Comment by Bluecobra

Comment by Bluecobra 5 days ago

194 replies

View on Hacker News

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.

randycupertino 5 days ago

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.

Reply View 103 replies
  • lelandfe 5 days ago

    > 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)

    Reply View 66 replies
    • cmiles8 5 days ago

      Such tactics sound… illegal

      Reply View 41 replies
    • sfjailbird 5 days ago

      It has been their practice since forever. Look up the diapers.com case.

      Reply View 0 replies
    • Chris2048 5 days ago

      Did he have a patent?

      Reply View 5 replies
      • lelandfe 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 2 replies
      • lambdasquirrel 5 days ago

        Do you want to go up against whatever patent portfolio AMZN has?

        Reply View 1 reply
        • Chris2048 5 days ago

          He already had the product, what would he be going up against?

          Reply View 0 replies
    • felixgallo 5 days ago

      I'm not aware of any Amazon product lines or organizations that specializes in devices for truckers. Can you provide a listing?

      Reply View 16 replies
      • gamblor956 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 5 replies
      • lelandfe 5 days ago

        Truckers are the biggest demo but it's sold under a generic category.

        Reply View 9 replies
  • noboostforyou 5 days ago

    > 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

    Reply View 3 replies
    • gamblor956 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 2 replies
  • kkukshtel 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 22 replies
    • deaux 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 0 replies
    • HPsquared 5 days ago

      At a certain point it's not about technology anymore, but access to cheap finance. See also: Uber.

      Reply View 14 replies
    • groundzeros2015 5 days ago

      Nobody on this forum believes in startups or technology anymore.

      Reply View 5 replies
      • _DeadFred_ 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 4 replies
  • mattmaroon 5 days ago

    And then they can’t figure out why the economics don’t work.

    Phase 1: bankrupt the competition

    Phase 2: ???

    Phase 3: profit!

    Reply View 0 replies
  • knowitnone3 5 days ago

    That's literally their MO. They've been doing that forever.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • pessimizer 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 6 replies
    • pixl97 5 days ago

      >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.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • silisili 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 1 reply
        • pixl97 5 days ago

          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.

          Reply View 0 replies
    • classichasclass 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • Supermancho 5 days ago

        Walmart is certainly the cheapest in some rather remote cities, like Fargo, ND.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • zhivota 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 0 replies
PaulHoule 5 days ago

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.

Reply View 69 replies
  • hshdhdhj4444 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 32 replies
    • ghc 5 days ago

      > 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.

      Reply View 0 replies
    • CSMastermind 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • kube-system 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 0 replies
      • mike50 5 days ago

        Again go to Queens or Brooklyn plenty of suburban size and shape supermarkets.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • craftkiller 5 days ago

      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!

      Reply View 2 replies
      • PaulDavisThe1st 5 days ago

        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 ...

        Reply View 1 reply
        • mike50 5 days ago

          100% no subway link to Manhattan, pretty car friendly and mostly two or three family attached homes.

          Reply View 0 replies
    • mrighele 5 days ago

      > 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.

      Reply View 6 replies
      • ssl-3 5 days ago

        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.)

        Reply View 3 replies
      • rpdillon 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 0 replies
      • maxerickson 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • belval 5 days ago

      > 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.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • justonceokay 5 days ago

        It’s what I’ve done in Seattle for decades and this isn’t even a very big city

        Reply View 0 replies
      • mrighele 5 days ago

        > 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.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • mancerayder 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • mike50 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 1 reply
        • mancerayder 5 days ago

          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?

          Reply View 0 replies
    • awkward 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 4 replies
      • bombcar 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 2 replies
      • shermantanktop 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • cyberax 5 days ago

      > 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.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • coredog64 5 days ago

        There's probably 5 CVS locations (and 3 Chase private banking lobbies) between your subway stop and your apartment :)

        Reply View 1 reply
    • cameronh90 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • shermantanktop 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • the__alchemist 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 0 replies
    • mike50 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 0 replies
  • moregrist 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 7 replies
    • bee_rider 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 4 replies
      • PaulHoule 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 3 replies
    • toyg 5 days ago

      NY State vs NYC mismatch here. I expect nobody in NYC goes to Ithaca for groceries... :)

      Reply View 1 reply
      • moregrist 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 0 replies
  • mgce 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 8 replies
    • ecshafer 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 7 replies
      • bombcar 5 days ago

        Whole Foods has always felt like Trader Joe’s - a great place to shop but few will shop only there - even for groceries.

        Reply View 0 replies
      • mangodrunk 5 days ago

        Can you share some examples in gaps of staples?

        Reply View 5 replies
  • wan23 4 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • aqme28 5 days ago

    I think this is why Lidl is taking off in parts of the US.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • mike50 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • wat10000 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 1 reply
    • kevin_thibedeau 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 0 replies
  • mangodrunk 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • ceejayoz 5 days ago

    I'm in Wegmans' home town, and the enshittification process has hit them hard in recent years.

    Reply View 11 replies
    • tmoertel 5 days ago

      What changes have you noticed?

      Reply View 7 replies
      • ceejayoz 5 days ago

        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".

        Reply View 6 replies
    • jinushaun 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • ceejayoz 5 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • [removed] 5 days ago
      [deleted]
      Reply View 0 replies
  • subpixel 5 days ago

    Give me a Kroger with a Murray's Cheese counter thank you!

    Reply View 0 replies
tshaddox 5 days ago

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).

Reply View 3 replies
  • _delirium 5 days ago

    > 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.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • none_to_remain 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 0 replies
sylens 5 days ago

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

Reply View 1 reply
  • Bluecobra 4 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 0 replies
spike021 5 days ago

> 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.

Reply View 2 replies
  • coredog64 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • phatfish 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 0 replies
liveoneggs 5 days ago

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.

Reply View 7 replies
  • kevstev 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 4 replies
    • liveoneggs 4 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 0 replies
    • Bluecobra 4 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • kevstev 4 days ago

        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.

        Reply View 0 replies
  • cjrp 5 days ago

    See Ocado, although things aren't going so well for them at the moment.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • Bluecobra 5 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 0 replies
RIMR 5 days ago

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.

Reply View 0 replies
hung 5 days ago

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!

Reply View 0 replies