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Subjunctive posted:"Only people with an Amazon account can shop here" -- a problem many retailers would like to have. Not just an Amazon account, but specifically set up on a compatible phone for their door system. They also really can't make signup that simple, as swiping/dipping a payment card is already about as simple a transaction as possible. Setting up an app and account on a phone is significantly more involved.
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Feb 3, 2017 00:43
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fishmech posted:But you don't need an account to shop at Sam's Club. You can go in without one and simply pay higher prices or need to purchase a day pass depending on the particular location, and you can also borrow someone else's membership depending on their own level of membership. Pretend he posted a picture of a Costco store, then.
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Feb 3, 2017 00:48
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James Baud posted:Pretend he posted a picture of a Costco store, then. You can also shop at Costco as a guest, whether when accompanied by a member, borrowing their card for certain sorts of membership levels or simply by using a Costco gift card for part of your purchase. Same deal with BJ's before you try to deflect to that - including BJ's having specific one day purchase cards you can buy. Not comparable in the least to needing to have an account set up on a phone app and compatible phone just to get in the door.
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Feb 3, 2017 00:53
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fishmech posted:You can also shop at Costco as a guest, whether when accompanied by a member, borrowing their card for certain sorts of membership levels or simply by using a Costco gift card for part of your purchase. Same deal with BJ's before you try to deflect to that - including BJ's having specific one day purchase cards you can buy. You an also borrow an amazon account. If you really want. If you say having a phone is some super high barrier that isn't perfectly all inclusive then sure, I guess. But they also ran an internet store in like 1995, they don't seem super concerned with a business model that is super inclusive of people that own no modern technology.
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Feb 3, 2017 01:02
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hate to interrupt the ShoppingChat, but snapchat has gone and done it:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-02/snapchat-parent-files-publicly-for-3-billion-initial-offering posted:Snap Inc., the maker of the disappearing photo app Snapchat, filed publicly for an initial offering, the first U.S. social-media company to do so since Twitter Inc. more than three years ago. yeah, let me get in on this ship with ballooning losses; it worked out so well for the Twitter investors too!
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Feb 3, 2017 01:08
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Real winner there is Google, goddamn.
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Feb 3, 2017 01:56
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How does a company justify that valuation when they're losing that much money? Are investors really that gullible or is there some way that going public is going to make them profitable?
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Feb 3, 2017 02:21
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Weed Wolf posted:hate to interrupt the ShoppingChat, but snapchat has gone and done it: Ccs posted:How does a company justify that valuation when they're losing that much money? Are investors really that gullible or is there some way that going public is going to make them profitable? quote:The company’s net loss widened to $515 million in 2016, on revenue of $404 million, according to the prospectus filed Thursday. That compares with a loss of $382 million in 2015, on revenue of $59 million.
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Feb 3, 2017 02:28
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I'm plotting those two points and drawing drawing an exponential curve through them before I decide how much to invest.
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Feb 3, 2017 02:41
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withak posted:I'm plotting those two points and drawing drawing an exponential curve through them before I decide how much to invest.
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Feb 3, 2017 02:54
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:
It is a significantly worse user experience then being able to just go into a store and buy things. Again, it's already been a problem for the various warehouse clubs, and it's why they all offer some way to "try out" their stores without having to commit to anything first. Ccs posted:How does a company justify that valuation when they're losing that much money? Are investors really that gullible or is there some way that going public is going to make them profitable? This is a long standing idiocy. Have an article from the first tech bubble: https://www.cnet.com/news/cybercash-first-virtual-lose-big/ quote:
The big difference here is that these companies had already made IPO and were trading on regular exchanges even while they were losing up 158x the money they got in revenue. (Incidentally both of these companies' primary businesses eventually got bought out by PayPal under Peter Thiel's direction.)
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Feb 3, 2017 03:25
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fishmech posted:It is a significantly worse user experience then being able to just go into a store and buy things. Again, it's already been a problem for the various warehouse clubs, and it's why they all offer some way to "try out" their stores without having to commit to anything first. Commit to what? Having an amazon login?
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Feb 3, 2017 03:50
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Commit to what? Having an amazon login? Why do you think Sam's Club et al would require you to have an Amazon login? They have membership programs with ongoing fees for the primary way to shop with them, and have created alternate ways to shop there to get people to try out the store without making the commitments to those programs. Those alternate ways exist specifically because the membership requirements otherwise keep people from bothering to shop there. Meanwhile the Amazon store requires a lot more than just "a login", you must setup a special application on your phone (which must be compatible). And if you were to try to "borrow" an account the way you can borrow a Costco card, it'd result in the person you borrowed it from having to pay for your groceries.
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Feb 3, 2017 03:57
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fishmech posted:Meanwhile the Amazon store requires a lot more than just "a login", you must setup a special application on your phone (which must be compatible). And if you were to try to "borrow" an account the way you can borrow a Costco card, it'd result in the person you borrowed it from having to pay for your groceries. Oh no, not a special application. What percent of American adults even OWN a phone!
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Feb 3, 2017 04:06
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Oh no, not a special application. What percent of American adults even OWN a phone! It's a pretty huge hurdle compared to "walking into a store", the current user experience for convenience stores and supermarkets.
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Feb 3, 2017 04:17
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Weed Wolf posted:hate to interrupt the ShoppingChat, but snapchat has gone and done it: I love the quotes in this BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38850229 quote:However, the firm also said it was yet to make a profit.  quote:Snap said in the filing that it expected "to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability".
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Feb 3, 2017 05:01
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Rhesus Pieces posted:https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/827267629677105152 According to the New York Times more 200,000 customers have deleted their Uber accounts.
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Feb 3, 2017 05:06
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Just to be clear, Amazon is just testing some retail stores right? And there are technical problems that could be overcome in theory but the costs in practice might be ridiculously high? The notion of them preventing theft with rfid tags and cameras makes me laugh. Having an email address and a cellphone with a compatible app is a barrier to certain groups but Amazon's not targeting those demographics. But maybe they'll figure some things out that are useful down the road. Things which will put more retail workers out of a job.
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Feb 3, 2017 07:04
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fishmech posted:Typically what you get when self-checkouts come in is that some of the people who'd have stood at a register all shift are now spending a lot of time around the store doing minor inventory/cleanup work while waiting to be called back to the front when someone has issues at the self-checkout. This tends to even happen at non-unionized stores because the same problems for the store owners show up in them too. It's just that a unionized store will tend to put the pressure on to change things back quicker. Self-scanning checkouts, with a couple of staff assisting, rapidly became near-universal in supermarkets in the UK, as they addressed a strong customer need: the prospect of interaction with humans fills British people with crawling horror. (Same reason home delivery is so popular and pretty well worked-out now.) Even WH Smith newsagents has them now. Ikea and Homebase don't yet, but I'd be surprised if they weren't working on it seriously. Possibly Amazon can bring that good an experience to the US. Who knows. We have Amazon Prime and use it for pretty much everything we can, 'cos my wife is disabled. They sent us an offer for the UK grocery home delivery thing. Their offer was ehhh not that tempting.
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Feb 3, 2017 12:03
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fishmech posted:The entire design is not feasible period. It requires people to actively set up and maintain accounts and payment information on those accounts and a phone to even get in the door.
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Feb 3, 2017 12:06
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RandomPauI posted:Just to be clear, Amazon is just testing some retail stores right? And there are technical problems that could be overcome in theory but the costs in practice might be ridiculously high? quote:Having an email address and a cellphone with a compatible app is a barrier to certain groups but Amazon's not targeting those demographics. But maybe they'll figure some things out that are useful down the road. Things which will put more retail workers out of a job.
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Feb 3, 2017 12:20
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Surely given the whole setup is cameras everywhere eventually they'll skip the need for a phone/device and go straight to facial recognition (paired to your Amazon account). (In before 'a significant proportion of people don't have a face' etc)
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Feb 3, 2017 13:34
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Cicero posted:That means if your phone is dead you wouldn't be able to shop, Which seems like a rare enough edge case they just wouldn't care. Uber and stuff have the same issue that you can't use their service if you don't have a phone but it's fine. In Japan there is a bunch of grab and go kiosks where you pay with money stored on your subway ticket card, you can think of a million "what if you don't have one", "what if you don't have a way to put money on it right then", "what if you left it at home" questions and the answer is just "guess you don't shop there right then" and it's fine.
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Feb 3, 2017 13:45
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Which seems like a rare enough edge case they just wouldn't care. Uber and stuff have the same issue that you can't use their service if you don't have a phone but it's fine. quote:In Japan there is a bunch of grab and go kiosks where you pay with money stored on your subway ticket card, you can think of a million "what if you don't have one", "what if you don't have a way to put money on it right then", "what if you left it at home" questions and the answer is just "guess you don't shop there right then" and it's fine.
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Feb 3, 2017 14:05
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Cicero posted:Yeah but for Uber solving that would be really hard given their context, whereas a physical store giving someone a temporary device similarly to how restaurants give you those little buzzer things sounds fairly straightforward. I feel like this thread is stuck ten years ago where things like cell phones or amazon accounts are really rare. You could easily make a business that lives entirely within the sphere of "people that own functioning telephones in 2017" and "people that have or could make an amazon account". It's like saying businesses that rely on credit cards could never succeed because not everyone has a credit card at all times. People just have phones now.
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Feb 3, 2017 15:25
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I'm not saying success would be impossible with those parameters, I'm saying Amazon would probably want to handle those edge cases anyway.
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Feb 3, 2017 15:32
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Cicero posted:I'm not saying success would be impossible with those parameters, I'm saying Amazon would probably want to handle those edge cases anyway. It would give them something to do with all those Amazon Fire Phones they never managed to sell!
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Feb 3, 2017 15:45
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Cicero posted:I'm not saying success would be impossible with those parameters, I'm saying Amazon would probably want to handle those edge cases anyway. Managing a bunch of android tablets for public use or whatever seems like a really really huge amount of work just to cover a minor edge case. Just expecting someone to own and have a phone isn't a big request in 2017. We hit 83% of 18-49 year olds owning smart phones 2 years ago. http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/29/technology-device-ownership-2015/ We are getting into "we need work arounds when selling milk because some people don't own refrigerators" territory. They exist, but they just aren't a big enough demographic to care about.
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Feb 3, 2017 15:46
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RandomPauI posted:Just to be clear, Amazon is just testing some retail stores right? And there are technical problems that could be overcome in theory but the costs in practice might be ridiculously high? Wasn't there some scuttlebutt a few years ago about Amazon opening brick-and-mortar bookstores? Which seemed weird to me at the time, but maybe they're playing a long, long game.
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Feb 3, 2017 16:18
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Ccs posted:Are investors really that gullible or is there some way that going public is going to make them profitable?
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Feb 3, 2017 17:07
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Managing a bunch of android tablets for public use or whatever seems like a really really huge amount of work just to cover a minor edge case.
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Feb 3, 2017 17:21
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Cicero posted:I'd expect something purpose-made like the Amazon dash buttons, not a full-blown phone/tablet. That sounds like even more work!
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Feb 3, 2017 17:43
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outlier posted:Wasn't there some scuttlebutt a few years ago about Amazon opening brick-and-mortar bookstores? Which seemed weird to me at the time, but maybe they're playing a long, long game.
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Feb 3, 2017 18:07
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/01/17/amazon-accept-food-stamps-usda-snap/96661036/ Prime fresh is going to start taking food stamps. I wish it was available in my area, because things like buying pop without a car would be so much easier. But prime fresh doesn't deliver where I'm at. I'm waiting on the outrage of people realizing that people on EBT can pay for Prime Fresh. (Usually by sharing an account...99/yr for prime split 3 ways is 33 each, plus the 15 for prime fresh averages to $8/mo) not awful.
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Feb 3, 2017 19:11
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AA is for Quitters posted:I'm waiting on the outrage of people realizing that people on EBT can pay for Prime Fresh. (Usually by sharing an account...99/yr for prime split 3 ways is 33 each, plus the 15 for prime fresh averages to $8/mo) not awful. definitely people going to be up in arms about amazon taking this money (not a word about walmart or kroger) and hopefully trump weighs in too
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Feb 3, 2017 19:18
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Cicero posted:How is that not feasible? I'd guess that at this point, a majority of American adults in urban areas at least have Amazon accounts. They'll probably also (eventually, if not right now) have a lobby area where you can set up a new account or get a loaner tracking device (which they'd have to support anyway for group shopping). Just having an Amazon account is not the same as also installing the app, having that set up properly, and a compatible device to communicate with the door system. Owlofcreamcheese posted:Managing a bunch of android tablets for public use or whatever seems like a really really huge amount of work just to cover a minor edge case. Just expecting someone to own and have a phone isn't a big request in 2017. It's interesting that you think people who don't want to bother setting up a particular app is an edge case, but you don't think the entire automated store concept is an edge case. It's a pretty big request to someone to install and use a particular app just to enter their store when they can just go to the same supermarket as always without doing any of that crap. You seem to forget that both other supermarkets and convenience stores AND cheap home delivery of groceries already exist. RandomPauI posted:Just to be clear, Amazon is just testing some retail stores right? And there are technical problems that could be overcome in theory but the costs in practice might be ridiculously high? Amazon is going to have to have to target all demographics if they expect to keep up on the costs of running and stocking physical stores full of perishable items which don't have a particularly high profit margin on them. It's why their whole automated store concept is likely to remain a gimmick they only bother to operate outside of some of their largest offices. As a mature company, they're not in the position to burn billions of dollars of VC in things like that anymore. outlier posted:Wasn't there some scuttlebutt a few years ago about Amazon opening brick-and-mortar bookstores? Which seemed weird to me at the time, but maybe they're playing a long, long game. Amazon does have a couple of physical bookstores around the country, and they're just plain old bookstores with a small section for the Amazon Kindles, Fire tablets and the Echo microphone devices. There's currently one location in Seattle and another in San Diego, with stores to open outside of Boston and in Chicago and Portland this year.
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Feb 3, 2017 19:24
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divabot posted:Self-scanning checkouts, with a couple of staff assisting, rapidly became near-universal in supermarkets in the UK, as they addressed a strong customer need: the prospect of interaction with humans fills British people with crawling horror. (Same reason home delivery is so popular and pretty well worked-out now.) Even WH Smith newsagents has them now. Ikea and Homebase don't yet, but I'd be surprised if they weren't working on it seriously. I was in a tiny Sainsbury in Cheltenham a few months back and they even had an automated checkout. It's everywhere there. The thing is that the idea of going into a retail store will for the immediate future require an actual checkout. Relying on RFID means that everything and anything needs to have a tag and that includes the two kilos in apples you purchase. How do you even work with produce that way? For me, using a self-checkout isn't alien because I used to work as a grocery clerk a decade and a half ago, so the idea of quickly scanning UPCs/EANs and punching in PLUs (for produce and non-barcode-able goods) is pretty natural. However, people who haven't had my experience find these self-checkouts alien and will take their time on using them, requiring assistance from someone when the machine doesn't register the weight of something right or if the barcode is being mixed up with others. With RFIDs coming into play you're relying on people being perfect each time and we know how well that'll go. It's adding unneeded complexity to something that already has a complexity that people can barely understand. People barely know how many kilos of apples are in a standard produce bag so how can you make sure that they don't screw up putting items into their basket and not get overcharged or undercharged? My wife and I started to use Loblaws' Click and Collect service which is really the way going forward for checkout-less shopping. We just go on their website, select whatever the hell we need plus any substitutions appropriate should something not be in stock, then set a time for when we'll come to the store. We go then go to the store, tell them which parking stall we're sitting at via phone, and then a few minutes later a clerk comes out with a cart full of the groceries we order. I imagine that if this is successful for the company that we'll likely end up with a larger version of this monstrosity taking care of the work:  These systems already exist at a convenience store-size and I would not rule out seeing in the next decade or so a Loblaws/Sams Club-type store where you just order ahead of time and a machine just sorts out a box for you to pick up when it's ready. However, the idea of just walking into a store and grabbing what you want and then leaving is never going to work beyond Amazon's experiments.
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Feb 3, 2017 21:40
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outlier posted:Wasn't there some scuttlebutt a few years ago about Amazon opening brick-and-mortar bookstores? Which seemed weird to me at the time, but maybe they're playing a long, long game. They have one in Seattle. Nobody likes it very much.
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Feb 3, 2017 21:53
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Why are you people still arguing about the future of shopping when it's already been given to us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQsNktD9zW4
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Feb 3, 2017 21:56
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duz posted:Why are you people still arguing about the future of shopping when it's already been given to us: I knew what that was before I even clicked the link. I prefer their horrorbeds.
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Feb 3, 2017 22:02
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