The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs.
The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. This is also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed. I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision and suddenly order more things.
If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience. The tech is still pretty much where it was in 2014. Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it. Make it a value add in my life and I wouldn't mind paying a subscription fee for it.
> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision.
This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (rightly or wrongly), blind ordering might be more tenable.
But some other head on the beast wants to keep Amazon shaped like an unmonitored digital marketplace where orders are fulfilled dynamically by bidders and algorithms, so your Tide Pods could be anywhere from $6.99 to $64.99, and you might get anywhere between 10 and 100, and they might arrive tomorrow or next week, and they might come in retail packaging or as a bag of tide-pod-resembling-mystery-objects, etc.
Of course blind ordering won't work when you can't give your customers any assurances (let alone guarantees) about price, quality, volume, etc
I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster.
Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list. It works.
But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's utter chaos. Multiple listings for the same item, sizes and quantities that mysteriously move from one listing to another, prices that vary 10x or more...
It's utterly baffling to me why Amazon created this consumer-hostile nightmare. I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but everything home and toiletries I buy from Target online, simply because the listings and prices are totally consistent. Even though I have Prime! I don't understand why Amazon doesn't figure out that Prime consumers like me buy from Target instead because Amazon's household supplies listings are such utter unpredictable garbage, while Target just works like a normal store.
The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine.
How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically listed price per volume labels? These things are all labeled specifically to fool people who are alive but not conscious. Again, we are just a rounding error to these monoliths
It's absurd that you have to become a being of continuous price comparison in order to be considered conscious. This is predatory behaviour loaded with decades of psychological research around manipulation strategies to increase purchases (e.g. price anchoring, physical positioning on shelves, store layout).
These things only work because of innate human biases and cognitive defects. The idea that anyone less than a pure rational being lacks consciousness is just silly. There's a huge power imbalance which is systemically leveraged against the consumer and it's more useful to see this as a designed aspect of the system rather than the collective individual failures of "nearly all the consumers"
PS: Even the conscious consumers loose, as they spend a ton of time at minimum wage scrolling prices for goods and services. Basically, yes, you get pay less, but for that you have to work 24/7 in the mine-defusing sweatshop.
Feels like winning to me. Feeds into my hunter-gatherer complex and every cent I keep from them gives me great satisfaction. Though, you are right, it does get old but then my defiant and vengeful nature kicks me right back into.
I know it doesn’t matter to them, it matters to me and it’s a win and winners keep winning, right?
It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store or online.
I try to do the calculation nonetheless. But every time I just need to buy some ordinary staple, I’m up against the Relentless Spirit of Pure Deception, who attempts an ever evolving and always brand new form of trickery, at every engagement.
Sometimes, I simply make the $1.00 donation to P&G or whoever just to avoid having to think of strategies to outsmart. This too feels terrible and exhausting in a different way.
> It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store
Where I live price labels must carry the per liter or the per kilo price too. It's printed with a smaller font size but it's visible and it's often the only price I look at.
The unit price labels here in the US are hilariously messed up. The items you want to compare will be say, a pack of 6 granola bars or a 10 pack. The unit prices will be like:
#1: $0.37 / ounce
#2: $6.50 / pound
or even:
#3: $1.82 / each (a price per item)
This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but it stretches my belief that they have the time to get it so wrong intentionally.
Sure but multiplying by ten to get the price per kilo shouldn't be the most complicated thing for even those folks that aren't math savy. It means to move the decimal point (or comma) one place to the right IIRC.
If you had to convert from arms to legs or feet like in certain areas of the world, that might be much harder, of course.
I prefer prices per 100g because I mostly buy food that's under one kilo. I'm sure they show prices per 100g just to make them look cheaper but in my case I actually prefer it this way.
It doesn't even matter what unit is chosen as long as it is kept the same across.
Comparing Smarties to M&Ms is super easy if both have to use price per pound, price per oz, price per g or price per kg. Who cares if the price per kg would be $0.031.as long as I can see it's $0.028 for the other for the same unit without doing math.
Comparable unit-pricing: A mandate brought to you by the European Union. You know, this allegedly evil entity that always hassles with the free market and annoys global companies. /s
Whilst I am waiting for my number in a chemist, I kill time by finding the highest price per litre. It's normally some anti-aging cream at well over €1000 / l.
It's malicious compliance. They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice, so there's something forcing them to show unit prices. So given that they have to show them anyway, they have an opportunity to inject profitable confusion.
"They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice"
The absolute dream would be to price it like health care. You only find out the price months or years after buying the item and multiple phone calls to clear up errors. And for one person it would be 50 cents and for another person 200 dollars.
I remember that around year 2000 a coworker from England told me that petrol pumps changed the prices from pounds per gallon to pounds per liter when the cost crossed the one pound mark. There is some malice in that too. Something like that could be the origin of using different units in those USA shops, not to cross some psychological threshold.
It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol is really sold by the liters there. Maybe somebody from the UK could confirm or refute the tale. Anyway it's probably way more than one pound per liter now.
The UK switched from selling petrol in gallons to litres in the 1980s. I think I just about recall petrol prices suddenly changing dramatically when I was fairly young - I used to help my Dad keep records of how much fuel we'd bought at what price. I'd write down the figures in the book while he went to pay (it was always self-service) so I must have been old enough to be left alone for 5 minutes!
This Energy Institute statistical series - https://knowledge.energyinst.org/search/record?id=58969 - says that their records changed from "new pence per gallon" to "new pence per litre" at the start of 1989. That seems late for my recollection.
Looking back at historical data from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/oil-and-..., it appears that the average price for "4 star" petrol (97 RON) crossed the £1 per gallon threshold some time in 1979 (Table 4.1.3, and multiply by 4.54609). I'm not old enough to remember that!
By 1989, prices were at 168.8 pence per litre (i.e. £1.68). So I think the story about the change being because it had gone over £1 per gallon has to be a myth. However, retailers certainly weren't complaining about the price displayed being less than one quarter of what it had been! In contrast, they were much less happy about prices per kilogram being more than twice the price per pound (weight).
Prices crossed £1 per litre for 'Premium Unleaded' (95 RON) in November 2007. They fell back below this level in November 2008 but went back up over it in June 2009.
The change-over was actually driven by the technology at the time - namely the outdoor road-facing price advertising panels, as well as many of the pump displays.
Simply - they were only designed to show 2 numbers so when the price-per-gallon exceeded 99 pence many had to stick a static "1" in front, and many point-of-sale terminals and cash registers couldn't handle it.
Since there are ~4.5 litres in a British gallon displaying pence-per-litre brought the displayed prices back to 2 digits and allowed for a gradual transition to 3 and 4 digit displays.
And yes, at the time the switch from pence-per-gallon to pence-per-litre occurred some retailers did take advantage to 'add some profit margin' but it wasn't universal.
Gallons are larger than litres, so in Canada you'll never find anything sold by the gallon. However, pounds are smaller than kilograms, so produce at the grocery store is commonly advertised with per-pound price, with the per-kilogram in small print.
It is, and everything is required to be sold in metric units. Except for things like pipe fittings and screw sizes, but even those have to show the metric somewhere.
There's an effort to switch car efficiency from mpg (higher is better) to "l/100km" (smaller is better), because the latter has more intuitive scaling as well as being properly metric.
There were definitely people complaining about the price hike when the currency changed, but that was back in 1971 so it's only boomers who'll bring it up.
Some pipes are in imperial units in Italy too. For example, from my memories of few days ago at a store: we have metric series of rigid PVC water pipes (32 mm, 40 mm, 50 mm) and imperial series for the flexible ones used for watering plants and grass. I remember sizes of 1/2" 3/4" 5/8" 1" 1 1/4". But there are also metric ones that more or less can fit with some of the imperial ones. Of course there are two series of adapters, hoses, etc.
Gas pipes are imperial. I think they never changed to metric because of safety concerns or because the number of meters sold is lower than water pipes (gas pipes last forever) and it's not worth splitting the market in two. But it's just my suppositions.
And I see there is a similar but less catchily-worded concept, "Hubbard's corollary" from 2020 mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Hanlon's razor... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
I actually thought I made it up, and almost called it "Nerdponx's Razor", but I thought it would be arrogant to name it after myself. Hubbard can take the credit!
Oh, they have plenty of time to do it. We have created lots of MBAs...people who want to take advantage of their education, and to do so they want to squeeze a little more profit. And they're bored. And they need to stand out from their coworkers. Therefore 'price per net weight' becomes a thing. And Surge pricing.
(Peanutbutter M&Ms are an egregious example...the share bag price varies 20% depending on the calendar, as does Hilshire Farm Kielbasa...which now comes in 14 oz packages...which is a choice and means a family of 4 needs to buy two of them now to make a meal.)
it has to be intentional. almost any two products that you might want to compare are always using different units. haagan Daaz pints are always shown with different units than the larger haagan daaz.
They have to do that in the UK too, but unfortunately the law doesn't seem to standardise the unit for these comparison values(or it does and is ignored).
If you have two packs of coke cans next to each other, and one gives you a price per 100ml, and the other per can, it doesn't help that much(yes you could multiply the value per 100ml by around 3x, but at a glance the difference isn't obvious).
My store has a few different brands of coconut milk. Some of the unit prices are per pound, while others are per quart. I make the approximation that coconut milk has the same density as water, which is two pounds per quart. The unit prices are all odd three digits numbers. It's a pain.
You could have one person who works in an office somewhere who's responsible for itemizing inventory for the whole grocery chain. They could solve this problem (maybe automatically!) with a spreadsheet. They could also solve the problem of tomatillos not being registered in the self-checkout catalog. But what is that person's salary paying for in the company's eyes?
To be fair, maybe the real explanation is "lots of stuff, shit happens." And it's only a factor of two (for watery goods, anyway).
Where I live, labels get these price per amount labels...
But they don't keep the denominator consistent, even across the same category of product.
So I get to compare a price/oz, versus a price/lb versus a price/serving and all the while, I contemplate why nobody's interested in burning the whole store down.
My mum has told me about her shopping habits in the 70s, she would have a list of everything they needed, she would walk around the first shop writing all the prices down. She would walk around the second shop buying the items that were cheaper, then return to the first shop to buy what was cheaper there.
We will all end up having to walk around with an AI shopping assistant that can do all these pricing calculations and comparisons for us.-
(Other than biases, them AI's being "mindless" might be an advantage here ...)
PS. Until we go so so multimodal that they start to be influenced by packaging size, bright colors, rounding, and big breasts.-
PSS. Heh. Perhaps the ultimate Turing test is when them AI's start to be influenced by marketing, and shady practices thereof.-
If a company makes something like Meta's ray-ban smart glasses but with the one function of being an AI shopping assistant (preferably offline), it would instantly make the case for why AI is good for the world. I think it could quickly become an unicorn startup, if it can deliver.
The company would have to make a compelling case of not selling itself to brands, and I am not sure such a company exists. Maybe we need an open source project, but it will be constant battle as with ad blockers.
The base features we need are:
1) price comparison: scan all unit prices of products on the shelves, compare and covert, then use AR to superimpose the comparison charts/prices.
2) filter by feature: e.g. food restrictions (allergy, halal, etc.), flavors, etc.
3) ad block: for the real world. Block misleading prices (3 for the price of 2, etc.), to avoid being primed with biased triggers in our choices.
I was excited about the brief wave of startup grocery stores that were selling zero/minimally packaged staple goods, like “The Rounds.” But it seems like they’re just not able to hit a level of scale to where they can be price competitive with the sneaky dark patterned stores.
If by "these companies" you mean the third party suppliers, then sure, but Amazon obviously loses business when a customer can't trust the branded microphone cylinder they bought to place the desired order for them and make the program profitable. This is especially evident in the failure of Amazon's bid over the past decade to replace the big box supermarkets and grocers: clearly customers aren't pleased enough with the service quality to select it over physically picking their "essential goods" themselves, even when their probable prime subscription partially went to setting the system up. What good does Amazon get in hamstringing its own ability to acquire new markets in exchange for enriching someone else? The argument that they've arrived here out of some rational, intentional economic calculation that they can but choose not to change is clearly penny wise but pound foolish.
If you look at the list of top online stores after Amazon, many are brands with also physical stores. One would assume they are less shammy. I know if I go to a regular supermarket here, great effort has been spent by the buyers and the organization to ensure that everything is actually of decent quality. Even the cheapest alternatives. That cost of course I then have to pay in the price of the products.
I prefer not to buy things from unknown sellers which I can get from known sources. Sometimes you need something special like a car spare part that has local markup of 300% so then online is worth the risk (not safety critical parts).
I just don't understand the situation where a person decides to buy a regular product from an unknown seller, especially from a system that incentivizes something that is not in the interest of the buyer.
On the other hand, hearing you refer to the people you’ve met as “consumers” before criticizing them sounds pretty dehumanizing.
It leaves me wondering if you were able to connect with them on a personal level at all, or if perhaps you were also “barely conscious” during these interactions.
Yeah, but I don't know anyone that will just blindly order stuff from Amazon using Alexa like this. They all know that they have no idea what item will be shipped or what price they may be charged. So I'd argue that they are leaving money on the table from potential sales.
It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with pricing information and links for household goods just to spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual price per quantity that I want due to the multiple dynamic listings that change every day nightmare.
Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3 instead of 1 30x package.
Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection legislation.
Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it.
Fun fact, that piece of legislation significantly contributed to Brexit propaganda, the campaign was based on "the EU wants to take away our pints/stones/pounds/whatnot".
Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a price per quantity, though that can vary between "each", "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods", so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure what you'll get, what quantity, or what price.
Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization.
It is true that if you go into a grocery store, you're literally presented with a whole aisle of detergent, and even if you are as the section for "Tide Pods" there may be quite a few options (larger/smaller, "stain blaster", "fresh", whatever), you very quickly get a pretty good view of what the options are and their differences, plus prices and things like "on sale" cards.
The shopping experience is absolutely inferior with Amazon for things for which there are many alike products.
One could even imagine some sort of mega page for "slim network cables" where you'd select the standard and color and length and be presented with a few options. They try this with things like screws, though I can't believe they have one option for star drive 5/8" wood screws...
Even if you search for the exact item, including the brand name and the size, you get pages and pages of choices, many of them just wrong.
I just did a search for "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack". This contains all the information you need to uniquely identify a single product. Brand, Product, Size, Quantity. Yet Amazon returns 3 pages of crap, including Wrong Brand, Wrong Product, Wrong Size, and Wrong Quantity. I can't make the query any more specific, Amazon, what the hell is your problem? This query should return one and only one result.
Their search result page is just a ranking of whatever they predict will sell best based on your query (based on units, not dollars). It’s stupidly simlistic, actually: if we sell more for a given search term because we’re advertising hard on that search term, our organic ranking for that term will rise almost immediately. So in your case, what’s going on is that basically other people who search with the same term end up buying other products. Thats bad for you, but perhaps its actually good for them?
But think about the corollary where places like McMasterCarr have exact products in known quantities, types and breakdowns because they used to be a catalogue. I will go to McMaster 9/10 times because it's just easy to find exactly what I want and so they get my money.
Amazon seems hostile to this very idea, that I know what I want, will spend 15% more to have it tomorrow and will not by the random stuff it smashes in the search results because I know what I want.
Oh I get it. I actually think there’s a huge opportunity in online retail to gate off categories and brands that are already in, say, Walmart. Then do the Amazon algorithmic model for everything else.
I think you’re missing how crucial Amazon’s algorithmic model has been as a way to connect shoppers with 2 day delivery for an unimaginably long tail of products. We sell a technical product that would be at home on McMaster. On the 2nd largest retailer in the US. It’s incomprehensible that our products would ever be in Target or Walmart stores. Yet we have access to the same customer base at the same place where they can buy Tide. Amazon’s purely algorithmic approach is what allows companies like us to do product/market discovery for them (and their customers).
Did you know that Amazon has a section that drives to compete with McMastercar? It’s somewhere in Amazon business they have parts and stuff and it’s just a horrible shit show.
my guess is sheer incompetency hidden by sales volume.
at some point they had the idea of translating the search to categories and showing alternatives. it got both unmaintained and other products teams added their own self interest on top of the algo and now you have the worst search on the planet which nobody have the political power to fix because it touches everyone revenue, even if for worse
It's not stupidly simplistic. It's ads. Random no names bid for keywords to be placed on those pages, the higher the better. Good luck discerning actual ads from the real listings.
For the sponsored returns to the search query, sure. But for the rest, isn't that the fuzzy search crapping the bed in the face of our expectations?
When I specify what I want I want the search to return what I searched for, not a lot of kinda similar junk. I've tried to explain the concept of fuzzy search to my girlfriend a few times and she still gets annoyed when a search for "24"x24" shadow box" returns a whole bevy of standard picture frames at an utterly random spread of sizes, for example.
Or is fuzzy search a convenient excuse for "we consider sellers who advertise with Amazon and subscribe to more of our seller services a valuable factor in search rankings"?
Fundamentally, Amazon seems to have a problem with not understanding priority. It's especially terrible at associating numbers with units. While I have no access to how Amazon actually works I think it's just counting matches and thus "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack" and "sprayway glass cleaner 1 oz 19 pack" would score equally and "bogus glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack" would score higher than "sprayway glass cleaner 19 ounce". Remember, most quantity 1 items will not say so in the description, "1 pack" is asking for trouble.
I think the only real fix here would be for Amazon to separate out brand, product, size (or sizes in a few cases) and quantity. And the parser needs to attach numbers to the following word if that word is a unit word.
While I've never done it at any real scale I have done a routine that predicts what's related to what. It required giving it a fair understanding of the data (for example, Xabcde is probably related to X despite the distance between them) to get it to quit spewing out whoppers. It's hard even in my case where I could afford to run the test against all reasonable candidates. Amazon simply can't do that. (My routine runs in length * length * table size. You simply do not implement anything that even resembles O(n^3) at scale.)
Trying your search, I'm not seeing a pile of crap.
First hit differs from your search term only in 2 vs 1. I believe Amazon doesn't consider numbers as as much of a mismatch as other things.
The third hit is obviously what you want, but it doesn't have the commas and the unit is "1 pack (packaging may vary)". Apparently that makes it score slightly less. Going down the page I find it in 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 packs, fresh scent vs unscented and there's also "blue". There's one clear typo of 15 oz, and you get a bunch of things where it's a multi-pack bundled with some other cleaning item.
Farther on down I start seeing different sizes and related products. Is there any harm to it displaying lesser matches farther on down??
The big difference with a store is that if tide pods should be ~$8 for a pack, the dtore is incredibly unlikely to have one pack of tide pods on the shelf for $70
In some cases the retail store just doesn't list the price and the store owner may just come up with a highly marked-up price when asked. 10x would be very rare though indeed.
What store doesn't list prices? Isn't that illegal in most places? In my country even the tiniest ancient village stores I've been to have prices listed on items (sometimes simple labels attached to the items, such as "10", but still there).
You will see 10 X but it’s in places where it’s considered emergency go to the 24 hour gas station and look at the price of diapers or butt wipes compared to Walmart.
“Try” being the key word, because it is useless. It maybe could work if vendors populated the metadata correctly, but they don’t, and amazon put far too many similar categories into it, so you can’t actually filter on most of the parameters without filtering out most of the options you wanted to see, or selecting dozens of options.
You can get burned real bad by this if the specific product SKU gets discontinued and the price spikes 10x because now they're called Tide Pods Original.
It seems the simplest form of code for software that says the last time you ordered tide pods it was $10 for 1 pound now it is $10 for 1/10 of a pound. Do you want to continue?
The kind of organization that is politically capable of creating something like this could successfully run Alexa the way Amazon is trying to run it too. Or in a lot of different ways.
Fun fact: my local store uses different units for the comparisons. Not that you can choose from that many different units, but for example brand A corn flakes comparison price is price/serving while brand B corn flakes is compared by price/kg. Sure, the serving is based on weight but I still need to do some math to figure out which one is cheaper :)
Incredibly common in the US as well to use different units per item. All the better because our garbage measuring system can make unit switches significantly trickier.
I had to do a double take a few weeks ago when I found the price/unit to be drastically different for the name brand to the store brand of something, until I realized they strategically switched the <unit> (# to oz I think it was) to make the store brand look astronomically cheaper instead of just slightly cheaper.
"Serving" is the biggest vector for manipulation ever. They can make up whatever they want. I still remember looking at a small bag of potato chips that had 3 servings.
> Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it.
That's pretty irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's about blind ordering without worrying about the price.
No one complained that Amazon was hiding prices or making price per quantity hard to discover.
Even with the legislation you suggest, wild price swings are still entirely legal.
The point was that they're _not_ kind enough when you buy through Alex. The instant coffee you bought last month could have doubled but if you say "Alexa add [the coffee] to my cart ot just work… and if my anexcodes extrapolate at all, LOTS people use this feature.
Nah. Just choose to buy the way you wish to. Vote with your money and don’t artificially restrict where there’s zero issues. Everything works out in the end.
I’d much rather transact in the US than Europe. The entire retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched. The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe.
> The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe.
Are you aware that Europe has a mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period on consumer purchases? A mandatory 14-days no-questions-asked return window on all purchases?
In the US, AFAIK you're fully at the mercy of whatever the vendor so graciously offers you.
Not sure why you're downvoted. There is material difference in prices of electronics due to whatever reason (taxes, warranties, low scale, etc) to the degree that my European friends often purchase laptops and iPhones when they travel to US.
Anytime you get something "for free", you're paying for it one way or another. No amount of legislation can change that, they might as well legislate pi=3.
They usually don't, but that only strengthens their point. People are choosing, instead of paying a European price and getting a very long warranty, to pay a cheaper US price even though they likely won't even get the benefit of our awful 1-year or 90-day warranty.
Yes I am aware and I stand by my statement. Have you actually returned stuff to stores over there?
I have returned half eaten cake that I did not like the taste to Costco and didn’t have to face a weird looking employee. No law and regulation necessary just capitalism.
How many half eaten cakes would you have to return to monetarily make up for, say, a PC or washing machine that stops working after 4 ½ years? Because you can get that device replaced or repaired in much of Europe, for free. I'm not aware of any US company that offers such a warranty window and actually keeps its word (look at crappy fridges where the company will replace one faulty unit for another with the same problem once, and then you're on your own). And even if some did, they are by far the minority. The voluntary "I'm a good brand, choose me" freebies offered by a company will almost never outmatch that mandated by regulation.
The reason is simple: the companies have a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money for shareholders as possible, and if it's marginally cheaper to shorten the warranty period (whithouth seeming out of touch with the rest of the market), the bulk will choose that. Whereas the aim of regulation is always to secure the interest of the consumer. I say "always", but there are exceptions in cases of regulatory capture, which admittedly is much of the US...
Interestingly, the particular retailer in question, actually offers at least "second year warranty" for free to products you purchase from them at no explicit additional cost, so you don't have to make a trade-off by summing all the halves of poor-tasting cakes. The point is there is a choice of retailers. You don't need the regulation hammer for everything.
So? You’re stuck with a warrantied product that you know has the same defect, unless they’ve changed things since last I saw it. What’s a two-year warranty on a product that breaks after three? The market is not fixing this particular issue. Sure you can choose another manufacturer next time but you’ve already been screwed by one. There was no need for that in the first place.
I will almost always choose to buy a product if offered at a cheaper price if I can do so by declining longer warranties, so, no, it's not "always a benefit". It's not a fairy tale. Someone has to pay for things.
That's not capitalism, that's culture. In the USA, it's very common to return products because of a change of mind and/or complain. That isn't universal.
The fact that a retailer is willing to accept it despite not being forced to is absolutely the result of capitalism. If they don't, you buy from a competitor. This is not some hypothetical. People in the US routinely choose retailers based on their service experience.
In any case, the overall retail experience is much better on west side of the Atlantic and prices are generally better too, without the need of too many "customer protection laws" so I don't think a good case is to be made to copy from a failed continent.
But, the usual case is that the major companies in the market collude to strip away these kind of offerings, as "free unconditional returns" hurts bottom line of all companies in the market. This is the real power of capitalism.
Think about it, for example the TV sector: All companies colluded to reduce the selection of TVs to "Smart" TVs only. I can't just go and buy from a competitor, because it simply does not exist!
The problem here is just the group that wants them is minuscule. Nobody wants to admit it, but the smart TVs are what people want. You can buy dumb TVs that have no smart features or smart TVs with the smart feature can be completely ignored. Vizio is good for this, but nobody wants to pay for those except commercial units.
TV companies do try adding features that go beyond dumb display panels. Ask them how that worked for 3D, which people didn't adopt. Yes most TVs are "smart" but I'm pretty sure most people won't pay much of a premium and many use something like an Apple TV instead anyway.
The premium paid is the $20-50 that the TV manufacturer gets for preinstalling shit on their smart TV.
Which is why (currently) Vizio is my doge because it just turns on with ARC and shuts off when the Apple TV does so I don’t even know it’s smart.
The stupid Samsung (praise be to the toddler, destroyer of shit tech) wouldn’t even let you switch inputs without being connected to WiFi, or if it could I couldn’t figure it out.
Is that the "usual case" really? I find it very rare actually.
You really think "Smart TV" is some collusion/conspiracy and not emergent from the market behavior? The most malicious theory I can come up with is that Smart TV makes more money for the manufacturers due to the ad opportunity, therefore they sell an inferior product to the consumer —in our minds— similar to bundling crapware in Windows laptops, but that still does not make it collusion or market distortion.
Under that theory, it just means dumb TV would have to be a comparatively more expensive product and I am willing to bet even the nerds who care about dumb TV will be buying the smart one, airgap it, and connect an Apple TV. Effectively no one would be paying even $50 more for dumb version of a TV.
In reality, I believe the average Joe & Jill actually strongly prefer Smart TV.
How will the government enforcing a minimum bar on return timelines lead to a worse experience at stores that already exceed those metrics? It might be unnecessary, but how would it hurt?
Various negative consequences but off the top of my head:
- Any regulation needs to be written, read, analyzed, made sure to comply with, defend in court, etc. which costs money.
- I might want to be very generous and voluntarily take back items from my legit customers because I find out it was good for business, but also have mechanisms in place to prevent abuse by a small minority of bad customers (restrict a subset of products, limits on the number of purchases you can return, etc). Once you codify it in law, it forces my hand in many ways, increasing prices making experience worse for my good customers.
- The regulation may change and the retailer may need to suddenly adapt to comply.
- It may not hurt those particular stores, but prevents cheaper competitors from emerging, which is a bad thing.
To show this whole thing is kind of stupid, where does "two years" come from? Some asshat in European parliament? Why not twenty years? Why not two months?
> retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched ... make it suck like Europe.
Maybe it's great in the US, I don't know, but it far from sucks in Europe. Amongst other things for returns policies you have a guaranteed 14 day return period for online orders even if there's no issues. Plus there's a minimum 2 years warranty, and a few years more if there's a reasonable expectation for the item in question to last longer. I'm not seeing the issue.
The person you’ve replied to has stated a concrete (what they perceive to be) benefit of consumer protection regulation. One that doesn’t seem to limit choice at all, but rather improves visibility.
I’m also inserting my own personal experience here. The country I live in, which isn’t in Europe, has similar regulation in place.
In response you’re throwing around some vague notion of “freedom” and vague implication of a “better experience” without really explaining how mandatory unit pricing is a bad thing for you as a consumer.
Has John Gruber got you all upset about the EU?
I’m currently booking a trip to the US and the consumer experience is absolutely terrible. Tax-exclusive “totals”? Resort fees? Give me a break.
It sounds like the US consumer experience is more aligned to your obvious libertarian ideology, and that’s the end of it.
I tried to book a small-group (~12 people) conference room at a US hotel and when I asked for a flipchart, they added "resort fees" and a $200 staff "service fee" to bring the flipchart into the room.
This was on top of renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours.
This is just how hotels make money. The key is to be very nice to the person who actually brings out the flipchart and asked for it on site. Then it’s on them to actually record that they did it and you know what people are lazy enough and failed to record it.
Can you think of any downside of that proposal at all?
Tax inclusive total means government can screw the business and the end user and hide behind the tax inclusive price tag. Jack up the tax it seems the business is doing it.
Tax-exclusive prices hide the true cost and encourage overspending by making things falsely appear cheaper. Their purpose is for businesses to squeeze more from their customers.
In NZ the price you see is the price you pay. The sales tax amount is always clearly stated on receipts, invoices, checkouts, online carts, etc. (by law) and the rate has changed twice in history, so everyone knows when it happens and who is responsible. Everything is explicit and nothing is or can be hidden (we don't do tipping either). In comparison when I visited the USA I never knew how much I would be paying for things, which felt fundamentally unfair and customer-opposed.
Funny, given that the product most US consumers are familiar with tax-inclusive pricing (gasoline) is the one product that hasn't had its tax rate changed in decades.
The government can not "screw the business and the end user" because tax rates are public. VAT changes don't just happen in secret. Tax changes to specific product categories (such as extra taxes for alcohol in some countries) are publically debated. And if you want lower taxes you try to vote in a more economically right-wing government. The framing of your statement makes it clear you just don't trust/like governments. That's fine, I guess, but it's an incredibly strong bias in your arguments
That's irrelevant. Give me the total price, so I know how much something will cost. I don't care what percentage of it goes where. I only care about easily evaluating whether something is worth the price.
Seriously. I don't care if the total price consists of 100% tax or 0% tax. I care only what it is. I don't ask to know how much you pay the cleaners, how much it costs to operate the pool, how much corporate profit you're booking, or how much the CFO is embezzling. The amount of tax is equally useless to me. I care what it costs me.
Looks like I'm not the only European that has seen a price tag of $9.50 on a product I wanted, only to find out that the $10 bill in my pocket was only two thirds of the amount needed!
Look at us poor Europeans with our metric-system money-math
The government routinely hides what you're paying in taxes. Case in point - the so-called "Employer's Contribution" to your social security taxes. There's no such thing. That comes out of your pocket, too.
This is because employers have no interest in what your paycheck amount is. They care about "total compensation", which is what it costs the employer to employ you. Seattle added some "payroll taxes" and successfully sold the fiction that it was the businesses paying it. The businesses did indeed write the check, but it was the employee's money.
In the US, a lot of people think of tax day as a "good day" because they get a refund from the government! Psychologically it is very different if you steal the money before they even see it than take it from them once they have felt it under their tongue.
Plus, I think the OP is referring to money that is technically paid by the employer but effectively passed through to the employee, because that's what happens, not some item on their payslip.
I can look it up if I am already motivated, but it is much easier for me to convince you to take a collective political action if you feel the depth of the government's dong in your rear end every day.
I care about what effects the policies are having, not how much I pay in taxes. The impact of the policies is what actually matters. The tax rate is one tiny detail. I'm not wired to automatically assume collective action is evil, so I only care about it in the context of the effects of all policies combined.
No one would blame the business. Receipts should show sales tax clearly.
I would very much blame the business for leaving out tax, concealing how much I'll need to pay to try to get me to overspend. Businesses claiming they don't want to be blamed for sales tax existing seems like misdirection from the real reason: it makes it look like you're spending less.
Everyone always blames price movements on the government anyways. And when it is tax inclusive--gasoline--the government hasn't dared to change the rate in decades!
Washington State added a 50c per gallon gas tax. They did it by taxing the oil companies, so when the pump prices went up 50c the politicians adamantly blamed the price increase on the oil companies.
So you believe that prices are set by supply and demand and nothing else in all of your other discussions, but when it comes to taxes, it's the government's fault?
When a tax hike happens, businesses don't automatically have to increase prices they charge by the same amount: they can take a hit to their margin instead. So, the price they choose to charge is not "price + tax". It is "supply-and-demand price, of which we pay X to the state in taxes".
The point is that supply and demand works on the final price, not on "price before tax". Especially when taxes are proportional, so if you offer a lower price than your competitor, you also pay less of it to the state in taxes. So the tax level is irrelevant to the value of the market price, if you believe in supply & demand as the price setting mechanism. Showing price without tax is then obviously a scam to try to attack your psychology to think it's cheaper. They could just as well show price - marketing costs.
Of course, if businesses actually set prices as cost + margin, then it does make sense to separate tax from the price, as the value "price before tax" is a meaningful part of the price setting algorithm.
And lowering your margin is not the same thing as running a low margin business. If your margin was 20% at a tax level of 10%, and taxes go to 15%, then reducing your margin to 18% doesn't make you a low margin business now. Regardless, if you believe in supply and demand as the sole mechanism for price setting, this is all moot: the state increasing taxes won't increase demand or reduce supply with the exact same level as the tax increase, so the price can't move the exact same as the tax increase in this model.
I'd also note that it's not strictly true that taxes are completely decoupled from supply & demand. States do compete on attracting businesses through lower taxation.
> supply and demand works on the final price, not on "price before tax"
That's correct.
> So the tax level is irrelevant to the value of the market price, if you believe in supply & demand as the price setting mechanism.
Taxes raise the price, which reduces demand. If the prices don't rise, then the margins decrease, which reduces the incentive for the business owners to continue.
> doesn't make you a low margin business
It makes you a lower margin business. It reduces the margins on all the businesses, and the marginal (!) ones are no longer viable, and a new set of businesses become at the edge.
It'd not even that I care much about small deviations--I just don't trust that something really crazy won't happen if I put it on autopilot. If I walk into Walmart and grab a big armful of Bounty I'm fairly confident things will be fine.
I'm in the process of moving. I thought maybe I'd give Prime Day a try and send some soaps ahead to my new place.
In my last apartment, I used Method's pump-dispenser laundry detergent and their basil-scented kitchen hand soap.
Amazon is selling the laundry detergent for $75 and the hand soap for $15. I'm guessing Method discontinued the SKUs I was used to, and there's some leftover stock on Amazon with crazy prices.
Or: There's third-parties that are selling the stuff at seemingly-outrageous prices just because there aren't other sellers moving them in large, efficient [at least pallet-sized] quantities on Amazon.
People sometimes want whatever they want, and some people are willing to pay a lot for whatever that is. That is not necessarily abusive.
eg, I like sardines, and there's some very particular sardines that I'm rather fond of. I'd love to pay $1 or $2 per tin for them, but I'll also pay $6 per tin for them if I must when they just aren't available otherwise for whatever reason.
Much of this can be explained with just supply and demand.
Don't even ask me about the price of Heinz canned beans in tomato juice or bottles of HP Sauce in grocery stores in my part of Ohio. They're inexpensive staples in some parts of the world, but if I can even find them here they're ludicrously expensive.
Amazon (and third-party sellers using Amazon) are no different than my local grocer is in that particular way.
Back in context of TFA: The problem isn't that things can be expensive; the problem is primarily that one must be able to easily compare prices and products, and an Alexa device is presently a terrible interface for letting that happen. (The Amazon website is also sometimes not very good at this, even on a real computer.)
The marketplace stuff is the killer and downfall of any online shopping experience. Right now Walmart is easy enough to search and target and Home Depot are pretty good too, but once they start really focusing on the marketplace where they just make money with no expenses then it all goes to hell.
Ordering items from the system where you are buying products from a local Walmart store for pickup or delivery works very well. I find their Amazon-style marketplace chaotic, high priced and fairly useless, though.
I worked at Amazon when Fresh was rolling out in Seattle. A coworker thought he was ordering 10 bananas but when his order arrived he received 10 bunches of bananas.
Generously, he brought them in to share along with the story. I’m sure they made a lot of banana bread the following week.
I once ordered qty. 6 bananas from Instacart, expecting one fairly-medium bunch of bananas to show up with about 6 fruits in that bunch. The listing clearly showed that it was for "quantity", not "weight."
But I got 6 pounds of bananas, which is a ton for a single person living by themself. [And I don't bake, so I got plenty of fresh potassium that week.]
It only happened once. After that, I started leaving careful notes that describe each item where quantity/volume/weight might be confusing and things have been fine.
(I could have complained and Instacart would have rubber-stamped a refund for that part of the order without discussion, but it wasn't worth that much effort.)
It’s not only Instacart. The first target that I ever went to that had a grocery store had turkeys that had been labeled at $.25. Not $.25 a pound. I pointed it out to the cashier multiple times and she couldn’t understand what I was complaining about so eventually, I went home with my $.25 turkey.
Each has significant advantages - it means you do NOT need a state-certified scale for transactions; you just count.
It was obvious that that Target had never priced anything per pound before (it had just been remodeled to have a supermarket) and an employee fat-fingered the label. But the cashier had no recourse and I wasn't going to fight it hard.
(The same Target also had some clearance steaks for like ten cents a pound because they were close to expiration because none of the customers were expecting a supermarket in their target and weren’t buying perishables.)
They typically list out the unit but what ticks me off is when adjacent items have different units. One is in ounces, the second is per unit, their third one is per bag.
funny, bananas were the only thing they greatly lowered price (and quality) when they took over wholefoods.
before you had .8/lb and 1.2/lb true organic from south America. after you had both bins failed with the the same Asian chiquita, but the fresher ones labeled organic and they cost .8 and .6 per lb.
They're not perfect, and I think Amazon does combine listings for the same item (see "other sellers"), but the bigger issue is that the system prioritizes getting you exactly what you ask for over warning you of weird market shenanigans or out of stock sellers meaning prices are way higher than usual.
If Target is out of the brand of paper towels I like I don't go to the next store and buy them no matter the price, I get a different brand or skip it. If I had a human shop for me, they would also get a different brand of skip it. But that logic doesn't work with Amazon so it's not safe to trust it.
No, they aren't. GS1 - the organisation that administers retail barcodes - has rules about when to change the Global Trade Item Number for a product. The GTIN is what you probably mean by 'UPC' but GS1 now distinguishes between the abstract product number (the GTIN), and the concrete barcode symbology containing a 12-digit GTIN (UPC-A).
The Guiding Principles are:
* Is a consumer and/or trading partner expected to distinguish the changed or new product from previous/current products?
* Is there a regulatory/liability disclosure requirement to the consumer and/or trading partner?
* Is there a substantial impact to the supply chain (e.g., how the product is shipped, stored, received)?
Last time I looked at it, they fell prey to the region-locking-franchise nonsense. Something like each country had a registered office that would manage their namespace of codes with some sort of segregation or grouping.
Ofc what inevitably happened: same product from same company had two codes because because. Heinz Ketchup in Germany is not the same as Heinz Ketchup in Australia...and no one can tell you why.
Different recipe? Labeling? Different sizes... 160ml vs Country Z standard of 13.2oz, etc.
Oh and different codes for different groupings. Pack of 6 somethings got a new code VS the item itself as the barcode.
Not sure if you encountered the same shenanigans but I just stayed away. This is ultimately a people co-ordination problem and everyone thinks they're special. Meanwhile China spams all our market places with "Wish Wonder Elements Store" sellers that sell "40mm 1/2/6 pack of nail screws, woodworking, drill, conical shape, amazing product $1.22" and 5000 variations across all their sellers.
This creates the opportunity for a start up offering such spreadsheet management as a service to flourish in the ecosystem whether or not Amazon ends up acquiring them. Yes I am being facetious. (obvi)
I buy a lot of household stuff from Amazon. I also buy a lot of household stuff from lots of other places, mostly bricks-and-mortar.
I don't keep a spreadsheet. I find that when I buy a thing enough times (a particular size of a particular shampoo, say), I get a vague feel for what it "should" cost, and I definitely have a range of values around that expected cost that may be acceptable to me. I don't need a spreadsheet for this. (A spreadsheet wouldn't hurt at all, but it just isn't necessary for me; I don't want to spend the time to get that level of accuracy since the return on my time isn't there for me.)
But sometimes, an item is relatively unfamiliar or the price "feels" somewhat high or low -- whether at Amazon or locally.
When this happens, I comparison shop. I've gotten pretty quick at it.
Charts of historic Amazon pricing for things -- often pretty good but sometimes with large granularity -- are available at camelcamelcamel.com, which scrapes Amazon pricing and has done so for quite a long time.
So I look there to see if Amazon's price is good, relative to Amazon's previous pricing.
And then, if I still haven't found clear direction, I fire up Instacart's website. This lets me search many local stores all at once. (Their prices are often [but not always] inflated, but that's easy to get a feel for as well.)
After that, I have enough vaguely-accurate data to say to myself "Self, this shampoo is a terrible deal at Amazon and I'll just pick some up at the store," or "Self, this shampoo is a fantastic deal at Amazon, and I should order one or two extra bottles while it is cheap."
I wish Amazon's prices were more consistent (why is it $13 this week for a 24-pack of cans of V8 juice delivered to my door, and $60 the next week?), but meh. I can deal with it, as long as I have a real computer or time to fiddle with my pocket supercomputer. It's not so different from conventional "shopping."
I just can't deal with it using an Echo speaker and the limited interactions possible with Amazon's broken Alexa "AI". That's a non-starter, as things are today.
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In terms of quantities, I don't think I've ever been surprised by Amazon. I do not think I've never experienced a thing on Amazon like my parents once did, where they bought mustard at a wholesale club ("Wow, 208 ounces [or whatever] of mustard! What a great price!") and wound up with several hundred individual packets of Heinz mustard loose-packed in a cardboard box.
They were pretty surprised by this. Discussions were had. "What will we ever do with these mustard packets? Should we take it back?
What if they refuse to accept it? Is it even worth the money to drive over there again just for this? We still need mustard right now, too..."
They elected to keep it, and that wasn't the end of the world at all: We had plenty of mustard for a very long time, and it was indeed priced right; it just wasn't packaged in a particularly good way for what we were using it for.
(But then, maybe that experience when I was a kid made a lasting impression on me. And perhaps this was reinforced every time I went to retrieve some mustard from that huge box, wherein: I looked at that box. And when I looked at that box, I could always see that it was neatly labeled from the factory and that the contents wouldn't be surprising at all to anyone who was actually paying enough attention.
It is entirely possible that I might automatically scrutinize the offerings at Amazon, and also at the local grocery store, more than others do.)
We're building that spreadsheet as a product. I'd love to show you. I'd message you a private link to a prototype but you have no contact info on your profile. If you are interested, can you email or DM me using my profile info?
I gave up trying to purchase Nikon OEM batteries on Amazon. It's easy on B&H, but I cannot (or do not know how to) exclude the hundreds of cheaper knock-off batteries that are inferior in every measure. I also tried to get an OEM battery grip for my Nikon D850 - but again near impossible on Amazon. This grip is $380 from Nikon, and its possible to get a knock-off for $29. Why get the original? It increases the camera's max frame rate for stills. it is also far more durable.
B&H is one of the places I check first before ordering on Amazon, which is about fifth on any list because fuck Amazon.
There’s a CS book I want to read but because the author self published I can only find it on Amazon. I need to try the book store at his university, and I’m not going to buy from Jeff until I’ve tried that avenue.
You lost me when you said their processes for books was "fine" -It may be good in some ways, but my experience of how they wrap it for consumer use is a giant mass of anti-patterns.
Charles Dickens should be the top match on the actual author, or at the very least biographies. But no. Amazon want us to go to "in the style of" or "related to a series which tangentially discussed Oliver twist" linkages "for your convenience"
Amazon will no doubt have A/B testing which shows net beneficial to revenue overall.
Amazon gets a lot better with an ad blocker because most of the crap is sponsored results at the top of the search which if they’re gone, you get stuff that’s closer to an actual result for your search.
Don’t be baffled… “worlds largest selection” pivoted to worlds largest fence. Financially, the third party product is better for Amazon (no inventory - the third party stuff is a revenue generator!)
How exactly does Spooky23 have the buying power to price competitively with a major retailer? The answer is pretty obvious. It’s cheaper to pay crackheads to loot CVS than to troll for clearance blowouts.
Plus, Amazons search is garbage. Available items that exactly match the query get ignored. Actually the query only vaguely resembles the results. There is basically no filter functionality (even simple things like which item I can get tomorrow), and the few filters that do exist are ignored. It's like they're playing some funny psycho game with you in order to make you buy stuff that's not quite what you want, even though they do have what you want.
Yes there should be a simple test such as "show me the cheapest three meter hdmi cable including shipping". Both ebay and amazon fail it spectacularly. Perhaps they don't want a race to the bottom?
I don’t think Amazon created this on purpose. They did create a system where individual vendors are incentivised to scam consumers though.
The most common and irritating one I see is making a listing for a product at a low price, selling lots of said item and getting people lulled into reordering, then bump the price, change the per-order quantity, or even change the brand or product sold under that listing, 10xing your profit on residual reorders, while you relish the original deal on a new item number. Rinse and repeat.
I believe an awful lot of it is due to allowing third party sellers.
And I think a lot of it is third party sellers uploading their catalogs without trying to sanely de-dupe it vs what's already there. And Amazon certainly doesn't help in how they organize their search results. Please give me a simple size and quantity separate from the description. So often I have to open up a bunch of entries because the description is long enough to push that off the summary you see on the search page.
I also think there are a lot of entries on there where the main objective is to get accidentally grabbed when the main supplier is out of stock.
What the replies seem missing is that books are not just the thing Amazon started with but also subject to regulation around pricing in places like Germany, which Amazon sells in. The reason they seem to have good and consistent data on many books is that it's necessary in order to avoid violating laws and regulations.
Agreed. Everytime I order supplements, I have to create a spreadsheet to compare the price per active ingredient weight. Hard to standardize such a thing, of course, but for a lot of other household articles it would definitely be possible.
To be fair, Amazon didn't create this.
Even supermarkets position products at different height to steer their sales, and the majority of customers grab the laundry detergent from the mid-shelf with the most sensational pricing-tag.
A specific book is also a far more unique product than i.e. "laundry detergent".
To be comparable, you would have to compare laundry detergent to a genre of books, and maybe also the publisher.
And then the absurdity of some of Amazon's "Smart Shopping" strategies becomes quite obvious: Is there a market for an Amazon Dash-button that blindly ships i.e. a "fiction book from Penguin publishing"...?
I wonder how true that is. I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves.
The fact that the middle shelf of a supermarket is usually the first one to be empty is quite compelling evidence.
> I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves.
Just to validate that assumption: Would you say this is the same for toilet paper? Soap? garbage bags? Sponges? Pencils? cooking-oil?
There are lots of commodity items I use where I don't know the brand, I cannot even tell how often I switched the supplier of them in the past year...
Subjectively, most people _I_ know buy out of a pool of detergent-brands, all looking quite similar (and most belonging to the same parent company).
If they are bombarded with advertisement inside and outside of the shop, and maybe a stacked palette of a different brand of detergent, many of them will "try" this new product instead and end up expanding their pool of brands they will buy.
For most of the items like toilet paper and paper towels and soap, we have specific brands that we always get the only differences which size seems to be the cheapest to me at the time. The wife is very adamant about those.
This means, at one point in time these specific brands used the same techniques to turn you into their dream customer: A buyer who is loyal to them no matter what competitors and even the retailers are offering.
Your choices are influenced by exposure, and I don’t mean Tuesday. I mean your entire childhood and adolescence as well.
How did you decide on that brand, really? And what was your second choice? Even if you narrowed down to three options by pure rationalism the tiebreaker is often emotional. Then we convince ourselves the decision was objective even when it was not.
At least with TP the choice was blind, as I was buying whatever was cheapest and receiving complaints until I just started trying every brand until a specific one “won out”.
See I don’t understand how they have multiple vendors for Kraft or Johnson and Johnson products. There are no multiple suppliers.
Coca Cola I can understand, but those are all franchisees and the parent company watches them like a hawk. Mostly what they make is purified water to mix with the syrup they got from corporate to reduce shipping costs and losses.
For branded products a seller would need an agreement with Kraft or Johnson and Johnson as a reseller before Amazon will let you list. Many companies do have multiple reseller (most with geographical limitations) but some like shoe companies are more strict.
Then you have Apple and Amazon creating the brand Amazon renewed to sell watches.
Not just many suppliers of generic products, but suppliers come and go on an almost weekly basis thanks to always choosing the cheapest, suppliers going out of business, etc. Hooray capitalism.
Nothing on Amazon is going to work like books on Amazon do.
Amazon is, originally and primarily, a bookstore. Amazon has long-established direct contracts with all book publishers (and in fact, a stranglehold over those publishers.) Any time you see a book listed on Amazon, it's a book sold by Amazon, attained directly from one of these publishers.
AFAIK no third-party sellers are even allowed to sell "books" Fulfilled By Amazon; if you see a third-party FBA "book" on Amazon, it's because the seller slipped it in under some category other than "books." (The "novelties" and "calendars" sections are often abused for this.)
But for categories other than books, Amazon never built up this same direct logistical pipeline to suppliers, let alone the sort of stranglehold over suppliers in other categories that they have over book suppliers. So Amazon doesn't have the ability to force constant, even, predictable supply with contractually-set pricing in other categories, the way they can with books.
Often, this means that Amazon's first-party supply chain for something, might just run out of that thing entirely.
Part of the reason the FBA program exists is that it allows Amazon to take advantage of third parties' connections to suppliers to compensate for their own supply-chain deficits. Amazon-the-asset-holder might have run out of e.g. Kleenex, but that doesn't mean that Amazon-the-site or Amazon-the-pool-of-warehouses has run out of Kleenex, because Amazon has allowed some third-party FBA seller to stock stuff in their warehouses, and that seller happens to have brought in some stock that have the UPC code for Kleenex. So hey, there you go, we have Kleenex after all! Only now Amazon has to follow the seller's dictates on pricing and discounts — and your experience on availability (unless/until first-party supply comes back) will be dictated by the seller's (usually much-less-predictable) ability+desire to resupply.
There are situations where this model actually makes sense! Some mid-sized OEMs that Amazon doesn't feel are worth their while to engage with directly, instead sell their products directly through Amazon as FBA sellers. In these cases, buying the product on Amazon is just like buying the product through the seller's website, but you get it faster because it's already in an Amazon warehouse.
That said, despite FBA having times where it makes a lot of sense, I also find Amazon Marketplace distinctly baffling. A thing sold by a third party, shipped by that third party, with returns handled by that third party, shouldn't be able to be conflated with an Amazon.com/Amazon FBA listing just because of a shared UPC code! Those are two very distinct experiences and are not fungible, and it's bizarre to pretty much everyone I know that Amazon has tried to conflate them.
I've gotten both novels and textbooks from Amazon that I'm not certain aren't counterfeits. (The textbook one is especially fuzzy, as sometimes you'll actually get an "international edition" which isn't necessarily fake...but may not be what you actually ordered either.)
These days, I'm not sure books are much different from any other good.
I am fairly certain that you're incorrect re: selling books with FBA.
Source: I've self-published books and sold them on Createspace, KDP, Amazon Advantage, and all of their old systems before switching to using my own local printer and shipping the books to FBA.
Blind ordering only made sense when Amazon customer service was top notch. That ended when Amazon started having profitable quarters and started Day Two.
Now I have to be paranoid about checking product details like if there are 3rd party sellers using FBA which potentially signals fakes. There’s no longer blind trust in Amazon for a lot of customers. I can’t just mindlessly buy stuff with the hope that Amazon customer service can take care of anything going wrong like they did years ago.
I can't come up with a single item that I would blind order. At most, I could ask Alexa to add an item to a shopping list and then verify the list and place the order myself.
I would love to order a bunch of things - toilet paper, kitchen paper, toothpaste, mayonnaise, sriracha, foil, dishwasher and laundry tabs. Anything that isn’t a weekly purchase that I find myself out of when I want to use it.
The problem isn’t that I don’t want to blind order it, it’s that I don’t trust blind ordering it from Amazon.
With the exception of foodstuffs, where I don't want to have to worry about perishability and storage, I've got most of these on scheduled deliveries - toilet paper every 4 weeks, laundry tabs every 6 months, etc. Once you figure out the appropriate rate and with a little bit of buffer stock to account for variability, you never run out of anything.
I don’t want toilet paper every 4 weeks, I want it when I have 2 rolls left. If we’re away, that might be 6 weeks. If we have family visiting it might be 3 weeks. If I buy toilet roll in the shop, my subscript still comes unless I cancel it.
To be clear, these are minor complaints, but they are the things that asking Alexa to order should solve
I put baby diapers on recurring order every X weeks, it just worked, and Amazon would inform me that there was an upcoming order and give me the time to either move the date or cancel it. Super convenient for working parents!
That’s the exact opposite of blind ordering though. You’re planning your orders way ahead of time.
That’s not to say that it isn’t useful, but it doesn’t do anything against the narrative that Amazon is not trustworthy like it used to be. It’s a common theme in the comments here. When I think about it, it’s been a common theme on HN for years now, ever since commingling destroyed Amazon’s reputation
I could come up with a few. And they are all sold exclusively by IKEA.
Never occurred to me before that vertical integration can be a positive factor in consumer trust. Usually I see myself girly in the camp of "oh noes! Sooner or later they will use it against us!"
The added dynamic of Amazon is they might not even be Tide pods but some counterfeit or perhaps a batch that didn’t pass quality control to sell in more traditional brick and mortar.
My latest in a long list of WTF was I ordered a medical device (new). It came in a package that had once been sealed but the seal was cut. Upon removing the product, it had clearly been used by someone and returned. It was a sling for my arm, and I intend to use it for 2-3 weeks until things feel better but I wouldn’t return it like the last person did. I returned it immediately. I’m not accepting open box items of that nature.
This was exactly my problem with the dash buttons, and with Amazon's recurring order system.
And I'm not certain, but I believe that sellers game this system- you can see certain things that make sense to order on a recurring schedule have unconscionable prices. Once you have a certain threshold of recurring orders, why not increase the price 10x? Especially because Amazon puts so many dark patterns in the way of a user canceling a "subscription".
I just reordered something I order fairly frequently today. The price is pretty predictable but, yes, I like to just double-check it hasn't doubled in price. Not a big deal to order every few months and confirm it's still what I want to order at the right price as opposed to just putting it on an out of sight, out of mind subscription.
Being in Canada makes Amazon seem entirely unhinged. I'll see something on Wirecutter or some other review site, click through to Amazon.com and see that it's only $64. Great. Switch to Amazon.ca and it's $350, presumably because of some bot that sees there's no one else selling it so it lists it for some huge price to take advantage of arbitrage.
Some things will double in price, or just suddenly be out of stock for no apparent reason. They tried to push groceries but a case of Kraft Dinner came out to several dollars per box, compared to about $1.50 from my extremely expensive local grocery or half that from Costco.
They never sold those dash buttons in Canada, but I can imagine pushing the button to get more tide pods and being irate when the cost was twice as much as it was last time.
Put another way, I don't trust amazon to not screw me. Many people have concerns, some based in reality and some completely imagined, about Amazon and other large corporations trying to screw them for just a few more cents.
Why would I give up what little control I have?
Buying purely on voice commands is new and different. In an environment of trust that is novel and exciting. In an environment of fear or concern that is scary and burdensome. Why would I choose burdensome?
They need more trust, which means being more trustworthy. That likely means losing some profits for consistency.
They need a smooth voice purchasing experience and I have no clue what that means.
On top of that, when you consider how often Alexa plays the wrong song, it's pretty hard to trust it with purchases. The equivalent of asking for a pop song and getting heavy metal would be trying to order some pens and ending up with a canoe or something.
Yes, the absolute deluge of options for price and shipping speed is one of my chief concerns as well, even outside of voice based orders. This plagues the web interface as well, requiring you to either try and refine via search options (not always available!) or basically doom scrolling. Even a simple sort option, like Ebay has had for years on price v distance, would be a welcome change.
But it seems that, much like Google search and the glut of questionable sites gaming the system via SEO, I think Amazon too will always be fighting against sellers clamoring to be 'above the fold' of results.
LOL, makes me think of something more like putting in an order on a stock exchange:
Alexa, what's the current price of a small box of Tide Pods?
A box of 10 Tide Pods costs $5
Alexa, place a limit order for a box of 10 Tide Pods at $5 to expire at the end of the day if not filled, and notify me when it is filled.
If I can order you a box of 10 Tide Pods for $5 or less today, I will do so and notify you.
...time passes...
I have filled your order for a box of 10 Tide Pods for $5; they are expected to be delivered within the next two days
Not that this would necessarily be a good thing, but it seems to me like it would generally beat having to pull out my phone or fire up my browser and do it that way...
I’d argue their app is so good and reliable that these other things don’t add enough to make them worth it. If I see something is out or I need something it only takes a second to buy it on my phone.
I would consider (something equivalent to) what Amazon envisions if it was products from my local grocery store, at the prices of that specific store. But Amazon? I can't trust they'll be any of: in stock, with the exact same product, at basically the same price.
Exactly... I'll order an item a few times a few weeks apart... then the next time it's suddenly 50% higher priced. No real reason why. I've taken to actually ordering direct from a few different mfgs for a few things Amazon has had that local stores haven't simply because Amazon's pricing is sometimes unreasonable.
That they outright lie about "retail" when doing sales is also offputting. The irony is I've started to appreciate Prime Video, and now they charge extra for that without commercials. It's infuriating all around.
That doesn't even begin to cover counterfeit, expired or other problems on fulfillment such as saying it'll be there tomorrow until the order is placed and you get it 4 days later, or maybe not at all (lost?).
I don't think any of that is true. If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it. Why? Because Costco has proven itself trustworthy of a blind repeat purchase. You could trust the price you're paying is typical and fair. Amazon on the other hand...
To build on the Costco analogy: for any given product category they typically only have three specific options: good, better, best. I could tell Costco bot that I need AA batteries and it would ask me if I prefer Duracell, Kirkland brand, or cheapest. I trust that either of them will be plenty good, so I would say cheapest.
Amazon has a vastly different experience with thousands of indistinguishable Chinese knockoffs. I can only ask Alexa for a very specific product, otherwise I don't trust what I'll get. I use Alexa to add products to my cart, which serves as a reminder that I need to do a little more shopping from my phone or PC.
These days, you can't even pick out a brand-name product from a brick and mortar store and be sure of getting the real thing.
People will buy something from a store, buy a fake version of that thing on AliExpress, swap the fake into the box, re-shrinkwrap the box, return the shrinkwrapped fake to the store, and sell the real one on eBay.
The store will often put the thing back on the shelf, because it's still shrinkwrapped, weighs the same, and even looks the same under an x-ray.
And then someone buys it and gets a dud.
This is why, except for a few high-margin categories, Amazon itself will never put returned stock back into inventory, instead always selling it off through bulk channels. It's effectively impossible to authenticate a return as legitimate these days, without converting the "BNIB" device into a "NIB" device.
Amazon put tons of stuff back on the shelf. It’s not quite as bad as Fry’s Electronics where every single thing they sold had obviously been opened and shrink up, but it’s getting close.
> People will buy something from a store, buy a fake version of that thing on AliExpress, swap the fake into the box, re-shrinkwrap the box, return the shrinkwrapped fake to the store, and sell the real one on eBay.
Because eBay will respond very angrily when people report getting the fake piece of junk. Walmart doesn’t care if you are intelligent work hard at it. You don’t even have to give them your drivers license and they never know.
That's been an issue with ordering consumer electronics. I don't know if the item is refurbished, returned,or endorsed by the manufacturer warranty. I basically only order through the manufacturer or best buy these days.
I once bought a "new" hard drive from Amazon. It was an enterprise datacenter drive with thousands of hours. Someone had scrubbed the SMART statistics, but did not wipe the drive. They deleted the partition table, but it was still chock full of data. Mostly encrypted, but there was plenty of cleartext logs including runtime statistics for the rack the drive was in.
I'm about 85% sure it was a decommissioned Backblaze drive based on the logs I could see. This was probably 10 years ago, though.
Even when amazon shows that you're on the manufacturer store, it still may not be genuine. I bought an intel wifi card off what looked like the official intel store on amazon, but it turns out that it was an out of production model sold by a third party, but amazon showed that it was "Intel". Very confusing and frustrating if you don't know what to look for beforehand.
I ordered automated cat feeders and had bought the “honey guaridan [sic]” which is a Chinese knockoff when I thought I was buying “HoneyGuardian” brand automated cat feeders.
This is blatant behavior on the part of sellers and Amazon turns a blind-eye to it.
I didn’t learn my lesson either.
I ordered seat covers, and what came was a misspelled Chinese knockoff brand instead of the name brand I thought I was ordering.
I can’t trust purchases made on Amazon and I have an eye for detail. They got me twice. I don’t know how non-detail oriented folks keep from it happening.
> I ordered automated cat feeders and had bought the “honey guaridan [sic]” which is a Chinese knockoff when I thought I was buying “HoneyGuardian” brand automated cat feeders.
I have to admit that's hilarious, but I'm pretty sure HoneyGuarDIan (correct spelling) too is a Chinese company, based in Shenzhen.[1] Edit: Actually I'm increasingly convinced HoneyGuarDIan and HoneyGuarIDan are the exact same company: take a closer look at the URL https://www.honeyguardian.com/pages/honeyguaridan-app and compare the second-level domain name with the last part of the URL pathname! Maybe it wasn't a knockoff after all :-D
But to your point, Amazon actually bait-and-switched their own batteries. They had basics batteries that were confirmed rebranded Panasonic eneloop, then changed them out to Chinese batteries while keeping the product page and reviews.
Amazon did that. So good luck getting them to crack down on reputation fraud.
I've never used Alexa, and hardly use Amazon anymore, but this kinda gave me an idea.
Is it possible to ask Alexa to add generic items to a list, then be able to iterate said list as Amazon searches? That seems kinda useful, if it exists.
Maybe I'm not the every man, but I price shop. If All free is on sale half of Tide free, I'm ordering that, and so on.
Yes, Costco is like the opposite of the Amazon experience. Costco will only carry a few brands of any given item, but they're all generally pretty good with nothing drop-shipped from a random AliExpress vendor. Their house brand - Kirkland - is pretty good as well. It's a curated set of products with a relatively small number of SKUs vs. Amazon's flea-market-like experience.
The Kirkland house brand is often backed by one of the name brands they sell. They have quality metrics for Kirkland and they check the products regularly. If the quality dips, they swap out the provider.
Amazon will accept returns, but not like Costco will or sears did.
Sears would exchange any broken craftsman tool for a new one even decades after purchase. Costco is much the same. Used, year old stuff with missing parts will gladly be refunded in full.
To be fair to Costco you have to understand that the way they do that is they just send the item back to the vendor and deduct it from the next purchase. The vendors only option is to not sell stuff to Costco anymore.
I think it's the other way around. Kirkland takes the "B quality stock" and sells it under it's own label. This is why they have an essentially no questions asked return policy. If the quality dips it eats into this margin and the provider is back to making next to nothing on units that fail to pass their own more stringent brand QA checks.
Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think it will do well with genz and younger millennials.
I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such incredibly healthy options as (only) Sunny Delite and Tropicana for orange juice, massive boxes of Lays chips and cheezits and popcorn. I saw so few items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays.
I didn't expect a complete grocery experience but I was expecting it to have far more healthy options these days, or even just more options in general.
I don't eat any of this stuff. I guess you're a costco family or not. I was a costco family as a kid and had to learn how to eat healthy after shoving soda down all day long my entire childhood.
edit: Yeah I'm looking just at their juice section here and there's not a single less-sugar option just as an example https://www.costco.com/juice.html.
Although, damn, $18.99 for 24 ojs is good. But both options are so disgustingly sweet. I had a single OJ for $7 from einsteins yesterday.
What’s healthier than being able to buy massive amounts of high quality fish and beef and decent quality vegetables and fruit, with zero extra ingredients? Same for legumes, farro, brown rice, etc. They have tons of zero sugar drinks as well.
I can’t eat that healthy via other grocery stores because it’s too expensive typically.
I find that Costco in store generally has stuff that tends to follow local consumer preferences.
It is worth mentioning that Costco.com does not stock the same things that the physical stores sell, more-so than any other retailer I know of. And different stores have a lot of latitude in what they stock.
My nearest store has tons of things like sugar free sodas, pro-biotic soda, kombucha, no sugar added juices, and juice shots, etc... It might just be the local Costco catering to their market.
Yeah, my wife and I always check out the local costco when visiting a city. I can't remember which one it was but I distinctly remember being surprised at all the asian-type foods at one. They had squid chips, sushi, boba, and all kinds of strange things. I want to say it was Oregon or Seattle but it's been a while
I saw a picture of the Costco in Alaska a few years ago and it was full of camping gear and salmon and stuff like that. It was pretty cool. I think it was Juneau, the "smallest Costco."
> I saw so few items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays.
Costco sells a lot of junk food because Americans, as a whole, eat a lot of junk food. They also stock a lot of staples (rice, beans, flour, cooking oils, canned/frozen fruits/veggies, &c), and decent quality raw fruit/veggies/meat. Not liking the Costco shopping experience is a pretty reasonable point of view (it forces you to plan/structure your shopping and food storage in weird ways IMO), but it seems like a strange complaint to zero in on the selection of processed foods when they really do seem to try and accommodate a wide variety of needs and preferences the best they can.
They also sell kind of strange (compared to the bags of doritos) stuff periodically, which I love. For instance the Costco in Maine (of all places) has Bird Nest Soup and NordeX PIKNIK cheese in a can. Kind of apropos of nothing. It's pretty cool.
Are there actually good juices on the public market? I'm pretty sure anything you don't squeeze yourself has been reconstituted from parts.
I was chatting up a hotel chef recently and he told me the lil 8oz of 'proper' orange juice he gave me cost more to put on the table than the entire rest of the breakfast combined.
> Are there actually good juices on the public market?
I never found one.
Fruit juices consist of fructose. It's bad for you in high quantities, just like sugar. Eating a piece of fruit is healthy for you - fructose in small quantities, and the rest of the fruit slows down its digestion. Fruit juice is a fructose bomb.
Not really. I was just using OJ as an example because for whatever reasons I've been paying attention to the pricing of different breakfast places OJ + grocery OJ since covid. I pay $7 for "fresh squeezed" from Einsteins, but Syrup a popular breakfast place next to me charges $8.99 for a cup about half the size of that. I made that mistake once.
I was just hoping for healthier, zero/low sugar options of a lot more things at Costco. If I ever have a zero/low sugar option, I usually get it. I haven't drank a full sugar soda in a decade and avoid all sugar so my tolerance to sweet things is super low. Black coffee, etc.
No/low sugar isn't inherently better for you...just saying. Most of the time stuff that advertises that there's no or low sugar is packed with sweeteners that your body still treats as sugars...but massive food conglomerates have lobbied the FDA to allow them to say there's no added sugar.
Plus, if you're drinking fruit juice to help stay hydrated, you literally need sugars and salts to actually instigate the hydration process.
What are you talking about? Buy a bag of oranges and a juicer from Costco and you’re set. You can also get 50lb bag of rice, tons of produce, milk, eggs, meat—you don’t need to buy the processed junk foods. In fact I don’t find many stores other than Costco where I can buy e.g. entire cuts of meat to cut into steaks myself.
if you want healthier juice....buy a juicer and make it yourself. You're never going to get healthy options from a wholesaler who buys from massive brands that are not known for healthy options. Long term, making it yourself is cheaper too.
Most of the time in the juice space, anything that is designed to be shelf-stable in a warehouse is not. at. all. healthy. It's packed with preservatives and other stabilizers that are not good for you to consume. Or it has been pasteurized, which kills the vast majority of the nutrients in the liquid itself.
I will say as a caveat, that the Kirkland Signature Organic Coconut Water is quite good.
Same, that's really why it was my sticking point for the post when in reality, getting the wrong item is a bigger issue. Lots of times I'll order something on promo only to have it substituted in the near future for either an inferior product or near double the cost.
> If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it.
The question is would it make people shop more? If you buy one set of paper towels a week, and Costco rolls out a voice interface, would you now start ordering 2 or 3? If not, what return are they getting on the billions of dollars in additional spending?
In reality people would use it for a day, go "neat", and switch right back to the website or app.
The question is would it make me shop more AT COSTCO.
And yes, it would make me shift some of my purchasing from my local grocery store to Costco. Costco is a long drive that's only worth it for large trips.
But if I could voice order for shipping or (even better) delivery? My local grocery with its god-awful parking lot full of blind 90-year-olds stuck in reverse would be in serious trouble.
This is the inherent problem with Amazon's support of 3rd party vendors through their platform, and the general lack of quality controls.
I increasingly use specific companies for purchases, because I can't guarantee that what I order through Amazon will actually be the product I wanted, or be at the quality level I'd expect. It's getting to be absolutely awful.
Some things Amazon did since the introduction of Alexa have definitely worked at cross purposes to a sightless buying experience as well. Maybe I would order a product sight unseen from 2014 era Amazon, but in the intervening time Amazon has been flooded by cheap knock offs including Amazon's own Amazon Basics. Amazon has also started placing promoted products higher in search results. As a result, even searching for a specific brand name doesn't yield the results you would expect.
> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy".
Especially given the bonfire of trust that is Amazon "sponsored results". Any time I search for anything on Amazon these days I have to spend a bunch of extra time scrolling around trying to figure which of the search results is genuinely a good deal as opposed to one that's paid for placement.
Given that, why would I ever trust something like an Alexa to select a good deal for me?
> The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs.
I disagree. The issue here is they had a really great use-case and utterly failed to deliver to the end user. No one is requesting their smart assistants to order anything because there is absolutely no support on the platforms + absolutely no user trust of how that is going to go.
If all they ever did was niche their assistant down to being a smart shopping list, it would have been a great product, and likely would have driven sales. Instead they failed at even the thing they would have been had an advantage on (selling things to customers who are buying from them directly). Google and apple would have been operating through a black box of "privacy preserving apis" to do the same with their own integrations.
Then they proceeded to suck at the stuff all the other assistants also suck at.
I think that could work, but not on Amazon. Their prices are all over the place. I bought a textbook, new on Amazon. Sold by Amazon, dispatched by Amazon. $30. When looking at that same listing it is now $90.
I don’t want Alexa to buy me a new bottle of my shampoo when it can be $10 one week at $50 the next.
But from Walmart or Target? There’s a price stability where you can basically go shopping without looking at the price tags. A price of a toilet roll won’t explode because of some price algorithm fighting each other.
>If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience.
Agree.
Go look at the Alexa Skills for any random category and sort by "best sellers," then sort again by "average review." There isn't an ecosystem.
For Lifestyle, the "4th best selling" [1] skill is "North American Roofing," which is for a company in Tampa.
There should be more there. Given the devices with a touch-sensitive screen, some form of presence detection, location awareness, and other things, there's a lot of missed potential there.
I have basically zero interest in "smart home" features and I'm not sure what "assistant experience" means at the current level of technology. It certainly isn't an admin with a roughly middle of the pack level of savvy much less the actual exec admin that I would want.
I'd be happy ordering with a voice assistant if it's at least as good as I am at deciding good alternatives. Imagine I want to, say, purchase garbage bags, because I am out. It's not exactly a complicated product, and yet I might care about whether it has any smell reduction agents, whether the bag is tough enough, the size, and possible alternatives that are either a bit better, or quite a bit cheaper. Either the agent understands my preferences, or I am not going to trust it.
And as we look at Amazon's webpage, we first have straight out ads, then a few items it hopes I might buy that are typically related to what other people buy, and maybe a mention of what I bought before, but no understanding of why I bought that one. It's not a very easy task, and one where it's easy to lose trust
> The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. This is also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed.
As an owner of several Echo devices and a former owner of the Dash buttons, my household LOVED the Dash buttons. Never once have we ordered anything via Alexa, nor do we want to. With the button, you selected the EXACT item with a single button. With Alexa, you have to explain what you want, don't necessarily know the price, seller, etc. It was an all around worse UI for buying.
And that's the problem you speak of. No one wants to do that. They made a smart speaker then convinced themselves something ELSE was the killer feature and predicated the finances on that.
> With the button, you selected the EXACT item with a single button. With Alexa, you have to explain what you want, don't necessarily know the price, seller, etc.
Hm, but wasn't the price of items ordered through the Dash buttons subject to change, too? Like last week when you set everything up it was $5 per item, but sellers changed and now its $15? Sounds risky to me without checking the order confirmation mails...
They only sold the buttons for specific brand names. The only one that had a brand I used was Charmin, and we had a specific pack size picked. The price was only going to change a little based on the market for toilet paper, so we didn't check it often. I had another for Dial soap but Dial discontinued the product I bought.
It would've worked if Amazon hadn't turned their store into a cesspit of fakes, random 3rd parties sellers and arbitrary pricing. At this point if I pressed one of those buttons I'd have zero confidence in what might turn up. If Costco or the like had those buttons that would add it to a regular delivery I'd plaster the house with them.
This is the core problem. If what I wanted was the first search results every time I searched Amazon, and I had no decisions to make between search and buy... then Alexa could work. That is far from the reality. This is a problem Amazon created, so it's hard to feel bad for them.
Not only had this hurt their Alexa dreams, imo it has hurt their brand reputation as well. Amazon is no longer a retailer I trust. I would much rather buy from a more traditional store that doesn't have 3rd party sellers, and maintains standard prices and quantities.
> Make it a value add in my life and I wouldn't mind paying a subscription fee for it.
I dunno, I feel like the value was priced in the purchase price for me. I would not consider paying both a purchase price and subscription fee for it and probably not a subscription fee at all because all they ever do is go up. What would I do with this dumb robot in my house when I don't agree to pay for their latest fee structure.
This is a problem in general with a whole bunch of products.
If I'm paying up-front, the subscription needs to be an optional add-on that provides additional value. The thing should continue working at some base level for its working lifetime, even if I cancel or the service is shut down.
If the "base level" on the thing I bought is ever changed after my purchase, the company has burned their trust with me. In fact I'll probably switch away and never buy anything from them again.
On the other hand, if they want to build it so a subscription is required to work at all, then I don't want to buy the hardware that I clearly don't actually "own" anyway. It's fair to require paying up-front for a year or two (eg: cell plans) or have a contract requiring a minimum term because obviously the hardware costs something to produce, but in this type of business the product is really the subscription, and the device is just the means of delivery.
Exactly. In our household Alexa is used for playing Spotify, switching some lights on and off, and as an intercom. There is absolutely no chance that I am paying a subscription for a device that is pretty bad as an intercom, and only okay as a light controller/speaker.
In fact, this quote from the article is a little concerning:
> The new technology would more seamlessly allow users to control functions like smart home devices using their voices rather than opening an app.
Problem is, the existing technology can already do this, most of the time. It sounds very much like Amazon is going to try and charge me a monthly fee for something I already have. That's not going to work out.
Well it's still a speaker, and will still play music. If they bundle in a GPT-5 level personal assistant I can definitely see a ton of people paying the added fee.
It's also why subscribe and save ends up being me cancelling or skipping every month. The prices are not stable enough to blindly trust. One month its cheap, next month it'll be 300% increase.
As an aside, the clock pairs nicely with timers. A sibling of mine who works second and third shift likes it in part because it keeps the time, isn’t illuminated (7 segment leds are out) and the analog aesthetic but without any noise of many analog clocks ticking.
I have one in my kitchen (no echo show for exact values on a timer), and it does a nice job with the timers.
Tangent, have you considered using the powder? It's much cheaper and you can pour the amount you need. The pods only come in large sizes so you're almost always going to be wasting detergent.
I've used the detergent before but I find it messy sometimes or it will clog the detergent door. I use the cheap Finish tabs now. The do just as well as the expensive pods.
I used pods for years after lots of clogged machines with powder.
Now I use powder again, cleans clothes so much better and haven’t experienced the same clogging as years ago.
I use white vinegar instead of fabric softener as I have sensitive skin, wash sheets on 90C which cleans the machine, and still use pods on short washes.
What I want is a truly personal assistant (which LLM's should be capable of). Alexa can barely get me answers to google-able questions.
If I could be assured of privacy issues, I'd be happy to give it access to my email, calendar, bank accounts etc. and then let me just use it like a Chief of Staff.
I know another company is going to come do this, but it's crazy that that company may not be Alexa/Google.
Why is that so simple? I've had online bank accounts, calendars and emails for many years now, but I still can't do a "text search" across all of them. Isn't the LLM the easy part? How do you link and connect all the different systems you interact with?
Or, and I know this is a radical idea, but I think it could work, sell the hardware for more than it costs to make.
I’m pretty happy with having a speaker in one of my room that can play whatever I want, all at the same time, and some basic assistant functionality. If they cost twice as much, I would still buy them.
>sell the hardware for more than it costs to make.
That probably won't work because, at least according to Wikipedia, at some point 10k (!) people worked on Alexa. I'd start at the other end, maybe don't hire an entire Death Star worth of people to develop a voice assistant. That'd probably have saved a few billion here and there.
This seems like such a solvable problem. It only requires some profile setup.
Take the most commonly re-ordered items on Amazon (paper towels, toothbrushes, etc) and have the user select a preferred product, brand, and fallback for each one, as well as a maximum price. Some of that is already implemented for Subscribe & Save and Whole Foods delivery/pickup orders. They could even leverage that existing system.
For less common items, first check the user’s purchase history for something similar and announce if the price has increased more than few percentage points or is not in a normal range for the product category.
That will cover a lot of cases. For the rest, refer the user to do some research on the computer.
Nobody wants to go through building a list of common items. I would just leave the door and come back with my toilet paper, bought from the shop, 5 minutes later.
Also I don't understand that "let's order household stuff" online randomly and individually example. Sure sometimes you run out of something but I think it mostly happens to people like me who live in small places because we don't have the space to have 3 packs of 6 rolls of toilet paper. But usually people who live in small spaces are usually the ones living in high density places where small groceries shops are always available at walking distance. People who live in suburbs usually have enough storage space and do their shopping of houshold items once a month and never run out of anything.
I have most household items on subscription. It saves a ton of time and costs about the same, maybe a little less for some items. And most importantly, it means I never forget something and then have to make another trip.
For me, in spite of living in an ex-urban location, there's a Walmart a 10 minute drive away. But I can absolutely see (and know people) for whom picking up a big package of paper towels in Brooklyn is sort of a pain.
The problem is that they thought consumers were dumb and lazy and would just blindly order Tide Pods no matter what the price. That's not how it works, and Amazon lost a lot of trust over the last 10+ years that their prices were the best.
They should incorporate AI and allow people to have a conversation. "Alexa, how much are Tide Pods?" "They are $10/pack right now, the last time they were lower was May 2023." "Are these cheaper than Walmart?" "No.", etc. But of course they are so greedy they want to try to funnel people directly into Amazon, and their greed is why they are don't have sales through Alexa.
> The problem is that consumers don't behave like that.
Actually they do, just not on Amazon. If you search for 'tide pods' you'll find a WHOLE page of product listings on the first page of the search results full of duplicates and confusing quantity packages. If I do the same on Target.com there are roughly 10~12 products I can actually choose from which is much easier to decipher which one to actually order.
> people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed...
> consumers don't behave like that
Computer savvy HN readers don't behave like that. My computer illiterate mother-in-law, on the other hand, kind of does. My brother-in-law got her one of those Google smart speakers years ago and she loved the thing. Finally, a computer to which she could bark orders and have them fulfilled, much like she does to any human within earshot.
My parents are more computer-literate than the average late-fifty-somethings, but they aren't HN techies by any means. Having lived with them for about a year, I'd break down their Alexa usage like this:
~90% timers
~8% weather
~2% putting items in a shopping list
And I don't recall them ever buying anything via Alexa that they wouldn't have bought on Amazon some other way.
This, plus the fact many of the products sold by Amazon now are fakes and low quality items. I almost never order from Amazon now and doing it blindly via Alexa is not an option.
> The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. This is also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed. I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision and suddenly order more things.
I don't think this is right. My understanding is the average Dash Button was pressed ~5 times, which isn't bad. The problem was that "subscribe and save" generated more orders than that.
For what it's worthy, my company[1] makes a re-ordering IoT device that uses weight to re-order rather than a button click, and we generate more orders than "subscribe and save" programs. This suggests that the problem with Dash was that the habit was not easy to build, not that people wanted to see the product page.
The standard profile from these tech companies is that the consumer is staggeringly, profoundly, unimaginably daft and they're either looking to shop or to have some venal vapid interaction devoid of substance.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, this is exactly how they design their products.
>> Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it.
I'm not sure if you're intending to be literal or engaging in hyperbole to make a point, but either way it doesn't gel with our experience. Yes, we definitely set timers and ask about the weather... near us, at places we're going to, in the near future, etc. We also ask for a lot of conversions, or adjustments to measurements. My partner is a great cook and she is constantly shouting out to Alexa to convert an amount, find a substitute, confirm a cooking temp and time and things like that. I ask it factual questions all the time and usually it has an answer: these might be history, technology, medicine, whatever. Given the device's low price point and lack of any ongoing subscription it seems like a pretty good value to us, and it will even play some mood music for us while we eat and tell us where our shipment of coffee filters is.
I think they've squandered it so much that I think it wouldn't be impossible for someone else to build a site with substantial traffic aggregating and sanitizing Amazon results (whether you could profit off of that might be a different question).
(I have seen people try this but it's immediately apparent that it's not hand-curated. I think selling that point needs to be priority.)
> If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience.
The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of their installed base don't care about the smart home features.
The highest margins in smart home equipment are in the high end, as usual. However, Alexa explicitly targeted the mass consumer market. Many of those folks are completely satisfied with a couple of those "smart" switching plug things, which are dirt cheap and totally commoditized.
Many others live in apartments, and thus their options for home en-smarttening are very limited. Even if they wanted to go for a costly, sophisticated smart home setup, they can't.
Other folks just don't give a damn about smart home tech and are totally satisfied with a thermostat that they must use by walking over to it.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my instinct is that Alexa's reach is incompatible with a business model of selling smart home products for profit.
I don't think they tried hard to create an experience user would like. Their shopping features is honestly very lacking.
I think Alexa was just because of Amazon's norm of spending very high on R and D. That was the reason AWS was born. No one thought people would pay something like 10x just for consistency in cloud, but here we are. One AWS could cover 20 Alexas.
I'm not sure there is a good means for buying over voice only, and I'd argue it's only possible to know now that users overwhelmingly prefer digitally handling the product (title, pictures, description, reviews) before making even repeat purchases. Similarly, I'm not sure Amazon could convert consumers to a tablet-based purchasing device like they envisioned Alexa; we all have smart phones and tablets already.
e.g. I order a particular soap/shampoo or coffee beans every few months. If they had tried recognizing it, they could actually have improved the experience.
It might have worked, if Amazon policed their sellers. However, there are so many poor or scammy sellers, so many counterfeit products, that you really have to scrutinize every order.
Aside from books, Amazon has become my last choice as a place to order.
I actually do use Alexa to buy stuff pretty often, but it’s stuff that I’ve already ordered on Amazon, and which I can’t conveniently buy locally, like pure sucralose powder and aeropress filters.
And that’s the problem. I’m not shopping with Alexa, because that experience is excruciating. I’m reordering things which I was already going to order through Amazon. They’re not actually generating new sales there; they’re just saving me from having to pull my phone out.
Out-of-touch execs that don't know how people shop. They love the experience of having a personal assistant they can tell "buy some flowers for my wife," and they aren't price-sensitive. They happily trade off control over the exact purchase for the time savings.
From that point of view, a robot assistant that you tell "buy me one banana what could it cost ten dollars," and it automatically buys something from their store - that's a slam dunk.
This has many problems. Imagine you are watching a video clip when someone orders a sack of potatoes through Alexa. What is the chance Alexa will place the order?
Or say you wanted to order flour and got flowers etc etc.
Then pranks. Guests enter your house and say "Alexa order 10 packs of cheese!" and you have to rush to cancel it.
Then Amazon has a tonne of spam and rubbish products, what are the chances you get garbage shipped to your house and not the things you wanted.
I would consider using Alexa to buy things if it understood what I wanted. It rarely does. Asking it to list subscriptions, for example doesn’t work. Trying to get it to set up anything beyond a simple timer is a hit-and-miss affair.
They need to make money through an associated line of Alexa compatible products, like smart bulbs, door bells, phones, window shutters, ...
It would be very hard to convince me to buy another subscription for something like Alexa. They would be competing with all the other Big Tech subscriptions I'm paying and that budget is limited. There's only space for a few of those before any new ones become a very tough sell.
Ahh the Dash buttons. I remember those. I remember thinking I'm not a gambling man at all, so what use would that buttons be? Will I pay £5 or £10 today? No thanks lol.
Amazon had low trust back then. It's even worse now
> This is also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed. I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy".
Dash button was great and i stopped using amazon completely over it’s cancellation precisely because i don’t want to go to the app or the website. They canned it because they can’t upsell you on random crap you don’t need
> Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it. Make it a value add in my life and I wouldn't mind paying a subscription fee for it.
I wouldn't. Amazon wouldn't be able to stop them selves double-dipping like they did with prime, throwing in adverts etc.
Subscription models were fine, until they weren't enough to keep big tech growth placated.
Seems like the voice-smart-home problem is the same as the voice-shopping problem: There is a limit to how many features you can/want to support in a voice interface.
It just sucks. I get non-deterministic reactions from "turn off the lights" vs "turn off every light" vs "all lights off".. one of those phrases eventually works. I had to set up a custom action ("goodnight") to reliably do the thing.
If they focused on getting voice control for home automation perfect, it could be a real winner.
> The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales.
As someone who knows folks that worked on Amazon Alexa (back in its earliest days), this was almost never the focus of Alexa. It might seem cool or trendy to constantly hate on Amazon here on HN, and then somehow tie that to some comment on free market capitalism, Amazon did in fact have very normal ambitions with Alexa, build a smart assistant. Bezos, particularly envisioned building some computer from star-trek as his inspiration.
Alexa in its early days was also quite impressive for what they managed to do. It was an example of early ML scaling. They rented hundreds of houses around Seattle, had voice actors talk in different locations in the houses, collected all that data and trained a speech recognition model that was SOTA at the time. Unfortunately while their voice recognition was great, they didn’t apply this scaling approach to natural language understanding. They instead went the root of trying to manually understanding grammar, and iterating all the thousands of possible sentence reconstructions in a large decision tree to help Alexa answer your queries. This of course was hopeless, but this was also almost 5 years before OpenAI released GPT-3 so you can’t fault them for doing essentially what Siri did.
Now the issue with Alexa is like most issues big organizations face, they are slow moving and cannot pivot quickly. What they need to do, is actually hard and will need to be done by essentially a monarch CEO, he needs to delete all the work the Alexa teams have done over the last 5 years in 1 swoop and replace it with LLM’s. Many folks in Amazon made their career on improving the Alexa stack, they will of course mostly be defensive and argue vehemently against deleting entirety of Alexa tech “LLM’s hallucinate too much, we need a combined approach”, they will plead, but the stack needs to be deleted, the entire organization needs to pivot to LLMs. Apple has managed to take steps towards this, I won’t be surprised if Amazon soon will, or maybe they won’t, depends on their ability to not be disrupted.
If they are guilty of anything, it’s being unable to do good research to discover GPT-3 on their own (though tbf no one except OpenAI did this), and then being unable to ditch all the technical debt they have accumulated over 5+ years and pivot completely into LLM’s.
> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy".
This is doubly true ever since they let shady sellers/scammers run free on their platform. I trust AliExpress more than I trust Amazon for any product that isn't explicitly "Sold by Amazon".
There was a noticeable drop in the quality of her ability to understand and answer questions a couple years back. I didn't get one when they came out in 2014, so I can't compare, but the capability is worse than it was when I first got one maybe 5 years ago.
I noticed that in the past year my Alexa speakers have gotten really great at handling long tail fact-finding questions (about history, health, etc.). I use it a few times a week to learn something, when I don't feel like picking up a device.
I actually trust it much more than ChatGPT since it never hallucinates and it cites its source.
It is funny… based on the way Coke (and Pepsi)prices their products (prices all over the place and near constant discounts) they seem to have a critical mass of people that buy their 12pack every time they go the the store no matter the cost.
> The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales.
Exactly why Amazon Fire phone failed. So, they didn't learn their lesson. What happened to their leadership principles, specifically - Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards?
Amazon makes more money on shady tactics than making ordering with that sort of mechanism too expensive.
Check camel camel… Tide pods vary 25% in price, from ok to ridiculous. When Amazon runs out you’ll get subbed with third party seller (probably stolen) product.
If I could use a dash button with Target, I would use it.
I think they're moving that way with charging for Amazon music. They could just bundle Amazon music and smarthome features into a little package and probably get some sales
>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales.
is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.
biz 101: losses in business commonly happen anytime. losses are not wrong or right. they just happen, for various reasons. it is called an occupational hazard. if getting profits all the time was guaranteed, every tom, dick and harry would be running a business.
so companies know about the possibility of losses before they start up.
>and consumers didn't have their expectations met.
naive. companies don't do businesses for that reason. that is kind of a side effect, although a desirable one for companies, because it makes customers continue as customers. companies do business to make money (i.e. profits, not even just sales), plain and simple.
whether we like that or not, and whether their behaviour is ethical or not, and legal or not, are separate, though related issues.
how many times has this been stated on hn, even if in other words? plenty, I bet.
apart from that, it is sheer common knowledge.
>>is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits
>You're describing the main reason for owning one.
Yes. Is that not obvious?
>This has nothing to do with why we collectively allow them to exist.
you are jumping around, and skirting my question. you, i, or we, may or may not wish to allow them to exist, but what the heck does that have to do with my original question? :
>>>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales.
>>is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.
I doubt that there is any company that envisions a product that will decrease sales, or even keep them flat. then why go to the trouble?
Don't make 8 generations of products that do not profit while simultaneously changing nothing other than their form factor.
> companies don't do businesses for that reason.
I didn't say they did. Perhaps you should slow down and use fewer insults while you craft your replies. In any case, if you are losing money and customers are happy, that's certainly different than losing money and customers are not happy. Would you not agree this is "sheer common knowledge" as well?
> and skirting my question.
The product is a full decade old. This does not seem to factor into your question or arguments at all. Perhaps it should?
Often or always? Is reading a generic description of a product (menu) seeing the thing?
What about alcoholic drinks in pubs or bars “2 pints of your best and a glass of house red”.
Alexa may not be great for purchasing from Amazon but this isn’t because humans have never shopped using only their voices. Nor is seeing things required.
The dash button doesn’t use voice it hasn’t proved popular either. Various other threads suggest stability of pricing as an issue. Voice ordering may be part of the issue, as might being unable to see the goods. There is likely a number of issues. The fact something doesn’t work doesn’t prove a single explanation.
>People don't shop with their voices and never have.
>They need to see things.
Nyet. Non. Nada.
What world do you live in?
People seeing things and then shopping with their voices are not mutually exclusive actions.
Not only are they complementary, they are very common, and must have been from the dawn of shops.
How many billions of times, worldwide, must people have looked around at some products there, and said "give me 5 foos and 10 bars" at their neighbourhood store or other shop?
IVR is not a good example because it's an annoying interface that people sometimes have to deal with when calling companies. It actually offers pretty poor UX, because users sometimes know what they want when calling but have to wait to hear the options before making a selection. But it's the best we have for over-the-phone interfaces.
Are you someone who orders things using the Echo? If not, are you just playing devil's advocate?
That already exists too, but it's also poor UX because it processes your response slower than a person would, and it sometimes misunderstands what you're saying or asks you to repeat.
For the sake of argument, we can imagine the Echo technology is advanced enough to be on par with speaking to a real person, like your own personal assistant that you trust.
I could see it being useful for recurring purchases when I run out of an item, although I (and I assume most people) get these items from the grocery store. For items you've never purchased before, I could also see it being useful if, like a personal assistant, it prepares a short list of items to choose from based on your purchasing preferences. But I would still rather see the list of the items before making the purchase.
no I don't use the Echo. but I was not playing devil's advocate. I was just arguing against some people's statements on the basis of logic as I see it. do you think there is anything wrong with doing that? I see it happening on hn all the time. and I think it is the only basis for rational discussion. otherwise what should we go on, emotions?
those have their place, but I think are out of place in debates.
>Again, no one buys things using only such an interface.
I was talking about future possibilities, not the past. I would have thought that was clear from my comment. but maybe it was not worded clearly, or maybe you didn't get it.
>I am middle aged and have never done, not even in pre-e-commerce times.
you are not the same entity as everyone else. you are one, they are numerous.
just the fact that you have never done it does not mean that no one else has ever done it, or would not like to do it.
>It is a non-existent behavior, and there was no reason to think Alexa could will it into existence.
non-existent past behaviours can become future existing behaviours.
I meant Amazon building that feature into Alexa, not that Alexa would create it by itself.
> I was talking about future possibilities, not the past.
Why would anyone want to do an audio-only interface? If there were a need or desire for it, it would have popped up somewhere else in society. It hasn't.
> you are not the same entity as everyone else. you are one, they are numerous.
OK, let me rephrase that. I've never heard of a single other person buying a single thing using an audio-only interface. It probably happens, but it's rare enough that it's safe to say Amazon was trying to invent a brand new human behavior, which (I will reiterate) is stupid.
I think the move to subscriptions makes a ton of sense from a business perspective. But what value add will they offer that is going to motivate people to buy subscriptions?
Maybe it can get bundled into the smart doorbell / camera video storage subscriptions?
I the Alexa app is also awful. Doesn’t follow any sort of standard design language, doesn’t seem updated in years and fails to help you understand the capability of the device.
Something simple like “alert me if my door is unlocked” using a ring device is impossible.
I run my fire tv with it. Context-free search - even if I'm in a video I can just ask "Alexa show me that new movie with Michael Baldwin" or whatever and it goes to the search screen with results. No fooling with a remote, at all.
Add to that that ordering stuff without explicitly stating the total, final price to the customer is illegal in the EU, that was never even going to work everywhere at all...
If that's true, I don't get it is Amazon being metrics driven company didn't see the pattern Alexa is not being used for ordering or orders from Alexa devices is pretty insignificant? Even in 10 years?
Good question. Seems to suffer from same fate. Spot checking 2 years of order history across 2 common personal care products shows at least a 30% variation in price
> If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience [...] and I wouldn't mind paying a subscription fee for it
Why do you say that (both parts)? Alexa has done a good job to integrate with lots of other devices. I can control many aspects of my house through Alexa - lights, blinds, AC, sound, etc. I value that, but I don't think I value it enough to ever want to pay a subscription for it. That's as silly as whoever though selling heated seats in your BMW would fly. I made sure that in each home component I chose a solution that works locally (only AC I had to compromise for lack of options).
And with all that value it provides as a hub? My alexa can't be used to buy anything, call anyone, etc. None of that is configured or permitted as much as I can shut it down. I don't personally see the value there.
I for one am curious where Amazon chooses to draw the line. I don't want to pay a subscription to shout out local hub control commands, but they could be draconian to extra value.
The other really big use case - actually the majority for me! - is telling Alexa to add things to shopping lists. I have one list I always check when I'm at a physical store or preparing for curbside shopping.
What works for a person works of course, but pulling out my phone and just holding down a button and saying "add onions to shopping list" is very helpful halfway through cooking some stuff in a kitchen.
Of course I could put that on my fridge and have a marker. But it's "I need my list right now and have almost no free hands to do this" in other parts of the house too (toilet paper etc). Meanwhile my phone is always in my pocket.
Maybe time to just keep a pocket pad + pencil in my pocket though...
I recently build some smart controls for my residence. Alexa understands the words "Alexa, tell the device to run" about 2/3 of the time, which is infuriating. The other third of the time you end up with "Announcing, 'tell the device to run.'" Put any white noise in the background, a fan blowing, a tea kettle boiling, anything at all, and recognition drops to below 50%. But google isn't any better.
They saw “voice” as the next “mobile” and tried to take it over the way Meta wants VR now. The idea of owning a platform the way Apple owns iOS is what drives these companies to delusion.
I would consider using Alexa to buy things if it understood what I wanted. It rarely does. Asking it to list subscriptions, for example doesn’t work. Trying to get it to set up anything beyond a simple timer is a hit-and-miss affair.
The fact that they could be finally fixing this, and then are putting it behind a paywall is ironic, because if it finally works properly, people could actually start using it for buying stuff.
It would be better if Alexa could have shopping lists. "Alexa how much is a box of tide pods? .... Okay, order me the large box with free shipping please." That would be pretty useful. And any subscription good you've already signed up for would be pretty helpful as it would be nice to manage them with a voice interface. But I don't know if it generates billions in revenue.
I mean, yeah - but take a step back from there. Why is this technology only for commerce? Why is technology only useful if it can be economically exploited? That's a deeper issue and not one you can get a ChatGPT-generated answer to. Culturally, we're hostage to psychopath companies and the investors that love them. Nobody in a hedge fund somewhere is going "hey folks, we should add a 'this makes people's lives better' quadrant to our analyst sheets?"
Maybe they are and we need time to see the pivot in market forces. I just want to take this moment to go on record that only seeing technology as a profit-making machine defeats the purposes of human progress. Let this be a lesson to the rest of you trying to be the next Amazon - it's not working for them. They're losing billions on Alexa and it's all their fault. You aren't bigger, faster, meaner, or better than Amazon. The only thing you can do - the only thing you must do - is focus on your customers as human beings, not just as cash registers.
That sounds really noble, but unfortunately, the world revolves around money. It's not just the psychopath hedge funds investors, a sweet old lady living next door to you would start killing and stealing if she suddenly wouldn't have anything to eat.
Other systems like communism floped and failed royally. Feufalism or slavery are out of question, they are pure vomit, even though Russians live under feudalism.
Business and charity are different things, you can't mix them.
Alexa is a lame product. People still have it simply because they feel bad about throwing it out. No one wants smart homes, people want cheap and affordable homes. No customer wants quick or convenient buying process, people are looking for cheap or at least not overpriced products and services instead. And putting way too sophisticated AI in Alexa would be stupidly expensive.
