Yep. I've been sitting here thinking Amazon was going to spool up tons of retail locations that leveraged their tech to create a massive moat that other Brick & Mortars couldn't possibly compete with.
In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world.
Surprising to me that Whole Foods still doesn't have this tech integrated. You'd think that'd be the "beta" step after the Amazon Store's "alpha" step.
Maybe they don't want to draw attention to how many people are going to lose their jobs because of this yet. Cashier is the #2 job in the US (by number of people employed) [0].
If they released this at Whole Foods, I'd guess they'd fire all the cashiers there. That would make this rollout a lot less exciting for a lot of people.
I hope Amazon comes up with an awesome way to help the cashiers this technology replaces. Then if self-driving cars end up working out, that industry can learn from what Amazon did.
We're already most of the way there with self checkout. My local Home Depot only has self checkout now, with 1 person managing something like 10-15 registers. They left the person running the "Pro"/lumber checkout area, but that area looks like it's being set up for self checkout too. They also seem to have removed the Garden Center checkout.
I'm not saying it's a great thing, just that the jobs Just Walk Out will be replacing are already being replaced by self checkout.
I frequent Whole Foods, and I digital nomad a bit, so I visit a lot of Whole Foods-es.
Recently came back to the East Bay (SF) and the Whole Foods I'm staying near, more than the others, seems like a staging store for Buy Online & 1) Get Delivered, 2) Pick Up In Store.
There are often more WF employees shopping for pick-up orders than customers walking around the store. Navigating aisles that are full of these WF shoppers gives the store a pretty signficantly different feel than the other stores that I'm a regular at. Plus, the staging/storage area at the front for ready-orders is much bigger than at other stores.
Not as true at SF city WFs, or the ones in Reno, LA, Park City and Phoenix/Scottsdale that I'm familiar with.
I'm guessing this dynamic, plus "Just walk out" is where they're headed, at least in certain densities. And that's where some of the cashiers may be transitioned.
I'll choose the store where I can grab what I want and walk out over the store where I have to wait in a dumb ass line while the cashier yells for a price check and the customer in front of me can't remember her PIN so slowly counts out nickels and quarters.
It's a massive competitive advantage far beyond whatever data they get by watching me roam the store.
The third-last FAQ entry speaks precisely to your comment:
> Will people still be working in stores with Just Walk Out technology?
> Yes. Retailers will still employ store associates to greet and answer shoppers' questions, stock the shelves, check IDs for the purchasing of certain goods, and more - their roles have simply shifted to focus on more valuable activities.
> I hope Amazon comes up with an awesome way to help the cashiers this technology replaces.
I'm not sure why this should be on Amazon. It's on all of us to better train people to have the jobs of the future. Our education system hasn't really changed in 100+ years. It needs to.
Amazon doesn't rip the benefits alone, all of us do. Just like Apple doesn't benefit alone from having invented touch-screen smartphones.
And if these companies profit, they do so as a reward for spending the capital (dollars and manhours) in creating new technologies that improve productivity. Specifically total factor productivity in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobb%E2%80%93Douglas_product...
It's on all of us because it really isn't on anyone in particular, surely not on Amazon.
I can take your statement and flip it around just as easily: why should Amazon bear the costs of paying for many R&D ideas that may or may not pay off? We should all share that cost if we're all going to benefit from those innovations
The thing we need to come up with is a basic income allowing robots to take over our work. Not because it's the right thing to do or a kind thing to do, but because the alternative is civil unrest on a scale few of us are familiar with.
>In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world.
It's not just about "AWS"-ing the thing. It's about gaining access to all of the transaction data and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you. A retailer like Walmart would NEVER use this tech, they know their data is one of the most valuable things they have (in fact they don't share their data with anyone, while all the other FDM retailers do), but boutique retailers like J Crew or whoever would happily.
> and marrying that to what Amazon already knows about you.
Amazon is always putting up ads for me based on my purchase history, but they're never what I wind up buying. I have no explanation for what is wrong with their algorithm.
I bought a new phone in a store, then bought a cover and a screen protecton on amazon. It sent me a notification: "We think you might be interested in a new phone".
It's pretty obvious that people don't go around shopping for screen protectors and then buy phones to match.
I've always assumed that was an artifact of free returns; if you bought one thing, maybe you're actually still shopping and want to know other options. I've noticed when I get these they're frequently more expensive than the one I already bought.
I've always assumed it was repairmen. Some people really do need to buy toilet seats again, and again, and again, each time they do a job that requires replacing one (without ever needing a bulk order of 100.) They also might switch brands depending on whichever one is cheapest at the time; or order several different ones for different concurrent jobs to see which turns out best (like Backblaze does with hard drives.)
I have this experience every time I buy something. Monitor? Needs more monitors. Yoga mats? Clearly opening a studio. Trash bags? This man hasn't learned about dumpsters. Of course this pays off eventually, but it seems like they could come up with a better strategy when they have a bunch of purchase history.
Nope. The fact is after you purchase something you are still in market for that product. So keeping you in a marketing segment will always be more profitable to the advertising team. Yes, you might be finished shopping now that you have finally decided on the best toilet seat, but the marketing segment that you fall into will always convert higher than a control group. There is just way too much data to confirm this.
It may make sense statistically, but for an individual customer it's just a strange experience. Look around this thread for all the comments pointing out the same thing, and wonder if a shopping app that was truly good would have all that people pointing out such strange behavior
They stopped free returns on Prime a long time ago. Now only a few select items offer it.
This was about the same time they stopped shipping things in cardboard boxes and went with bubble packs, and most recently, paper wrap with no padding whatsoever.
what are you talking about. i buy things from amazon weekly and i have never once received something in paper wrap with no padding and have never paid for a return.
Source? Literally everything I've returned on Amazon over the last couple years has had at least one free return option (usually via UPS / Amazon Hub dropoff).
Clothing comes to mind, that's also the only case I've ever received something in just a white plastic bag.
Basically, you choose why you're returning. In some cases if you say something other than "the item was defective", it'll only have options that cost money.
The worst was when I searched for gorilla glue once. Good ol' Jeffy B thought I'd also want a $100k watch, a racecar/nascar (themed) Bible, and an anatomical model of some gonads. Pretty sure I still have the screencap somewhere
Sometimes you can learn a domain-specific life-hack from that kind of thing. I'm guessing, for this example, that gorilla glue is the secret weapon of taxidermy—for all your mounting-a-deer-to-the-wall needs.
Turns out people who have just purchased something are far more likely to purchase that thing again than a random person.
This makes them the perfect person to advertise to.
Even if the percentage is quite low this can be better than advertising to the general population. Say the numbers were 1 in 10 000 impressions leads to a toilet seat sale, but 1 in 1000 people who have just bought a toilet seat buy another one soon after (first one was broken/distributor/toilet seat collector/remodelling whole home/etc).
If those were the numbers it would be silly to not advertise to recent buyers.
Essentially, the self selection of 'I just bought <x>' very often puts you in a category that is far more likely to buy <x> again than almost anyone else.
There is a simple answer. Once you have bought a turtle necklace, you are identified as a "turtle necklace buyer" as opposed to any other general consumer. Unintuitive as it may be, you are far more likely to buy another turtle necklace than any of 330 million Americans picked at random. Hope that makes sense.
Very helpful for identifying what’s hot and releasing your own version. Figuring out seasonal trends. Or getting competitive price information to match/beet. Walmart brags about their ability to presciently stock stores, which keeps turnover & capital efficiency high.
Following up on this: "Amazon promises not to use customer purchase data for anything other than emailing receipts, but that leaves all of the data entailed in actually making the system work." (via Stratechery). Changes the equation a bit.
Maybe their real algorithm is so scary good that they can only use it for internal use. Didn't they also show pregnancy-related items to women who didn't even know they were pregnant yet?
Or maybe showing a wild selection of weird products results in people "brainstorm" other shopping needs, as a kind of anchoring.
Yesterday I walked into target with my brother and said something along the lines of "I'd rather go to jury duty than shop at target."
I wonder if their creepy surveillance tech knows I said it. I was going there to pick up my brother's medicine from the pharmacy. It's a real shame. I used to LOVE shopping at Target. But the dang store has gotten greedier and super obnoxious over the years.
I was positive they used to use their tracking data to design store layouts with minimal clashing, such that they distribute the shoppers across the store. It seemed to really work, too.
In their newer layouts, I dunno what it is, but everything seems crammed together all in the same spot. They replaced the popcorn, icees, and hot dogs, with food I don't like that costs too much. They got rid of the handbasket things that were handy and all over the store, and got rid of the benches too. Then they sold their pharmacy to CVS.. which immediately threw out the kickass containers Target used to use and added a super obnoxious phone system.
No, that's a misconception. They sent letter(s) to at least one person who had been purchasing products commonly purchased by [knowingly] pregnant women. In at least one case, family members "discovered" the pregnancy this way.
And in this way Amazon gets a lot more data and avoids the "monopoly" issue. Better optics too. But this is the only way that Amazon can get tons of data from smaller companies that they can't (don't want to) compete with (niche products or physical spaces).
And they didn't just do that with AWS. They did it with ecommerce as well. Become the biggest online retailer, nail the implementation, then get everyone else to jump on your platform.
They are following it up with shipping and logistics. Amazon has been pushing us hard to switch from FedEx/UPS/USPS to using them for most of our packages, and it's working. Our defect rate is less with Amazon despite all of the anecdotal evidence of lazy/incompetent last mile Amazon personnel, and our rep bends over backwards to make sure she can fix any issues and get us what we need. She's sending us free label printers even though ours are generic enough to work with all carriers including Amazon, just because the labels for them are less expensive.
After shipping with Amazon for our non-Amazon orders for six months, we've moved about 80% of our shipments to them because they save us that much time, hassle, and money. FedEx picks up almost all the rest, with a handful of packages going out UPS and Postal due to address requirements, or customer preference on phone orders (all online orders are Amazon/eBay/website where we limit shipping choices; we are about 60% Amazon, 30% eBay, 8% website, and 2% phone orders on a typical day).
> Amazon has been pushing us hard to switch from FedEx/UPS/USPS to using them for most of our packages
I hope that there's always a USPS option. My apartment complex has package lockers that can only be used by the USPS, so that's the only safe way to get packages delivered when I'm not home.
They're only good because they were repeatedly given an infinite amount of money for 2 decades by investors while their retail operations lost money so that they could nail the implementation and the promise that they would figure out how to make it profitable.
Amazon effectively leveraged investment capital to do exactly what they said they would do - innovate, learn into the market, and improve iteratively. From investors' perspectives (and probably consumers' perspectives as well), Amazon has succeeded brilliantly.
Starting in 1997 they bled money with mounting losses until about 1999, when they began to turn things around. The dotcom pop is clearly visible but they recovered almost immediately and their losses continued to shrink until about 2001-2002 when they became break even. From 2002-2011 they either made small profits or nothing, but that was obviously because they were growing at a rapid pace and putting all the money back into the business. Once AWS launches in 2006 (so about 10 years after day 1 in retail) profits start growing but then are back into the red around the time of the GFC+recession, and again in the 2012-2013 European recession. After that it's stratospheric profits.
How much investor money is "infinite money"? Somewhere between $8-$9 million before they floated on the stock market.
Obviously, investors who put money into their IPO have done extremely well and cannot claim they were shovelling money into a furnace, far from it.
The inflation in investment round sizes over the past 20 years has been staggering. I see nothing that suggests Amazon was unusual in raising so little money (comparatively speaking) before they went public.
Did they really nail the implementation? I still refuse to buy anything that would go on or inside my body from amazon because I'm worried about getting counterfeits.
Yeah, ebay has much better buyer protections unless the item is Fulfilled By Amazon (which carries a cost premium). eBay prices also tend to be better. If you're going to buy cheap chinese crap anyway, just cut out the middleman.
Finally, Amazon's marketplace is just not navigable. Their search is pathetically bad, and this is nothing new, it's been a common complaint for years. Some fairly massive amount of their traffic is inbound from Google searches like "some product amazon" just because of how pathetically bad it is. The only other reasonable way to navigate their site is if their similar product suggestions or "commonly bought together" happens to nail the item you were looking for.
I've had searches where adding an additional keyword that is in the product title will actually cause the product to disappear from the search. What in the actual fuck.
Yes! Amazon's search has been driving me crazy but it went from bad (loose interpretation of what I typed with a whole bunch of irrelevant stuff) to worse (adding more sponsored results, i.e. even less what I want).
Their recommendation engine for related prducts used to be nice but that's been replaced by sponsored products which lowers the quality.
Now, the only way I use Amazon's search is when I have a SKU or part number and type it in directly. But I also do that in Google and often find the same thing elsewhere at similar or less cost (including shipping, though to be fair it may take a day or 2 longer).
eBay's search is still one of the best for me, in that it respects the keywords I put in and allows for extended query syntax to really hunt something down (which then can be turned into a saved search).
One of the most creative things I found on eBay was tool rental. I needed a tool to replace the bearings on my washing machine, and a seller was selling one explicitely as a rental: tool was charged about $120, with $35 shipping. When done, sent it back for a refund. The "shipping" included the rental fee and shipping both ways.
Yeah, I specifically find ebay search to be very powerful and useful as well. It accepts (keywordA, keywordB) as an "or" syntax, -badkeyword as "not" syntax, and filtering for most of their internal functionality (eg auction/buy-it-now format, item location, item price, etc).
The one that they're missing that I really wish they would include is "multi item BIN" formats. People will list a $1 item so that they're the first result that comes up, and then the item you're looking for is high priced. The prices are in fact so high that I go out of my way to try and exclude these items using "not" keywords, setting a minimum price, and filtering to US only, which collectively get most of them.
I have a lot of saved searches for "rare" items that only get listed infrequently, or for items that I'm waiting to come down in price.
The contrast between the way those two sites handle their search is stark.
I personally find eBay to be much better for items that I can't buy from the manufacturer already. Individual sellers have reputations & reviews separate from product reviews, and those ratings are among the first things you're exposed to when interacting with a seller.
> Yeah, ebay has much better buyer protections unless the item is Fulfilled By Amazon (which carries a cost premium). eBay prices also tend to be better. If you're going to buy cheap chinese crap anyway, just cut out the middleman.
That's what I thought until I was scammed by a Chinese on eBay... after countless emails, calls, even police reports, eBay did not return the 800 dollars I lost... not sure if it's an isolated case but it was pretty frustrating.
In hindsight it seems obvious that the play was to "AWS" the whole thing: make yourself the first/best customer, nail the implementation, then sell it to the world.