[HN Gopher] Amazon Fresh Opens in London
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Amazon Fresh Opens in London
Author : adrian_mrd
Score : 19 points
Date : 2021-03-08 21:23 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fruitnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fruitnet.com)
| turtlebits wrote:
| The branding is so confusing - in the US, Amazon Fresh is grocery
| delivery (or used to be), and Amazon Go are the checkout-less
| convenience stores.
|
| Even more confusing is that Amazon Fresh in-person "stores" are
| only in California and regular Amazon Fresh is still
| delivery/pickup in Washington. There also seems to now be an
| "Amazon Go Grocery" along with the existing Amazon Go.
|
| I'll patiently wait for Fred Meyer stores to adopt this.
| (probably never). Amazon Fresh/Go prices are way too high for me.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Amazon is following in the tracks of Google Play Music All
| Access I'm Feeling Lucky Radio (no joke, this was the actual
| product name)
| amelius wrote:
| Selling fresh Chinese knockoff vegetables?
| uncledave wrote:
| If it's like their Morrisons service it'll all be bashed to shit
| and half of it missing.
| shalabajser wrote:
| Everything is wrapped in plastic, most of it non-recyclable. This
| is not progress.
| xxpor wrote:
| That's typical for London IME.
| nicoburns wrote:
| In a supermarket, yes (but they're moving away from this).
| Local shops tends to be better.
| pizza234 wrote:
| When fruit is sold loose, people will pick individual fruits up
| and select them; at the end of the days, there will be much
| more ruined fruit and general leftover.
|
| I've seen middle grounds where the box itself was made with
| waxed cardboard (with wrapping). Not sure if this is
| necessarily better. Only few items I've seen are sold in
| unwaxed cardboard (and I suppose it depends on the food
| contained).
|
| I don't know how to calculate which alternative is the least
| polluting, but it's not obvious at all that lack of wrapping
| implies less pollution in the big picture.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I feel like delivery has the promise of better packaging
| alternatives than in-person shopping ever will. It'd be
| easier to have more bulk/unpackaged items, less packaging,
| less attention-grabbing packaging/displays, and less wasted
| "impulse buy purchase" space, if no non-professionals were
| allowed in the store. Professional shoppers aren't going to
| mishandle bulk items (or lick them and put them back, which I
| _have_ seen happen with kids in grocery store bulk-goods
| sections).
| plumeria wrote:
| Interesting, I wonder what European country could follow next?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| So many European countries are hell-bent on paying with cash,
| even for transactions like supermarkets. I wonder if the idea
| will translate to somewhere like Germany, since the whole point
| is not having to stop and interact with a checkout point.
| plumeria wrote:
| Netto in Denmark recently introduced something called Scan-N-
| Go, which is a "low-tech" alternative to the walk-out
| shopping from Amazon.
| oneplane wrote:
| I wonder why they could write "Fruit" as a complete word, but
| "Vegetables" was too long? It appears a few times in a few
| images. If it was shortened to be 'hip' you'd expect "Fru" and
| "Veg".
|
| It's odd to see certain words being dumbed down in other
| countries, be it 'trimming' or using a version you'd use when
| communicating with children (as per usage presented in popular
| media, i.e. saying "eat your veggies" to a child).
| pkage wrote:
| Fruit & Veg is a common expression in the UK.
| verletx64 wrote:
| Local thing. Fruit and Veg is a common colloquialism around the
| UK.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| "Fruit and veg" is absolutely standard British English idiom.
| [deleted]
| ageitgey wrote:
| As an American who lives in the UK, here are some of the daily
| things that you might think are someone being cute but are 100%
| proper and accepted speech, even in a formal BBC news story:
|
| - Vegetables are just called 'veg'.
|
| - You don't get a shot, you get a 'jab'.
|
| - You say 'whilst' instead of 'while'
|
| - You don't get a turn, you 'have a go'.
|
| - Band-aids are called 'plasters'.
|
| - Many vegetables have different names. Eggplants are
| 'aubergines'. Cucumbers are 'courgettes'. Pickles are
| 'gherkins'.
|
| So a headline like "To Promote Veg And Vaccines, Boris Johnson
| Has A Go With COVID Jab Whilst Eating A Gherkin and Walks Away
| With A Plaster" is maybe a little silly, but totally proper.
|
| They also write 'Mr Johnson' without the '.' after 'Mr' - and
| they call the '.' a 'full stop'. Basically it's a real
| nightmare over here.
|
| tl;dr - You should localize your US software for the UK market
| if you want to fit in. It's more different than you think. Even
| street addresses work differently here.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Courgettes (from French) are zucchini (from Italian).
| Cucumbers are cucumbers but I understand that commonly not
| the same ones.
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Pickles are 'gherkins'
|
| Only pickled cucumbers are gherkins.
|
| You wouldn't call a pickled egg or onion or whatever else a
| 'gherkin'.
| samatman wrote:
| While this is correct, in American vernacular 'pickle'
| without qualifications is precisely a gherkin.
| binrec wrote:
| If pickles are called gherkins, what are gherkins called? Or
| is there no separate word for them?
|
| (In the US, a gherkin is a small pickled cucumber. A
| cornichon is a type of gherkin, but there are other types.)
| carmen_sandiego wrote:
| I don't think we care that much about localisation in
| software. Or rather we're very used to not having it. So as a
| native I recommend not spending that much effort on it.
|
| A lot of the above will make you fit in better, but some are
| kind of colloquial and the standard 'international' ones work
| fine. Nobody will find it unusual if you use 'while', for
| example, or ask for your 'turn'. True enough though, 'shot',
| 'band-aid', and probably 'eggplant' will mark you as an
| outsider. Some of them are also class-based, which is a whole
| other thing that I'm happy to say Americans suffer much less
| from.
|
| Also, when in the US, I feel weird calling a band-aid a band-
| aid because it feels like corporate subservience. A bit like
| I feel a pang of rebellious disgust when using the word
| 'hoover' in British company.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| In the UK Amazon has a deal with supermarket chain Morris ons for
| groceries orders and deliveries through the Amazon website. My
| understanding is that a significant portion of the groceries sold
| at this new store are Morrisons'.
| kingosticks wrote:
| I don't know if this is just a coincidence but there's a
| Morrisons supermarket almost opposite this new store in Ealing.
| They could wheel the stock over the road in a trolley if they
| wanted!
| londons_explore wrote:
| And it costs significantly more to get the exact same egg box
| from Amazon than from Morrisons... (They have slightly
| redesigned labels)
| [deleted]
| olso wrote:
| wow, plastic everywhere
| jackhalford wrote:
| But how does it work?
|
| The article only mentions that you scan your phone at the
| entrance. The tags don't seem to be RFID or anything special
| neither.
| tuna-piano wrote:
| Amazon claims cameras automatically track what you take and put
| back. But if that's the case, then I'm left confused as to why
| receipts take so long (15-20 mins+ sometimes) to be generated
| after leaving the stores?
|
| Is it possible it's actually a manual process of people
| watching the videos, or more likely identifying what happened
| at each "take off shelf/put on shelf" point?
|
| They're still just building up the customer base, training data
| and models and it's not as magical as it all seems?
| londons_explore wrote:
| They need to wait till not only you leave the ship, but also
| all people who were near you when you picked or returned any
| item. Then they can use that to resolve ambiguities ("one of
| these 3 people took this item which is now missing from the
| shelf, who was it")
| plumeria wrote:
| Is your observation based on multiple samples? Or just a
| couple of casual visits? Would be interesting to know their
| real median receipt generation time.
| devindotcom wrote:
| I wrote about it back when they showed off the first one here
| in Seattle. Not sure how much they've updated it but it's
| largely RGB cameras in the ceiling and weight sensors in the
| shelves:
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/21/inside-amazons-surveillanc...
| londons_explore wrote:
| Closer inspection of the shelves in the London store shows
| regular cheap steel shelving units with no weight sensors
| visible anywhere.
|
| Either the weight sensors are very well hidden, or there
| aren't any.
| jackhalford wrote:
| a bit of googling found a better article thats shows the
| cameras and sensors on the ceiling do the work.
|
| https://www.google.fr/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-...
| raspyberr wrote:
| Is that a critique of the article or are you unable to find
| that out online?
| jackhalford wrote:
| I just found it, see sibling.
|
| Not a critique, honest curiosity.
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