Hi all,
Amazon just announced that it is shutting down Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, citing a failure to create a "truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion."
I used to work at Amazon on a skunkworks team developing something called the Dash Cart, which was organizationally tied to those two businesses. Given the news, I thought I'd take the time to share my own thoughts on the matter.
Amazon Go, if you're not familiar with it, was a wildly ambitious technology project to allow you to skip the checkout line at the grocery store. The idea was that you could just grab things off the shelf and go. You'd get a receipt on your phone after you left. (Unless of course, you wanted to pay cash.)
It used a combination of physical sensors and machine vision to understand what you picked up off the shelf and, depending on how much of the news you believe, a small army of workers in India, manually reviewing video.
The first time I went to a Go store, it was a trippy experience. It felt distinctly weird not paying at a cash register (an experience that SNL lampooned from the point of view of black Americans). If you could get past the Big Brother vibes of knowing that cameras were watching and recording your every move, and you thought the technology was actually working, it was cool.
On my second trip, the novelty had worn off and the technology had become utterly irrelevant. I was travelling with my family to Seattle. My children, one aged 18 months, and the other 4 years old at the time, were both jet lagged, hungry, tired, and cranky. My kids didn't understand how the entry gates worked, and given that they'd never paid for anything a day in their life, were totally unimpressed by the prospect of not "paying" for something.
As a parent, all I cared about was getting the kids a reasonably healthy snack that they would actually eat, and something reasonable for myself. It was years ago, so I don't remember exactly what I got, but I distinctly remember the feeling of disappointment and regret with our food purchases.
At the time, there were maybe millions of dollars in hardware sensors instrumenting the Go store. I remember estimates in the news that the engineering team for the Go stores, derived from job postings and LinkedIn analysis, was over 1,000 people. At Amazon salaries, that easily comes to a sizeable fraction of a billion dollars a year, all to run what were essentially a few 7-Eleven stores.
(My third and last trip to a Go store was on a business trip to Seattle, where I needed something quick for lunch. I got popcorn chicken and it was bland and dry.)
On the flip side, my kids at that age LOVED going to Trader Joe's. As a parent, I approved of and liked the snacks (obviously), but Trader Joe's had a fantastic gimmick. Every store in my area had its own unique stuffed animal that they would hide somewhere in the aisles, usually high up on one of the shelves. "If," by which I mean "when" the kids found it, they could tell the store manager, and they'd get a lollipop.
Maybe I wasn't in the target demographic for Amazon Fresh, or for the Go store. And I don't know exactly what drove Amazon's shutdown decision. I've heard they're getting better traction with 3rd party licensing at sports stadiums. I'll let you translate the corporate-speak of "truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model" on your own.
But from my point of view, a billion dollars worth of Amazon technology was defeated by a lollipop.
Best regards,
Sam Feller
aka THE Awkward Engineer