Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores will close, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday, with some locations converted into Whole Foods Market stores. “While we’ve seen encouraging signals in our…
(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. is shuttering its Amazon-branded grocery stores and automated grab-and-go markets, eliminating two centerpieces of its push into physical retail.
Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores will close, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday, with some locations converted into Whole Foods Market stores.
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“While we’ve seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven’t yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion,” Amazon said.
The moves mark the e-commerce giant’s latest retreat from its brick-and-mortar retail efforts. Since the surprise opening of a physical bookstore in 2015, Amazon has tried and failed to establish a foothold under its own brand in categories from groceries to fashion, often with technology flourishes like digital price tags or novel checkout methods.
Over the last few years, the company has backed away from the bookstores, an eclectic kitchen goods, toys and electronics store called Amazon 4-Star, electronics kiosks in shopping malls and a short-lived clothing storefront.
In the blog post, Amazon said it would continue to invest in groceries sold both online and offline. That includes an ongoing effort to stock more produce and perishables in Amazon’s same-day delivery warehouses and at more Whole Foods locations, which now comprise more than 550 stores.
Amazon currently operates 14 Go stores, which use cameras to track what people grab off the shelves, and 58 Amazon Fresh grocery stores, according to its website. The last day of operation for most of those stores will be Sunday, a spokesperson said, except in California, where they’ll stay open longer to comply with state requirements for advance notice of closures. The company says it will help store employees find other jobs at Amazon.
All told, the Seattle-based company says it’s a top-three grocer in the US, with more than $150 billion in gross sales. Much of that volume is shelf-stable items and consumables. After buying Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon quickly added home delivery from the organic grocer’s stores, but the company has struggled to find the right formula for stocking and delivering perishable goods from its massive network of warehouses.
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> On April 4, 2024, it was revealed that Amazon's "Just Walk Out" technology was supported by approximately 1,000 Indian workers who manually reviewed transactions. Despite claims of being fully automated through computer vision, a significant portion of transactions required this manual verification. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Go )
Wonder how much of this is due to economics since computer vision tech never reached the expected performance + outsourced workers got (relatively) much more expensive after COVID.
I left the following comment some months ago, duplicating it here:
[Disclaimer: Former Amazon employee and not involved with Go since 2016.]
I worked on the first iteration of Amazon Go in 2015/16 and can provide some context on the human oversight aspects.
The system incorporated human review in two primary capacities:
1. Low-confidence event resolution: A subset of customer interactions resulted in low-confidence classifications that were routed to human reviewers for verification. These events typically involved edge cases that were challenging for the automated systems to resolve definitively. The proportion of these events was expected to decrease over time as the models improved. This was my experience during my time with Go.
2. Training data generation: Human annotators played a significant role in labeling interactions for model training-- particularly when introducing new store fixtures or customer behaviors. For instance, when new equipment like coffee machines were added, the system would initially flag all related interactions for human annotation to build training datasets for those specific use cases. Of course, that results in a surge of humans needed for annotation while the data is collected.
Scaling from smaller grab-and-go formats to larger retail environments (Fresh, Whole Foods) would require expanded annotation efforts due to the increased complexity and variety of customer interactions in those settings.
This approach represents a fairly standard machine learning deployment pattern where human oversight serves both quality assurance and continuous improvement.
The news story is entertaining but it implies there was no working tech behind Amazon Go which just isn't true.
The go tech is amazing in 2 places: airport and stadium beverage tunnels. There's a premium price and high volume in those areas. The go tech has basically revolutionized the speed of getting a beer and a dog at the stadium here in Seattle. I can be back in my seat in 4 minutes including the bathroom now which for NFL means I can literally be back in a commercial break sometimes.
no idea how much they make on it, but it's a game changer in that small area.
By trollbridge 2026-01-2818:00 One wonders just how much technology is needed to dispense a beer and a hot dog.
Couldn't you just use vending/automat machines in these scenarios? Beers in particular are... not complicated. I believe the go tech makes the existing situation better but if you were to reimagine it from ground up I can't help but imagine you could do better.
By mrguyorama 2026-01-2819:361 reply Automats don't have to have huge queues.
One employee as a stocker/chef can support higher throughput in automat style than in counter style fast food service because you have a much more focused task (put food in empty cubby, repeat) than the normal process of "Take order, take money, get order, give customer, deal with mistakes"
They can have an entire wall full of panels for the same item, so that purchases are heavily parallelized. There's usually only a single digit number of items available.
Automats seemingly died because inflation made it hard to accept payment, but that has been a solved problem in vending machines since then.
Japan and some other places still do a lot of vending machine food, but the specific "Wall of items" Automat format enables great logistics that you don't get from vending machines. Weirder still, there are places in asia I have seen that have a AutomatWall style setup, but cook food to order, so you end up waiting!
You can't use an Automat for beer though, without some sort of external system to only allow use by "adults". But surely that's true of a vision system?
By Breza 2026-01-3020:03 I've been FASCINATED by Automats ever since I watched Bugs Bunny as a child. The idea that you could just walk up, look at what looked good, and buy it seemed indescribably awesome.
What’s still not clear to me about this story is if there was ever live human monitoring of shoppers. Did the low confidence resolution occur in real time, at some point between the customer grabbing the item and getting their bill?
By davidst 2026-01-2817:47 It wasn't real-time. Recorded events were entered into a queue and latency would vary depending on the size of the queue and the number of annotators.
By BoredPositron 2026-01-289:331 reply I get being proud of the work done but if they scrapped the project after 10 years because of feasibility I don't think the tech rolled out at the start was "working" as intended.
The first iteration of the tech reached the accuracy needed to support just-walk-out for a small-format store. It did achieve that goal. I left the project before it went further.
I imagined, at the time, future goals would be to scale store size and product variety while reducing the cost of the technology, but I have no insight into how that progressed. I am sorry to learn it's been shut down.
By BoredPositron 2026-01-2811:132 reply But they started to have more clerks at the stores 2-3 weeks after launch and they were still present when I last visited one.
By burningChrome 2026-01-2815:301 reply This was one of the issues that killed it. They continually missed goals of reducing human involvement.
Training is part of any AI project, but it sounds like Amazon wasn’t making much progress, even after years of working on the project. “As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales,” the report said.
The report said Amazon’s team “repeatedly missed goals” to cut down on human reviews, and “the reliance on backup humans explains in part why it can take hours for customers to receive receipts.”
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-power...
By davidst 2026-01-2818:20 Scaling from a small-format store with limited item selection (where the tech worked well) to a large grocery format would come with many challenges. A previous comment touches on a couple of them:
By davidst 2026-01-2818:04 I don't know how the store clerk staffing changed over time but they were not directly involved with the underlying tech (that is, clerks did not annotate data.) Stores had to comply with state laws for certain kinds of items (e.g., a live person must verify ID and age for alcohol) so the store automation had the ability to summon a clerk when needed. And there were the usual things all stores must do: restocking, cleaning, safety, and customer relations. I expected customer relations to decrease over time as people became accustomed to the just-walk-out shopping experience.
By throwaway_15612 2026-01-2815:02 Could it be improved by requiring the customers to use a "smart" shopping basket that can read RFC codes from the product packaging? In combination with vision tech it should give a relatively higher accuracy.
If so, is the reason why it is not used related to cost?
Obligatory /disclaimer/disclosure/. (Don't worry, most HNrs get this wrong for some reason. I will be downvoted for pointing this out, but whatever. It's a meaningful difference to those that understand.)
By londons_explore 2026-01-289:042 reply As soon as you get to ~99% accuracy, you probably don't need to go further.
If the customer is accidentally billed for an orange instead of a tangerine 1% of the time, the consumer probably won't notice or care, and as long as the errors aren't biased in favour of the shop, regulators and the taxman probably won't care either.
With that in mind, I suspect Amazon Go wasn't profitable due to poor execution not an inherently bad idea.
Actually, discount grocers operate on razor-thin margins of 2-4%. If your inaccuracy is geared to the benefit of your customer (because otherwise you'll be out of business due to the regulatory bodies) and thus removes just one percent of that, you suddenly lose a quarter to half of your earnings! And that goes ON TOP of the additional cost incurred with all that computer vision tech.
In addition to that, you'll have the problem of inventory differences, which is often cited as being an even bigger problem with store theft than the loss of valued product. If the inventory numbers on your books differ too much from the inventory actually on the shelves, all your replenishment processes will suffer, eventually causing out of stock situations and thus loss of revenue. You may be able to eventually counter that by estimating losses to billing inaccuracies, but that's another complexity that's not going to be free to tackle, so the 1% inaccuracy is going to cost you money on the inventory difference front, no matter what.
By SilverBirch 2026-01-2812:38 And to add to that, it's not a neutral environment. If there's 1% of scenarios that are incorrect, people will figure out they haven't been billed for something, figure out why, and then tell their friends. Before you know it every teenager is walking into Amazon Fresh standing on one foot, taking a bag of Doritos, hopping over to the Coca Cola stand, putting the Doritos down, spinning 3 times, picking it up again and walking out of store, safe in the knowledge that the AI system has annotated the entire event as a seagull getting into the shop.
By davidst 2026-01-289:55 I don't have insight into what ultimately transpired at Amazon Go so take the following as speculation on my part.
It is unlikely the tech would be frozen when an acceptable accuracy threshold is reached:
1. There is a strong incentive to reduce operational costs by simplifying the hardware infrastructure and improving the underlying vision tech to maintain acceptable accuracy. You can save money if you can reduce the number and quality of cameras, eliminate additional signal assistance from other inputs (e.g., shelves with load cells), and generally simplify overall system complexity.
2. There is business pressure to add product types and fixtures which almost always result in new customer behaviors. I mentioned coffee in my prior post. Consider what it would mean to add support for open-top produce bins and the challenge of complex customer rummaging. It would take a lot of high-quality annotated data and probably some entirely new algorithms, as well.
Both of those require maintaining a well-staffed annotation team working continuously for an extended time. And those were just the first two things that come to mind. There are likely more reasons that aren't immediately apparent.
It's great that they faced essentially no consequences for this. A sure sign that we have a functional and sane market.
By colinplamondon 2026-01-2716:563 reply Why would they face consequences? Every store has video surveillance that can be reviewed.
They trusted their tech enough to accept the false-positive rate, then worked to determine / validate their false positive rate with manual review, and iterate their models with the data.
From a consumer perspective the point is that you can "just walk out". They delivered that.
By acdha 2026-01-2717:15 If the stock price goes down, I won’t be surprised if there’s a shareholder lawsuit claiming that they misrepresented their level of AI achievement and that lead to this write-off by keeping operating costs and error rates high. The whole business model really assumed that they could undercut competitors by lower staffing.
Their initial advertising claimed near full automation by their "AI" system when, in reality, they had people manually handling around 70% of the transactions.
I get that this is a message board for YC, so lying about your company's tech is considered almost a virtue but that is an unreasonably big lie to tell without getting your hand-slapped by some regulatory body or investor backlash.
I don’t remember Amazon claiming “near-full automation” by AI. They said that you can checkout automatically and that AI/computer vision is somehow involved.
By EdiX 2026-01-287:54 If they didn't say it they heavily implied it to the point that journalists were fooled. For example you can read about it in this very quaint 2018 article that went with a woke "it's your fault I'm disfunctionally paranoid" angle: https://www.cnet.com/culture/amazon-go-avoid-discrimination-....
Turns out people did care what she was doing.No one cared what I was doing. Is this what it feels like to shop when you're not black?
By thegrim000 2026-01-2723:481 reply Well that's because, again, it was indeed algorithms doing the work, and the people were only used to verify / train the system, after the fact. People keep, intentionally, conflating the two things, doing everything in their power to say (or strongly imply), that the people involved were managing the orders in real time, which is a lie. You are the one pushing misinformation here.
By freejazz 2026-01-2816:57 Automated checkout cashier except that you need a human to verify the work of the automated checkout cashier. Brilliant.
By CamperBob2 2026-01-280:571 reply Who cares how they monitor and validate transactions? That's Amazon's problem, not mine.
Indians, AI, whatever, meh.
By expedition32 2026-01-2810:281 reply In my country they have 16 year old kids working in the supermarket. They are pretty cheap to employ and these jobs train the boys and girls into becoming adults.
It would be a shame if this shared experience was taken over by third worlders.
By CamperBob2 2026-01-2816:12 Still doesn't sound like my problem.
Meanwhile the distinction between the US and the so-called "third world" seems to become less apparent and less relevant every day. Indian teenagers need jobs too, don't they? More power to them.
By colinplamondon 2026-01-2718:341 reply I think investors like Amazon taking shots like this? It was never a broad roll-out, 43 stores is micro-scale for Amazon.
Still, would love to see a breakdown of why it didn't improve. Regardless of the accuracy at launch, I'd think that advances in AI would have been massively to their advantage. I wonder if security degradation hit them hard.
The entire system depends on a level of social trust that doesn't exist in American cities today. Similarly, the "Dash Cart" seems like a cheaper and easier way to accomplish the same thing.
At the end of the day, there's also a mismatch in the use case. If I'm going to a smaller format store, like they had, I'm not buying a ton of stuff. Self checkout is great, and minimal friction.
I'd think that improving the UX of self-checkout gets 80% of the way there with way less fraud, way less theft, and way less technology.
Still, I think it's wicked cool they took a big shot.
I know someone that worked on the project in the early days. It was always incredibly difficult technology, they were always behind on their accuracy targets, and the solutions were increasingly kludgy as they layered more and more complex systems on top. An honorable failure.
A lot of smart people really tried to make it work.
By Cornbilly 2026-01-2718:50 That's great but they could have been honest up-front and said "The plan is that this is eventually fully-automated but we estimate that it needs supervised training for X amount of time in order to handle Y% of transactions automatically".
But this is tech and you just lie because hardly anyone in the investor class knows enough to call you out on it or they are just going with the lie to make a buck off of other rubes.
Privacy concerns aside, I thought it was a cool project. I agree that “convenience store” was probably not the best target but I think it was an effective enough proof of concept (creating a decent sized chain of them probably wasn’t the best idea) . I’ve seen the system used more effectively in smaller situations like stadium concessions, where the duration of the transactions needs to be very short to facilitate throughout.
By swiftcoder 2026-01-288:08 It's also pretty par for the course from Amazon automation initiatives. Like Glacier being marketed as robotic tape drive loaders, where in reality it is mostly just regular old S3 running on the outdated server clusters.
By madeofpalk 2026-01-281:02 Isn't the consequence that that they're shutting the stores down?
It’s autonomous 80% of the time. That’s significant. Put another way, they only had to hire 1000 people instead of 5000.
By mrguyorama 2026-01-2819:472 reply It only takes 1 employee to staff 20 self checkouts for comparison.
For a full fat grocery store. With zero change or adjustment to the rest of the grocery store. And customers weirdly like self checkouts even when they are a dramatically worse outcome (compared to the highish bar of well trained cashiers)
By octoberfranklin 2026-01-2921:47 We like self-checkout because there's hardly ever a line.
An idle self-checkout machine costs the store almost nothing. An idle cashier costs the store wages. So the stores will always skimp on cashiers, leading to lines, wasting my time.
By dyauspitr 2026-01-2820:04 What exactly is the point of a well trained cashier, what service do they provide. I guess I appreciate what the bagger does and the cashier knows the codes for the loose vegetables but those are minor benefits in my opinion.
What's the crime? If lying about AI capabilities is a crime we have some billionaires in big trouble.
By kube-system 2026-01-2719:541 reply If it's a publicly traded company, everything is securities fraud.
By kube-system 2026-01-2722:431 reply Criminally, no. In a class action? every day.
It's common for companies to claim AI:
Example: Tesla Cybercab with safety drivers, or Starship Technologies "autonomous" robots, which are remote controlled delivery robots.
By kube-system 2026-01-2818:44 Tech companies are also the most sued for securities fraud.
And in fact, Tesla was sued for securities violations by shareholders over the cybercab.
https://kehoelawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Tesla-Cl...
Starship Technologies is a private company.
By Cornbilly 2026-01-2719:20 AI is not unique in this regard. We just saw the same thing with the crypto/blockchain nonsense.
Regulation lags so far behind that you can get away with bad behavior long enough that, by the time regulation catches up, you can buy your way out of consequences.
This was proven to be false on the WAN show. Only 20% of transactions were low confidence and handled by mechanical turk.
By Breza 2026-01-3020:07 For sure! Twenty percent moves you from "Game changing tech" to "Slightly improved self checkout."
20% is an incredibly high number though, if a store has 400 people/hour that means you're manually reviewing 80 transactions per hour, over one transaction per minute. That's multiple human employees.
By iLoveOncall 2026-01-2721:011 reply One transaction per minute is nothing at all when the transaction can be as simple as "did the person put that back on the shelf" with a 5 seconds clip.
If it was clear from just a 5 second clip it probably wouldn't have needed to be reviewed
By iLoveOncall 2026-01-2821:201 reply Hum, yes it does? It's not because it's not a complex action that it's necessarily supported by the models.
It's not hard to imagine edge scenarios for which the models aren't trained, like a customer dropping an item, or putting an item back in a random shelf instead of the one it's intended for, or someone picking up that previously randomly placed item, etc.
By freejazz 2026-01-2822:26 Just a big assumption on your part when the more reasonable conclusion was just that it was not working and it was not a 5 second thing (hence why receipts were taking so long, etc).
By pessimizer 2026-01-2719:01 Proven "false." I've noticed that if one admits the truth with a dismissive or offended tone, you can just continue to claim the lie and through sheer force of will people will still go with it.
I think people just think that they must be misunderstanding something; that nobody could claim one thing while offering evidence of its opposite. 1/5 of purchases lose their significance.
By EdiX 2026-01-287:48 Nothing has been "proven". The original story was The Information (paywalled article) reshared by Business Insider [1] and claimed that 70% of the transactions were reviewed by an indian. The source was an anonymous source.
Business Insider also reached out to Amazon at the time and a spokesperson denied that actually reviewed any transactions.
This "proven false" thing is just another anonymous source claiming that actually it was only 20%.
So you actually have no proof of anything, you just have three persons claiming three different things (0%, 20% and 70%).
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...
By whateveracct 2026-01-285:40 Transactions or grabs? Cuz I grab >5 things every time..so it stands to reason Indians always reviewed me.
I’m skeptical of this scoop.
It’s reasonable to expect a system like Amazon’s to use human feedback in training, and to quote the article linked on Wikipedia:
> Amazon said that the India-based team only assisted in training the model [and validating] a small minority of shopping visits.
By hereonout2 2026-01-2815:06 I went to Lidl UKs first walk out shop a few weeks ago. You get the bill and receipts about 40 minutes after you've left.
It certainly felt like it could have been sent off to a lower paid country for a human to tot up.
Also consider you're in the store for what, 10 mins - that's a lot of video processing presumably using state of the art CV models. It's quite possibly cheaper to pay a human than rent the H100 to do it.
By theanonymousone 2026-01-2716:283 reply Why did "outsourced workers get (relatively) much more expensive after"?
By foxyv 2026-01-2716:43 Essentially the thinking went. If everyone is remote, why not hire remote workers from countries that are a lot cheaper. Suddenly you had a hard time finding contractors and FTEs from those countries because everyone was hiring them. At the same time it got really hard for entry level developers in the USA to find work.
The supply/demand curve shifted and now those workers are becoming more expensive while domestic workers are becoming cheaper.
By giraffe_lady 2026-01-2716:441 reply India specifically is in the middle of a massive years-long labor movement that is changing the terms of work there and I believe shifting the degree of alignment with western corporate outsourcing though I'm not very informed about the details.
Scale is beyond comprehension though, there were 250 million people on strike one day last summer. This is not ever really covered in western media or mentioned on HN for reasons that are surely not interesting or worth pondering at all.
By givemeethekeys 2026-01-2716:584 reply Americans can’t afford to strike like that.
By dragonwriter 2026-01-2718:01 No one (at a national scale) can afford to strike like that, except people who have an understanding of why they even more can't afford not to strike like that.
By linkregister 2026-01-2717:402 reply You're most likely correct; I originally started writing this comment to refute your statement, but found that my assumptions appear to be wrong.
Americans have the nearly the highest nominal and PPP income of OECD countries as of 2024, only behind Luxembourg, Iceland, and Switzerland [1].
India experiences substantially higher shelter and food insecurity and poverty rates than the United States.
However, tech workers in Bangalore are paid an order of magnitude higher than prevailing local wages in other sectors, at around ₹2M (₹20 lakh) [2]. Median annual rents for 2BHK (2 bedroom) apartments appear to be around 1/10th of that figure at ₹3 lahk in desirable neighborhoods [3].
It appears to be reasonable for a technology worker to be able to perform a sustained strike. I have never personally traveled to Bangalore, though I have lived in places where cost of living is under a tenth of median American income.
I invite correction by people with first hand knowledge about cost of living in Bangalore.
1. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/average-annual-wages...
2. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/median-te...
3. https://www.birlaevara.org.in/best-areas-in-bangalore-for-re...
By leosanchez 2026-01-2717:462 reply > It appears to be reasonable for a technology worker to be able to perform a sustained strike.
I don't think the strikes are done by tech people at all. Just normal workers.
By linkregister 2026-01-2723:17 Then indeed these striking workers are doing so bravely, especially in comparison to the wealth of American workers.
By quetzthecoatl 2026-01-2815:591 reply and it was an absolutely made up number. The real numbers would be so low it was insignificant. That number was only reported in global outlets, and that strike had zero practical impact in India. It was so uneventful, almost all of India except select pockets that has communist party influence didn't even know about the whole thing - let alone felt the impact of the strike.
By leosanchez 2026-01-304:45 > and that strike had zero practical impact in India.
This is a fact.
I think they might have added all the trade union workers across India and came up with that number.
By dragonwriter 2026-01-2718:071 reply > However, tech workers in Bangalore are paid an order of magnitude higher than prevailing local wages in other sectors
250 million people striking in India isn't mainly “tech workers in Bangalore”, or mainly tech and other elite workers at all. It’s about 40% of Indian workers, and most articles I've seen about it centered on widespread participation of workers in coal, construction, and agricultural sectors.
By linkregister 2026-01-2723:18 Thank you for the correction. Indeed these workers' livelihoods are more perilous than their American contemporaries.
And Indians can?
When India "shut down" for Covid, day labourers suddenly had no income, and no government support - they had to walk all the way to their home province (can't remember if the trains were even running).
But oh well, Uberizing employment means the run-of-the-mill American worker can also live like that in the future... progress!
By giraffe_lady 2026-01-2718:34 Americans have chosen to learn exactly how good they have had it. You get to watch!
By esseph 2026-01-2718:02 Can't afford not to.
Great question. I'm not an economist so I have no idea why. The outsourcing rates I've all seen have gotten way higher in the past ~10 years though.
Beyond just the usual inflation?
I'm not an economist either, but I also assume that as the country attracts more local talent for local companies, the competition for outsourcing becomes harder. (i.e, you now have to pay more than the local companies).
All just speculation on my part though, I really have no clue either.
By PaulHoule 2026-01-2717:06 People from Bangalore were telling me it was getting crazy expensive to live there (by Indian standards) circa 2013.
By thinkingtoilet 2026-01-2716:352 reply Another case where AI = "actually Indians". It's funny how often this has happened.
By Dylan16807 2026-01-2717:27 Maybe. I'd really want to know what percent of items (not transactions) needed review. 1,000 people to oversee how much revenue?
Theoretically if it was 99% computer and 1% human, that's enough to mess up the economics but it's not a bait and switch like some companies have done.
By kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 2026-01-2723:171 reply I remember this case the one who put "Actually Indians" in my mind. What other instances do you know?
(Not to refute your point, of course, I am just curious)
By Sateeshm 2026-01-2723:43 Builder ai
By andoando 2026-01-2814:55 I wonder if they were doing the same thing for palm recognition
By adamsb6 2026-01-2719:03 People don’t know what the H is in RLHF.
Their fate seemed sealed when it was revealed a bit back that the “just walk out” technology was more hype than substance. Just lots of people watching what you’re doing on camera vs an actual AI that worked well at mass deployment scale. A good idea, poorly executed.
Reports said the “AI” was largely 1000+ people in India watching the cameras.
If Amazon actually managed to build AI that worked well at a decent cost point it would have been great since nobody likes those silly self checkout machines.
What’s amusing about all of this is that before it got leaked that it was basically a bunch of people in India watching cameras Amazon folks spoke about the tech like there was some super secret AI they developed. Since that story broke nobody there seems to want to talk about “just walk out” anymore.
Even that didn't work well, when I was at an airport recently I had investigated 4-5 items as I had some time to kill. When I was walking out it wanted to bill me for 70 dollars even though I only had a bottle of water and a candy bar.
I have little trust that a corporate behemoth will do right by me and refund the discrepancy at an unspecified later time as it says it will on checkout.
By rurp 2026-01-2721:54 This keeps me away from these sorts of stores if I can avoid them, which is pretty much always (so far, anyway). I would be absolutely shocked if the error rate was comparable to a normal checkout process and I don't want to waste the cognitive overhead of either wondering how much I'm getting ripped off by a corporation or having to go back and review and try to resolve overcharges.
By itsamario 2026-01-2716:11 They pay the most for human involvement. Wages, special conditions, and insurance are exponentially higher than their plans of warehouse to end-user via lockers and drones.
By Fernicia 2026-01-2717:31 > Reports said the “AI” was largely 1000+ people in India watching the cameras.
This was totally fake news though. Those people were labeling training data and reviewing low confidence labels, after the fact. There wasn't ever live monitoring of shoppers.
Yeah, we had one near us, close to the metro exit, and it was genuinely great when you needed to grab something for dinner on the way home. Once you knew where things were, you could be in and out in 20 seconds. That said, it never seemed busy compared to other grocery shops in the area, so I think a lot of people were put off by it feeling "weird" to shop without checking-out.
By goatforce5 2026-01-2717:47 You can use the Apple Store app to purchase physical items at Apple retail locations (smaller items like cables or cases). I've used it a couple of times, and I feel very awkward using it, so much so that I'll walk out kinda waving the receipt/acknowledgement screen around so that staff/security can hopefully see I'm not nicking something.
By ryukoposting 2026-01-2813:09 IIRC the Fresh near my old job required you to have a Prime membership, otherwise it was just a normal grocery store. I only went in there a few times, but I don't have a Prime membership, so there wasn't much of a point.
By usefulposter 2026-01-2716:20 AI: Actually Individuals¹
¹ Individuals manning a labyrinthine system of cameras and sensor fusion, like hawks, logging the precise moment you plop a Twix into your basket! Praise Bezos!
By hackingonempty 2026-01-2716:211 reply There is no difference from the customer perspective so the store failed for reasons that have nothing to do with the "just walk out" technology or lack thereof. Why spend lots of money doing R&D only to find out that the concept doesn't sell? Wait for the product to be successful before spending the money to scale it up. Same as anything else.
"Do things that don't scale."
I think the idea could work well but the execution in the field was consistently very poor. There were a few of these at airports with just an intimidating gate and generally non-engaging human standing there.
It was as if they expected everyone to know what to do, but when I’d watch 99% of people just sort of looked at the store, saw the odd gate things, and then just shrugged and walked off. The stores were almost always completely empty amidst a busy concourse.
Even if the tech worked (reports say it didn’t work well) they completely missed the boat on creating a clear customer experience that navigated the new tech.
By xp84 2026-01-2717:10 I agree, it needed a better hook to get people in the 'gates' so to speak. I don't think I've ever waited behind like maybe a single transaction at an airport convenience store, so it's not like having to fiddle with my phone to get in beats tapping a card or phone or watch at checkout. Either way most people are buying 1-3 things so it's not like it saved time scanning.
As for the big Amazon Fresh grocery stores, I only have one out of my way so I only visited once or twice, but the big things I noticed were that it had a small selection and very average prices. Not that surprising because even after buying Whole Foods, Amazon itself has terrible prices on dry goods (meaning supermarket items besides fresh food), and relies heavily on random third-party sellers with big markups for a ton of it.
If they really wanted to get people to buy into Amazon Fresh it would have taken a lot more money (and thus pretty unprofitable for a long while): Probably one way to do that would have been making it as attractive as Costco for Prime members.
By GorbachevyChase 2026-01-2720:12 I’m a bit surprised a publicly traded company is allowed to make materially false claims about their products and capabilities without getting into a major lawsuit for defrauding shareholders. Maybe Amazon is just above such trifling things such as law.
By AppleAtCha 2026-01-2717:443 reply Do people really have problems with self-checkout? I use it all the time in box stores like Kroger, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. It seems to work just fine for me and doesn't add more than a minute or two vs just walking out of the store.
By vikingerik 2026-01-2718:001 reply Self checkout is fine, if the happy path works. If everything scans once and doesn't accidentally scan a second time, if everything scans at the price you thought it was posted for, if you don't have any controlled substances requiring approval, if the weight sensor doesn't freak out incorrectly or from putting your bags on it, if it accepts any coupons you have, if it accepts and processes your payment method correctly.
If everything goes fine, self checkout is fine. But the exception handling process for any of those is thoroughly aggravating, as you wait and try to get the attention of the one overworked attendant dealing with a dozen of these machines constantly throwing exceptions, as the computer screams at you for whatever it thought you were doing wrong.
By AppleAtCha 2026-01-2718:033 reply Yeah I agree that it can potentially go wrong but in my experience here in east TN the machines have gotten better to the point that hasn't happened for me in the past few years. Also it seems like the "just walk out" process would have more potential error modes but I never visited one.
By OkayPhysicist 2026-01-2719:34 The best machine I've seen so far is one in my local gas station, where there's just a surface and a camera. Toss whatever you want onto the surface, all haphazard like, check that the screen agrees with reality (it always has so far), and bump your watch/phone/credit card and walk out. We're talking substantially less than 30s, oftentimes less than 10s.
By Izkata 2026-01-281:01 Yeah, I've been using self-checkout at my Jewel (grocery store) in Chicago weekly for about a decade (multiple times a week in the past, before I bought my own cart, I walk to it), and had maybe 5-10 issues with the scale in total. None recently.
I've had three failures in the last week. I had the "thought my bag was product" problem, the "I somehow double scanned" problem and the "need a reset but no one can explain why." The first and third were on the same visit.
By AppleAtCha 2026-01-2722:47 Interesting! Thanks for the reality check. I personally like the home depot ones with the very prominent handheld scanner for big items. Hopefully it will keep improving. The days of waiting in line to check out were terrible and I don't want to go back.
By jillesvangurp 2026-01-287:132 reply Here in Germany, the newer generation self checkout terminals are fine. I use them all the time. No issues. The first generation ones were terrible.
The issue with the first generation was that they were too strict with bag placement, weight sensors, etc. They were impossible to use without having to call a very grumpy shop attendant to unlock them. Sometimes multiple times. They were grumpy because all this was technically user error but when a largish percentage of users run into the same issues over and over again, it gets really annoying to deal with.
They fixed most of the glaring UX issues with the newer generation. No weight sensors. No prompts to put the item in the bag it is already in, etc. The new ones basically only need people to unlock things like alcohol purchases, but are otherwise fine. The first generation was over engineered and had way too many failure modes. They still have them in some super markets but they are getting replaced with better ones.
Anyway, it's getting harder and harder to hire staff for supermarkets. These are low wage jobs and most of these people can get better paying jobs. Self checkout creates some opportunities for shop lifting of course. But that is offset by the wage savings. They compensate with security, cameras, etc.
By mynameajeff 2026-01-2814:57 The bag weight sensors was something I was very happy to see go away. I hated self checkouts for years because it was a miserable experience of it freezing every third item and requiring someone to come get it working again. I only realized this tech had changed when COVID forced me to try self checkout again and it was suddenly a very pleasant experience, though one I have to imagine causes a lot of shrink for stores.
By VMG 2026-01-2813:02 the Kaufland ones where I live still have weight sensors which for me completely eliminates the appeal
By SHAKEDECADE 2026-01-2718:081 reply If you find value in it, that's fine. I not only find value with interaction with the lovely checkout people, I dislike the cost of scanning and managing the items during checkout being my problem so a huge company can save money. If they were to implement a discount as a way to say "we'll pay you for your work to give us your money" I would consider it.
That's not to say the value of the convenience is never worth it. I exclusively use Sam's Club scan-and-go because the time I save is much larger than the publix/walmart/ect.
By AppleAtCha 2026-01-2722:48 Yeah true. I do enjoy visiting with the cashiers but I don't love waiting in line.
By in_a_hole 2026-01-2717:25 A.I. = Actually Indians
By MengerSponge 2026-01-2718:10 AI: Actually Indians
By bsimpson 2026-01-2716:23 That 90s IBM commercial was pretty rad though.
By bayarearefugee 2026-01-2717:08 > Since that story broke nobody there seems to want to talk about “just walk out” anymore.
Optimus and Robotaxi are just as fake and Elon Musk never shuts up about them.
I guess Amazon never learned the important lesson that the OP meta for modern technology companies is just to consistently and blatantly lie.
Doesn’t surprise me. I frequently shop at Amazon Fresh in store and it’s a mediocre experience. It’s a poorly run store with no visible manager making sure things are in order. You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders and they aren’t helpful. I always find expired groceries/produce on the shelf so I have to spend a lot of extra time inspecting each item. The only reason I put up with their nonsense is that some of their prices are insane and they have easy returns, for example $0.85 for a box of Barilla pasta. They actually don’t accept returns in store and just refund you automatically in the app (Returnless returns). It’s pretty silly and rife for abuse.
I also found a loophole with the Amazon.com return grocery credit. The systems are separate for the $10 off $40 coupon and you just scan a QR code in the store to get it. It turns out you can just take a photo of their QR code and reuse it over and over again.
By randycupertino 2026-01-2717:096 reply I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores. There were instances of their prices being lower than Walmart or other budget stores. The avocados were $0.25 each and carrots were half price of ones in Safeway, even ground beef was weirdly cheap. One time as a comparison I put the same items in my cart for Amazon fresh and Walmart and it was $21 at Amazon fresh and $36 at Walmart. WAY cheaper than Instacart too.
> operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores
Wouldn't surprise me. I know a guy who invented a device for truckers that became ubiquitous in truck stops across the US. This would've been like 2014.
He refused to sell on Amazon, so Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price, until he agreed to list (at which point they dropped their competing product)
By simulator5g 2026-01-2718:143 reply Haven’t you heard? Laws don’t apply to companies
By NickC25 2026-01-2719:15 [flagged]
By Zambyte 2026-01-283:14 [flagged]
By groundzeros2015 2026-01-2721:061 reply [flagged]
You are on a website called HackerNews, where people are encouraged to comment on articles or "posts". You are seeing this because you are looking at the comment section of one such post.
By groundzeros2015 2026-01-3021:40 political quips with no insight or information used to be considered against the rules and removed.
By knowitnone3 2026-01-2720:282 reply Illegal in what way? They are not allowed to set prices lower than competitors or raise them at any time?
By arrosenberg 2026-01-2721:072 reply Predatory pricing is illegal in the US, but difficult to prosecute under the existing laws.
Selling items for less than they cost to produce is known as "dumping" in international trade (where it is generally disallowed by trade organizations) and can be illegal in the US if the intent is to eliminate competition [0]. That last factor can be hard to prove, and I don't think the FTC is doing much about anticompetitive behavior these days.
[0]: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Yes, I can imagine it’s hard to prove, which is a pretty good indicator it’s a slippery concept to being with. Everyone wants to “eliminate the competition”, including your competition!
The predatory pricing pattern the FTC would in theory sure over would be: selling items at an artificially low price until the competition goes out of business, then raising prices once you are the only seller left standing. It's the second step that makes it anticompetitive instead of just competitive
What does it mean to be “the only seller left standing”? If somebody’s out there making big margins because they don’t face competition, competition is likely to emerge!
Yes, but the monopoly seller has already demonstrated that they will operate at a loss until their competitors go out of business, which is a pretty big deterrent to any new market entrants. They've also demonstrated that no one will be making any money until either the monopolist or the new entrant is out of business, so who would actually launch a new business in that environment?
“Imagine profitability doesn’t matter to ownership, and investors will accept losses—and less losses than a more efficient competitor—indefinitely.”
Even Amazon had to eventually find its way to profitability.
Yeah, it is theoretically possible to have a marketplace where "predatory pricing" is an accepted though aggressive business strategy, and I'd say that we are roughly there in the US. But the original intent behind the law on the books was to make markets friendly to new entrants, even if that meant sometimes constraining what large participants were allowed to do.
By twoodfin 2026-01-303:13 This is an historical question I’m not equipped to answer, but I’d guess it was just the opposite: These laws were intended to protect incumbents from more efficient, better financed new competitors!
Selling it at cost though isn’t. And the cost to make a good is often less than 50% retail
By giaour 2026-01-2813:45 Standard grocery margins are usually lower, in the 30%-40% range, and are often much lower for promotional items. Rotating "loss leaders" to get people in the door are standard practice. IMHO that would make it hard to bring an antitrust action against a grocery chain, as pretty much every store engages in a limited amount of predatory pricing as a marketing technique.
50% is the standard retail markup, but it varies by industry.
I'd be unsurprised in this case that Amazon could produce the product profitably for less than half the cost due to scale.
By giaour 2026-01-2813:47 I don't think Amazon was producing anything they sold in their grocery stores. They were probably buying the same white label items as everyone else for their store brand.
By krferriter 2026-01-281:431 reply The Biden admin went slightly harder against anti-competitive actions and anti-consumer actions by companies and all the billionaires freaked out and poured money into Republican campaigns in 2024 in order to roll all that back.
By somenameforme 2026-01-283:542 reply What was rolled back? There was no major change in action whatsoever, only rhetoric, which is meaningless. As for funding, Trump raised substantially less in 2024 than 2020 while Harris raised more money than any campaign ever has, by a wide margin. [1] Dark money also overwhelmingly flowed to the DNC. [2] And a large chunk of all of Trump's funding came after the previous administration tried to imprison him, which rather freaked people out - even those not particularly fond of him. That also likely played a significant role in the more DGAF presidency we're seeing today relative to 2016.
[1] - https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_election_campaign_finan...
[2] - https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/dark...
By triceratops 2026-01-284:45 > As for funding, Trump raised substantially less in 2024 than 2020 while Harris raised more money than any campaign ever has, by a wide margin.
Does that include the $44b spent on the Twitter acquisition?
By specialist 2026-01-284:351 reply Enforcement.
By mcmcmc 2026-01-280:04 To add onto sibling comment: it is specifically when they sell below cost to eliminate competition, with the goal of later being able to raise prices to recover those losses (and more) once they are the only player in town and can jack the prices up all they want. The later price elevations are what result in consumer harm, which is why it is illegal.
By bmurphy1976 2026-01-282:151 reply Predatory pricing:
A big gorilla comes in and under prices the entire market. They can do that because they already have tons of money. They do this long enough to break the market and drive the competition out of business. Once the competitors are gone they jack up the prices to unprecedented levels because there's no more alternatives available and bleed the market for all the money.
Regular pricing:
Charge a fair price based on actual costs.
This presupposes some athletic new competitor can’t enter the market and take the margin off the fat incumbent.
It’s why we have capital markets: If capturing a profitable opportunity requires spending some money, someone who wants to profit will send that money your way.
By spockz 2026-01-286:43 But it should only be because they indeed have lower margins or more efficient operations. It should not be funded by external money (other departments or investors), only to undercut competition too force them out only to raise prices to above the previous point after.
So a simple law could be that prices can only be raised to the point where they were at before the competition was squashed.
By nothrabannosir 2026-01-285:45 You can do this to a low margin business. In fact you can increase the margin once the dust settles.
By conception 2026-01-2723:51 No it means it’s illegal and enforcement agencies don’t have the means and/or political support to prosecute.
> Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price
Pricing below an appropriate measure of cost is generally considered predatory pricing. It is very difficult to enforce this, but that doesn't change the fact that it could be illegal and a violation of antitrust laws.
By belter 2026-01-2822:22
By bgro 2026-01-285:09 [flagged]
By sfjailbird 2026-01-280:27 It has been their practice since forever. Look up the diapers.com case.
I just looked it up - yes, and far in advance of the timeframe
This is (or was) a very small business. An office and a warehouse, basically.
By lambdasquirrel 2026-01-2721:031 reply Do you want to go up against whatever patent portfolio AMZN has?
By Chris2048 2026-01-286:38 He already had the product, what would he be going up against?
By felixgallo 2026-01-2717:482 reply I'm not aware of any Amazon product lines or organizations that specializes in devices for truckers. Can you provide a listing?
By gamblor956 2026-01-2721:092 reply There's no listing. The story is made up.
While the general premise is true (big company will try to rip off small company), Amazon doesn't have the magical power to get around patent law and the economic penalties are fairly harsh, which is why most companies don't do it. And no war chest of tech patents is going to get Amazon around a patent in the trucking industry because the inventor of the trucking gizmo couldn't care less about whether Amazon patented the right to make Alexa speak in tongues.
It's possible, and likely, that Alibaba vendors decided to rip off the product, but again...patent law is a useful tool for those who use it, and Amazon can be held liable for the sales of infringing products on its storefronts.
By _DeadFred_ 2026-01-2722:351 reply Amazon currently sells fake fuses that have probably already killed people.
Amazon cares just slightly more about breaking the law then they about killing people.
By gamblor956 2026-01-281:161 reply That's because criminal prosecution and product tort liability are not meaningful deterrents.
Patent litigation is a different thing entirely. The burden of proof is lower, and the payouts are higher.
To put things in perspective, Apple, Amazon, etc., have lost patent lawsuits worth hundreds of millions over trivial aspects of their devices that are just tiny parts out of thousands compromising the phone/tablet/whatever.
By worik 2026-01-285:04 > criminal prosecution and product tort liability are not meaningful deterrents.
> Patent litigation is a different thing entirely
Wow! Infringing my idea is "worse" than infringing my body...
Tell that to a judge after 15 years millions of dollars and an out of date product.
By gamblor956 2026-01-281:14 It seems a lot of people on HN fundamentally misunderstand how patent litigation works.
If this trucking device actually existed, and for some reason was being sold on Amazon, and the inventor had sued, he would be living large these days off the settlement.
Yes, Amazon sellers have copied products before, but those aren't Amazon. Amazon prefers to just buy the competition (see, e.g., Diapers.com and Zappos).
Truckers are the biggest demo but it's sold under a generic category.
By felixgallo 2026-01-2718:126 reply huh. What's the product listing? I don't think this story rings true.
By serf 2026-01-2718:58 it's a known behavior of theirs[0]. sounds plausible to me.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-produ...
Amazon also did this with diapers.com
They are notorious for doing this.
By lotsofpulp 2026-01-2722:101 reply https://archive.is/2020.07.29-212026/https://www.bloomberg.c...
>“We have already initiated a more aggressive ‘plan to win’ against diapers.com,” longtime Amazon retail executive Doug Herrington apparently wrote in an email released by the committee. “To the extent that this plan undercuts the core diapers business for diapers.com, it will slow the adoption of Soap.com,” another company owned by Quidsi.
>Herrington called Quidsi Amazon’s No. 1 short-term competitor. “We need to match pricing on these guys no matter what the cost,” he said in the email.
I bet Quidsi was also selling the diapers at a loss since they were using UPS and Fedex, so not sure what the difference is if Amazon sells diapers at a loss or Quidsi was selling diapers at a loss.
The innovation would have been in the logistics buildout, which Quidsi obviously wasn’t doing.
By to11mtm 2026-01-280:07 The logistics buildout is arguably Amazon's biggest retail lynchpin.
However, it's built on a few fragile external costs.
First that comes to mind, is the comingling, which will theoretically resolve one way or another with their ending of comingling. Comingling almost certainly lowered logistics costs however...
Second being, the externality of how both warehouse and delivery workers are treated in the name of the almighty metrics. NGL I feel like the public's acceptance of their labor practices has ironically only accelerated the erosion of labor rights and worker treatment.
By freejazz 2026-01-2720:43 You don't think it's believable that Amazon sells something truckers would use?
By pessimizer 2026-01-2719:12 It's good to ask for a link (although not good to give one if this is your friend and it may affect their relationship with Amazon that you're talking about this in public), but you can't expect people to waste time thinking about your ringing ears.
By mikestew 2026-01-2720:21 Then don’t believe it and go on with your day. No one owes you a link to anything, especially if you simply don’t pay attention to Amazon’s widely-reported business practices.
By llbbdd 2026-01-2723:44 All of the replies to this comment: "The fact that I thought it was real says a lot" [0]
By noboostforyou 2026-01-2718:221 reply > I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition
iirc that's exactly what Amazon did to destroy diapers.com over a decade ago
By gamblor956 2026-01-2721:191 reply Amazon did not destroy diapers.com.
Diapers.com aka Quidsi was already operating at a loss when it was acquired by Amazon. It's whole business model was using VC-funding to offer products below sustainable costs with the goal of eventually jacking up prices once they drove out smaller/local competitors. Amazon used its own business model against it by dropping prices even lower, knowing that the VC investors couldn't afford it.
Walmart passed on buying Quidsi when Walmart was thinking about launching its own e-commerce platform because the business model was unsustainable. Walmart decided they would rather spend several hundred millions building out their own platform then to buy an existing website with millions of customers.
By pasttense01 2026-01-2722:551 reply Walmart bought out jet.com
By gamblor956 2026-01-281:12 5 years after it passed up on buying Quidsi, and after it's first disastrous e-commerce attempt...
This is basically the playbook of every "disruptive technology" startup or FAANG initiative of a similar stripe - set prices incredibly low to bleed out competition and gain market share, then raise them once you are in the dominant market position.
By deaux 2026-01-282:21 Correct, and this is why US big tech, including the big LLM players, need to be tarriffed/DSTed harder than Chinese cars by the rest of the world. They get big off of the exact dumping that China has always been accused of.
At a certain point it's not about technology anymore, but access to cheap finance. See also: Uber.
By groundzeros2015 2026-01-2721:072 reply Uber is far better for me than the old taxi system.
By kkukshtel 2026-01-2816:47 I really like this piece for Real Life Mag (rip) on what most startups "do":
https://reallifemag.com/money-for-nothing/
"privatization by way of electrification"
By direwolf20 2026-01-2723:083 reply Maybe the one where you flagged down a car on the street, but you could always call to book a taxi and those companies worked exactly like Uber — over the phone, because it was the pre–app era.
By warkdarrior 2026-01-2723:283 reply Uber also gives you a price upfront, and that is the most you will pay (+ tip, if you feel like it). I don't remember pre-mobile phone taxi system that gave you a price upfront. They used to list the price per mile, and then it was up to you to figure out the distance and make sure the driver took a reasonably short route.
So no, the old taxi companies did NOT work "exactly like" Uber.
I've seen more than a few people on this forum assert that the old taxi system was/is comparable to Uber or somehow better. I even got some shit for referring to it as old, legacy, I forget the exact verbiage I used. But it is old, and it is worse. I get the price upfront, I can adjust the "class" of car I order if I'm going to the pharmacy alone or to a nice dinner. Calling ahead to preorder a taxi feels like calling to order a pizza over the phone at this point. If I called, would they even know how to handle it?
By direwolf20 2026-01-2723:491 reply Obviously we live in a different era now where things are ordered by apps instead of websites or phone calls, but those used to be socially acceptable ways to order things.
For sure, I was there. But we also used to have to have the people on the phone read our order back to us to confirm it, now I've got a screen that does that automatically. I'm not at all nostalgic for the alternative.
By direwolf20 2026-01-280:331 reply We're talking about the ride service itself, not the interface used to book it.
The whole thing end-to-end is the ride service though. The interface is the differentiator that made Uber popular and forced traditional taxi providers to compete for once. There used to be tons of anecdotes about "the card reader being broken" in traditional taxis, because they dodged taxes by only accepting cash. Exposing the whole process through an app and handling your billing outside of the car made tactics like that less useful. Taxis thrived on hidden information games and obligation; Uber doesn't remove that entirely but the playing field is more level.
By Bluecobra 2026-01-2814:46 > the playing field is more level
Quoted for truth. I still take taxis from time to time if there’s no wait at a taxi stand at an airport or building. I noticed in places like Las Vegas things seem better now, there’s flat rates and everyone has touchscreen payment terminals in the passenger area. I remember pre-Uber occasionally getting cab drivers that would take suboptimal routes like getting on the freeway to drive up the meter.
By giaour 2026-01-280:03 It depends on where you lived. NYC had a large number of "black car" livery services where you would call, arrange a ride, and typically get a price up front. It wasn't legal to hail them on the street, but in practice it was pretty common to hail a black car (a "gypsy cab") and negotiate a price up front. Source: I lived a few blocks north of Central Park and in Hamilton Heights before Uber was a thing and took gypsy cabs a couple of times a week.
By dpkirchner 2026-01-281:30 Also, Uber drivers tend to show up. It was always a crapshoot with regular cab drivers. I don't have experience with other car services, maybe they were better pre-Uber.
By theshackleford 2026-01-283:00 > and those companies worked exactly like Uber
Not in my country they didn’t. Booking or no booking, taxis did whatever they wanted. More often than not your booked taxi just wouldn’t turn up and you wouldn’t know until well after you needed it.
By dalyons 2026-01-284:53 nah. They never came, or took hours. Taxis were awful services and deserved to die. (australia)
By groundzeros2015 2026-01-2721:241 reply Nobody on this forum believes in startups or technology anymore.
By _DeadFred_ 2026-01-2722:383 reply Heck, Elon's ownership of SpaceX even got to me to not really care about space travel anymore, one of my biggest passions since I was 6. But I just can't root for whatever his vision of space faring society would look like.
By groundzeros2015 2026-01-280:211 reply Politics consuming all other interests
By _DeadFred_ 2026-01-280:26 Yeah I hear you. I too wish he would have stayed out of politics. Sadly he chose not to, and not just go a little, but to go all in. And to choose to make it basically his public identity.
By pokstad 2026-01-285:27 You know rocket science was founded by literal Nazis, right? We actually brought them to America to run NASA and get us to the moon.
By direwolf20 2026-01-2723:07 Kessler syndrome, but every debris piece is a Starlink transceiver.
By mattmaroon 2026-01-283:52 And then they can’t figure out why the economics don’t work.
Phase 1: bankrupt the competition
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: profit!
By knowitnone3 2026-01-2720:27 That's literally their MO. They've been doing that forever.
By pessimizer 2026-01-2718:593 reply Walmart isn't a budget grocery store, though. Its prices are higher than actual grocery stores (like Safeway.) Also, everyone is WAY cheaper than Instacart.
>Walmart isn't a budget grocery store,
The answer to this is complex, it has any number of products that are cheaper than products of similar quality from any other store. Places like Safeway/Aldi typically beat on price on very generic items that may or may not have similar quality.
The biggest thing to watch for at Walmart is price discrimination dependent on location. Back in the days I used to shop with them (read made less money) picking a store in a poorer neighborhood could save $10 to $30 dollars on the same car of items.
I found Lowes (hardware) to be one of the worst about this. I lived in an area with 4 Lowes, and never shopped at my local one because of how much more expensive everything was, and never clearance. I'm not talking a couple dollars, in some cases 4x the price of one just 15 minutes away.
By pixl97 2026-01-281:26 In the days before places started requiring ID for returns an acquaintance of mine would pick up rifle scopes at one Walmart and return them at another Walmart on a route he took. Only once every few weeks to give employees time to rotate out. He could pay for a few days of gas with that arbitrage.
By classichasclass 2026-01-2723:441 reply Not in the areas of California I frequent. Walmart is usually the cheapest around here; heck, even Target beats Safeway on some items. On the other hand, Walmart is also usually the worst at stock rotation.
By Supermancho 2026-01-281:51 Walmart is certainly the cheapest in some rather remote cities, like Fargo, ND.
By zhivota 2026-01-284:42 This is the opposite of my experience. Safeway is usually the most expensive, more than the Kroger/Albertsons chains.
The only place that competed with Walmart on price for me was WinCo.
Wegmans opened a store at the Brooklyn Navy Yard just to show people in NYC what a real supermarket looks like. I mean, you might be impressed with Whole Foods if all you know are those bodegas that have around NYC but if you've been to a real supermarket Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and such are not impressive at all.
By hshdhdhj4444 2026-01-2717:3711 reply This comment completely misunderstands why NYC (and the core of most major cities) is not impressed by a supermarket.
Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
You get the highest quality products from people who specialize in those products.
Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days.
Thats why Wegmans opened a store in Brooklyn Navy Yards in an area that’s close to no mass transit, because supermarkets are valuable in car centric areas and not as useful in walkable dense neighborhood.
By ghc 2026-01-2717:53 > the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days.
Yeah, so for me that changed after having kids. Once I had to spend 30 minutes a day running around to various stores because we were always running out of everything it wasn't fun anymore.
Furthermore, specialist stores charge higher prices for the same goods because they don't have the pricing power of a large supermarket. It makes a material difference once you have a family.
Urban supermarkets are great because they give you the option of getting everything in one place when you're pressed for time, and they're usually not as large as suburban ones. Mine has a direct entrance from the subway station, so I don't even have to go aboveground.
By CSMastermind 2026-01-2718:322 reply One of the things I hated most about living in NYC was grocery shopping.
Having to walk meant you could only practically buy in small quantities, and visiting different places for different things was super annoying and inefficient.
Moving out and being able to take my car to the georcery store once a week and get everything I needed was one of the best quality of life upgrades from leaving.
By kube-system 2026-01-2719:50 I did the exact opposite and and it was most impactful quality of life upgrade I've ever done. I eat fresher and healthier food, I walk more, and I'm not tempted to snack on my stockpile of accumulated food.
By mike50 2026-01-2719:00 Again go to Queens or Brooklyn plenty of suburban size and shape supermarkets.
By craftkiller 2026-01-2717:471 reply While that is true for the quality-based things like deli/baker, there is one advantage to massive grocery stores that the stores inside the city can't compete with: selection. Every time I leave the city, I make a point to go to a suburban grocery store and walk down their massive spacious aisles to find new/different products that simply aren't stocked inside the city because shelf space is so limited. Entire aisles dedicated to chips!
By PaulDavisThe1st 2026-01-2718:161 reply Do you consider Red Hook to be suburban? Because the Fairway there is one of the best supermarkets I've ever been inside of in the USA ...
By mike50 2026-01-2719:01 100% no subway link to Manhattan, pretty car friendly and mostly two or three family attached homes.
> Further, when you don’t have to drive 20-30 mins to go to a grocery store but the stores you need are within a 5 min walk,
Once you get used to have everything at a walking distance, you wonder how you could put up with having to drive to a supermarket.
Two are the main advantages.
The first is that you don't need to plan much in advance. Want to make hamburger tonight ? Cross the street, get meat from the butcher, get a couple of tomatoes and salad from the grocery store and the bread, and you are ready to go. I used to shop once a week and I had to have an idea of what I wanted to cook every day for the whole week.
The second is that this way you regularly eat really fresh food. My shopping list is always stuff like "two tomatoes", "three apples", "fish for tonight", "a loaf of bread". My fridge is mostly empty.
It's a 4-minute drive for me to get from my present house to the nearest grocery store (a Kroger of decent size).
I don't plan much for this journey. I don't bundle up on clothes or lace on a pair of stout boots first. I just kind of set forth (in my loafers) and drive over there -- even as everything is covered in snow, muck, and it it is 2 degrees (F) outside.
I went there last night for two tomatoes, a head of lettuce, and some cheese because those were the ingredients I was missing to make some tacos last night. While I was there, I remembered that I was running out of green tea at home and picked some of that up. I also grabbed a box of Barilla pasta because I walked by a display of it where it was on sale for 99 cents (oh noes they successfully upsold me on pantry supplies!).
There was no great investment of time or planning needed to accomplish this. I just went to the store for some odds and ends, and that was that. I might go back (or hit some other store) on my way home from work this evening -- since you mentioned apples, I kind of want one. (And I might buy exactly 1 apple. I can do that. It's Kroger, not Costco.)
I need to have the car anyway because it is necessary for me to own one in order to make money to stay alive in my environment. As long as this necessity remains, I might as well also use it for other things.
(I looked at some other addresses I've lived at, and their drive time to the local grocery store, on Google Maps. Despite "distance to grocery store" having not ever been on my radar at all when selecting a place to live, most of the places I've lived were a reported 2 minute drive to the local supermarket. The furthest was just 5 minutes out. I was pretty surprised by this at first, but looking back: That's actually a pretty fair estimate.)
By chasd00 2026-01-2721:25 just to let you know you're not alone, i'm in the same situation. I have a Tom Thumb 5-7min away depending on if i get caught in the one stop light. It has everything I need, capers to tampons, and i have the store memorized. There's also a pharmacy inside which is convenient. This is just SW of downtown Dallas TX ( maybe 3 miles ).
By iknowstuff 2026-01-2719:511 reply But does your drive look like this https://www.reddit.com/r/Suburbanhell/comments/13r7fd3/whats...
And can taxes from the community actually pay for the infrastructure to support this, or do they need subsidies because taxes per sqft are abysmally low and car infrastructure costs astronomically high? https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023-7-6-stop-subsidizin...
By ssl-3 2026-01-2720:12 No. We don't have roads like that here where I am. At all.
But when I've lived in larger cities that did feature such expansive roadways, the supermarket was also less than a ~5 minute drive away.
In one instance, it was close enough that I'd walk there instead of drive -- even for a couple of tomatoes, just to stretch my legs. That was a fairly opulent store as such places go, but there was a Kroghetto just a block further out if I felt like being cheap today.
(And I refuse to be baited into a discussion about how cars are, or are not, evil. I am powerlesss to change that, or to change anyone's views. That's a complete non-starter of a conversation that is absolutely devoid of merit.
I can only piss with the cock I've got.)
By rpdillon 2026-01-2722:29 I'm a Costco booster, and I have storage space. One of the greatest feelings for me is returning from a Costco and knowing I have enough in the house to last a month for a family of four.
But your second point is spot-on: this strategy has to be augmented by weekly (or more) runs to get fresh food. I like to make fried rice with vegetables, so having a local market is essential.
By maxerickson 2026-01-2723:00 Small car towns are more or less the same. I drive 10 minutes to work, the stores are all on the way. It's easy to stop anytime.
The more local one is medium sized and I've been shopping there for years, so I don't really have to find anything.
I should go to the butcher that's a few blocks away more often though.
> all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
Is that really a thing though? I feel like arguing for quality is a strong argument, but between walking between small shops at the end of my work day and just doing one supermarket feels more efficient.
Finding stuff within a supermarket is also not hard once you've been once or twice.
By justonceokay 2026-01-2718:07 It’s what I’ve done in Seattle for decades and this isn’t even a very big city
By mrighele 2026-01-2719:03 > Is that really a thing though?
You need to be able to afford it as it it is more expensive, but yes it is.
I have the luck to live in a well served area: I have a Carrefour supermarket at about 200m from home yet I have 3 small markets closer than that. If I have to buy one or two things it doesn't matter if the supermarket is cheaper, in my mind spending 10 euros instead of 9 or 8 is worth it if it takes 5 minutes instead of 15. Moreover instead of having to interact with a bored cashier or an automated checkout machine, I will have a chat with a real person (yes, a cashier is a real person too, but most of the time doesn't act like one) . He will ask me how I am doing, put my stuff in the shopping bag and gasp smile at me. I think we lost sight of how those small things makes our life better.
The interesting part is, I always have to buy just 2-3 things because if it takes 5 minutes, whenever I need I just go out and buy it, so half of my shopping is not at the "big" supermarket.
I have to add though: I work from home, so for me shopping means having to go out just for that. Maybe if I was working at an office the dynamics would be different as I could just stop at a supermarket one the way home.
By mancerayder 2026-01-2718:501 reply That really, really depends what neighborhood you live in. Bakeries and especially butchers don't exist everywhere, and sometimes they (bakeries) suck. It's not Paris or Rome. And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn). Some neighborhoods are both densely populated and a desert for quality, leaving only bodegas and overpriced artisanal boutiques.
I'm with the original poster here about Wegmans. In London you have Waitrose, which is 10,000 times better than Trader Joe's/Whole Foods and has fresh bread, alcohol, a butcher, etc etc and way more all in one place.
NYC is gar-bage when it comes to groceries.
If you spend a few minutes in the suburbs, even a rural exoburb outside of NYC, you'll drive to the supermarket and take a deep calming breath. You're not supposed to say driving could ever be better than a walkable city, but if time is precious to you and you value not hauling bags back and forth across multiple stores, you'll be way way happier.
Maybe if you only shop at the mass market chains in the gentrified central part of the city. Go to Flushing and tell me that or just go to a Western Beef.
By mancerayder 2026-01-2721:45 I predicted someone would say something about that topic, though I didn't think someone would use the term gentrified anymore. That's why I qualified it as "And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn)".
That said Flushing is not only a long commute, I don't know if it would qualify as "pre-gentrified", would it?
You aren't renting walking distance to a butcher baker and candlestick maker for less than $3K for a studio. That's an aspirational lifestyle for a few neighborhoods.
In all these discussions it would be really nice to have actual addresses and locations because the dream is obviously desirable but I just don’t know how often it occurs in actuality.
That'd be nice. Except...
I only speak for myself here, but: While it would almost certainly be very easy for a sufficiently-motivated person to track me down and knock on my front door, I don't like broadcasting the details of where I am.
I might occasionally mention something like "some small city in Ohio [of many hundreds]" when that seems pertinent to the context, but that's about the extent of what anyone will ever get out of me on a public forum.
Y'all generally seem to be rather swell here, but this is a very public place that gets crawled approximately-instantly by search engines, and the world doesn't need to know what block I live on or the name of the bodega on the corner that I might feel like writing about.
By bombcar 2026-01-2720:34 Yeah I don’t need people to dox themselves, but even just generic “look at this apartment building, it’s built on top of a supermarket” (iirc I found that in downtown San Diego) would help.
And if it’s common and something people look for, it should be findable relatively easily.
By shermantanktop 2026-01-281:19 A family member lucked into a studio in Brooklyn for 1500.
A rent-stabilized studio from a slumlord who is regularly fined for violations, on the ground floor of an interior shaft, right inside the exterior door where people come and go all hours.
But she’s very happy about it and her friends are jealous.
> Wegmans is popular because Wegmansnis good. But if you have a local baker, a local grocer, a local deli, and a small grocery store within the same block, all within walking distance of your apartment, you don’t need to deal with the hassles of finding stuff within a massive supermarket.
Except that you don't. Typically, you have maybe one small store selling random junk reasonably close to you. At high prices, because there's no local competition.
There's a reason the current NYC mayor campaigned on opening government-run stores.
By cameronh90 2026-01-2722:571 reply It’s normal in London to live a few min walk to bakery, grocery, deli, so on but we still have supermarkets - from smaller ones to large hypermarkets. Everyone uses them and they sell good quality products.
The same is true in every European city I’ve been to. There’s a large hypermarket a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe and you can hardly say Parisians don’t have a good choice of local bakeries, cheesemongers and butchers.
It’s true you won’t usually get something like a Target or Costco in the central area, but in the slightly further out suburbs (e.g. Z2 in London) where most people actually live, Europe is full of supermarkets.
By shermantanktop 2026-01-281:37 Sure, Europe is different than the US in many ways. I think most people know that.
What is more surprising to me is that Europe has become relatively homogenous. There are more differences between some US states than there are between some European countries, if we set aside language. A mid size French city vs an equivalent German/British/Swiss/Italian city… they differ of course but Tampa vs Seattle is a bigger contrast to me.
By the__alchemist 2026-01-2718:25 That's the dream, but isn't currently an option for most people in the USA. And it's usually only availabil in very expensive to live areas.
By mike50 2026-01-2718:56 If you live in a Sienfield rerun in Manhattan the city looks like your comment. There are plenty of conventional supermarkets in NYC they just don't have a huge parking lot.
I don't know the Wegman's in NY at all, but the one I used to use in the Boston area was ... okay?
It was a good grocery store with decent produce, a good frozen section, some nice specialty items, and some decent prepared meals. I would put it at roughly the early-2010s era of Whole Foods with slightly better prices. Now that I'm no longer working near there, I don't miss it much.
So I've never understood the hype. But I've also been told that the Boston stores were pretty mediocre compared to the ones in NY and especially Ithaca.
If you live in MA the standard options are Star Market and Stop and Shop, right? New England supermarket chains are already perfect.
I think the comment you are replying to is playing up a specific characteristic of, like, deep-in-the-city NYC (it looks like Wegmans has a place in downtown Manhattan?). I also read it as slightly tongue-in-cheek. People in NYC know what grocery stores look like, I think. They just don’t fit in dense areas.
Well I dunno to what extent the NYC lifestyle distorts the perception of stock market analysts. Do they think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast?
I used to joke that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC in the 1990s because there were 2 or 3 Starbucks on every block to fool stock market analysts that the country was saturated with them -- thus driving out the independent espresso bars that you'd find in flyover states that had better coffee and leaving only the completely-indifferent-to-quality bodegas.
Was there ever good coffee in NYC? I was a kid in the 90’s so I wouldn’t remember any time before. I grew up in NE and am convinced we
1) just haven’t really ever been on the forefront of coffee
2) invented Dunkin Donuts to flip off the coffee world (I know people sometimes say it is good but I think they are just being contrarian (although I will agree it is really not much worse than, or is just as good as, Starbucks))
Anyway, I’m pretty glad for the explosion of hobbyist coffee, it is pretty easy to make a good espresso at home these days.
> Was there ever good coffee in NYC?
Before all the third-wave shops came along? D'Amico, Sahadi's, Porto Rico, Zabar's, Gillies, and that's about it. You'd have to have been a coffee buff to seek those places out as a consumer, as they mostly served as suppliers to hospitality.
By Bluecobra 2026-01-2815:02 Zabar’s seems incredible, I saw a mini documentary a while ago and want to visit the next time I am in NYC. How many grocery stores are actually cupping their coffee shipments every week?
NY State vs NYC mismatch here. I expect nobody in NYC goes to Ithaca for groceries... :)
By moregrist 2026-01-2719:05 FWIW, I’m not confused about the two; I’m quite familiar with the NYC metro region.
I haven’t heard any Wegman’s fans comment on their NYC stores. I’ve heard multiple people wax poetic about Wegmans who frequented the Princeton-area store and the Ithaca store.
From my experience, I don’t get it, but I haven’t spent substantial time in either of those stores.
Strong disagree, and I used to go to that Wegmans regularly. It's fine. Solid market. Whole Foods is equally fine, and excels in some ways. Neither is obviously better.
Wegmans is obviously better than Whole Foods, and its not even close. You can much more easily buy normal food at normal prices at Wegmans than Whole Foods. Whole foods has very large, strange gaps in staples.
By bombcar 2026-01-2718:55 Whole Foods has always felt like Trader Joe’s - a great place to shop but few will shop only there - even for groceries.
By mangodrunk 2026-01-2718:252 reply Can you share some examples in gaps of staples?
In my experience, it's less gaps and more lack of mainstream brands. The example that comes to mind is ketchup. At Whole Foods I can get generic store brand ketchup or a variety of fancy ketchups that cost 3-10x as much, but they don't have any variety of basic Heinz on the shelf. This "mid-market" gap is common for virtually every product category.
By mangodrunk 2026-01-2720:361 reply That’s true, but intentional because of the focus on organic and avoiding certain ingredients. That is one of the reasons why Whole Foods is better.
By Bluecobra 2026-01-2815:11 I think I remember reading somewhere that 75% of the groceries at Walmart don’t qualify to be sold at Whole Foods. I thought Amazon was going to step back on this though.
I'm not OP, but don't go to WF looking for stuff like ibuprophen or sudafed.
By mangodrunk 2026-01-2720:37 True. That would be nice if they had more typical pharmacy items.
By aqme28 2026-01-2717:09 I think this is why Lidl is taking off in parts of the US.
By wan23 2026-01-2822:13 I like that store but it's not exactly convenient. I'm a New Yorker - my apartment is small and I've never had a driver's license in my life. I need to buy small amounts of food frequently rather than load up, so going to a place that has kind of middling versions of everything isn't super useful compared to places that have smaller selections of good things. I spend a lot of time at Trader Joe's for example, though I buy bread from a bakery, tea from a tea shop, meat and cheese from a specialty shop, etc.
By mike50 2026-01-2718:52 I can list like five mass market supermarkets in NYC. Western Beef, Food Bazaar H Mart, City Fresh the regional chains like Stop and Shop Target.
What's so special about Wegmans? I have one a mile away but I almost never go there. It's a little pricey and they don't have anything particularly special. Although I pretty much never go to Whole Foods either. Amazon Fresh isn't (wasn't) near me so I only went to one once, also nothing special.
By kevin_thibedeau 2026-01-280:54 They were great 15 years ago. Now they're running on a fading rep. Notably, the prepared foods were affordable and outclassed typical supermarket fare.
By mangodrunk 2026-01-2718:21 Wegmans is good, but I find Whole Foods to have much better quality of products. Whole Foods used to be even better, we will see how Amazon manages it.
I'm in Wegmans' home town, and the enshittification process has hit them hard in recent years.
My store used to have a big bread oven, desserts made in-house, fresh prepared food made in woks etc. right next to the buffet table, etc. All gone now; the coffee shop got replaced by robots, they tried to close the seafood counter (with enough negative feedback they reversed it), etc.
It's all made centrally now, for 3x the price and half the taste. All the kids went and got MBAs and the third generation family business curse hit hard as a result.
I've heard locals say "Bob Wegman loved people, Danny Wegman loves food, and Colleen Wegman loves money".
In Ithaca the coffee went downhill lately, that's for sure. On the other hand, my favorite drip coffee anywhere is made by machines that brew it by the cup.
Honestly, it's not even about the coffee. The lady working there would see me, greet me by name, ask after my kids, and start making my drink without me having to tell her my order. That was part of the Wegmans magic for a long, long time.
(Same reason closing the seafood counter got a big backlash. There's a similarly awesome guy working there. For now.)
By dredmorbius 2026-01-286:15 One of my favourite cafes ... thirty years ago now ... the barista would set up my drink when she saw me walk through the door, by the time I'd reached the counter she was handing it to me with a big smile.
Tipped her generously on her last day there, got a big hug for it.
There's something no machines can replace.
That isn't something isolated to Wegmans or even supermarkets.
This[0] image basically says it all, and quality has only further nosedived since 2020.
[0]https://i.ibb.co/Zz2Mb6rF/e0vb5drbeh0e1.jpg
In general, it seems like the pareto products dont exist anymore, the midrange has basically dropped out for daily products and it's been bifurcated. If quality is a scale from 1-100, most places sell a 1, a 10, or you go to an artisanal place for a 90, for exorbitant prices.
But in the past a supermarket or toy store would have sold you an 80 for a reasonable price.
What sucks even more is that for example due to the cacao shortage, lots of products now contain less cacao for the same price. And usually down from 500g/250g to something like 485g/235g. Shrinkflation.
But, when cacao becomes cheaper or inflation stabilizes, companies don't think "let's push the quality back up for the same price", no, they'll pocket the difference. The same is planned to happen if Trump's tariffs get struck down. Businesses will get a huge refund, but the customers that got the costs passed along won't see a penny.
I know it's widespread, I just would've thought Wegmans would be one of the last to do it. The premium vibes have long been their thing, and it was part of their secret sauce to vastly larger per-square-foot sales in their stores.
By jorvi 2026-01-2720:44 One thing I'm really envious of as European is Costco. Costco is absolute king of finding pareto stuff (20% of the investment nets 80% of the quality) and offering that. I know their whiskys are good, their tires are good, their medicines are good, their chicken is good. And all for a relatively reasonable price. It really seems like a last bastion haha.
No! Wegmans was amazing when in lived in NY. We would actually go out of our way to shop at Wegmans and plan our weekend around it.
By ceejayoz 2026-01-2717:37 Yeah, it'd be our first stop whenever we came home from a trip; we even got Christmas presents from the store one year for being (embarassingly) one of their higher-spend customers. The magic has gone; places like Kroeger and Whole Food have caught up.
By subpixel 2026-01-2718:01 Give me a Kroger with a Murray's Cheese counter thank you!
Interestingly, we only went to our local Amazon Fresh store a handful of times but it was always a perfectly fine experience. It seemed reasonably clean, well-stocked, and well-organized. Other than those new self-checkout shopping carts (which also actually worked well, even weighing produce), it was fairly indistinguishable from other grocery stores in our area.
Amazon Go, on the other hand, always seemed like a dead man walking. It's a fun novelty to check out and grab some junk food, but it must be far more expensive to build and run than a 7-Eleven, and it's not even meaningfully more convenient.
I should also add that we've been pretty happy Amazon Fresh delivery customers for a couple of years now (we resisted regular grocery delivery for a long time...until we had a child).
By malfist 2026-01-2721:19 You should also know that the AI that enabled the Amazon Go experience was the Actually Indians type of AI. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...
By _delirium 2026-01-284:16 > those new self-checkout shopping carts
I'm going to miss those. Two nice things about them compared to a normal self-checkout: 1) you see things ring up as you shop instead of at the end, which is nice in case of errors or unexpected prices, 2) you can shop directly into a reusable bag or backpack instead of repacking everything at the end.
By none_to_remain 2026-01-2723:14 They had Amazon Go by Grand Central Terminal and it was great to grab a snack and drink on the way to the train, with no worry about being delayed by the checkout line. I figured they had people in India verifying things but saw no reason to care as a customer.
Spot on assessment of an Amazon Fresh store. Their big gimmick is a cart where you can scan your groceries as you put them in it, then you just walk through a designated check out lane and it charges your card automatically for whats inside. I've tried it a few times and I can't say its preferrable for any type of shopping trip. Only picking up a few things? You're faster with a basket and self checkout. A big weekly food order for a family of four? All of your groceries won't fit in their special cart because it needs room for the scale and the scanners.
The prices are indeed pretty insane and the produce is always great, but the stores are ghost towns most of the time. The only people inside are those using it as a spot to drop off Amazon.com returns and those fulfilling pick-up orders
By Bluecobra 2026-01-2814:52 They could never get that cart right. I tried using that cart again last week and it was still glitchy and it seems like you waste more time screwing around with the cart. I found it quicker to just use the normal check out since nobody shops there anyway. At my local store, you could go there on a Saturday afternoon and find only one cashier with no line. The Trader Joe’s nearby would be absolutely jammed.
> You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders
To be fair I've noticed this in multiple supermarket chains the last few years. Although they aren't usually employees, they are instacart runners or whatever.
I go fairly often to a Sprouts grocery store and there are times I need to avoid multiple people clearly doing an Instacart run with 2+ carts full of items.
Shelves are often emptier than they used to be also at these times.
By coredog64 2026-01-2719:32 Walmart is particularly bad for this: The employees do the picking and they have giant carts that monopolize the aisle. You're stuck waiting for them to scan and bag 8-10 popular items before you can get in there and grab the one thing you need.
By phatfish 2026-01-2721:42 Having watched these people when I do my own shopping, it made me realise, if i ever needed get someone to shop for me, it wouldn't be on a busy weekend.
By liveoneggs 2026-01-2716:593 reply The delivery shoppers are especially bad at whole foods. There really must be a critical mass where having a grocery warehouse makes more sense than these people meandering around.
There is actually. I used to work in grocery e-commerce. The model is pickers in a store --> a "dark store" that looks more like a home Depot with only pickers, not open to public --> warehouse like environment with various levels of automation.
This was a bit before the model of having Uber driver type delivery though. I am guessing that having the deliverers be close to the deliverees make it more economical to keep them in stores until a larger scale is reached. The dark store+ model was also predicated on a more factory floor like environment with only FTEs present. Think pallets moving about among the pickers- not too hard to work around IMHO but maybe the lawyers and insurers feel differently.
I still feel the overreaching factor is that in dense urban centers there is no cheap commercial/industrial space that is also in close proximity to customers.
By liveoneggs 2026-01-2822:53 I can see how minimizing drive times is cheaper in aggregate but there is just so much commercial space here in Atlanta..
I suppose you pay for the retail stores either way so the threshold to justify a "dark store" is pretty high unless it can double up as the regional grocery warehouse or something.
Peapod? I really miss their drivers, I had the nicest guy on my route and they always handled cold deliveries properly in those big green crates.
By kevstev 2026-01-2820:06 No, Walmart. Their drivers were actually quite nice as well, at least the ones I met. The standards were high, I have mixed feelings about Walmart overall with respect to their line level employees, but in general everyone meant well. This was quite a long time ago though, and we were still in "startup" mode and focused on gaining market share, as opposed to focusing on squeezing out as much profit as possible.
By liveoneggs 2026-01-2822:48 FreshDirect in NYC is the gold standard.
By cjrp 2026-01-2717:45 See Ocado, although things aren't going so well for them at the moment.
By Bluecobra 2026-01-2717:04 Yep, my local Amazon Fresh store felt like it was already a distribution center with the cold fluorescent lighting, gray shelves and gray concrete floors.
By drysine 2026-01-2816:41 >$0.85 for a box of Barilla pasta
That's cool. Which one? The cheapest one in Russia costs about $1.20 [0]
> a photo of their QR code and reuse it over and over again
Don't you think it's a wrong thing to do?
[0] https://5ka.ru/product/makarony-barilla-dzhirandole-n-34-450...
By RIMR 2026-01-2717:18 For a while, they had two stackable 10-off-40 coupons, and a 2-off-10 coupon, and it activated $36, so you could buy $36 worth of groceries for $14.
By hung 2026-01-2723:12 lol are you me? There was also a loophole with the coupons where it only used the total before discounts to validate the limit was met, so you could buy something that was $10 or 2 for $15, but the 2 would count as $20 towards your $40 limit.
I moved away from Seattle a while back so I'm not sure if they ever closed that one. I really miss getting all those cheap groceries!
