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I used to visit one of the NYC the Go stores daily until covid happened. It was cute and surgically clean, worked wonderfully, and their inventory management wa
by zxcvbn4038 4y ago
I used to visit one of the NYC the Go stores daily until covid happened. It was cute and surgically clean, worked wonderfully, and their inventory management was much better then CVS and Duane Reade which often sell out of things and have empty shelves for days.
But nobody ever went there - no matter what time of the day I went, there would be one person doing inventory and stocking, two people standing by to help people install the Go app on their phones and explain the concept, and myself. Occasionally one other person being helped to install the app.
I think the issue was that everything there except Coca-Cola and Arizona tea cost significantly more then any of the surrounding stores, and if you hate quinoa you were SOL because it was in everything except drinks and sushi. If you are paying two thirds of your income or more on a Manhattan apartment you probably couldn’t afford to eat routinely from the Go store. Then Covid happened.
I really hate the guy who decided to put quinoa in everything. Because of that I only ever bought drinks there.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoThere's nothing wrong with quinoa. Makes excellent insulation or packaging material. Some crazy bastards will even try and eat it.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y agoPutting quinoa in everything and assuming the addressable market had more disposable income seems like one of the signs of the last bubble.
- Spivak 4y agoWhy are people so weird about food? What about quinoa made it associated with rich yuppies? If you didn’t already know you would probably assume the main consumers would be dudes who want their chicken and carb to have even more protein.
- swatcoder 4y agoFood choice being a proxy and signal for class/culture is nothing new. You’d be hard pressed to find a cultural tradition that doesn’t speak to it. While everyone needs sustenance, there are often several adequate choices about how to get it and making those choices become a way of communicating to others. And communicating is an defining and seemingly valuable part of being human. It’s not really weird and it’s not going anywhere.
- kazinator 4y agoConsumption of quinoa doesn't demonstrate your food choice as much as that you follow quaint trends.
- sammalloy 4y agoI share the same concerns about quinoa as OP. My guess is that it has to be made and served fresh, and these stores have it sitting on shelves for days at a time and it tastes funny after a while.
- chordalkeyboard 4y ago> What about quinoa made it associated with rich yuppies? poor people use wheat etc.
- baq 4y agoOh the irony. Rye was poor people’s cereal back then, wheat was for the rich.
- urfullofsht 4y ago[dead]
- capableweb 4y agoLobster was once for prisoners and slaves or a poor mans food, while nowadays it's almost exactly the opposite. It'll be hard to find a prisoner or slave that gets to eat lobster.
- philwelch 4y agoThat’s mostly because they didn’t really know how to prepare it back then.
- giaour 4y agoOysters were poor people food in the same era, and like now, many people ate them raw. It has less to do with culinary trends and much more to do with the relative productivity of the lobster fishery. (In recent years, the lobster fishery has been really productive, but prices have been pretty sticky[0].) Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster has some great primary source research on the social status of eating shellfish through the years. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/us/in-maine-fishermen-struggle-with-glut-of-lobsters.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/us/in-maine-fishermen-str...
- philwelch 4y ago
- passwordqwe 4y agoThere's reports of prisoners complaining about the torture of being fed salmon all the time, because it used to be common food. People signal their class and status through everything, also through food.
- specialist 4y agoThe lumber camp installation inside the Nordic Hertitage Museum (Seattle) shows a sample employee contract: Salmon will not be served more than 3 times per week. At the time, salmon was the cheapest, most abundant source of protein. Poor people's food. IIRC, lobster in New England was about the same.
- novok 4y agoSalmon not prepared, handled or stored properly or not served fresh can taste pretty bad and smell pretty bad compared to other meats. Seafood in general goes bad fast compared to beef or pork for example.
- cstejerean 4y agoI used Blue Apron for a while and got an unreasonable amount of salmon for some reason. It's been almost 6 years and I can still barely eat salmon after that. So I can definitely understand where the prisoners were coming from on this one.
- yukinon 4y agoThis comment is confusing to me, because Blue Apron lets you select your own meals. Why would you continue to select salmon if you had it too often?
- cstejerean 4y agoThings might have changed since then, but from what I recall while we had some options on what to pick, for example I could eliminate red meat entirely, there was no option to get meat and not get salmon. So pretty much every week at least one of the meals was salmon.
- asveikau 4y agoQuinoa specifically: it's foreign sounding, so people were unfamiliar with it, and it was touted for being more nutritious than things like rice. So, novelty and cool factor, plus appeal to those looking for healthy options; some overlap with the faddish nature of trends in healthy eating.
- emodendroket 4y agoBecause nobody really ate it in the US and then it was everywhere it was a fad among rich yuppies. Yeah peasants ate it in South America (there were even newspaper editorials chastising yuppies for denying poor people their quinoa supply by eating it for frivolous reasons) but so what?
- rsynnott 4y agoIt become quite expensive for a few years, as it became popular at a greater rate than production increased. Bulk price seems to be down again now, though.
- hgsgm 4y agoWhat is quinoa put in?
- sammalloy 4y agoMostly grab and go foods like salads. It’s terrible just like the OP said.
- CydeWeys 4y agoIsn't the whole point of Amazon generally, and these stores specifically in not having staff, that it's supposed to be cheaper? I think you've pinpointed the reason it failed, but I can't imagine why they thought it was going to succeed at those prices.
- imglorp 4y agoMaybe they were thinking about the immediate gratification cognitive bias. You might see the price on the shelf as you take each item from the shelf, but that doesn't translate to a total expense until you actually pay the Amazon bill at the end of the month.
- 13of40 4y agoI'm not sure it actually failed. These stores work by having AI track customer actions via camera, and over the last couple of years they've gotten a ton of data and domain knowledge from them. It isn't hard to imagine that's been leveraged in whatever's watching the cameras at Whole Foods.
- jarjoura 4y agoAlthough they've added self-checkout lanes to Whole Foods, human interaction is in its DNA and you pay for that premium. Amazon is only able to capture your order details if you use the app at checkout.
- WeylandYutani 4y agoWhat kind of human interaction do you get out of some bored 15 year old girl at the supermarket? For me it doesn't go beyond "hello" and "bye". Maybe it's something to do with culture. Anyway I looked up some data and over half the customers in my country use the self checkout now.
- CydeWeys 4y agoThe point of spending this massive amount of money on an automated store is to recoup that investment by opening lots of automated stores and make money in volume, taking advantage of your lower labor costs. If they don't actually open at least hundreds of these then they've thrown away massive amounts of money on R&D they'll never get back, and the data they did accumulate isn't even particularly useful as it's in the context of a type of store they're not running at scale.
- boh 4y agoI think "nobody ever went there" is difficult to gauge since most purchases are very quick. Typical purchase would take 30-60 seconds for me to make. Since people are quick in/quick out it seems less people shop there.
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- Talanes 4y agoI'm a smoker who worked next to one of these stores, so I spent a good deal of time on the curb outside. I'd see multiple people enter and exit the CVS anytime I was out there, but I'm not sure I ever saw anyone do more than stand outside the Amazon Go trying to figure out what it was before moving on.
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- draw_down 4y ago> nobody ever went there As a shopper, sounds great! Not hard to understand why they’re closing, though.
- HDThoreaun 4y agoThe food was just really, really bad. The ones near me stocked a bunch of pre made meals and they were all horrible. I can't wait for this tech to get into my grocery store, but the convenience stores were not it.
- sammalloy 4y agoMy intuition tells me this is the problem. I moved away from purchasing any type of grab and go food about ten years ago and I think a lot of consumers have joined me.
- twelve40 4y agoit might never make it, depends on where you live. where I live, they were banned because must accept cash, and they can't sell things like booze because id checks, so you end up having a bunch of humans around anyway, which kind of defeats the purpose of installing hundreds of cameras and other expensive systems.
- CydeWeys 4y agoAutomated cash registers exist and are widely used, and are much simpler technologically than a scanner-less checkout. Amazon is choosing not to use them.
- phphphphp 4y agoI don't know if they've evolved their approach, if my local store is an outlier, or if yours was an outlier, but I live near an Amazon store and go in a few times per week: the experience you describe doesn't match my experience. Over maybe 100 visits: there's usually a few people in there at minimum, the food is pretty good (as far as convenience food store goes) and prices are the same as similar stores. I sometimes have to dance through a crowd of people struggling to get in. I wouldn't say the concept is a huge success because... it's a convenience store, and location is far more important than anything else, so there's a pretty low ceiling on what a convenience store can achieve beyond being in a good location, but it is certainly convenient. (As far as business goes, they seem like a cute experiment that has escaped the pointless novelty stage but hasn't reached the industry disruption stage ('cause there isn't one) and so is floating aimlessly in the middle space where they probably can just about justify keeping them around.)
- novok 4y agoFor a convenience store, they were missing items you'd find reliably in 7-11s, like charging cables or headphones, at least when i asked the guy at the front.
- grogenaut 4y agoThe food was good quality and very fast. It was basically a micro cafeteria for my building. I went there daily for the soda and sushi or salad until we had our catered lunches back. This is the Stewart location in Seattle... Which there isn't much food around right nowand is across the street from my office
- animex 4y agoIf I were an automated store that relied on a charged mobile phone I wouldn't sell charging cables either! :-)
- mattmanser 4y agoThey aren't things people buy regularly, that's a niche thing. 7-11s will be selling cheap and nasty cables and headphones at huge markups to even justify the tiny amount of shelf space they occupy.
- emodendroket 4y agoIf you’re charging way more than surrounding stores going all-in on quinoa seems like it’s a sound strategy, or maybe would have been one in the the recent past.
- rsynnott 4y ago> two people standing by to help people install the Go app on their phones and explain the concept That feels like a problem with the concept, really. That's one more than you need for conventional automatic checkouts.
- nivenkos 4y agoWhen I was in Seattle it was pretty cheap lunch option. Although Whole Foods had better food for the same price tbh.
- oceanplexian 4y agoThis will be huge rant but as someone who worked right next to one of these in San Francisco I didn’t use it because it was obnoxiously annoying. Speaking as someone technically inclined who writes code for a living, I don’t want to have to scan a QR code or use an App to go through some weird robot gate to buy a thing from the automated store. And that’s (me), not the average Joe Blow who can’t even figure out how to open the calculator app on his phone. It was a terrible idea from the start and 10x more convenient to walk into a corner market, grab a drink and hand the cashier a few $1’s from my wallet. All this super advanced technology and it has zero real world benefit or time savings for normal human beings.
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- rr808 4y agoI go to the one in Brookfield a few times a week. Its been getting busier every month, often now there are 5+ people at a time in the store.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoMy interpretation is the tech worked but they got greedy, and failed at supply and demand optimization. (Failed at execution.)