter by feature: e.g. food restrictions (allergy, halal, etc.), flavors, etc.

3) ad block: for the real world. Block misleading prices (3 for the price of 2, etc.), to avoid being primed with biased triggers in our choices.

An AR, AI assistant with marketing and advertising IRL-blocking.-

These things only work because of innate human biases and cognitive defects. The idea that anyone less than a pure rational being lacks consciousness is just silly. There's a huge power imbalance which is systemically leveraged against the consumer and it's more useful to see this as a designed aspect of the system rather than the collective individual failures of "nearly all the consumers"

I know it doesn’t matter to them, it matters to me and it’s a win and winners keep winning, right?

I prefer not to buy things from unknown sellers which I can get from known sources. Sometimes you need something special like a car spare part that has local markup of 300% so then online is worth the risk (not safety critical parts).

I just don't understand the situation where a person decides to buy a regular product from an unknown seller, especially from a system that incentivizes something that is not in the interest of the buyer.

It leaves me wondering if you were able to connect with them on a personal level at all, or if perhaps you were also “barely conscious” during these interactions.

A specific book is also a far more unique product than i.e. "laundry detergent".

To be comparable, you would have to compare laundry detergent to a genre of books, and maybe also the publisher.

And then the absurdity of some of Amazon's "Smart Shopping" strategies becomes quite obvious: Is there a market for an Amazon Dash-button that blindly ships i.e. a "fiction book from Penguin publishing"...?

How did you decide on that brand, really? And what was your second choice? Even if you narrowed down to three options by pure rationalism the tiebreaker is often emotional. Then we convince ourselves the decision was objective even when it was not.

The fact that the middle shelf of a supermarket is usually the first one to be empty is quite compelling evidence.

> I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves.

Just to validate that assumption: Would you say this is the same for toilet paper? Soap? garbage bags? Sponges? Pencils? cooking-oil?

There are lots of commodity items I use where I don't know the brand, I cannot even tell how often I switched the supplier of them in the past year...

Subjectively, most people _I_ know buy out of a pool of detergent-brands, all looking quite similar (and most belonging to the same parent company). If they are bombarded with advertisement inside and outside of the shop, and maybe a stacked palette of a different brand of detergent, many of them will "try" this new product instead and end up expanding their pool of brands they will buy.

The most common and irritating one I see is making a listing for a product at a low price, selling lots of said item and getting people lulled into reordering, then bump the price, change the per-order quantity, or even change the brand or product sold under that listing, 10xing your profit on residual reorders, while you relish the original deal on a new item number. Rinse and repeat.

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-monopoly-enshittified-amazon...

And I think a lot of it is third party sellers uploading their catalogs without trying to sanely de-dupe it vs what's already there. And Amazon certainly doesn't help in how they organize their search results. Please give me a simple size and quantity separate from the description. So often I have to open up a bunch of entries because the description is long enough to push that off the summary you see on the search page.

I also think there are a lot of entries on there where the main objective is to get accidentally grabbed when the main supplier is out of stock.

My latest in a long list of WTF was I ordered a medical device (new). It came in a package that had once been sealed but the seal was cut. Upon removing the product, it had clearly been used by someone and returned. It was a sling for my arm, and I intend to use it for 2-3 weeks until things feel better but I wouldn’t return it like the last person did. I returned it immediately. I’m not accepting open box items of that nature.

Alexa, what's the current price of a small box of Tide Pods?

A box of 10 Tide Pods costs $5

Alexa, place a limit order for a box of 10 Tide Pods at $5 to expire at the end of the day if not filled, and notify me when it is filled.

If I can order you a box of 10 Tide Pods for $5 or less today, I will do so and notify you.

...time passes...

I have filled your order for a box of 10 Tide Pods for $5; they are expected to be delivered within the next two days

Not that this would necessarily be a good thing, but it seems to me like it would generally beat having to pull out my phone or fire up my browser and do it that way...

[Edit: formatting]

But it seems that, much like Google search and the glut of questionable sites gaming the system via SEO, I think Amazon too will always be fighting against sellers clamoring to be 'above the fold' of results.

Why would I give up what little control I have?

Buying purely on voice commands is new and different. In an environment of trust that is novel and exciting. In an environment of fear or concern that is scary and burdensome. Why would I choose burdensome?

They need more trust, which means being more trustworthy. That likely means losing some profits for consistency.

They need a smooth voice purchasing experience and I have no clue what that means.

That they outright lie about "retail" when doing sales is also offputting. The irony is I've started to appreciate Prime Video, and now they charge extra for that without commercials. It's infuriating all around.

That doesn't even begin to cover counterfeit, expired or other problems on fulfillment such as saying it'll be there tomorrow until the order is placed and you get it 4 days later, or maybe not at all (lost?).

Some things will double in price, or just suddenly be out of stock for no apparent reason. They tried to push groceries but a case of Kraft Dinner came out to several dollars per box, compared to about $1.50 from my extremely expensive local grocery or half that from Costco.

They never sold those dash buttons in Canada, but I can imagine pushing the button to get more tide pods and being irate when the cost was twice as much as it was last time.

Their prices are generally too unstable to put anything on "ship & forget". There are some exceptions, like the items you subscribe to.

Amazon has a vastly different experience with thousands of indistinguishable Chinese knockoffs. I can only ask Alexa for a very specific product, otherwise I don't trust what I'll get. I use Alexa to add products to my cart, which serves as a reminder that I need to do a little more shopping from my phone or PC.

I'm about 85% sure it was a decommissioned Backblaze drive based on the logs I could see. This was probably 10 years ago, though.

This is blatant behavior on the part of sellers and Amazon turns a blind-eye to it.

I didn’t learn my lesson either.

I ordered seat covers, and what came was a misspelled Chinese knockoff brand instead of the name brand I thought I was ordering.

I can’t trust purchases made on Amazon and I have an eye for detail. They got me twice. I don’t know how non-detail oriented folks keep from it happening.

I have to admit that's hilarious, but I'm pretty sure HoneyGuarDIan (correct spelling) too is a Chinese company, based in Shenzhen.[1] Edit: Actually I'm increasingly convinced HoneyGuarDIan and HoneyGuarIDan are the exact same company: take a closer look at the URL https://www.honeyguardian.com/pages/honeyguaridan-app and compare the second-level domain name with the last part of the URL pathname! Maybe it wasn't a knockoff after all :-D

[1] Go to https://www.honeyguardian.com/pages/honeyguaridan-app and click either of the appstore links to see the company name (Shenzhen Hailong Zhizao, whose corporate website is at https://www.pdpets.com/)

People will buy something from a store, buy a fake version of that thing on AliExpress, swap the fake into the box, re-shrinkwrap the box, return the shrinkwrapped fake to the store, and sell the real one on eBay.

The store will often put the thing back on the shelf, because it's still shrinkwrapped, weighs the same, and even looks the same under an x-ray.

And then someone buys it and gets a dud.

This is why, except for a few high-margin categories, Amazon itself will never put returned stock back into inventory, instead always selling it off through bulk channels. It's effectively impossible to authenticate a return as legitimate these days, without converting the "BNIB" device into a "NIB" device.

Why not just sell the AliExpress one on ebay?

Amazon put tons of stuff back on the shelf. It’s not quite as bad as Fry’s Electronics where every single thing they sold had obviously been opened and shrink up, but it’s getting close.

But to your point, Amazon actually bait-and-switched their own batteries. They had basics batteries that were confirmed rebranded Panasonic eneloop, then changed them out to Chinese batteries while keeping the product page and reviews.

Amazon did that. So good luck getting them to crack down on reputation fraud.

Is it possible to ask Alexa to add generic items to a list, then be able to iterate said list as Amazon searches? That seems kinda useful, if it exists.

Maybe I'm not the every man, but I price shop. If All free is on sale half of Tide free, I'm ordering that, and so on.

Hand tools variously came from many OEMs like SK, Plumb, Knipex, and Williams{2}. I suppose they still do, now at Lowes, but the OEM is Chinese.

{1}https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/How_to_identify_who_made_your_Ke...

{2}https://forum.toolsinaction.com/topic/2118-craftsman-date-co...

If I want to return a product to Costco, I have really strong confidence that they will take it back.

Sears would exchange any broken craftsman tool for a new one even decades after purchase. Costco is much the same. Used, year old stuff with missing parts will gladly be refunded in full.

I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such incredibly healthy options as (only) Sunny Delite and Tropicana for orange juice, massive boxes of Lays chips and cheezits and popcorn. I saw so few items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays.

I didn't expect a complete grocery experience but I was expecting it to have far more healthy options these days, or even just more options in general.

I don't eat any of this stuff. I guess you're a costco family or not. I was a costco family as a kid and had to learn how to eat healthy after shoving soda down all day long my entire childhood.

edit: Yeah I'm looking just at their juice section here and there's not a single less-sugar option just as an example https://www.costco.com/juice.html.

Although, damn, $18.99 for 24 ojs is good. But both options are so disgustingly sweet. I had a single OJ for $7 from einsteins yesterday.

edit: Go down the orange juice flavor pack "Why do they all taste different" rabbit hole with me.... https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mpdop/e...

It is worth mentioning that Costco.com does not stock the same things that the physical stores sell, more-so than any other retailer I know of. And different stores have a lot of latitude in what they stock.

My nearest store has tons of things like sugar free sodas, pro-biotic soda, kombucha, no sugar added juices, and juice shots, etc... It might just be the local Costco catering to their market.

Yep found it https://old.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/1e0t9u6/costco_june...

I can’t eat that healthy via other grocery stores because it’s too expensive typically.

I was chatting up a hotel chef recently and he told me the lil 8oz of 'proper' orange juice he gave me cost more to put on the table than the entire rest of the breakfast combined.

I never found one.

Fruit juices consist of fructose. It's bad for you in high quantities, just like sugar. Eating a piece of fruit is healthy for you - fructose in small quantities, and the rest of the fruit slows down its digestion. Fruit juice is a fructose bomb.

I was just hoping for healthier, zero/low sugar options of a lot more things at Costco. If I ever have a zero/low sugar option, I usually get it. I haven't drank a full sugar soda in a decade and avoid all sugar so my tolerance to sweet things is super low. Black coffee, etc.

Plus, if you're drinking fruit juice to help stay hydrated, you literally need sugars and salts to actually instigate the hydration process.

Most of the time in the juice space, anything that is designed to be shelf-stable in a warehouse is not. at. all. healthy. It's packed with preservatives and other stabilizers that are not good for you to consume. Or it has been pasteurized, which kills the vast majority of the nutrients in the liquid itself.

I will say as a caveat, that the Kirkland Signature Organic Coconut Water is quite good.

The Vitamix is easy to clean, so that's the winner for me.

Costco sells a lot of junk food because Americans, as a whole, eat a lot of junk food. They also stock a lot of staples (rice, beans, flour, cooking oils, canned/frozen fruits/veggies, &c), and decent quality raw fruit/veggies/meat. Not liking the Costco shopping experience is a pretty reasonable point of view (it forces you to plan/structure your shopping and food storage in weird ways IMO), but it seems like a strange complaint to zero in on the selection of processed foods when they really do seem to try and accommodate a wide variety of needs and preferences the best they can.

The question is would it make people shop more? If you buy one set of paper towels a week, and Costco rolls out a voice interface, would you now start ordering 2 or 3? If not, what return are they getting on the billions of dollars in additional spending?

In reality people would use it for a day, go "neat", and switch right back to the website or app.

No, that's not the question.

The question is would it make me shop more AT COSTCO.

And yes, it would make me shift some of my purchasing from my local grocery store to Costco. Costco is a long drive that's only worth it for large trips.

But if I could voice order for shipping or (even better) delivery? My local grocery with its god-awful parking lot full of blind 90-year-olds stuck in reverse would be in serious trouble.

I increasingly use specific companies for purchases, because I can't guarantee that what I order through Amazon will actually be the product I wanted, or be at the quality level I'd expect. It's getting to be absolutely awful.

Checking now, I placed 83 orders last year. I've placed 3 so far this year.

Until they figure out price stability for staple goods then nobody will use this. Hell I don't even use Subscribe and Save for the same reason.

I disagree. The issue here is they had a really great use-case and utterly failed to deliver to the end user. No one is requesting their smart assistants to order anything because there is absolutely no support on the platforms + absolutely no user trust of how that is going to go.

If all they ever did was niche their assistant down to being a smart shopping list, it would have been a great product, and likely would have driven sales. Instead they failed at even the thing they would have been had an advantage on (selling things to customers who are buying from them directly). Google and apple would have been operating through a black box of "privacy preserving apis" to do the same with their own integrations.

Then they proceeded to suck at the stuff all the other assistants also suck at.

And as we look at Amazon's webpage, we first have straight out ads, then a few items it hopes I might buy that are typically related to what other people buy, and maybe a mention of what I bought before, but no understanding of why I bought that one. It's not a very easy task, and one where it's easy to lose trust

Especially given the bonfire of trust that is Amazon "sponsored results". Any time I search for anything on Amazon these days I have to spend a bunch of extra time scrolling around trying to figure which of the search results is genuinely a good deal as opposed to one that's paid for placement.

Given that, why would I ever trust something like an Alexa to select a good deal for me?

I dunno, I feel like the value was priced in the purchase price for me. I would not consider paying both a purchase price and subscription fee for it and probably not a subscription fee at all because all they ever do is go up. What would I do with this dumb robot in my house when I don't agree to pay for their latest fee structure.

In fact, this quote from the article is a little concerning:

> The new technology would more seamlessly allow users to control functions like smart home devices using their voices rather than opening an app.

Problem is, the existing technology can already do this, most of the time. It sounds very much like Amazon is going to try and charge me a monthly fee for something I already have. That's not going to work out.

If I'm paying up-front, the subscription needs to be an optional add-on that provides additional value. The thing should continue working at some base level for its working lifetime, even if I cancel or the service is shut down.

If the "base level" on the thing I bought is ever changed after my purchase, the company has burned their trust with me. In fact I'll probably switch away and never buy anything from them again.

On the other hand, if they want to build it so a subscription is required to work at all, then I don't want to buy the hardware that I clearly don't actually "own" anyway. It's fair to require paying up-front for a year or two (eg: cell plans) or have a contract requiring a minimum term because obviously the hardware costs something to produce, but in this type of business the product is really the subscription, and the device is just the means of delivery.

So for that I appreciate Alexa.

The fact that they could be finally fixing this, and then are putting it behind a paywall is ironic, because if it finally works properly, people could actually start using it for buying stuff.

Why do you say that (both parts)? Alexa has done a good job to integrate with lots of other devices. I can control many aspects of my house through Alexa - lights, blinds, AC, sound, etc. I value that, but I don't think I value it enough to ever want to pay a subscription for it. That's as silly as whoever though selling heated seats in your BMW would fly. I made sure that in each home component I chose a solution that works locally (only AC I had to compromise for lack of options).

And with all that value it provides as a hub? My alexa can't be used to buy anything, call anyone, etc. None of that is configured or permitted as much as I can shut it down. I don't personally see the value there.

I for one am curious where Amazon chooses to draw the line. I don't want to pay a subscription to shout out local hub control commands, but they could be draconian to extra value.

I think Alexa was just because of Amazon's norm of spending very high on R and D. That was the reason AWS was born. No one thought people would pay something like 10x just for consistency in cloud, but here we are. One AWS could cover 20 Alexas.

Agree.

Go look at the Alexa Skills for any random category and sort by "best sellers," then sort again by "average review." There isn't an ecosystem.

For Lifestyle, the "4th best selling" [1] skill is "North American Roofing," which is for a company in Tampa.

There should be more there. Given the devices with a touch-sensitive screen, some form of presence detection, location awareness, and other things, there's a lot of missed potential there.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?i=alexa-skills&bbn=13727922011&rh=n...

Seems like the voice-smart-home problem is the same as the voice-shopping problem: There is a limit to how many features you can/want to support in a voice interface.

If they focused on getting voice control for home automation perfect, it could be a real winner.

y protein powder that was, I think $50s pre-2020 is now $80ish. Sigh. Goodbye Hydrowhey, back to the chalky stuff.

A bigger problem is their kids do.

If I could be assured of privacy issues, I'd be happy to give it access to my email, calendar, bank accounts etc. and then let me just use it like a Chief of Staff.

I know another company is going to come do this, but it's crazy that that company may not be Alexa/Google.

LLM's can do that (ex: https://www.skyvern.com or https://www.gumloop.com).

edit: Though more generally, I can see a future where all these operations are essentially different functions in a function calling system.

Amazon had low trust back then. It's even worse now

Kitchen timer

What's the weather

Shipping and weather alerts

So yeah, not sure where the money will come from. I get angry any time Alexa recommends anything.

Of course I could put that on my fridge and have a marker. But it's "I need my list right now and have almost no free hands to do this" in other parts of the house too (toilet paper etc). Meanwhile my phone is always in my pocket.

Maybe time to just keep a pocket pad + pencil in my pocket though...

> consumers don't behave like that

Computer savvy HN readers don't behave like that. My computer illiterate mother-in-law, on the other hand, kind of does. My brother-in-law got her one of those Google smart speakers years ago and she loved the thing. Finally, a computer to which she could bark orders and have them fulfilled, much like she does to any human within earshot.

~90% timers

~8% weather

~2% putting items in a shopping list

And I don't recall them ever buying anything via Alexa that they wouldn't have bought on Amazon some other way.

The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of their installed base don't care about the smart home features.

The highest margins in smart home equipment are in the high end, as usual. However, Alexa explicitly targeted the mass consumer market. Many of those folks are completely satisfied with a couple of those "smart" switching plug things, which are dirt cheap and totally commoditized.

Many others live in apartments, and thus their options for home en-smarttening are very limited. Even if they wanted to go for a costly, sophisticated smart home setup, they can't.

Other folks just don't give a damn about smart home tech and are totally satisfied with a thermostat that they must use by walking over to it.

Maybe I'm wrong, but my instinct is that Alexa's reach is incompatible with a business model of selling smart home products for profit.

My usage is:

~30%: timers

~10%: weather

~60%: tell Alexa to add things to a shopping list, which I use when I'm at a physical store or ready to do a curbside shopping order

I have one in my kitchen (no echo show for exact values on a timer), and it does a nice job with the timers.

I'm not sure if you're intending to be literal or engaging in hyperbole to make a point, but either way it doesn't gel with our experience. Yes, we definitely set timers and ask about the weather... near us, at places we're going to, in the near future, etc. We also ask for a lot of conversions, or adjustments to measurements. My partner is a great cook and she is constantly shouting out to Alexa to convert an amount, find a substitute, confirm a cooking temp and time and things like that. I ask it factual questions all the time and usually it has an answer: these might be history, technology, medicine, whatever. Given the device's low price point and lack of any ongoing subscription it seems like a pretty good value to us, and it will even play some mood music for us while we eat and tell us where our shipment of coffee filters is.

"Alexa, order more dish detergent"

"From your recent order history, I found Cascade Dish Detergent pods, 120 count, $17.99. Would you like to order?"

"Yes"

It was super convenient when I was ordering something I had already ordered before, which is all my common purchased.

Now I use powder again, cleans clothes so much better and haven’t experienced the same clogging as years ago.

I use white vinegar instead of fabric softener as I have sensitive skin, wash sheets on 90C which cleans the machine, and still use pods on short washes.

Maybe they are and we need time to see the pivot in market forces. I just want to take this moment to go on record that only seeing technology as a profit-making machine defeats the purposes of human progress. Let this be a lesson to the rest of you trying to be the next Amazon - it's not working for them. They're losing billions on Alexa and it's all their fault. You aren't bigger, faster, meaner, or better than Amazon. The only thing you can do - the only thing you must do - is focus on your customers as human beings, not just as cash registers.

Other systems like communism floped and failed royally. Feufalism or slavery are out of question, they are pure vomit, even though Russians live under feudalism.

Business and charity are different things, you can't mix them.

Alexa is a lame product. People still have it simply because they feel bad about throwing it out. No one wants smart homes, people want cheap and affordable homes. No customer wants quick or convenient buying process, people are looking for cheap or at least not overpriced products and services instead. And putting way too sophisticated AI in Alexa would be stupidly expensive.

I’m pretty happy with having a speaker in one of my room that can play whatever I want, all at the same time, and some basic assistant functionality. If they cost twice as much, I would still buy them.

That probably won't work because, at least according to Wikipedia, at some point 10k (!) people worked on Alexa. I'd start at the other end, maybe don't hire an entire Death Star worth of people to develop a voice assistant. That'd probably have saved a few billion here and there.

But yeah they clearly spun their wheels on the software side.

As an owner of several Echo devices and a former owner of the Dash buttons, my household LOVED the Dash buttons. Never once have we ordered anything via Alexa, nor do we want to. With the button, you selected the EXACT item with a single button. With Alexa, you have to explain what you want, don't necessarily know the price, seller, etc. It was an all around worse UI for buying.

And that's the problem you speak of. No one wants to do that. They made a smart speaker then convinced themselves something ELSE was the killer feature and predicated the finances on that.

Hm, but wasn't the price of items ordered through the Dash buttons subject to change, too? Like last week when you set everything up it was $5 per item, but sellers changed and now its $15? Sounds risky to me without checking the order confirmation mails...

What about 'subscribe and save' on amazon. I never use it, but curious if it has a similar fate as ordering on alexa.

I actually trust it much more than ChatGPT since it never hallucinates and it cites its source.

(I have seen people try this but it's immediately apparent that it's not hand-curated. I think selling that point needs to be priority.)

Something simple like “alert me if my door is unlocked” using a ring device is impossible.

Check camel camel… Tide pods vary 25% in price, from ok to ridiculous. When Amazon runs out you’ll get subbed with third party seller (probably stolen) product.

If I could use a dash button with Target, I would use it.

is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.

Yes. They are losing billions on the deal and consumers didn't have their expectations met.

> is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits

You're describing the main reason for owning one. This has nothing to do with why we collectively allow them to exist.

>Yes. They are losing billions on the deal

biz 101: losses in business commonly happen anytime. losses are not wrong or right. they just happen, for various reasons. it is called an occupational hazard. if getting profits all the time was guaranteed, every tom, dick and harry would be running a business.

so companies know about the possibility of losses before they start up.

>and consumers didn't have their expectations met.

naive. companies don't do businesses for that reason. that is kind of a side effect, although a desirable one for companies, because it makes customers continue as customers. companies do business to make money (i.e. profits, not even just sales), plain and simple.

whether we like that or not, and whether their behaviour is ethical or not, and legal or not, are separate, though related issues.

how many times has this been stated on hn, even if in other words? plenty, I bet.

apart from that, it is sheer common knowledge.

>>is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits

>You're describing the main reason for owning one.

Yes. Is that not obvious?

>This has nothing to do with why we collectively allow them to exist.

you are jumping around, and skirting my question. you, i, or we, may or may not wish to allow them to exist, but what the heck does that have to do with my original question? :

>>>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales.

>>is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.

I doubt that there is any company that envisions a product that will decrease sales, or even keep them flat. then why go to the trouble?

Don't make 8 generations of products that do not profit while simultaneously changing nothing other than their form factor.

> companies don't do businesses for that reason.

I didn't say they did. Perhaps you should slow down and use fewer insults while you craft your replies. In any case, if you are losing money and customers are happy, that's certainly different than losing money and customers are not happy. Would you not agree this is "sheer common knowledge" as well?

> and skirting my question.

The product is a full decade old. This does not seem to factor into your question or arguments at all. Perhaps it should?

I don't see where I used any insults in my earlier reply. saying biz 101, maybe?

as for the rest, I can't really understand what you are saying, so I'll drop out of the discussion now.

in any case, i had no intention of insulting you, sorry if you felt that way.

maybe I was talking in the same way as that architect described, possibly due to having picked up on that trend, after having worked in that company.

What about alcoholic drinks in pubs or bars “2 pints of your best and a glass of house red”.

Alexa may not be great for purchasing from Amazon but this isn’t because humans have never shopped using only their voices. Nor is seeing things required.

Restaurants and catalogs have menus. Street vendors show you their goods.

You don't need to take my word for it. No one uses Alexa this way. The proof is in the outcome.

>They need to see things.

Nyet. Non. Nada.

What world do you live in?

People seeing things and then shopping with their voices are not mutually exclusive actions.

Not only are they complementary, they are very common, and must have been from the dawn of shops.

How many billions of times, worldwide, must people have looked around at some products there, and said "give me 5 foos and 10 bars" at their neighbourhood store or other shop?

heh. maybe I should become a consultant to Jeff, charge him gigabucks.

Are you someone who orders things using the Echo? If not, are you just playing devil's advocate?

but did you notice that I also said:

>or an advanced, literally voice-only version of it, where you don't even have to press any digit keys to respond to voice menus?

above?

For the sake of argument, we can imagine the Echo technology is advanced enough to be on par with speaking to a real person, like your own personal assistant that you trust.

I could see it being useful for recurring purchases when I run out of an item, although I (and I assume most people) get these items from the grocery store. For items you've never purchased before, I could also see it being useful if, like a personal assistant, it prepares a short list of items to choose from based on your purchasing preferences. But I would still rather see the list of the items before making the purchase.

Again, no one buys things using only such an interface. I am middle aged and have never done, not even in pre-e-commerce times.

It is a non-existent behavior, and there was no reason to think Alexa could will it into existence.

I was talking about future possibilities, not the past. I would have thought that was clear from my comment. but maybe it was not worded clearly, or maybe you didn't get it.

>I am middle aged and have never done, not even in pre-e-commerce times.

you are not the same entity as everyone else. you are one, they are numerous.

just the fact that you have never done it does not mean that no one else has ever done it, or would not like to do it.

>It is a non-existent behavior, and there was no reason to think Alexa could will it into existence.

non-existent past behaviours can become future existing behaviours.

I meant Amazon building that feature into Alexa, not that Alexa would create it by itself.

Why would anyone want to do an audio-only interface? If there were a need or desire for it, it would have popped up somewhere else in society. It hasn't.

> you are not the same entity as everyone else. you are one, they are numerous.

OK, let me rephrase that. I've never heard of a single other person buying a single thing using an audio-only interface. It probably happens, but it's rare enough that it's safe to say Amazon was trying to invent a brand new human behavior, which (I will reiterate) is stupid.

>Why would anyone want to do an audio-only interface? If there were a need or desire for it, it would have popped up somewhere else in society. It hasn't.

what utter rubbish you talk, dude.

you are talking repeatedly past me, that is, not directly addressing my replies, instead, you are going off at a tangent each time. that's not the way to conduct a rational argument. it's often seen as evading the point that the other person made (because you don't have a good answer for it), although it can also be just due to poor logic, and due to talking on the basis of emotion rather than reason.

as an example your illogic, to be precise, and referring to both of our points that I quoted just above:

I talked about the future possibilities, and yet you are continuing to harp on the fact that that innovation has not happened yet. does the fact that something has not happened yet, mean that it can never happened in the future? jay. eff. cee. did people think that mobile phones would happen before they happened? or computers? or cars? or fridges? or so many other modern inventions? maybe for a some of those cases it was predicted, but not for all, damn sure of that. and I bet some of those at least were not needed or desired earlier. still they happened.

quoting one of your above points again, to make another very valid point:

>>Why would anyone want to do an audio-only interface? If there were a need or desire for it, it would have popped up somewhere else in society. It hasn't.

nonsense, on 2 counts:

1. so you think that if there's a need or desire for something in society, it will automatically "pop up"? by the grace of god, maybe?

2. you say it hasn't.

here is another hn user, NotMichaelBay, in this same subthread, who says that it already exists:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41077865

start of his comment (italics mine):

>That already exists too, but it's also poor UX because it processes your response slower than a person would, and it sometimes misunderstands what you're saying or asks you to repeat.

so he says that it already exists. I don't think he would be making it up. but to address his point about UX, I think his argument that it is poor UX may be wrong. however I have not replied to it yet and may not do it for some more hours, because I have other things to do too.

but in a nutshell:

voice recognition and voice processing technology has progressed in leaps and bounds. it is much better than it was a few years back. I used to be a skeptic about it then, but nowadays it is so good that I use it many times on a daily basis, including for voice typing these hn comments, at least partially. I just have to make a few edits to correct the mistakes that it makes. this is an example of a need and a desire (referring to your comment above), that I, at least, did not know about beforehand, but happily use once it is available.

still editing to check for typos.

Maybe it can get bundled into the smart doorbell / camera video storage subscriptions?

Exactly why Amazon Fire phone failed. So, they didn't learn their lesson. What happened to their leadership principles, specifically - Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards?

Not only had this hurt their Alexa dreams, imo it has hurt their brand reputation as well. Amazon is no longer a retailer I trust. I would much rather buy from a more traditional store that doesn't have 3rd party sellers, and maintains standard prices and quantities.

Dash buttons failed because they were superseded by Alexa. And because they were a bit silly to begin with.

I don’t want Alexa to buy me a new bottle of my shampoo when it can be $10 one week at $50 the next.

But from Walmart or Target? There’s a price stability where you can basically go shopping without looking at the price tags. A price of a toilet roll won’t explode because of some price algorithm fighting each other.

They should incorporate AI and allow people to have a conversation. "Alexa, how much are Tide Pods?" "They are $10/pack right now, the last time they were lower was May 2023." "Are these cheaper than Walmart?" "No.", etc. But of course they are so greedy they want to try to funnel people directly into Amazon, and their greed is why they are don't have sales through Alexa.

Aside from books, Amazon has become my last choice as a place to order.

Take the most commonly re-ordered items on Amazon (paper towels, toothbrushes, etc) and have the user select a preferred product, brand, and fallback for each one, as well as a maximum price. Some of that is already implemented for Subscribe & Save and Whole Foods delivery/pickup orders. They could even leverage that existing system.

For less common items, first check the user’s purchase history for something similar and announce if the price has increased more than few percentage points or is not in a normal range for the product category.

That will cover a lot of cases. For the rest, refer the user to do some research on the computer.

Also I don't understand that "let's order household stuff" online randomly and individually example. Sure sometimes you run out of something but I think it mostly happens to people like me who live in small places because we don't have the space to have 3 packs of 6 rolls of toilet paper. But usually people who live in small spaces are usually the ones living in high density places where small groceries shops are always available at walking distance. People who live in suburbs usually have enough storage space and do their shopping of houshold items once a month and never run out of anything.

I have most household items on subscription. It saves a ton of time and costs about the same, maybe a little less for some items. And most importantly, it means I never forget something and then have to make another trip.

I don't think this is right. My understanding is the average Dash Button was pressed ~5 times, which isn't bad. The problem was that "subscribe and save" generated more orders than that.

For what it's worthy, my company[1] makes a re-ordering IoT device that uses weight to re-order rather than a button click, and we generate more orders than "subscribe and save" programs. This suggests that the problem with Dash was that the habit was not easy to build, not that people wanted to see the product page.

[1] bottomless.com

Google, Facebook, Amazon, this is exactly how they design their products.

How were they envisioning to make lots of money with it in the first place?

Actually they do, just not on Amazon. If you search for 'tide pods' you'll find a WHOLE page of product listings on the first page of the search results full of duplicates and confusing quantity packages. If I do the same on Target.com there are roughly 10~12 products I can actually choose from which is much easier to decipher which one to actually order.

This is doubly true ever since they let shady sellers/scammers run free on their platform. I trust AliExpress more than I trust Amazon for any product that isn't explicitly "Sold by Amazon".

A friend of mine used to be very into that but he seemed to sour on the experience last time I talked to him.

I wouldn't. Amazon wouldn't be able to stop them selves double-dipping like they did with prime, throwing in adverts etc.

Subscription models were fine, until they weren't enough to keep big tech growth placated.

It would be very hard to convince me to buy another subscription for something like Alexa. They would be competing with all the other Big Tech subscriptions I'm paying and that budget is limited. There's only space for a few of those before any new ones become a very tough sell.

As someone who knows folks that worked on Amazon Alexa (back in its earliest days), this was almost never the focus of Alexa. It might seem cool or trendy to constantly hate on Amazon here on HN, and then somehow tie that to some comment on free market capitalism, Amazon did in fact have very normal ambitions with Alexa, build a smart assistant. Bezos, particularly envisioned building some computer from star-trek as his inspiration.

Alexa in its early days was also quite impressive for what they managed to do. It was an example of early ML scaling. They rented hundreds of houses around Seattle, had voice actors talk in different locations in the houses, collected all that data and trained a speech recognition model that was SOTA at the time. Unfortunately while their voice recognition was great, they didn’t apply this scaling approach to natural language understanding. They instead went the root of trying to manually understanding grammar, and iterating all the thousands of possible sentence reconstructions in a large decision tree to help Alexa answer your queries. This of course was hopeless, but this was also almost 5 years before OpenAI released GPT-3 so you can’t fault them for doing essentially what Siri did.

Now the issue with Alexa is like most issues big organizations face, they are slow moving and cannot pivot quickly. What they need to do, is actually hard and will need to be done by essentially a monarch CEO, he needs to delete all the work the Alexa teams have done over the last 5 years in 1 swoop and replace it with LLM’s. Many folks in Amazon made their career on improving the Alexa stack, they will of course mostly be defensive and argue vehemently against deleting entirety of Alexa tech “LLM’s hallucinate too much, we need a combined approach”, they will plead, but the stack needs to be deleted, the entire organization needs to pivot to LLMs. Apple has managed to take steps towards this, I won’t be surprised if Amazon soon will, or maybe they won’t, depends on their ability to not be disrupted.

If they are guilty of anything, it’s being unable to do good research to discover GPT-3 on their own (though tbf no one except OpenAI did this), and then being unable to ditch all the technical debt they have accumulated over 5+ years and pivot completely into LLM’s.

This has many problems. Imagine you are watching a video clip when someone orders a sack of potatoes through Alexa. What is the chance Alexa will place the order?

Or say you wanted to order flour and got flowers etc etc.

Then pranks. Guests enter your house and say "Alexa order 10 packs of cheese!" and you have to rush to cancel it.

Then Amazon has a tonne of spam and rubbish products, what are the chances you get garbage shipped to your house and not the things you wanted.

From that point of view, a robot assistant that you tell "buy me one banana what could it cost ten dollars," and it automatically buys something from their store - that's a slam dunk.

And I'm fascinated over and over again on just how bad even that experience sometimes is.

Not finding the right song on Spotify, not understanding what I'm asking, trying to push useless information on me and so on....

In the days of LLMs it looks even worse, because I would expect Alexa to use technology like that to give better answers.

And that’s the problem. I’m not shopping with Alexa, because that experience is excruciating. I’m reordering things which I was already going to order through Amazon. They’re not actually generating new sales there; they’re just saving me from having to pull my phone out.

Dash button was great and i stopped using amazon completely over it’s cancellation precisely because i don’t want to go to the app or the website. They canned it because they can’t upsell you on random crap you don’t need