[HN Gopher] Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is los...
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Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
Author : marban
Score : 442 points
Date : 2024-07-23 05:54 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| mPReDiToR wrote:
| I'm never paying for Alexa.
|
| They get latinum enough from datamining and privacy intrusions.
|
| As soon as they put adverts on, or charge for the smart
| timer/lightswitch functionality, I'm out.
|
| There are OSS projects and I have RasPi devices sitting around.
| Burn an SD, plug a mic in, off we go.
|
| Alexa found its way into homes because it was free and does what
| people want. Don't screw that up, add value. Make people want to
| give you money. Don't tighten your grip or star systems will slip
| through your fingers.
|
| What do I know though, I'm only a guy who has one or more of
| these things in every room of my house. SMH.
| corint wrote:
| I still believe that device manufacturers should be forced to
| reveal any keys / similar to load 3rd party firmware onto
| devices like this, if/when the devices go out of support or
| deviate in pricing from when sold (viz: Ring Doorbells adding
| subscriptions).
|
| Sure, the vendor lock does allow them to sell the device at a
| lower cost, but you pay for it later.
| infinityplus1 wrote:
| I would pay for a Jarvis style holographic AI, even if not
| fully AGI.
| wdh505 wrote:
| I saw some waifu tech that is currently available in Japan
| that should be able to have the holographic part and a port
| for current ai
|
| https://blog.dejapan.com/2018/08/life-in-japan/gatebox-ai-
| vi...
| smarm52 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/5VPB5
| nope1000 wrote:
| > More than half of customers who buy smart-camera doorbells from
| Ring, another profitable Amazon device that the company bought in
| 2018, purchase security subscriptions.
|
| Security... Subscriptions?
| ygjb wrote:
| Yes, most consumer home security products have a security
| subscription attached because they require monitoring (and many
| jurisdictions require monitoring for alarm permits to help
| reduce false alarms). For Ring, that also means the features
| listed on their product page (cloud video access and history,
| etc).
| cut3 wrote:
| Probably paying for the ability to save video recordings in the
| cloud, as opposed to paying them monthly to ensure they dont
| send goons to break into your house.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Cloud storage. Downside is that only clips with detections are
| uploaded (plus a capture every n seconds).
|
| Alternative is something like ubiquiti that stores locally, so
| you get 24/7 recordings but it can be stolen or destroyed.
| taskforcegemini wrote:
| it is one alternative, there is plenty others. I'd suggest
| local storage with onlinebackup of any alerts (timeframes in
| which an alert occured)
| mgdev wrote:
| This is the cost of building a proprietary distribution network.
| Now they need to monetize it.
| stacktrust wrote:
| > The report also highlighted the dire need for this [AI] version
| of Alexa to make money to keep the voice assistant alive.
|
| The early iPhone left doors open for experiments that could later
| be supported and productized. Alexa failed to open up devices for
| experiments that could seed innovation. Look at the failure of
| the official "Skills" program, compared to the thriving
| HomeAssistant ecosystem that is an obvious match for smart
| speakers.
|
| If the device fails, 500K devices should be unlocked for use with
| generic Linux, instead of being relegated to landfill.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Alexa gone Lisa ...
| StressedDev wrote:
| I think Amazon actually sold 500 million Alexa devices, not 500
| hundred thousand.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| The very next in doorstopping brick technology
| saulpw wrote:
| It was the second sentence in the article: "Amazon claims it
| has sold more than 500,000". 500m units in 4 years would have
| been an unqualified success. I don't even think the iPhone
| sold 500m in its first 4 years.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| The article appears to be simply wrong.
|
| In May of 2023, Amazon reported that over 500,000,000
| Alexa-enabled devices had been sold:
| https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/5/amazon-introduces-
| four-...
|
| Now, of course: "Alexa Enabled" includes many things other
| than Amazon's own line of Echo smart speakers.
|
| But at least one source suggests that Echo devices sold
| 0.88mm units the first year alone (2014), with tens-of-
| millions sold each year in more recent times:
| https://www.businessofapps.com/data/amazon-
| statistics/#Amazo...
| skhunted wrote:
| Alexa can add things to your shopping list but not take them off.
| You have to manually delete items in your shopping cart. This
| exemplifies why Alexa was never going to be successful. It is a
| user hostile experience.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| I can see why it was the case from engineering standpoint:
| adding a name from spoken phrase to a list is trivial, but
| looking up an item (that might not even be there) from a list
| based on a spoken phrase is prone to transcription errors. The
| user might refer to it with different phrasing than when it was
| added too.
|
| This is feasible only very recently with LLMs.
| brianwawok wrote:
| That's a terrible argument. You found the item to add it.
| Just search a list 1/100000000 as big to find the item to
| remove. I can do with this Python and text to speech with no
| AI.
| skhunted wrote:
| I don't see why one direction is harder than the other. The
| only thing that makes sense to me is that Amazon is user
| hostile and tries to dupe people into buying stuff even if
| they don't want it.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Amazon is pretty generally user hostile. We see it in their
| corporte behavior too. I think for that reason culturally
| they'd struggle to design a device users want to interact
| with.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| That's right. See:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149986
|
| We all wanted an experience as simple as interacting with
| the human at Whole Foods checkout OR the robot at the
| self-checkout, but what we got was this cacophony of
| anything but what you came here for that is amazon.com
| and most modern software design.
|
| People wonder why I long for Amazon Go years after I left
| Seattle and recommended that approach to various retail
| executives.
|
| Is there any better way to subvert retail than to promote
| stealing the merchandise as the ultimate UX?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Go
| leni536 wrote:
| It's far more mundane than that. Adding items to the list is
| a core feature, so there is plenty of engineering time
| getting assigned to it.
|
| Removing items from the list is a feature that has negative
| return, so nobody wants to work on it.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| In addition to that, the inability of Alexa to just answer your
| question and shut up seemed to have gone way off the tracks.
|
| For most of the things I ask my Echo Show, it just follows up
| with "by the way, xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxx.... Pricing is $3/month. Do
| you want it?"
|
| Fuck you. This is worse than the salespeople that bother me at
| Department Stores.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| This is the single thing that killed ours.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Minus the sales pitch (which I've never had), this is one of
| the complaints I have about Google Assistant. "By the way, if
| you ever want to X, just say Y". Just answer the question
| asked and then shut up immediately.
|
| And, preferably, learn to answer the question asked with more
| brevity, as well. If I ask "what's the high for today", I
| don't need to hear "In Cityname, expect a high of 90
| degrees", just say "90".
| im3w1l wrote:
| The reason they say "In cityname" is probably because they
| aren't 100% certain of your city. The preface lets you
| catch the mistake if it makes it.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Yeah, I'm aware, though in general the devices have a
| location specified. But even then, "90 in cityname" would
| suffice.
|
| There are many other interactions in which almost every
| word is unnecessary noise and _can 't_ even be explained
| away as a confirmation.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| The shopping aspect is approximately useless. It is an awful
| experience: It seems to be incapable of producing good results,
| and it is impossible to correct the results without using some
| manner of computer.
|
| This means that it's a lot like shopping with a [pocket]
| computer is, but with even more steps.
|
| (Nobody wants this in its present form. It does not fucking
| work.)
|
| I do enjoy some aspects of having an always-listening device
| that I can command to do stuff (like play some music, or to
| turn on a light, or look up some random factoid), but they've
| made it almost impossible to succeed at using it to do the
| thing they seem to so-desperately seek: Allowing me to spend my
| money more freely on Amazon.
| mFixman wrote:
| I'm glad that Amazon thought they could make money with
| Alexa; mine is currently fantastic as an universal remote
| control (using Zigbee) and music player (using Spotify).
|
| I could see Ameca only being compatible with Amazon services
| if it had been launched a few years later.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For me the killer app was listening to music while doing the
| dishes.
| janalsncm wrote:
| If Alexa could do the dishes for me that would absolutely
| be a killer app.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Tie it to an as-yet-unknown startup company that sends
| people to your house very quickly to perform individual
| light housekeeping tasks. "MicroMaids.com" or some such.
|
| Sounds invasive and scary, but I would've said (and
| probably did say) similar things about a service that
| connected you with strangers for the purpose of getting
| into their cars.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| That's an easy route to a 10- or 11-figure company with a
| huge liability policy and a very fat band of warm bodies
| in the middle that all conspires to mean both high
| prices, and minimal pay with terrible terms for those
| doing the work -- just like Uber.
|
| Other than the fact that it broadly sounds awful, I don't
| see a downside. I'd sometimes love to have such a service
| myself: I have plenty of money to buy services and very
| little time when I'm busy, but when I'm not busy I have
| plenty of time to do these things myself, which I prefer.
| Hiring things to be done on a regular schedule doesn't
| really work for me.
|
| But an informally-arranged, impromptu service? _Maybe_?
|
| ---
|
| "Alexa, mow the lawn."
|
| "OK. Greenscape will arrive today between 3 and 4PM to
| mow the lawn. By the way, did you know that Husqvarna
| offers automated electric lawnmowers? Would you like to
| know more?"
|
| _beep_
|
| ---
|
| Who's up for exploitation? Anyone?
| whateveracct wrote:
| heh I'm sure a PM with a relevant metric punted on that ticket
| plenty times.
| o_nate wrote:
| I ask Alexa to remove things from my shopping list all the
| time. It always asks you to confirm, but then it does remove
| it. Sounds like maybe you're talking about the Amazon shopping
| cart, not the generic shopping list feature?
| tiltowait wrote:
| How does shopping with one even work in practice? Most items I
| buy on Amazon require careful scrutiny to make sure I'm getting
| the right thing. What I want is almost never the first result.
| This is true even in areas that feel like they should be easy,
| like video games.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| It's great for repeat items. Stuff I've bought before I need
| more of. Buy "X" and the first item is the thing I've bought
| before. I use it that way when I know I need it, but I don't
| want to forget. So I just say it, and it's done and I don't
| need to remember or record it somewhere or pull out a phone
| or what have you.
|
| I use it sometimes for new items, usually when I know what I
| want and I specify brand. If it's not the first item, I can
| easily see the other options on the screen and it's not much
| to say to buy the second or third item on the list.
| eastbound wrote:
| But they jack up the prices every few months, right? You
| can get the original at the original price, but from the
| new vendor "OUFIOU"...
| dylan604 wrote:
| For those that do have an Alexa, how _does_ this work? Do you
| have to haggle with Alexa, and then it picks from the
| different sellers that meets your haggling? It seems like a
| much longer conversation is needed than "Alexa, add Tide
| Pods to my list" as Amazon propaganda wants you to believe.
| fckgw wrote:
| If you say "add Tide Pods" then it adds the most popular
| listing of Tide Pods, shipped and sold by Amazon to your
| cart. Which is how 98% of people buy stuff on Amazon
| already.
|
| You may have to specify a quantity but if you're adding
| detergent, paper towels or whatever else popular, name
| brand item it's pretty straight forward.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I'd imagine a shopping list could mean any vague things from
| nerby grocery (i.e milk, and if there are eggs then 6) to
| electronics (a sound recorder for my wife) without much
| specificity. To refine later or already have family
| understanding (eggs = organic vary large ones from black tail
| hens of the Fen Farm). A vocal fridge board basically.
| Shopping lists do not imply ordering items Right Now! Now!
| Neither a specific marketplace at a specific time with
| specific stock. Just a record about something. That the user
| will pick up and do something about it in a follow up step.
| E.g. clear a single item because fuck that sound recorder!
| theGnuMe wrote:
| The app on ios is dreadful...
| dietsprite wrote:
| Yeah, how they don't just build a native app and hire any UX
| agency of any repute given their immense resources and
| investment is beyond me.
| StressedDev wrote:
| The basic problem is Alex never had a business plan, which means
| Amazon never figured out how to build a profitable (sustainable)
| business. It also looks like Alexa's leadership gamed internal
| metrics to make Alexa look far more successful than it really
| was. I think this is what we can learn from Alexa:
|
| 1) Do not assume you can build a business, and then make it
| profitable. You always need to understand how a business can
| become profitable. Also, avoid fuzzy ideas, and metrics. For
| example, claiming unprofitable product X, is a success because it
| helps a company's brand, or causes people to buy more of product
| Y unless you have very very very strong evidence to back up these
| claims.
|
| 2) Dishonesty and bullshit do not work - Leaders, and teams need
| to be honest with themselves and with senior leadership. Do not
| use metrics to mislead other people, and point out flaws and
| limitations in metrics. Also, misleading people in general is not
| a good idea, and it harms organizations.
|
| 3) While killing products prematurely is a bad idea (see Google),
| continuing to support failing products for decades is probably
| not a good idea either.
|
| I wish the Alexa team luck. I hope they can figure out how to
| create a profitable business which delights customers.
| msoad wrote:
| > The technology isn't there, but they have a deadline
|
| The technology is there, as demonstrated by OpenAI's ChatGPT
| Voice Mode. With the resources and talent that Amazon possesses,
| they should at least be able to demo something similar. It's just
| that the Alexa organization is a mess, which prevents it from
| happening.
| shell_game wrote:
| Does Amazon actually have talent and resources though?
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| Not any more. Majority of talent got fired. Whoever is hired
| now will be gone in a couple years (says the internal
| tracking software that tells you how "new" you are across all
| of Amazon). That kind of churn ensures no real progress can
| be made.
|
| Just throw Alexa away already. It's a wrap.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| The actually good people left long before anyone got fired.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Amazon doesn't have the talent.
|
| They do have many layers of metrics-massaging incompetent
| management that spends time attacking the people who do the
| real work.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| Metric hacking is still hacking, just not machines but
| processes. Mbas are golemn hackers,real recognizes real.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I don't think they can.
|
| One of the things that will define the AI era is that the cost
| of computation for one user drastically outweights what you
| could normally make in ad revenue.
|
| Thats why I have to pay more for Chat-GPT than I do for
| Netflix.
|
| What do you think adoption would look like Alexa costs 20 a
| month on top of the hardware? Because that may be approximately
| what it would cost for Amazon to be able to run an AI to power
| Alexa.
|
| Apple is the only one that is partially immune to this, because
| they can run the software on your phone, at least some of the
| time.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Maybe AI as a service? End user pays for AI once and most
| things that need AI capabilities offload it to that provider.
| o_nate wrote:
| I assume the piece of technology that is missing is a reliable
| way to combine generative AI features like ChatGPT Voice Mode
| with the existing voice assistant features of Alexa.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| I definitely think Amazon music's growth is completely Alexa
| driven but not sure how much revenue that makes
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| You'd be incorrect. Amazon Music is not as valuable as people
| think, compounded by the fact that it helps foot the bill for
| Alexa. It's only right though, seeing as Music helped
| completely break Alexa internally. Repeatedly.
| baq wrote:
| I only have Amazon Music because I've got some Alexa
| speakers, so not sure which way the causation is presented,
| but end result is I am Amazon's MRR, however small that is.
|
| ...that said, the Amazon Music app doesn't have an option to
| cast to Alexa and that's beyond dumb.
| o_nate wrote:
| That's definitely true in my case. The only reason I pay for
| Amazon music is so I can use it on Alexa.
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| Isn't Amazon Music included for free with Prime? It must be the
| biggest reason for its growth. I personally don't know anyone
| who pays for Amazon Music without Prime.
| listless wrote:
| The entire business model was people being willing to buy things
| "site unseen". This is not how people shop. Seeing is an
| important part of the experience.
|
| Also, these losses are staggering. And yet they are still selling
| these things. I just bought one for the kids dorm room.
| Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 wrote:
| One other reason is that the quality of Amazon listings has
| really nosedived over the last decade. There are too many
| spammy merchants in the marketplace now. You cannot just trust
| the name or description - you need to look at the reviews (or
| other websites) these days before you feel confident about your
| purchase.
|
| It's a classic case of mismatched incentives - the Retail org
| is just focused on increasing sellers and listings because they
| have reviews to bail them out, but Devices really need quality
| results which Retail is not motivated to provide. Their recent
| focus on mimicking Temu and Shein is only going to make things
| worse.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The reviews can be bogus too. I've just stopped shopping on
| Amazon. Their business model isn't trustworthy.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> One other reason is that the quality of Amazon listings
| has really nosedived over the last decade.
|
| I stopped using Amazon years ago when I had four purchases of
| completely different and random items all turned up to be
| counterfeit. One was a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, the
| other was a pair of Lucky brand jeans, the other was a pair
| of Ski goggles and the last thing was a Topo Designs
| backpack.
|
| I've also noticed that when I came back looking for something
| simple like a charging block for a new phone, I had pages and
| pages of Chinese merchants who all had similar looking
| products but just different brand names stamped on them.
|
| But I agree with everything you're saying, its not just
| logging on, finding what you need and ordering something. It
| takes ungodly amounts of due diligence to make sure what
| you're buying is a) a legit product and b) its not some
| suspect seller that's paying people to write fake reviews.
| joshjje wrote:
| There's a video on YouTube of some guy gathering pee bottles
| discarded by Amazon drivers/contractors, created a fake
| drink, and got it listed on Amazon to the top spot.
| arder wrote:
| It's _especially_ not how people shop at Amazon. You could
| feasibly imagine a shop where there is basically 1 version of
| each thing. Like the low cost supermarkets in the UK, they 're
| efficient because they have very small product inventories. In
| that scenario you say "I'll buy some ketckup" and they only
| have 1 ketchup so you don't need to see it. You know the shop,
| you know what you're getting. Amazon is the polar opposite, for
| any given product it'll have 100,000 options and you have to
| fight Amazon every step of the way to find what you want, not
| just what will give Amazon the fattest margin.
| fckgw wrote:
| If you say "add Heinz ketchup" or "add Bounty paper towels"
| then it works exactly how you describe. It's not really that
| complicated.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Except for everyone else saying they've received
| counterfeit goods, or wrong items based on Amazon's
| commingling strategy, etc.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Costco is the biggest name I can think of devoted to that
| model. They're very aggressive about keeping to a short list
| of high-quality products in each possible subcategory, even
| for online sales.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| You bought an Alexa..... For the kids dorm room...?
|
| Wanna share with us your thought process?
| listless wrote:
| It was requested for...weather, alarms, music. You know - all
| the things his phone ALREADY DOES.
| chasd00 wrote:
| you can use routines to get alexa to talk pretty dirty. heh
| I bet it's good for a dorm room laugh or two.
| baq wrote:
| Of the precious little Alexa can do reliably announcing that
| dinner is ready without having to yell is quite useful.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| How big is your house? Just looking to understand under
| what circumstances what you said might be a good idea.
| Where I live it would be silly.
| baq wrote:
| Kitchen downstairs, rooms upstairs, closed doors.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Do you value your family's privacy at all?
| coopierez wrote:
| Around 15 years ago, as a semi-joke, my Mother bought a
| wireless doorbell and put the speaker in my brother's room
| to announce dinner was ready. It turned out to be quite
| handy actually. I think Alexa is a bit overkill for that
| usecase.
| scubbo wrote:
| > willing to buy things "site unseen"
|
| Heh - that eggcorn is actually applicable in this case, as they
| have not seen the Amazon website.
| pjmlp wrote:
| All these voice assistants are gimmicks to me, they hardly
| provide any value, plus never get a proper Portuguese support.
| genericacct wrote:
| Can't entirely agree, alexa makes navigating smart TVs much
| easier for older folks
| pjmlp wrote:
| Doesn't help if language recognition is broken.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| older folks struggle with the set up so the efficacy is
| mixed.
| _-_-__-_-_- wrote:
| I managed to set one up for my in-laws. It works well enough
| with their smart tv (a plasma lg from 2010) that they can say
| "Alexa cable tv" or "Alexa Die Hard" and it will turn on the
| tv, find the streaming service that has the movie, and start
| playing. The voice incantation does have to be fairly
| specific and it did take some practice to figure it out.
| hulitu wrote:
| > they hardly provide any value,
|
| maybe for you. Sincerely, the CIA.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Voice controlled radio + timers is more than worth the cost of
| an Alexa device. Why does it have to be more than that?
| pjmlp wrote:
| If it doesn't speak my native language without gimmicks, it
| is trash.
|
| Additionally, I already have a radio and alarm clock.
| burningChrome wrote:
| Doesn't your smartphone have both of these already?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| My smartphone does not auto play from my kitchen speaker
| with voice control, no. Sure I could just use a normal
| speaker but dealing with connecting to it and siri's crap
| voice control is worse than alexa.
| mitjam wrote:
| Can I reflash an Alexa with an Open Source Firmware? Or is there
| another documented way to repurpose it? I've tried to find
| something but was not successful. I Like the industrial design of
| the Alexa Show but not its Software/Service.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > Amazon claims it has sold more than 500,000 Alexa devices
|
| I think they left a few zeroes off this one:
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-has-sold-more-than-500...
| saberience wrote:
| The strangest thing with Alexa is how it seems to have gotten
| worse and worse over time. That is, my Alexa right now has issues
| doing the most basic thing, it can't even play music right
| anymore.
|
| I remember when my friend in LA first showed me Alexa, playing
| music was all we used it for and it worked great for that.
| Somehow it's degraded over time and now it barely every picks the
| song or band I asked for. There was a time when I used Alexa for
| managing every light in my house, now I just gave up on
| everything except music, and I'm almost done with that part now
| too.
| fhub wrote:
| I've set a countdown timer and then asked it "how much time is
| left on the timer?" and it says "You have no timers set" then
| inside say 30s, the timer goes off. Has happened to me a half
| dozen times in the last 2 months (at different amounts of time
| left obviously). This was my primary use case of alexa and now
| I just use Siri on my phone when my phone is nearby. Siri isn't
| ideal as I find it hard sometimes to quickly see how much time
| is left on the timer. But at least it doesn't forget one is
| running.
| traes wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this occurs when the timer goes off during
| your query, and the alarm gets queued after the response. In
| my experience the alarm usually goes off immediately after,
| though, I've never experienced a 30s delay.
| arder wrote:
| That "Downstream impact" metric sounds like a big yikes. Massive
| incentives to game that metric and before you know it you've got
| 10 projects all claiming credit for some theoretical downstream
| impact all of which are actually just canabalizing existing
| revenue. Like, Amazon is doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods,
| the Alexa team make some claim about people's likeliness to order
| tide pods via the Alexa and before you know it Amazon is still
| doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods but they've got a $2Bn
| cost centre of overpaid enginers designing hardware that lets you
| order tide pods.
|
| I wonder which way this splits for Amazon though, on the one hand
| lots of people already have Alexas and so you've got great brand
| recognition when you want to sell your Gen AI doodad. On the
| other hand, your Alexa brand is trash, everyone knows its
| basically only good for timers so maybe no one will take them
| seriously when the Gen AI version comes out.
| klodolph wrote:
| Tech companies have to cannibalize existing revenue to stay
| relevant long-term. If you don't cannibalize your own revenue
| streams, then some other company will figure out how to take
| your revenue. ( _Innovator's Dilemma_ takes this concept and
| stretches it out across a whole book.)
|
| That said... Alexa seems like such a waste. It's like Sony
| making an MP3 player. Sony Electronics was never going to make
| a good MP3 player as long as Sony Records wanted copy
| protection. These are user-hostile decisions that protect the
| larger business. Likewise, can Amazon deliver an AI assistant
| that does something else, besides get people to buy more
| products through Amazon more easily? No, the incentives aren't
| there.
| adolph wrote:
| I don't Sony Electronics can blame the music side of the
| house for Memory Stick.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick
| klodolph wrote:
| Sure, I agree that not 100% of all bad decisions ever made
| by Sony Electronics can be blamed on Sony Records.
|
| The number is not 0% either.
| treis wrote:
| It does seem important for the ecosystem. I'm on Google Music
| because Spotify & Amazon Music didn't work well with android
| auto & Google Home.
| skellera wrote:
| Downstream impact is gamed internally at Amazon.
|
| People crucified Sears for making teams compete internally but
| that's literally what's happening at Amazon at a larger scale.
| Teams and orgs regularly push back against helping each other.
| Will not waste resources to help others.
|
| I don't believe Amazon has a good outlook over 5 years unless
| they get lucky with random bets. They no longer innovate, they
| just copy and try to compete with scale. Even then, it doesn't
| work because no one working on that product actually cares
| about the problem so startups can easily outcompete with
| "customer obsession."
| wnc3141 wrote:
| I think even if Amazon stagnates, servicing that core
| business at scale is a once in a generation moat.
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe, but Amazon is already from the previous generation
| and so by your metric another is due. Good luck starting
| it.
| StressedDev wrote:
| Retail is extremely competitive. Amazon does not have the
| best prices, and has a horrible experience for shopping.
| It's basically a specialized search engine with lots of ads
| at this point. Also, the things which made Amazon shopping
| a no-brainer are gone. Items no longer always arrive within
| two days if you have Prime, there are lots of poor-quality
| items, and it's hard to find what you really want. Finally,
| it's obvious Amazon's retail employees are not customer
| obsessed. Look at the web site design, and ask yourself if
| you would design a retail web site like Amazon's?
|
| My guess is Amazon's retail business will eventually start
| declining as customers discover it's relatively expensive,
| and it's too easy to buy low quality items.
| onion2k wrote:
| Prime _is_ Amazon 's moat though. More than 100 million
| people subscribe to a service that locks them into
| choosing Amazon first. People with Prime choose Amazon
| over going to a physical store. It's what took Amazon out
| of being an e-commerce business and into being a retail
| business. Don't underestimate how important Prime is to
| Amazon - it's literally a vendor lock-in that generates
| billions directly through fees and tens of billions
| indirectly through additional sales.
| gen220 wrote:
| It is until it isn't. The value of prime has largely
| being hollowed out and competed away in the last five
| years, from my perspective as a recently-cancelled Prime
| member.
|
| When the next recession comes, look for the diff in churn
| rate between Prime and Costco memberships.
| parpfish wrote:
| I think an under appreciated part of their most is that
| people hate logging in to things and making new accounts.
|
| I know there have been times where I see a product is a
| little cheaper on the actual brand website but I decide
| to just order with Amazon rather than creating an account
| to place a single order on the other site.
|
| I tell myself that it's about privacy and minimizing
| exposure to future breaches, but really it's just that I
| don't want to go through the whole create a
| password/enter your card and address/wait for marketing
| emails you need to unsubscribe from loop
| ghaff wrote:
| For me it's just about time and laziness. I accept for
| large and specialized purchases, it's worth potentially
| going to someplace else to buy something. But for some
| run of the mill $20 item? I probably spend a few minutes
| on Amazon and call it a day. I usually get the item in a
| day or two and, if I don't? It's still probably faster
| than I would get it elsewhere and it probably doesn't
| matter.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I mean, Sears is still around, if barely.
|
| Other retail giants had been seen as walking dead for
| decades in the 1970s and 1980s before finally falling.
|
| Though drivers then and now may differ. Old-school retail
| benefitted from purchase contracts (dedicated suppliers,
| corporate buyers), as well as service contracts (for
| purchased kit). Back when durable goods might actually last
| 15, 20, 30 years, this meant that at least a _trickle_ of
| income was still coming in. Sears rather famously botched
| this hard when it used its automotive repair unit to commit
| nationwide fraud, see in 1992: "Accusation Of Fraud At
| Sears"
| <https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/12/business/accusation-of-
| fr...>.
|
| How durable Amazon might prove under similar mismanagement
| in the globalised Internet age is ... an interesting
| question.
| onion2k wrote:
| Amazon is the same as Google, Meta, Twitter, etc in the sense
| that they have a couple of _wildly_ profitable products that
| enables the company to 'play' at running some other
| businesses that _might_ turn a profit eventually after
| investing fifty billion. For Amazon it 's the retail business
| and AWS. For Google it's AdWords. For Meta it's Facebook Ads.
| These businesses will never die, or even face a threat to
| their futures, despite throwing billions at self-driving
| cars, AI, phones, VR, etc.
|
| The only existential threat to FAANG companies is a shift in
| consumer behavior away from spending money on things they see
| ads for. That's _quite_ unlikely.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Twitter never really had any wildly profitable products.
| pwthornton wrote:
| I'd pay a monthly/yearly fee to be able to run Alexa's that can
| function as a smart home voice controller that does not try to
| sell me stuff.
| bluGill wrote:
| But of course there is no option for that as they think
| advertising is more valuable. Worse they have set the initial
| price as free and so now most people will object to paying
| despite how useful it is (I've seen some uses of Alexa that are
| probably not worth a monthly price, can they make money on
| $5/year for 10 devices?)
| balls187 wrote:
| Not me.
|
| One: I don't want to pay a yearly fee to use a hardware device
| I paid for. Especially when that price will inevitably
| increase.
|
| Two: Paying a monthly fee for the privilege of saying "Turn the
| lights on." in my own flipping home. That is very hard pass.
|
| Three: Amazon already EOL's several smarthome products
| (CloudCam, Amazon Key come to mind).
|
| I'm glad that Amazon would take a huge L if they decide to
| abandon their Alexa ecosystem now.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I find voice AI creepy as it's always listening. If you have to
| press a button to get it to start listening then you're better
| off typing your query. Plus I scan and read faster than an AI
| reads responses. I'd pay more for products that dont support
| it. (similar story for smart TVs).
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| I'm confused. This is already a thing via vendor, Hubitat or
| Home Assistant plugins.
| sfblah wrote:
| Right. Just charge a low fee, or attach it to Prime somehow.
| I'd pay for sure.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I still cannot believe Amazon convinced people to install 1984
| surveillance in their homes, much less pay for it, for whatever
| trivial conveniences the stupid thing offers. It's not Amazon's
| fault but it's just strange to me how sideways our culture is
| that it's considered normal to let a corporation have unfettered
| access to your private space and _pay_ them for being there.
|
| I get the tradeoff with smartphones...at least they have utility,
| and at least some weak guarantee of privacy (for whatever that's
| worth). What does Alexa really bring to the table? It can flip a
| light switch for me? I have a finger for that. It can tell me the
| weather? I can open the curtains and look outside. It can deliver
| counterfeit garbage to my house? No thanks.
|
| Who is enticed by this thing, and why?
| tantalor wrote:
| I'll explain in Steve Jobs language:
|
| A voice assistant, a home automation controller, and an
| internet-connected speaker. Are you getting it? These are not
| three separate devices. This is one device!
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| > I have a finger for that.
|
| You have to get your finger to the switch.
|
| > It can tell me the weather? I can open the curtains and look
| outside.
|
| That doesn't tell you the weather today, just the weather right
| now.
|
| > It can deliver counterfeit garbage to my house? No thanks.
|
| Garbage often is sufficient. I don't need good quality goods in
| most cases.
| nikolajan wrote:
| What a weird take.
|
| What can a phone do for me, I can tap my finger a few times to
| send a message over telegram.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No you can't.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| It can tell me the time when I'm wondering if I should just get
| up or have two hours left without me having to open my eyes and
| look for my glasses.
|
| It can set a timer when I have my hands full with veggies and
| cooking utensils.
|
| It can tell me what the weather will be later that day while I
| get dressed without me having to navigate my phone to the
| weather app.
|
| Could I do without all that? Sure. But its usefulness is
| undeniable to me.
|
| And it was cheap. Also, I consider my phone way more
| 1984-esque, as it knows and probably tracks my location, half
| my thoughts, half my conversations, lots of other habits, and
| could eavesdrop on me all the same.
| geodel wrote:
| I don't have it. Last year I visited family in India and
| surprised to see so many of my tech illiterate family and
| relatives are all Alexa users. Mother used it to play
| devotional songs every morning. They don't have anything to
| order from Amazon , neither there is any notion or concern
| about privacy. Its pure convenience and work like magic.
|
| As an aside they do seem to be heavily radicalized by social
| media and hilariously think they were always like this.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I feel the same way. I reject all this kind of stuff, as in
| real life it doesn't work very well and doesn't solve any
| problems I have. My light switches have never failed. Neither
| are setting timers and playing music things that vex me.
| Computers fail all the time, either literally, or by popping up
| some irrelevancy that gets in the way of what I want to do.
|
| I want dumb devices that I directly control and that do not try
| to second guess what I mean or suddenly behave differently or
| have to "restart" because an update got pushed out, or have to
| deliver an advertisement before they will do what I asked.
|
| I'll never have an Alexa or anything like it. But, I get that
| some people like gizmos and their perception is different. They
| are welcome to do whatever they want.
| paxys wrote:
| So according to you corporations are listening to you 24x7
| through your phone and you are okay with that for whatever
| reason, and they also spy on your home 24x7 through Alexa and
| that is unacceptable?
| chasd00 wrote:
| one surprisingly useful thing it did for me involved my phone.
| I couldn't find my phone and i think i just blurted out "alexa,
| i can't find my phone" jokingly. it then responded if it should
| call it. I said yes, and then my phone started ringing and i
| was able to find it. That was pretty useful actually.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Just an hour ago I asked Alexa
|
| "Is negative ten an even number?" and was shocked when it said
|
| "No, minus ten is a negative number and is not even"
|
| I asked again and the reply was exactly the same. Variations of
| the question still resulted in
|
| 'negative numbers cannot be even or odd'
|
| I checked again 20 minutes later and it then gave me correct
| answers to the exact same questions. I deeply want Alexa to fail
| as a product. It is constantly objectively wrong and should not
| be used for anything important.
| spyspy wrote:
| > It is constantly objectively wrong and should not be used for
| anything important.
|
| Welcome to AI. I got into an argument with a junior dev about
| some coding best practices the other day and came to find he
| was using chatgpt as a source for his argument. It's terrifying
| anyone takes anything an AI says as truth. Now I'm afraid to
| even ask my google home simple math or kitchen measurement
| questions.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Update: I asked again if -1000 is even or odd, and Alexa
| continues to think negative numbers can never be even or odd.
| ergonaught wrote:
| We have several Alexa devices. We use them all the time and for a
| wide variety of purposes. By any rational, actual customer-
| connected metric, they are a wild success in this and similar
| homes.
|
| This is an example of Amazon not actually letting the smartest
| people into the room. We do vast amounts of our shopping via
| Amazon, but that's through the app and website even when we
| manage the shopping lists/etc via Alexa. We're not going to do
| that directly through the robot. We're never going to do that
| directly through the robot. Anyone who proposed billions in R&D
| investments hanging on the delusion that we will do that through
| the robot, instead of paying attention to the things we are all
| actively actually doing every single day, should have already
| been moved along.
|
| We don't need to shop like that.
|
| We do need the hundred other things we do every day, and those
| are things Alexa currently does _vastly_ better than the
| competition. The Prime stuff, the Kindle stuff, the dozen other
| Amazon-related things we do, are certainly further embedded into
| our lives by the fact of the Alexas.
|
| Their real problem is the sudden closing of the gap, which is
| nearly certain to occur in the next year or two.
|
| TLDR: "Amazon says you're using it wrong. Doesn't know how to
| count."
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| What do you use yours for? Mine's little more than a fancy
| voice-activated light switch.
|
| Fully agree on the point about not shopping through Alexa.
| Basic questions are misinterpreted in sometimes hilarious ways.
| djeastm wrote:
| I have enough Echoes to cover my whole place within speaking
| distance and they serve as fancy voice-activated light
| switches and also timers, radios/music/podcast players (via
| Spotify) and calculators/measurement converters. They also
| provide local weather alerts and let me know when an Amazon
| package has arrived, both of which are nice.
|
| But whenever it tries to sell me anything, I get annoyed
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning the Amazon package alert. I hadn't
| set mine up.
| stacktrust wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41062989
| 8note wrote:
| They maybe should count the times when you add something to
| your shopping list, via Alexa, then later purchase it through
| another method. If you didn't have the voice box, you may
| forget that you needed that thing
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| I absolutely agree. They are not positioning Alexa correctly in
| the market. It's a tremendous opportunity to move towards a
| smarter integrated home and a personal assistant. Buying even
| basic things using voice will never make sense.
|
| I use Alexa daily to voice-control devices in my Hubitat. Once
| there is an easy to set up local voice control option I will
| remove Alexa. Unless they reposition themselves as something
| more useful.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| 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...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| 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.
| 39896880 wrote:
| 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.
| rainbowzootsuit wrote:
| This used to be the Sears Kenmore & Craftsman model where
| appliances were really Whirlpool, or Maytag, Carrier{1}.
|
| Hand tools variously came from many OEMs like SK, Plumb,
| Knipex, and Williams{2}. I suppose they still do, now at
| Lowes, but the OEM is Chinese.
|
| {1}https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/How_to_identify_who_made_y
| our_Ke...
|
| {2}https://forum.toolsinaction.com/topic/2118-craftsman-
| date-co...
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The big thing with Sears Craftsman (formerly), and Costco
| (currently) is that the company will back the product.
|
| If I want to return a product to Costco, I have really
| strong confidence that they will take it back.
| throwadobe wrote:
| TBF to Amazon they take all my shit back on the reg
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Which provides an incentive to the manufacturer to
| produce at least decent quality products.
| xeromal wrote:
| I've seen people drop off stained mattresses at Costco
| for return.
| akira2501 wrote:
| 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.
| swozey wrote:
| 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.
|
| edit: Go down the orange juice flavor pack "Why do they all
| taste different" rabbit hole with me.... https://old.reddit
| .com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mpdop/e...
| meroes wrote:
| 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.
| NickC25 wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I tried multiple juicers, but they were too hard to
| clean, so I stopped using them.
|
| The Vitamix is easy to clean, so that's the winner for
| me.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Well Sunny D is an "orange drink" and there are various
| widely available "fresh squeezed" real juice options
| so... Yes?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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.
| swozey wrote:
| 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.
| NickC25 wrote:
| 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.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| 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.
| swozey wrote:
| Weird, I'm in Denver, pretty healthy crowd here but maybe
| that Costco is just bad. Nothing like that there.
| xeromal wrote:
| 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
| swozey wrote:
| 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."
|
| Yep found it https://old.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/1e0
| t9u6/costco_june...
| kubectl_h wrote:
| Oh they definitely cater to the local market. Here is a
| costco in Mountain View: https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/
| comments/1dk2pfo/not_a_wine_...
| philwelch wrote:
| 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.
| nimih wrote:
| > 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.
| kubectl_h wrote:
| 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.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| 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.
| jprete wrote:
| To add to your point, one can't even pick out a brand-name
| product directly from Amazon's website and be sure of
| getting the real thing.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| 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.
| sambaumann wrote:
| 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.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Does Best Buy not resell returns?
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yes, they do. Plenty of horror stories on r/datahoarders
| of fake resealed HDDs.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| 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.
| gortok wrote:
| 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.
| aragonite wrote:
| > 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
|
| [1] Go to
| https://www.honeyguardian.com/pages/honeyguaridan-app and
| click either of the appstore links to see the company
| name (Shenzhen Hailong Zhizao, whose corporate website is
| at https://www.pdpets.com/)
| smcin wrote:
| "typosquatting"
| derefr wrote:
| 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.
| ta1243 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Why not just sell the AliExpress one on ebay?
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| https://toolguyd.com/amazon-sent-me-used-broken-knipex-
| plier...
|
| 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.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Panasonic makes the best batteries though.
|
| 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.
| silisili wrote:
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| Executive function tax.
| paxys wrote:
| > 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.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| > The question is would it make people shop more?
|
| No, that's not the question.
|
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| Huh, we are not talking about building a delivery network
| here. The comparison is between ordering on a website/app
| and ordering on Alexa.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| Do you think you go pick up your Alexa orders at the
| store?
| ashconnor wrote:
| The prices for items in my Amazon cart change multiple times
| per day.
|
| Until they figure out price stability for staple goods then
| nobody will use this. Hell I don't even use Subscribe and
| Save for the same reason.
| kyllo wrote:
| This. I bought toothpaste on Amazon, used it up, and the
| next time I went to buy the exact same toothpaste, the
| price had doubled.
| coliveira wrote:
| Yes, they have a dark pattern where people buy a product
| and give good reviews, so suddenly they increase the
| price to benefit from that.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| 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.
| Twirrim wrote:
| 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.
| rendang wrote:
| This is interesting because you often hear Amazon treats
| its 3rd party sellers poorly - perhaps they are driving
| away the quality sellers?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Yeah I've largely migrated my purchases off of Amazon for
| exactly this reason.
|
| Checking now, I placed 83 orders last year. I've placed 3
| so far this year.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > 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
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| 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".
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| chaostheory wrote:
| 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.
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| 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.
| usrusr wrote:
| 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!"
| subsaharancoder wrote:
| 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!
| chaostheory wrote:
| 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
| maccard wrote:
| 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.
| regularfry wrote:
| "Alexa, repeat my last toothpaste order" with a
| confirmation if the price has gone up would be good.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| And at that point, there's no real value-add compared to
| a general todo-list application with simple voice
| commands.
| delecti wrote:
| Yeah, this is the more salient detail.
|
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This a million times.
|
| 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.
| booi wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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".
| zyberzero wrote:
| 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 :)
|
| This is one of the biggest food chains in Sweden.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| 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.
| Arrath wrote:
| 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.
| newzisforsukas wrote:
| > strategically
|
| More like deceptively...
|
| If a person did that, I would consider the behavior
| antisocial.
| bombcar wrote:
| The one I've seen a couple of times recently is where the
| bigger item is more expensive per unit volume unit
| weight.
|
| This is sneaky as hell.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "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.
| linsomniac wrote:
| 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...
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Pretty sure that's Amazon selling your query results, not
| a failure in search algorithm.
| Arrath wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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"?
| Arrath wrote:
| There is that
| toasterlovin wrote:
| 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?
| Hextinium wrote:
| 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.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| 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).
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| 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.
|
| Payola.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| that's your guess and what they tell investors.
|
| 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
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 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??
| maccard wrote:
| 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
| dchftcs wrote:
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Some stores won't let you near the stuff they sell, you
| have to talk to somebody. Maybe that's what the GP is
| talking about.
|
| Anyway, it's expected that you'll ask for the price and
| may go away after hearing it. So crazy mark-ups are risky
| business.
| oblio wrote:
| That only happens in shady mom and pop corner stores
| where laws are not enforced. Most countries force price
| listing and it's trivial to get caught.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, but it's different if they list the price and it's
| huge, compared to no price listed at all.
| lancesells wrote:
| I'm not saying Alexa would be used more, but what if it
| confirmed with you on either the quantity or the last
| quantity of the item you ordered?
|
| "The same order of Tide Pods as last time?"
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Except then you have to wonder if the price changed. Or
| if something else about the listing changed.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
|
| But Amazon can't.
| sofal wrote:
| 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.
| creato wrote:
| > They try this with things like screws,
|
| "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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The concept of a marketplace just isn't compatible with
| the concept of Alexa.
|
| If you do both, at least one will fail. Every time.
|
| You can probably mangle one of those concepts enough for
| them to become compatible. But you'll end up with
| something very different.
| tgma wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopp
| ing/gua...
| tgma wrote:
| 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.
| timClicks wrote:
| 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.
| tgma wrote:
| 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.
| csunbird wrote:
| 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!
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| 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 1/2 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...
| WalterBright wrote:
| > mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period
|
| Such regulations make products more expensive.
|
| I'm constantly offered warranties when I buy online. I
| don't want to be forced to buy them, as I don't need
| them.
| tgma wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Do those products have worldwide warranties? Often not.
| That is a real issue with buying electronics outside your
| home country.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| dacryn wrote:
| those times have long been gone. Warranties were not the
| driving factor, but taxes and exchange rates.
|
| Today, the price difference is negligible on most
| hardware (smaller than $50 on MSRP on an iPhone if you
| compare New York to Paris for example)
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| This is fun.
|
| 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.
| tgma wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| Where? They're constantly futzing with the taxes on it in
| my state.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Nothing says you can't put ($40 of this is government
| taxes) in the receipt.
| mkl wrote:
| 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.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Tax rates are easily discoverable (more so than currently
| hidden things like tariffs).
| girvo wrote:
| ...the receipts show what tax is charged in the total.
| This is a total non-issue. Tax-exclusive pricing is
| ridiculous.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| 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
| WalterBright wrote:
| The tax exclusive prices lets you know how much the
| government is soaking you, rather than hiding it and
| blaming it on the business.
| chowells wrote:
| 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_.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| 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
| chowells wrote:
| I'm American, actually. I've just managed not to have my
| brain poisoned by Libertarianism. (The capital L sort.)
| dambi0 wrote:
| Was the markup just sales tax or did it include tips or
| extra fees? A 35% plus sales tax seems awfully high where
| in the US was it?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| A ~10% sales tax is normal, and that will bring $9.50
| over the $10 limit.
| tgma wrote:
| > The amount of tax is equally useless to me.
|
| Not if you are voting someone in a political office in
| the next election.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Then you can look up how much the tax is when you are
| making your voting decision. This isn't secret
| information.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| taylorius wrote:
| Indeed - UK the same. The government makes so much hay
| out of persuading the electorate that businesses are
| somehow entirely separate from them.
| razakel wrote:
| Do you really think people don't know that the tax
| deductions on their payslip are actually their money?
| WalterBright wrote:
| The "Employer's Contribution" is not listed as a
| deduction on the payslip.
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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!
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| There's no reason they couldn't also list the tax as a
| separate line item. That's what they do in my state with
| liquor and cannabis.
| jimsug wrote:
| Do shops usually show both prices, so you can see before
| you have it rung up "how much the government is fleecing
| you"?
| mkl wrote:
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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".
| WalterBright wrote:
| Taxes are not set by supply & demand.
|
| > they can take a hit to their margin instead
|
| Not for long. Low margin businesses tend to go out of
| business. And if you can earn 5% buying bonds, why run a
| business that has an ROI of 4%?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Agreed on all these points. But none of this means that
| the price before tax is a meaningful number that people
| need to be aware of or care about.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours
|
| Next time, just ship it from Walmart or Amazon and throw
| it away when done with it.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| 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?
| kcartlidge wrote:
| > _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.
| eru wrote:
| > 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.
| tomoyoirl wrote:
| Amazon is kind enough to include unit pricing on many UI
| elements.
|
| It does seem to be less than consistent about the units,
| though. $/count, $/oz, $/g, $/lb, all on the same search
| page? Yes, and more :)
| schrodinger wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| bsimpson wrote:
| 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.)
| prepend wrote:
| I switched to Walmart a few years ago and their online
| experience has been more consistent.
|
| Although I detect it's starting to drift as they switch
| to a "marketplace" approach similar to Amazon.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| code_duck wrote:
| 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.
| polynomial wrote:
| 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)
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Unfortunately, another commenter is indicating that
| they've done just that. This is truly some darkest
| timeline stuff.
| juxtaposicion wrote:
| 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?
| jaggederest wrote:
| You also don't have an email on your profile, for what
| it's worth. I don't use Twitter. I'd be interested in
| something like this as well.
| juxtaposicion wrote:
| Oh, thanks! I added my email to my profile. Look forward
| to replying to your note!
| b3ing wrote:
| Oh wow, I've had that idea for 14yrs but never wanted to
| start coding it
| supportengineer wrote:
| Prescription drugs have something called "NDC number" (
| National Drug Codes ). What we need is NDC numbers but
| for consumer goods.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| European Article number
| doubled112 wrote:
| Like a UPC?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Are UPCs stable at scale and over time? It's been a
| minute since I was in retail, but I remember there being
| a bunch of asterisk-but's around them.
| neltnerb wrote:
| 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.
| zo1 wrote:
| 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.
| kruador wrote:
| 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)?
|
| - from https://www.gs1.org/1/gtinrules/en/guiding-
| principles
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Ironically, this is probably why books don't suffer the
| same problem. ISBNs
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Every consumer product has a UPC.
| jonhohle wrote:
| 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.
| wombatpm wrote:
| All stores have problems with produce. Is that 2.99 a
| pound for peaches, bag or each?
| gessha wrote:
| 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.
| senderista wrote:
| Was that the origin of the banana stand?
| camkego wrote:
| For a little context, Amazon has one or more "community
| banana stands"
|
| For more info:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Banana_Stand
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Same, but different.
|
| 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.)
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I've seen fixed-price turkey before. But not 25 cents.
|
| On the flip side, many local places have gone to pricing
| bananas by the each.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| At least he didn't order a truckload like Shiv Ramdas'
| brother in law:
|
| https://cheezburger.com/12444421/twitter-thread-
| frustrated-h...
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.
|
| ---
|
| 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.)
| _alex_ wrote:
| Third party sellers make up most of the inventory. Means
| Amazon has less inventory risk, but the buyer experience is
| terrible. Really unfortunate.
| LiquidPolymer wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| derefr wrote:
| 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.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| 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.
| __float wrote:
| 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You have one supplier of a book. You have many suppliers of
| generic products. Target gets from one supplier.
|
| The multi vender estore offers something different. The low
| prices, large selection more supplied inventory are some
| benefits.
| samplatt wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > It's cheaper to pay crackheads to loot CVS than to
| troll for clearance blowouts.
|
| Is that where all the crazy stuff on Amazon is coming
| from?
| toddmatthews wrote:
| Wouldn't be surprised
|
| https://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-
| drugs-2013-1/
| conductr wrote:
| Probably not all but it's well known they're just
| stealing consumer durables because they're easy to
| convert to cash
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| dsclough wrote:
| 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
| mlsu wrote:
| 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.
| pmontra wrote:
| > 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.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| regularfry wrote:
| 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.
|
| Non-metric units are just icing on the cake.
| pmontra wrote:
| 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.
| frameset wrote:
| Petrol is around PS1.44 a litre at the moment, varying a
| bit geographically.
| iam-TJ wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| paledot wrote:
| I can see bearing a grudge for 50 years over that one,
| though.
| pmontra wrote:
| 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.
| kruador wrote:
| 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 PS1 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.
| PS1.68). So I think the story about the change being
| because it had gone over PS1 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 PS1 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.
| paledot wrote:
| 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.
| tonylemesmer wrote:
| Love that phrase: 'profitable confusion'. Basically the
| business model of commodity box shifters
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "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.
| jjeaff wrote:
| 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.
| asfodelsu wrote:
| In many places in Europe: Normal price per item big
| letters, price per Kg small letters. Problem solved
| rickdeckard wrote:
| 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
| cromulent wrote:
| 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 EUR1000 / l.
| animuchan wrote:
| This is not just EU, in our here Middle Eastern country
| there's the same law. (And also mandatory "high sugar"
| warning stickers on unhealthy stuff.)
|
| Customer-friendly regulation sure feels nice.
| rvnx wrote:
| The same with this "metric system"
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > and annoys global companies
|
| Lol... Meta is doing a huge campaign here in Brazil about
| how they won't provide us their AI services because they
| are annoyed by that entity.
|
| It has been quite a help to the government popularity.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| In Europe Apple follows the same strategy, but in a more
| subtle way than a full campaign.
|
| And sadly, it seems they found some audience...
| netsharc wrote:
| I've seen the "unit price" be per 100g (Especially so you
| don't notice it's a ton of money per kg) so there's still
| some screwing around...
| jcynix wrote:
| 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.
| hahamaster wrote:
| 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.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| 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.
| teapot7 wrote:
| Australia too.
| papichulo4 wrote:
| Ah, sensible internationally recognized easy to divide
| units of weight? No thank you comrade!
| nerdponx wrote:
| When money is at stake, never attribute to incompetence
| what could be attributed to greed.
| gregw2 wrote:
| Nice twist on the incompetence version of Hanlon's
| razor... does it have a name? "Nerdponx's razor" will
| have a hard time catching on...
|
| EDIT: I see esmifra on Reddit said this six years ago...
| but not sure "esmifra's razor" would catch on either. htt
| ps://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/8itqf5/comment/d
| ...
|
| 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
| nerdponx wrote:
| 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!
| Damogran6 wrote:
| 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.)
| AceyMan wrote:
| Well, Peanutbutter M&Ms are sacred manna, so they are a
| bad example.
|
| At my Ralph's (=Kroger), all the large bags dissappear
| minutes after getting loaded into the shelf.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| > as does Hilshire Farm Kielbasa...which now comes in 14
| oz packages
|
| Your grievance reminds me of this classic phone call:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4RNb3tt0LM
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| but even with the label you don't know if the cheaper one
| is full of sugar or is mostly water etc... there's no
| escape.
| dwighttk wrote:
| At my store they are free to choose their unit and they
| strive for unit heterogeneity within a specific product
| you might want to compare
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| 8A51C wrote:
| 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.
| naravara wrote:
| 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.
|
| So I guess I'm sticking to Aldi.
| Bluestein wrote:
| 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.-
| Phiwise_ wrote:
| 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.
| rkachowski wrote:
| 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"
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Behold: The Market doing Market shit.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| 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.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Probably stuck in a local optimum.
| schaefer wrote:
| 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.
| vondur wrote:
| 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.
| hnbad wrote:
| 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.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| 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"...?
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > I wonder how true that is.
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| K0balt wrote:
| 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.
| ant6n wrote:
| 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.
| cschmidt wrote:
| Cory Doctorow has a good blog post explaining why Amazon is
| so bad. Amazon is now an ad business
|
| https://doctorow.medium.com/how-monopoly-enshittified-
| amazon...
| aswegs8 wrote:
| 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.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| conductr wrote:
| 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.
| ertian wrote:
| 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.
| Tcepsa wrote:
| 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...
|
| [Edit: formatting]
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| I love this idea.
| NBJack wrote:
| 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.
| sqeaky wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| You also might get counterfeit Tide full of melamine or lead.
| tracker1 wrote:
| 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?).
| danudey wrote:
| 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.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| This 100%.
|
| Their prices are generally too unstable to put anything on
| "ship & forget". There are some exceptions, like the items
| you subscribe to.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| 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.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| 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.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| > 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?
| walthamstow wrote:
| Ublock Origin disables all the sponsored stuff and shows your
| more organic search results. I only see sponsored when I use
| the Amazon app on my phone.
| elpakal wrote:
| > 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| 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.
| gregmac wrote:
| 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.
| dawnerd wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
|
| So for that I appreciate Alexa.
| jeffh wrote:
| > 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.
| hibikir wrote:
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| On the other hand, I have--for better or worse--default
| brands for most of that stuff and I go to a Walmart every six
| months and load up my cart.
| playingalong wrote:
| The system could simply default to whatever I picked the
| latest (or same brand).
| ern wrote:
| 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.
| ern wrote:
| 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.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| > 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.
| crorella wrote:
| 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.
| mikehollinger wrote:
| >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.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/s?i=alexa-
| skills&bbn=13727922011&rh=n...
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| deanCommie wrote:
| What do you need Alexa to do with your smart home that it can't
| do today? https://www.amazon.com/alexa-smart-
| home/b?ie=UTF8&node=21442...
|
| 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.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| 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.
| swozey wrote:
| With how much Amazon pricing fluctuates I definitely want to
| see the page before I buy.
|
| y protein powder that was, I think $50s pre-2020 is now $80ish.
| Sigh. Goodbye Hydrowhey, back to the chalky stuff.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa
| order me Tide Pods"... The problem is that consumers don't
| behave like that._
|
| A bigger problem is their kids _do_.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| I would not give Amazon control over my home. That's too far. I
| want a company that focuses on security.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| 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.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| 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?
| pj_mukh wrote:
| I mean at its core operating a bank account, an email and a
| calendar is just running operations on a browser.
|
| LLM's can do that (ex: https://www.skyvern.com or
| https://www.gumloop.com).
|
| edit: Though more generally, I can see a future where all
| these operations are essentially different functions in a
| function calling system.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| Letting an LLM use my banking login is now one of my
| wordt nightmarrs. Thanks, i hate it.
| switch007 wrote:
| 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 PS5 or PS10 today? No thanks lol.
|
| Amazon had low trust back then. It's even worse now
| Rapzid wrote:
| 99% of my Alexa usage is:
|
| Kitchen timer
|
| What's the weather
|
| Shipping and weather alerts
|
| So yeah, not sure where the money will come from. I get angry
| any time Alexa recommends anything.
| julianeon wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| And I use a steno pad for that.
| julianeon wrote:
| In my family a few people add things to the list, from
| different rooms even, which would be impractical if we
| were passing a single steno pad around.
| ghaff wrote:
| Computer calendars and shopping lists probably make more
| sense as more people are involved. I just keep a single
| list.
| rtpg wrote:
| 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...
| Rapzid wrote:
| That sounds handy, how do you get the list back out?
| julianeon wrote:
| You check the app on your phone. I use Alexa to add
| things to the list and the app to cross them off.
| anthomtb wrote:
| > 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.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| 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.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > 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.
| julianeon wrote:
| > Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's
| basically it.
|
| My usage is:
|
| ~30%: timers
|
| ~10%: weather
|
| ~60%: tell Alexa to add things to a shopping list, which I use
| when I'm at a physical store or ready to do a curbside shopping
| order
| shagie wrote:
| 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.
| markbnj wrote:
| >> 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| That sounds pretty right. I'll ask for an odd conversion, the
| weather forecast, set an alarm for the one in my bedroom, but
| that's about it.
| leros wrote:
| I actually used my Alexa like that all the time.
|
| "Alexa, order more dish detergent"
|
| "From your recent order history, I found Cascade Dish Detergent
| pods, 120 count, $17.99. Would you like to order?"
|
| "Yes"
|
| It was super convenient when I was ordering something I had
| already ordered before, which is all my common purchased.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| 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.
| leros wrote:
| 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.
| Jaauthor wrote:
| 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.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| 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.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >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.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Well I mean going forward of course. Have to ignore the
| sunk cost.
|
| But yeah they clearly spun their wheels on the software
| side.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| How can one even organize 10k people adding stuff to the
| same product?
| burnte wrote:
| > 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.
| martin_a wrote:
| > 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...
| burnte wrote:
| 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.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change
| my decision and suddenly order more things.
|
| What about 'subscribe and save' on amazon. I never use it, but
| curious if it has a similar fate as ordering on alexa.
| mbajkowski wrote:
| 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
| vostrocity wrote:
| 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.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Amazon could have that business model if they hadn't almost
| completely squandered any trust people had in their listings.
| bentcorner wrote:
| 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.)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The killer-app is playing fart sounds for children.
| Revolutionary!
| ec109685 wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >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.
| smt88 wrote:
| What's wrong with it is that it was a stupid idea. People
| don't shop with their voices and never have. They need to see
| things.
| dambi0 wrote:
| Restaurants?
| tempest_ wrote:
| Often give or display a menu with prices.
| dambi0 wrote:
| 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.
| smt88 wrote:
| People who can see and read _almost never_ use voice-only
| to shop.
|
| Restaurants and catalogs have menus. Street vendors show
| you their goods.
|
| You don't need to take my word for it. No one uses Alexa
| this way. The proof is in the outcome.
| dambi0 wrote:
| 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.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >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?
| smt88 wrote:
| Alexa shopping was intended to be _voice only_. Of course
| people _order things_ with their voice after they 've
| seen them or read a menu.
| fuzztester wrote:
| how about IVR? or an advanced, literally voice-only
| version of it, where you don't even have to press any
| digit keys to respond to voice menus?
|
| heh. maybe I should become a consultant to Jeff, charge
| him gigabucks.
| NotMichaelBay wrote:
| 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?
| fuzztester wrote:
| I do know that IVR has poor UX, since I use it a good
| amount on my mobile phone.
|
| but did you notice that I also said:
|
| >or an advanced, literally voice-only version of it,
| where you don't even have to press any digit keys to
| respond to voice menus?
|
| above?
| fuzztester wrote:
| 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.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _how about IVR? or an advanced, literally voice-only
| version of it, where you don 't even have to press any
| digit keys to respond to voice menus?_
|
| Again, no one buys things using _only_ such an interface.
| I am middle aged and have never done, not even in pre-e-
| commerce times.
|
| It is a non-existent behavior, and there was no reason to
| think Alexa could will it into existence.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >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.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > is there anything wrong with that?
|
| Yes. They are losing billions on the deal and consumers
| didn't have their expectations met.
|
| > 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. This has
| nothing to do with why we collectively allow them to exist.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >> is there anything wrong with that?
|
| >Yes. They are losing billions on the deal
|
| 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?
| akira2501 wrote:
| > biz 101
|
| 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?
| fuzztester wrote:
| >fewer insults
|
| I don't see where I used any insults in my earlier reply.
| saying biz 101, maybe?
|
| as for the rest, I can't really understand what you are
| saying, so I'll drop out of the discussion now.
| akira2501 wrote:
| If you didn't know calling someone naive is often
| perceived as an insult.
| a13n wrote:
| 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?
| DragonStrength wrote:
| 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.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > 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?
| msy wrote:
| 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.
| al_borland wrote:
| 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.
| amzsdmthrowaway wrote:
| 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?
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" This is also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed."_
|
| Dash buttons failed because they were superseded by Alexa. And
| because they were a bit silly to begin with.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| 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.
| blindriver wrote:
| 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.
| bradley13 wrote:
| 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.
| sholladay wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| Brechreiz wrote:
| What shmuck orders paper towels on the internet?
| sholladay wrote:
| Who you calling a shmuck? /s
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| Yep, I'm in a city and don't own a car. I walk to the
| grocery store and bulky items like that are a pain, so I
| get them from Amazon.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are many/most of us for whom getting bulky/heavy
| consumables aren't even on the radar but they certainly
| are for some.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] bottomless.com
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Alexa can and also does spy on you and your family.
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| I would love to see their initial "vision doc", which amazon
| usually writes for new products.
|
| How were they envisioning to make lots of money with it in the
| first place?
| mbesto wrote:
| > 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.
| dwighttk wrote:
| 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.
| 9dev wrote:
| 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...
| dns_snek wrote:
| > 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".
| brightball wrote:
| Did they stop letting developers build skills or restrict it
| somehow?
|
| A friend of mine used to be very into that but he seemed to
| sour on the experience last time I talked to him.
| ta1243 wrote:
| > 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.
| sebstefan wrote:
| 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.
| manojlds wrote:
| Even Amazon Subscribe and Save is untrustworthy with price
| changes and product changes at times.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| > 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.
| RajT88 wrote:
| 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.
| varispeed wrote:
| "Alexa order me Tide Pods"
|
| 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.
| fwip wrote:
| 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.
| 2o34jro2j wrote:
| 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.
| martin_a wrote:
| > Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's
| basically it.
|
| And I'm fascinated over and over again on just how bad even
| that experience sometimes is.
|
| Not finding the right song on Spotify, not understanding what
| I'm asking, trying to push useless information on me and so
| on....
|
| In the days of LLMs it looks even worse, because I would expect
| Alexa to use technology like that to give better answers.
| mistercow wrote:
| 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.
| gdilla wrote:
| All i use it for is kitchen timers, occasional weather and
| traffic check. It's like yelling at your phone, which is
| slightly better UX than the phone.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > 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
| xeromal wrote:
| 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
| mgh2 wrote:
| Is this a failure of the UXR (observational studies) or product
| team (metrics)?
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| Products need to evolve with time. Gmail is not same as 0 years
| ago even though core functionality is email. Same for Google
| maps, Same for Amazon Prime etc. But Alexa has not really
| evolved.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Gmail would be more or less just as successful if it were
| exactly the same as 10 years ago
| francisofascii wrote:
| We pay $179 a year for Amazon music. We use Alexa all the time to
| play music. How is that not a huge revenue success? It sounds
| like they are not properly factoring that in as a downstream
| impact.
| simonw wrote:
| It takes a LOT of $179/year subscriptions to pay the salaries
| of 10,000 engineers. Especially since a lot of that
| subscription revenue for music will go to licensing the
| content.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| That's not a revenue problem, that's an over-hiring useless
| employees problem.
| Balgair wrote:
| "All problems are people problems"
|
| -Gerald Wineberg
| kevingadd wrote:
| In general music is a business you go into if you want to
| lose money. At Amazon's size they can probably negotiate
| better deals than smaller companies can, but it's still a
| painful business to be in.
| graton wrote:
| For $168/year you could get YouTube Premium, which comes with
| YouTube music and ad-free YouTube (not counting ads inside the
| videos done by the content creator).
| ghaff wrote:
| Or as part of an Apple deal that comes with other stuff you
| may want. The music subscriptions are all pretty much the
| same unless you have very niche requirements.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| can you stream youtube music on the alexa?
| pchristensen wrote:
| Music rights aren't cheap. Just ask Spotify.
| doubtfuluser wrote:
| But the question you must ask is: how much of the fact that you
| pay for music can be attributed to Alexa?
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| The problem with Alexa is that they overpriced it and pocketed
| the money instead of using the cost of the machine to build
| something that performed most of its commands on device. Instead,
| it's reliant on the cloud which is 100% a problem they created.
| That being said, their "losses" are all just tax write offs that
| they have to pay themselves, so Amazon doesn't lose a dime.
| StressedDev wrote:
| It's better to pay taxes on profits than to lose money and not
| pay takes. The reason is very simple. If you pay taxes, you
| keep the portion of money you made. If you lose the money, you
| have nothing. Note, I suspect that the Alexa business is worth
| nothing, and I bet the shareholders would rather have the money
| spent on Alexa instead of having the Alexa business.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Imagine putting one of these in your home. Whenever I visit
| family/friends with one, I unplug it asap. 95% of people just use
| it to play a song or start a timer. Big waste.
| Theodores wrote:
| One problem with Alexa and all other voice assistants is that the
| older people that have money are precisely the people that detest
| voice assistants.
|
| So how do you make money?
| devilbunny wrote:
| Older people are not the ones who detest voice assistants (my
| in-laws love them). It's the middle-aged (me) who grew up using
| computers and don't trust something that's always listening.
| S0y wrote:
| >Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as
| setting alarms and checking the weather. "We worried we've hired
| 10,000 people and we've built a smart timer," said a former
| senior employee.
|
| That's actually really funny to read. Just last night I was
| watching my brother cook and he asked Alexa to set a timer (It's
| pretty much the only thing he uses it for...) I jokingly said
| "You know, that's a really expensive timer."
| philodelta wrote:
| don't get me wrong, it is silly, but also being able to set a
| timer without touching anything with your gross cooking hands
| is unironically a wonderful feature.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| I like my Apple Watch for other reasons, but do have to admit
| that raising it to my face to set a timer or do a quick unit
| conversion while cooking is by far the most common "active"
| way I use it. I also use voice control a lot for music when
| I'm wearing gloves while working with greasy bicycle parts or
| when gardening.
|
| An entire product segment for when your hands are dirty...
| emj wrote:
| How does one need unit conversion while cooking? Sometimes
| I need how many grams is 1 dl of flour/oats (60g/35g) but I
| memorized that the second time, maybe if you are doing
| larger portions.
| snapcaster wrote:
| You answered your own question in the comment? If you
| require two instances to memorize it that means you
| needed unit conversion twice in cooking
| crazygringo wrote:
| Exactly. And given that there are probably 50 different
| common conversions you'll encounter in cooking, both
| between imperial units and between imperial and metric,
| not to mention common weight-vs-volume conversions of
| things like flour, good luck in not only memorizing them
| all but _getting them exactly perfectly right every
| single time_.
|
| You mess up a single conversion and your finished baked
| goods go straight in the trash.
| emj wrote:
| I do not understand how a voice assistant help with this,
| it has never worked for me. Seems like pretty hard things
| to do on the fly with recipes.
|
| Weight to volume conversions are rare here but sure I do
| those on the fly so I guess it makes sense, do you really
| do you guys really do it that often? If you do extensive
| conversions of recipes you will need to get the ratios
| correct as well it is just not something I see myself
| doing with a voice assistant.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _I do not understand how a voice assistant help with
| this, it has never worked for me._
|
| What do you mean it has never worked? What do you ask
| your assistant, and what does it respond?
|
| > _Seems like pretty hard things to do on the fly with
| recipes._
|
| What's hard? I don't understand. If you need a quantity
| in unit x, but you only have a measuring cup or spoon in
| unit y, then you ask for the conversion and then you
| measure out that amount in unit y.
|
| I genuinely don't understand the difficulties you seem to
| be encountering.
|
| > _do you really do you guys really do it that often?_
|
| Yes, literally all the time.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| If I have a measuring cup that maxes at at one cup, and I
| need to add a pint of something to a pot on the stove,
| being able to say "Hey Jibble, how many cups are in a
| pint" and getting an answer would be pretty nifty.
|
| As things stand, I walk over to the conversion chart
| hanging on the fridge.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Some people might just not want to take the time to math
| it out while they've got something time-sensitive on the
| stove. I feel like your comment doesn't really serve a
| purpose other than to put other people down. Congrats on
| your memory and math prowess but not everyone in the
| world has the same brain as you.
| emj wrote:
| I wanted concrete examples, I see I could have been
| clearer on that point but I did not intend malice or to
| brag.
|
| I memorize because of diabetes. You need to know how much
| sugar you eat so you do volume -> weight * carbs/weight *
| portion size to calculate how much insulin you are
| supposed to give for a meal. That is not because of
| cooking and having tried doing that with voice assistant
| several times I know it is hard to get correct numbers.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I have no idea how many cups are in a pint. I have no
| idea how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, or how many
| tablespoons are in a cup, or frankly any of the other
| byzantine imperial measures.
|
| The only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that there are
| four quarts in a gallon - and yet, I would only bet $10
| on that, not $20.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| I probably ask Alexa how many oz in cup or how many
| cups/oz in a gallon once a month but have yet to commit
| it to memory. I have no need to memorize this stuff when
| I have the internet available.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Everyone who routinely tries to cook American or British
| recipes, for example. It's all "tablespoons", "cups",
| "ounces", "fluid ounces" (whoever thought about naming
| that one deserves a special place in hell...) and
| whatnot.
|
| And since that stuff isn't metric, orders-of-magnitude
| conversions (e.g. scaling a recipe up/down) become
| needlessly more complex as well.
| tomn wrote:
| > American or British recipes
|
| American or _old_ British recipes; ours are all metric
| now.
|
| The exception is perhaps teaspoons/tablespoons, but those
| are trivial metric values (5ml and 15ml), so easy enough
| to scale and convert if you don't have the right
| measuring spoon handy.
| emj wrote:
| That is probably it, never would have occurred to me.
| When doing international recipes doing a
| translation/conversion is not always straight forward. I
| cook a lot and often it becomes a investigation into the
| ingredients and what to replace rather than a simple
| conversion of units. Not something Alexa does.
| 9dev wrote:
| It's a real problem for all countries not using the
| metric system, so, uhhh... the US, Liberia, and Myanmar.
| If the units have no meaningful way of conversation, like
| gallons, ounces, pounds, cups, and so on, cooking can get
| hard.
| ljf wrote:
| We are a 'Google home mini' house - it's the same for us -
| timers/alarms, Spotify, radio, occasional weather checks, and
| even more rarely asking it to answer a question like 'how far
| away is the moon' - while we are eating dinner together.
|
| For all these purposes it is great not to get a phone out,
| and the speaker is far better than my phone speaker for
| sound.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I feel like there's an unmet market opportunity here for a
| physical timer that is voice activated without a connection
| to the internet.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Make it a microwave feature (I use the convenient timer on
| the microwave far more frequently than any other) and I
| could see it really taking off.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I'd hate to have it on another appliance because
| appliance manufacturers would love to have another avenue
| to get me to use their cloud-connected products.
| harmmonica wrote:
| agree with this and we're an alexa household, which I don't
| love, but we tried a homepod and friggin' siri was (still
| is?) shockingly inept when it specifically came to setting
| multiple timers, adjusting timer duration, cancelling timers,
| etc. it feels pretty dumb having Alexa and all the potential
| snooping just to set timers and for an inferior Spotify-
| playing experience (sound quality of the ones we have are not
| good), but... here we are.
|
| that said, considering how much we rely on alexa for timers
| and spotify, what I really want is a homepod for the sound
| quality (if apple and Spotify would just start playing nice),
| privacy (yes, in a world with a lack of privacy I actually
| believe apple is basically our best bet given the ecosystem
| choices) and mostly for the potential of apple intelligence,
| which, if it worked as well as chatgpt today in "conversing"
| with you I'd be over the moon about.
|
| does anyone else primarily interact w chatgpt via voice? it
| really does seem incredible how you can start with a
| superficial question about a topic and then keep digging
| down. it's replaced a lot of my information-seeking google
| searches, which I have never used voice with, with a voice
| app that I would use endlessly if I didn't have to open the
| chatgpt app and tap on the microphone button (that may seem
| crazy, but think of all the time you spend away from your
| phone, or like others are saying, with something in your
| hands, where you voice is the ui).
|
| p.s. can't leave this comment without saying that, yes, I
| worry about the privacy implications of all of this stuff
| daily, but guess I'm dumb enough that I still use all of
| these privacy-invading devices
| rconti wrote:
| My Sonos Era 100s have the alexa integration and have my
| spotify account linked to them. You just gave me an idea!
|
| ... except, my Sonos Roam responded, and started playing.
| Not my stereo pair of era 100s on my desk. Let alone all
| the speakers in my house.
|
| tried again. "I didn't find anything called "office
| speakers" in your music library". To be fair, she suggested
| setting up multi-room in the alexa app, which I suppose I
| could do.
| harmmonica wrote:
| ha, this is too typical. we have a super poor man's
| version of multi-room speakers (two shitty-sounding
| echos!) and whenever I try and throw the music from one
| to the other with a voice command Alexa just doesn't get
| it. I end up just going back into Spotify and manually
| tapping on the other room. of course now you have me
| fantasizing about having the sound of Sonos speakers;
| glad to hear someone has enough sense to optimize their
| music-listening experience.
| rmccue wrote:
| Sonos Voice Control is better for any multi-room control,
| and it seems to work near flawlessly - probably because
| of the small domain it operates in.
| rconti wrote:
| Thanks for the tip, installing now. Combination of too
| many toys and being too much of a luddite means I never
| played with it. Or knew it existed.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > siri was (still is?) shockingly inept when it
| specifically came to setting multiple timers, adjusting
| timer duration, cancelling timers, etc
|
| I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this Apple AI leap will
| bring us a less stupid Homepod Mini so I can throw away my
| Alexas. It's almost 4 years old with zero refreshes, still
| running on the S5 chip from Apple Watch 5.
|
| The only things we use our Alexas are pretty much: turn
| on/off lights in the room it's in, ask for the weather and
| timers. Homepods can do the first two, but the timers are
| pretty useless unless one is enough.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > gross cooking hands
|
| I cook a lot and totally get this feeling, but honestly your
| cooking hands probably aren't gross. And if they are you're
| probably doing something wrong, in which case some cooking
| classes will be both very enjoyable and eliminate the
| problem.
| HaZeust wrote:
| A cooking class won't eliminate the raw meat on your bare
| hand
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Both of them? At the time where you need a timer?
| kevinsundar wrote:
| You've never had to set a timer while cutting meat (which
| inherently takes two hands)?
| scotteric wrote:
| You should be washing your hands immediately after
| handling raw meat.
| lolinder wrote:
| With a voice assistant you can set a timer while
| _actively handling_ the raw meat.
| zymhan wrote:
| Either you don't cook much, or you have a much different
| definition of "gross" than most people.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| A thread about Alexa is a good place to criticize a
| stranger's cooking technique?
| ghaff wrote:
| I mean I have a microwave with a cooking timer and it
| doesn't seem like a big deal to set a timer I can monitor.
| cushychicken wrote:
| Being able to have multiple, named timers that you can set
| hands free is my favorite feature of Alexa! I'm convinced
| that better timing for all of my recipe steps has made me a
| better cook and helped me make better food for the last few
| years.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I wonder how feasible it would be these days to create a
| single-purpose voice-controlled kitchen timer product, at a
| price the market would like? Sounds like it might do well...
| unless nobody needs it cause they already have Alexa!
|
| But yeah, I think a lot of Alexa's get used mainly for
| kitchen timers!
| acchow wrote:
| Your iPhone can already do this.
| 14 wrote:
| I bought a kitchen sink faucet that has a sensor and you just
| wave your hand in front of it and it runs the water and wave
| again and it stops. It is such a good feature I never
| realized I didn't have. Dirty chicken hands no need to touch
| the handle before or after. Pump the soap with my forearm and
| clean my hands.
| parpfish wrote:
| Id love to buy a voice activated timer that didn't require an
| internet connection, but I'm guessing that once you pack in
| enough compute to do language transcription on the device you
| can't help but stack on lots of other features and complicate
| the whole thing
| hereonout2 wrote:
| Yep, it's these simple thingsthat are actually the killer
| features for me. Alexa is so cheap too (often given away free
| with other products like ring cameras) that I have them in
| most rooms.
|
| Mainly I just use them as alarms, timers, a talking clock and
| for listening to radio. I occasionally ask it what time a
| local shop may close or similar.
|
| For the little money I've spent on them I'm perfectly happy
| using them in such a superficial manner, they make life a
| little tiny bit easier and that's ok.
| gspencley wrote:
| Maybe it's because I've worked in food service but if you
| have "gross cooking hands" you really ought to be washing
| them before doing anything else. I suppose that a voice-
| assisted timer could allow you to multi-task so you set it on
| your way to the sink to wash up, but I don't see how that's a
| big selling point. At least not for anyone who cooks in a
| kitchen that I would want to eat food out of. I mean, it's
| not solving a problem that I've ever heard anyone in a
| professional kitchen preparing hundreds of plates per service
| complain about. In that setting "gross kitchen hands" gets
| called a "potential health code infraction."
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Let's say he's cooking lutefisk. It has alkaline, so he'd
| destroy the Alexa by touching it. But his hands are free of
| bacteria, so are they really gross? It might not be the
| health code that applies, but something like the ChemG:
|
| https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/chemg/BJNR017180980.html
| mdavidn wrote:
| This is my primary use case for Siri too. I use my watch or a
| HomePod to start named timers in parallel. Voice is also great
| for adding items to a grocery list, one shared by the entire
| family in Apple's Reminders app. e.g. When I notice the olive
| oil is running low, I can make note without washing my hands.
| chasd00 wrote:
| my Alexa use cases are timer, music, news (sorta), weather. I
| also use "routines" for pranks form time to time.
|
| I setup a routine that made it say "I heard that" at 630pm on a
| Friday when my MIL comes over, drinks some wine, and starts
| talking about the latest conspiracies her and her son have been
| discussing. Heh, Alexa blurting out "i heard that" in the
| middle of the conversation like it was listening all along
| worked like a charm.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I really enjoy this joke,
|
| "Wow, my laptop is a really expensive clipboard today"
|
| "My monitor is a really expensive webcam stand"
|
| "My phone is a really expensive alarm clock"
|
| It's never not funny to me
| kps wrote:
| It's a very old joke, by computing standards.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expensive_Tape_Recorder
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| haha TIL of the origin! thanks!
| sundvor wrote:
| Tesla: Really bloody expensive outside thermometer.
|
| (Via the app climate page, my Model 3 is in an detached-
| adjacent garage where zero attempt was made to insulate the
| gaps)
| saagarjha wrote:
| I have a HomePod that serves a similar purpose inside of
| the house.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| That's the thing, it's not very expensive! It's actually a
| pretty excellent price for what it does well. That's why so
| many people bought them and continue to use them.
| pants2 wrote:
| That's partly because all voice assistants have a feature
| discoverability problem. People have generally no idea what it
| can do unless they ask. And if new features are added, they
| won't know about those either. But at the bare minimum you know
| it has timers and weather.
| conradfr wrote:
| But a phone does the same thing.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I got an Alexa as a gift and never opened it
|
| But now its finding a ton of use as a Cocomelon device for my
| toddler
|
| I'm dreading the day she learns to say "Alexa, play Cocomelon".
| It's over for me the.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Set the wake word to "Computer." It's harder to say and will
| buy you a few months ;)
| nox101 wrote:
| I already have that, it's my phone. I don't need a second
| device to respond to "Set a timer"
| crazygringo wrote:
| I do.
|
| If my phone's in my pocket, it won't hear. If it's in my bag,
| it won't hear.
|
| Or it sets the timer, but then a kid grabs my phone for
| something and leaves it upstairs were I won't hear it.
|
| There's something to be said for a voice-activated timer in
| your kitchen that is always in your kitchen and never leaves
| your kitchen.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| That the oven timer is oven adjacent seems a must.
| flatline wrote:
| I use it as a timer and to control a couple smart lights. About
| 1 in 5 times I use it as a basic utility, it attempts to sell
| me something. I have nearly stopped using it altogether as a
| result of this unwanted behavior.
|
| As an added annoyance, I moved states and it reports the
| weather in my previous location, despite repeated attempts to
| update my home location through the app. So I don't even ask it
| the weather any more.
|
| At one point it was the cheapest whole-home, multi-speaker
| audio setup on the market. But I use spotify as the music
| source.
|
| None of these things generate revenue for Amazon, and their
| feeble attempts to do so run counter to the actual utility of
| the device.
| julianeon wrote:
| The other really good use case, which I'm surprised to see more
| people don't use, is to use it to immediately add items to a
| shopping list when you're out (which doesn't auto-buy, to be
| clear).
|
| Example: cooking, noticed the paprika is out, or in the
| bathroom, noticing the razors are used up. "Alexa, add to my
| shopping list..." My most used Alexa feature.
| ghaff wrote:
| It probably wasn't for him. Maybe for Amazon.
|
| A lot of Amazon engineers have probably gotten a hard kick in
| the face over Alexa though.
| nickm12 wrote:
| I love using my Echo while cooking in the kitchen. Timers,
| music, news. All great features while my hands are occupied and
| covered with chicken grease or whatever.
| lazylion2 wrote:
| My Google assistant is 90%+ alarms and timers
| theshrike79 wrote:
| This is 99% of the use of our kitchen Alexa (29EUR on Prime
| Day, delivered). The multiple named timers are extremely
| useful.
|
| I set up the smart home stuff once, but keeping it updated with
| the crappy mobile app is a huge chore, most of my stuff is in
| Home Assistant and HomeKit, which are a lot easier to keep
| updated.
|
| I'm just hoping for a Homepod 2.0 so I can throw away all
| Alexas and replace them with Homepods.
| alexathrowawa9 wrote:
| Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was
| amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people)
| considering it doesn't seem to be a big revenue generator
|
| I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were
| working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would
| that ever make money"
|
| Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible
|
| It was like empire building at its finest
|
| I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer for
| a lot of services
|
| And the way amazon works with SOA even what seems like a small
| feature ends up being a couple services, a pizza team of 10 devs
| + SDM, the overhead is huge
|
| Back when it was announced alexa org was being hit harder by
| layoffs that did not surprise me
| spike021 wrote:
| I once heard about a feature dogfooding invite that was sent
| out specifically for people with babies because they wanted to
| use Alexa always-listening to activate when a baby was crying
| and automatically order diapers or something ridiculous like
| that.
| alexathrowawa9 wrote:
| I remember getting that invite!
|
| You could use "baby crying detected" as an automation trigger
| bagels wrote:
| Doesn't even make sense. Babies cry all the time for a
| multitude of reasons, none of which are informed by how many
| diapers are in the house.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Yeah and given how often we get it wrong as parents,
| imagine the absolute dumpster fire it would be to have a
| voice assistant get it 10x as wrong.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Babies just need to learn to cry only when the diapers in
| the garage are running low. How hard could that be?
| crabmusket wrote:
| Clearly the feedback loop is too long currently. If we
| could instantly dispense diapers onto the baby as soon as
| it started crying, that would improve learning outcomes
| and encourage experimentation.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Sounds like a virtuous cycle to me!
|
| Babies who cry a little at a time will be awash with
| diapers, leading to secondary market opportunities. Now
| we just need a two-sided marketplace to capture that
| business and charge a modest fee.
| sa46 wrote:
| Interestingly, there is an app, Chatterbaby [1], that
| claims to detect why a baby is crying based on the acoustic
| features of the cry. I've used it with middling success.
|
| That'd be a neat integration: "Alexa, why is my baby
| crying?"
|
| [1]: https://www.chatterbaby.org/pages/
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-019-0592-4
| UberFly wrote:
| "Your baby is crying because it doesn't like the brand of
| formula you purchase. We recommend Amazon Basics!"
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| "We recommend you try UBQTLONR this time!"
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Now with extra melamine!
| Electricniko wrote:
| "Your baby is crying because you often raise your voice
| and make unreasonable demands of those around you. Would
| you like to add insurance for a lifetime of psychiatric
| help to your cart?"
| 39896880 wrote:
| This sounds like a joke but Amazon made a device
| specifically to listen to people talk all day and tell
| them how they sound to others. It is called Halo.
| smolder wrote:
| Your baby is crying over the intrusion of big tech into
| their private life before they even have object
| permanence.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| It wasn't for diaper ordering, Alexa has a feature to detect
| particular sounds (like glass breaking, dog barking etc) for
| monitoring and alerting purposes. Basically it involved
| adding hotword recognition for not just the N number of
| hotwords but also Y number of sounds for particular devices.
| Balgair wrote:
| Hey, I gotta ask a few questions here, given this oportunity:
|
| How many people actually 'worked' there? Like, really did
| something all day?
|
| What was the pay like?
|
| What were the internal politics like?
|
| Any good stories?
| alexathrowawa9 wrote:
| > Any good stories?
|
| One time I walked into a dark room with like 50 test devices
| to get something and somehow accidentally triggered them and
| all 50 started talking at the same time
|
| Was both hilarious and creepy
| LegitShady wrote:
| the furby horror
| deepfriedrice wrote:
| > Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as
| possible
|
| It happened outside of Alexa too. Every team with a public
| facing product was directed (it seemed) to come up with some
| sort of Alexa integration. It was usually dreamed up and either
| a) never prioritized or b) half assed because nobody (devs,
| PMs, etc.) actually thought it made any sense.
| brazzy wrote:
| I guess that's what happens when you're generating absurd
| amounts of revenue and want to "reinvest" it all: anything that
| even vaguely smells of "innovation" gets money thrown at it
| like crazy, and you end up incentivizing bullshitting.
| bloggie wrote:
| My optimistic side tells me that Blue Origin was founded as a
| tech lab / app lab / skunkworks and not necessarily as a
| company with the goal of putting humans in space, that has
| suffered from said bullshitting. But my cynical side tells me
| the latter.
| bobnamob wrote:
| > I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer
| for a lot of services
|
| This is true for a surprising number of amzn/aws products
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| I've interviewed many people on Alexa before. From what I
| gather, its just a giant switch statement, and each individual
| "path" takes a bunch of effort to support and there are
| thousands of paths for music, ordering, commands, etc. It's
| peak AI == if statement architecture.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Do you mean actual coded if statements as in actually human
| written code like if (question.match(/^what
| is (.*)/)) return wikipedia.search(question)
|
| or something more automated?
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| Not like that, but once you get to first party Alexa Skill
| themselves there's a bunch of match rules that make up a
| big chunk of the traffic. Don't know exactly how much. The
| longtail is done through ML means.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| I think describing the NLU Engine as a switch statement is
| underselling it a bit. Determining domain and intent alone
| requires more than that (frequently, at least).
| ihkasfjdkabnsk wrote:
| Throwaway, used to work at the NLU unit of Alexa about 5
| years ago. There is some ML going on but as with all ML
| projects I have worked on people want control. This means you
| add rules for the "important" stuff. You also add test cases
| to make sure the ML works. But if you already have those test
| cases, why not just match on them directly? There are also
| advanced techniques for generating examples (FST for
| example).
|
| What this culminated in is a platform where 80% of request,
| and pretty much 99% of "commands" are served by rules built
| with a team of linguists.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| Later on, there were methods to generate FSTs themselves
| without manual human curation.
| rtpg wrote:
| Is this not actually kind of powerful? Having linguists
| write up a bunch of rules seems a lot more predictable than
| "rolling a bunch of dice and hoping that some LLM spits out
| a coherent set of steps".
|
| It feels very fractal but on the other hand if Alexa has
| only a specific gamut of responses it's not exactly a
| limitless state space right?
|
| Very curious about how those rules look like though
| ihkasfjdkabnsk wrote:
| Honestly the FSTs themselves were actually really cool,
| it's very much GOFAI. It automatically creates lots of
| permutations, i.e. `play taylor swift`, `please play
| taylor swift`, play taylor swift now`. etc. And once the
| FST is built it always works deterministically. It's
| compiled to a graph and an incoming command is pushed
| through the state machine, if you get to an end state it
| "matched the fst" and some specific behaviour would be
| triggered.
|
| the rule were really just strings and we had efficient
| matching against it. I didn't work on that, I would
| assume some sort of LHS.
| phito wrote:
| what do all these acronyms mean
| 39896880 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_transducer
|
| https://medium.com/fetch-ai/classical-roots-of-ai-
| unpacking-....
| factormeta wrote:
| wouldn't that just be some kind of NLP https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing?
|
| May just be a long list of if/else and/or switch
| statements or isomorphism.
| IshKebab wrote:
| The problem is it's completely undiscoverable. You can
| tell Alexa "play some music" because you're pretty sure
| one of these linguists added a rule for that. But can you
| tell it "play me a song that lasts longer than 5
| minutes"? Doubtful. The only way to know is to try it.
|
| The problem is the space of _possible_ commands is
| waaaaay bigger than the space of commands you can
| manually handle, which means if you just randomly try
| stuff 95% of the time it won 't work. Users learn that
| very quickly and end up sticking to the few commands they
| know work.
|
| The one exception is "search" queries - "how tall is
| Everest" and so on, but that only really works well on
| Google's platform because they've done all the work for
| that already.
|
| Contrast that with LLMs which basically at least
| understand everything you're asking of them. If you give
| them a simple API to carry out actions they can do really
| complex commands like "send a WhatsApp to my wife telling
| her how when I'll get home if I start cycling in 10
| minutes". That's impossible without LLMs but pretty
| trivial with them.
|
| Obviously the downside is they are prone to bullshitting
| and might do completely the wrong thing.
| 39896880 wrote:
| It's worse than that. These systems can be adapted by
| looking at failed user commands, but people don't really
| sit around trying out fun things and watch it fall on its
| face for longer than the first day or so. After that, the
| novelty wears off, so you've trained your users to accept
| the device's limitations. Then, even when you _do_
| improve the functionality, your users won't know! They
| won't try it, and those commands will never get traction
| in the system or get more testing beyond the initial
| launch criteria. It's a death spiral. The same thing
| happens with the tone of voice people use.
| mycall wrote:
| > people don't really sit around trying out fun things
| and watch it fall on its face for longer than the first
| day or so.
|
| Isn't this what thumbs-up/down RL is for? To improve the
| quality of the results.
| 39896880 wrote:
| That's the intention but very few users enjoy being
| unpaid QA for trillion dollar corps.
| 9dev wrote:
| > The one exception is "search" queries - "how tall is
| Everest" and so on, but that only really works well on
| Google's platform because they've done all the work for
| that already.
|
| Had a small Google Assistant thingy for years, and that
| search stuff works great, until it doesn't, and
| completely misses the mark. This immediately kills trust
| and reduces it to a gadget that I will only use for non-
| critical stuff, always expecting it to break anyway.
| chamanbuga wrote:
| This is exactly how Cortana and Google Assistant have been
| built as well.
| shagie wrote:
| Was there a knowledge engine of some sort in the past? I
| could ask it some questions like "what color is a light red
| flower" and I would get back "a pink flower is pink."
| Asking what color a purple cat was would get back purple...
| but asking what color a blue bird was would get back "a
| blue bird is blue, red, and brown."
|
| "Who has birthdays today?" And I would get a list of famous
| people with birthdays today. I could also ask if Alice and
| Bob (two names in the list) had the same birthday and I
| would get an answer (one time I think I got back some
| internal query language for it instead... but that's lost
| in old bug reports).
|
| Now any interesting question starts its answer with
| "according to an Alexa answers contributor..."
| gregmac wrote:
| > You also add test cases to make sure the ML works. But if
| you already have those test cases, why not just match on
| them directly?
|
| Kind of says it all.
|
| At the end of the day if you have a complex product but
| don't have comprehensive test cases, it's just a matter of
| time until your users notice your product sucks.
| novok wrote:
| IMO with my experience with siri being AI-style unreliable in
| many ways, like bit flips when saying turn off the lights
| makes the dimmer go to %100, I think it's better to do the
| switch statement for the dozen or so query types that
| probably represent %90 of traffic, like weather, music, home
| control, unit conversions, etc in exchange for way more
| reliability.
| visarga wrote:
| > I've interviewed many people on Alexa before.
|
| I got a recruiting message once for a ML engineer position in
| Alexa, ignored it.
| conductr wrote:
| My take on it was that Alexa was developed at a time they were
| trying really hard to solidify their continued existence as a
| tech company; AWS and kindle came around then too. The stock
| market values tech companies much higher than retail companies.
| That's what justified the headcount expense
| nickm12 wrote:
| AWS and Kindle were developed a decade before the Echo.
| conductr wrote:
| Yeah, it's just how I remember it. It was a period of time,
| not a moment. A bit longer apart than i remembered but that
| phase of amazons management and growth felt like a cohesive
| moment to me as an outside observer. Their strategy has
| changed since then. And have they released much new tech
| that wasn't expansion or iterations of those?
| baxtr wrote:
| I would love to see the initial "vision doc". How were they
| envisioning to make lots of money with it in the first place?
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| I am actually surprised that there are thousands of people
| working on Alexa.
|
| WTF are they all doing?! It's pretty much unchanged from the
| outside in any way that's relevant to me compared to where it
| was in 2014. And the few changes I've noticed have been things
| _breaking._
|
| I used to, for instance, have a script (I forget the Alexa
| term) that would turn off a few lights and then play a Pandora
| radio station when I gave it a "bedtime" command. Worked great
| for about a year, and then the Pandora plugin suddenly refused
| to take any combination of commands that I could figure out to
| play a particular Pandora station in my account. This is true
| from outside of the automation as well, by the way. It's just
| completely broken.
|
| The weather app integration is annoying too. I wanted weather
| to use a different weather source, and instead of just giving
| me results from that weather source, it would always preface it
| with "Weather from BlueSky" or whatever. Maybe it's their fault
| and they wanted the ad blurb? But as a consumer, it sucked. I
| just wanted more localized weather, not an ad every time I
| asked for the weather.
|
| And the "AI" behavior of the app...it was just awful. I could
| get better answers from Google Home devices across the board.
| The best Alexa would do if I asked it a question is to read the
| first paragraph of a Wikipedia entry, and it was about a 1 in 4
| chance it would actually choose the correct Wikipedia entry.
|
| OH, and don't get me started on the Android Alexa app (!!!).
| Again, the most major change was a UI update where _the_ most
| important feature I ever use was hidden behind another layer of
| menus for no particularly good reason. And the "Kindle
| Accessibility" feature of reading Kindle books is so flaky I
| doubt anyone on the team ever uses it, from random pauses to
| sudden jumps back to read from the beginning of the section of
| the book you started on 10 minutes ago, looping forever on
| those same 10 minutes.
|
| Sorry. I know it wasn't your fault. But I finally gave up on
| using Echo devices, and the only reason I still even have the
| Alexa app on my phone any more is so I can have it read a
| Kindle book while I'm driving, and it's so amazingly
| frustrating to use that it would likely be better if it didn't
| even exist. It's more "customer frustration" than useful.
| venkat223 wrote:
| They have data for AI skimming and training the ai agents. But
| with voice tracking issues inside homes may not yield structured
| data
| mgraupner wrote:
| Speaking of Alexa: Can anyone explain the thought process behind
| making it possible to change the volume in small increments via
| buttons, but not via voice command (only in 10% increments)? I
| only use it as an internet radio player for background music and
| it's extremely annoying that it can't do that.
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| You can set the volume to any number from 1-10
| mgraupner wrote:
| Which correlates to 10% and 100%. I want for example 15%,
| which works with the buttons.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| If you say, "volume 15 percent" it will set it to 15%.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I thought each button press on the volume buttons
| corresponded to + or -10%? I always thought Alexa's volume
| only had 10 states (11 counting zero) regardless of buttons
| or voice commands? Maybe it depends on the device, I have
| the spherical echo.
| mgraupner wrote:
| I checked and it's 3% increments via the buttons. I have
| 3 different Echos, they all behave the same.
| jetrink wrote:
| Can't you just ask it to set the volume to a specific volume as
| a percentage, like 38%? This works on Google Home. In the
| Google ecosystem, it also _usually_ works if you ask it to
| raise the volume by a small increment like 5%. (Other times,
| this sets the volume to 5%.) I think you also used to be able
| to ask the device to raise the volume 'a bit' or 'a lot', for
| 5% or 20% respectively, but that stopped working a long time
| ago and I haven't tried recently.
|
| If neither of these work, then I am very frustrated on your
| behalf.
| mgraupner wrote:
| Unfortunately it only knows integers and rounds 15% up to 20%
| and 12% down to 10%.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| If you say, "volume 15 percent" it will set it to 15%.
| mgraupner wrote:
| Not working for me, as I said in another comment, asking it
| to set it to 15% will set it to 20%.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| that sucks that you're the only one in the world that it
| doesn't work for. sorry to hear that
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| Voice command on volume modulation used to work. Then Video,
| Music, Shopping and Home Automation built a "revamped" Alexa
| system and broke it. This is also why people struggle to turn
| of alarms, why Alexa Pay broke, among many other service-side
| performance degradations.
|
| Pretty cringe, the number of people who were promoted for this.
|
| 10/10 not worth working for Amazon.
| mgraupner wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback.
| stacktrust wrote:
| If it's not doing what you want, you can remap any arbitrary
| voice command to a precise Volume setting in 1% increments, via
| a custom Routine.
| mgraupner wrote:
| Which is fine (although these routines are very slow, which
| makes it awkward to use for volume adjustments), but why make
| things so complicated when the possibility to adjust the
| volume in 1% steps via the app and 3% via buttons exist?
| superfrank wrote:
| Years ago, my wife did some contracting work for a team
| responsible for the voice assistant at one of the major tech
| companies. Her role required her to work with the directors and
| VPs and she came home one day to tell me how one of them laid out
| their grand vision for the product and was talking about how, not
| only will people use these things to buy every day items, but one
| day people will be making major purchases like cars with these
| things.
|
| I can't speak for the Alexa team, but if the execs at Amazon are
| anywhere close to that delusional, it's no wonder these things
| are falling short of expectations.
|
| The problem IMO is trust. These devices get simple commands like,
| "turn off the lights" wrong on a semi-regular basis. No one is
| going to trust Alexa to buy the right thing until they're
| confident that it consistently understands them correctly and
| currently the error rate is just too high. Even if it does
| understand me, I don't trust Amazon to send me a quality product.
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| I think the issue of trust is a part of it, but not the most
| crippling when it comes to purchases. It's not that I don't
| trust Alexa is that I have no idea how to communicate what I
| need. There are thousands of options for any product - so which
| one should Alexa pick? How can I tell what sliced bread I want
| it to order without seeing the available options and prices?..
| superfrank wrote:
| That's fair. For me at least, I see those as two sides of the
| same coin.
|
| If I tell my wife, "buy me toilet paper", I trust that she
| knows enough about me to pick a quality product. I don't need
| to specify details because I trust her.
|
| If I tell Amazon, "buy me toilet paper", I wouldn't be at all
| surprised if I got some garbage product from a brand I've
| never heard of and like you said, it isn't clear what I could
| do to get Amazon to do something different.
| matrix87 wrote:
| I think another problem is just a general lack of value. Why
| should the average person care about a 1% gain in convenience
| and adjust just to appease some C-suite delusion? It's like
| they all want to be Steve Jobs without offering any significant
| value to back it up
| anandlovelin wrote:
| I was really pissed when Alexa tried to sell me "Despicable me"
| movie as the first thing when I announced good morning. Never
| tried that again.
| Minor49er wrote:
| What were you expecting it to do instead?
|
| Edit: Why the downvotes? This is a legitimate question
| tonymet wrote:
| if they integrate LLMs and build true conversational capabilities
| they could charge a premium for therapeutic conversations
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| I love the idea but the only way I would ever use a product
| like that is if it's fully local and open source. No company is
| getting my "therapeutic conversations".
| atum47 wrote:
| I'm doing my part.
|
| Every time I search for a product I filter out Amazon from the
| results.
| meroes wrote:
| I'm doing mine by never having bought a voice assistant
| amelius wrote:
| Same here. I voted with my feet.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They should sell them all to openAI to become the voice interface
| of GPTx.
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| Amazon is surely working on an LLM competitor integrated into
| their ecosystem. Even using Llama 3.1 would suffice.
| advisedwang wrote:
| The article says as much:
|
| > A group was assembled ... to create a way to charge
| customers a fee for Alexa. Code-named "Banyan," like the
| tree, the group has been working to create a product called
| "Remarkable Alexa," that would be built on an entirely new
| technology stack and have more capabilities ... It will also
| incorporate generative artificial intelligence more than the
| current Echo experience. Bezos hinted at a new version of
| Alexa in a podcast interview in December. "Alexa is about to
| get a lot smarter," he told the host.
| rrwo wrote:
| The last thing anyone wants a smart home assistant for is to
| purchase stuff.
|
| Controlling lights, heating and cooling, play music, find
| information, yes. But shopping is unexciting and low on the list.
| ddawson wrote:
| https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-alexa-devices-echo-losses-st...
| farceSpherule wrote:
| They made similar stupid decisions with the flood of their Amazon
| branded products that they were ripping off from Amazon sellers.
|
| The issue with Amazon is that they have so much money, they can
| afford to make dumb decisions.
| textlapse wrote:
| If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn't figure out how to
| monetize a voice/chat 'app' after a decade of plowing money into
| it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition?
|
| Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite
| consumer interest, but just like 'kitchen timers on Alexa' what
| if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and
| the most basic RAG?
|
| How does this manifest into a trillion or gazillion dollar
| market? What am I missing?
|
| (I am discounting GH Copilot/Cody and the like as they are an
| extension of intellisense/ dev oriented workflows which really is
| a fantastic use case)
| mvanbaak wrote:
| hype, marketing, investors spent millions so lets make it
| happen.
|
| It feels a lot like the whole crypto thing
| monero-xmr wrote:
| But bitcoin and ethereum are near all time highs, while Alexa
| is laying everyone off and AI has no paying customers...
| LordKeren wrote:
| This is by design-- the rhetoric around crypto was
| specifically tailored to emulate all the new-exciting-tech
| talking points in an attempt to get new people to buy in to
| the market and prop up the next rug pull.
|
| Every new culturally significant tech is going to sound like
| crypto from now on. And ultimately I think it is too easy to
| cynically look at all tech hype through the lens of crypto.
|
| I think it is pretty fair to say that LLMs have already
| achieved several magnitudes more real use cases than crypto
| ever did.
| matrix87 wrote:
| > I think it is pretty fair to say that LLMs have already
| achieved several magnitudes more real use cases than crypto
| ever did.
|
| If you include black market economic activity, then crypto
| has done way more and over a much longer period
| LordKeren wrote:
| > If you include black market economic activity
|
| I don't
| tempodox wrote:
| > more real use cases than crypto ever did.
|
| Indeed, with crypto the suckers needed to do the
| hallucinating themselves. LLMs automate that and do it for
| you.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| The question is the cost to value ratio. There is some value
| in LLM's, the question is if people are willing to foot the
| cost.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > how does the whole LLM market come to fruition?
|
| It replaces all the David Graeber "bullshit jobs". As well as
| about 90% of the education system.
|
| It's not replacing them with something _better_ , but it is
| cheaper.
| loire280 wrote:
| Except according to Graeber those jobs exist because leaders,
| companies, and society _like_ having lots of employees doing
| this work for various reasons and we all more or less tacitly
| agree that the output of those jobs is useless and only
| exists because the last 50 years of productivity gains mean
| there isn 't enough real work to keep everyone busy for 40+
| hours 50 weeks a year.
| matrix87 wrote:
| > It replaces all the David Graeber "bullshit jobs".
|
| Those jobs were already replaceable to begin with? Isn't that
| already implied by their name?
|
| Also, is it possible that the recent investment in LLMs have
| actually produced more bullshit jobs instead of decreasing
| them?
|
| > As well as about 90% of the education system.
|
| :/ there's a lot more to the education system than just the
| content
| QuiDortDine wrote:
| Even just the content needs a deciding mind to prioritize.
| If lesson plans were enough, education would happen through
| VHS tapes.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > As well as about 90% of the education system.
|
| There are multiple stories from actual teachers about kids
| and teens doing this today.
|
| They don't use search engines or books, they ask an LLM.
|
| Then 20 students get 20 different answers of varying quality
| and do ZERO validation that the answer they got is real, they
| trust the LLM implicitly.
| conradfr wrote:
| They are useful for customer service.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| When? I've used various customer service chat bots and they
| just point me to the knowledge base. They can't take any
| actions. You have to talk to a human for that, and if I just
| wanted info I wouldn't have contacted support in the first
| place.
| conradfr wrote:
| The vast majority of CS contacts don't require action, and
| are not through a chat bot.
|
| You don't even need to automate all the steps, an IA is
| perfectly capable of fetching the customer data, delivery
| info etc and write a decent reply, then a human agent can
| discard it, improve it or send it as written.
| rty32 wrote:
| Here is the thing. Most of the time I call customer service
| because the app/website does not provide the information or
| the ability to do certain things, and I need to talk to a
| human to get things explained or get something done. And more
| than a few times customer service agents don't know what they
| are doing or are just talking nonsense, and I need to
| escalate to a manager.
|
| You think you can trust an LLM to make decisions for
| something like resetting password or closing an account?
| nox101 wrote:
| > how does the whole LLM market come to fruition?
|
| I'm paying for chatGPT and use it quite often. I find it very
| useful. I don't pay for chat because there have been free
| options since the 80s. I don't pay for voice(chat) because
| there have free options for ~10yrs?
| textlapse wrote:
| Interesting. How much would one have to pay you to stop using
| it?
|
| Wondering what the use cases are (replace Google? Stack
| Overflow? etc).
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I'd have to be paid probably at least $200/mo to stop using
| LLMs, they are a massive productivity boost for new
| projects and can replace google for simple things. As an
| example of replacing google (since I was writing C++ today
| and I haven't used it in ages):
|
| me: is there an issue with passing "hello" to std::string
|
| claude: Passing "hello" to a function expecting std::string
| is actually not an issue. C++ allows implicit conversion
| from string literals (like "hello") to std::string objects.
| This conversion is possible because std::string has a
| constructor that accepts a const char*, which is the type
| of string literals in C++.
|
| If I type this question into google, I get this:
|
| > some_function(std::string{"hello, world"}); is completely
| safe, as long as the function doesn't preserve the
| string_view for later use. The temporary std::string is
| destroyed at the end of this full-expression (roughly
| speaking, at this ; ), so it's destroyed after the function
| returns.
|
| which doesn't really answer my question
|
| As an example of simple project: I wanted to make an app
| with swiftUI, and I was able to just describe it to claude
| and have it give me the basic outlines of the app, and then
| improve it by iteratively asking claude for changes. Since
| I try to understand the output, this lead to me learning
| Swift and SwiftUI very quickly while also having a
| functional app within a few minutes.
| saagarjha wrote:
| String literals are not const char *, but const char[] in
| C++. They decay to a pointer when you pass them to the
| std::string constructor that takes one.
| skydhash wrote:
| Not arguing with your anecdote, but I expect LLMs to
| respond better with question type queries. Due to
| learning with books, I tend to use a keyword based to my
| search, and while reading I tend to collect technical
| terms as that how they will be referred most of the
| times. As for your example, I would type "c++ string
| literal std::string" as the query. Or I'd probably look
| for the documentation of std::string and seek the answer
| there.
|
| Why? Because books, articles, and documentation often
| have related pieces of knowledge next to each other. It's
| like experiencing a whole journey instead of a short
| slideshow of pictures and video clips. Maybe that one
| specific answer is all you needed, but having the
| complete picture helps me refine my ideas better.
|
| DuckDuckGo (What I use) is still useful for me. I either
| know the resources I'm looking for or I'm hoping someone
| has written about it. And the keyword based approach
| works great. It's like the index at the end of the book
| and it's table of content. You look at them to see if
| what you're seeking in in this book and where. It's just
| a short stop to the actual information.
| lionkor wrote:
| Its because you clicked on an unrelated google result
| about string views.
|
| After you have taken any kind of C++ course, like
| learncpp.com, you dont have to look this stuff up anymore
| either.
|
| So if LLMs are worth 200$/month to you, I would be very
| interested to see what actually learning the tools you
| use would be worth.
| joenot443 wrote:
| Do you take a course for every programming language you
| encounter?
|
| I needed to edit a Ruby script the other day for a
| client, though I'm not at all a Ruby developer. ChatGPT
| was super helpful.
|
| If I'm understanding correctly, your model here would
| instead be to enroll in a Ruby course, right? I think we
| must value our time very differently :)
| gspencley wrote:
| Different people learn and approach problems differently.
|
| I haven't taken any programming courses since high-
| school. But I also very rarely use search engines or LLMs
| when I'm writing code, even in a language that is new to
| me.
|
| My preferred approach to learning new languages or
| frameworks is typically to begin by reading the
| documentation. If that is not a sufficient enough deep
| dive because I'm approaching some ginormous "ecosystem"
| language like Java where I need to learn tons of new
| concepts to get started then I'll reach for a textbook.
|
| I have tried to get into using LLMs, especially because
| so many of my coworkers rave about them and they take it
| for granted that everyone else uses copilot or claude
| because they use them so much. But I don't find any
| utility in using copilot (or whatever the JetBrains
| equivalent is) and I've found that LLMs in general are so
| hit or miss for me that they have become my last resort
| for searching for information when all else has failed.
|
| My coworkers often talk about how copilot is like a very
| advanced auto-complete and that it saves them having to
| look things up on StackOverflow and copy/paste from there
| ... but I can probably count the number of times that
| I've looked something up on StackOverflow over the past
| 10 - 15 years on one hand, and I've never copy/pasted any
| code .. not once, ever. Typically I find myself actively
| searching for solutions when I've come across some weird
| compiler or framework error that I've never seen before
| and need to search for that specific error string (in
| which case a traditional search engine beats an LLM 10/10
| times).
| lionkor wrote:
| > Do you take a course for every programming language you
| encounter?
|
| Yeah often
| rtpg wrote:
| It's silly but having the Apple robot or Google robot put stuff
| into your Apple shopping list or Google shopping list is a
| pretty good ecosystem play, right? Like how people get kinda
| locked in with photo sharing and airplay and friends.
|
| Like if both environments feel equivalent but one has a better
| speaker setup (or inversely if one environment feels better and
| both have equivalent-feeling speakers) now you're locked in?
| It's good marketing I guess? Very hand-wave-y
| DaoVeles wrote:
| That is a fair point. The only thing I use Co-pilot to do is to
| make stupid stuff like pictures of Wizards bowling.
| WatchDog wrote:
| If OpenAI ends up releasing the GPT-4o voice model they demoed,
| I feel like I would use it a lot, especially while driving.
| maronato wrote:
| Isn't it out already? I can definitely use something very
| similar right now on their app.
| WatchDog wrote:
| The app can do speech-to-text, and text-to-speech using
| their whisper model, and it's integrated with chatgpt.
|
| On May 13th, they demoed GPT-4o's multi-modal voice
| capabilities, and it's much better than a text/speech
| model.
|
| Converting speech to text, and vice versa, is quite lossy,
| all the tone and emotion of the speech is lost in
| translation, the model they demoed in May was capable of
| much more than whisper is.
| tempodox wrote:
| Investors hallucinating large windfalls and users who want to
| believe in miracles and/or are just ignorant. How many people
| know that LLMs are just text completion engines and cannot do
| reasoning or math or have a concept of truth?
| southwesterly wrote:
| Product looking for a service.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I use mine to start music. I have different commands for music
| when I work, when I cook, when I'm getting ready for a run. About
| 4-5 commands in total.
|
| Sometimes I have to change the "whole house" Command because it
| doesn't like where the word 'group' was. Sometimes it wants it
| first, other times.. after.
|
| I use commands like "music time". I have for years. And sometimes
| it won't understand my command request. I have to say it 5 times
| and then it works. I've looked for words it's likely to
| understand better than others. I also have "sleep time". Usually,
| when I've said it enough times for Alexa to understand, I'm no
| longer calm enough for sleep.
|
| I also can't believe you can ask it to start an album and go to
| the second song. Seems like a basic request.
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| Please realize, for this to be true, there must be another
| incentive. I.e., Alexa devices are government-subsidized spyware.
|
| What are the advantages for Amazon?
|
| - Mic-popping, Camera-popping, mobile phone backdoor access,
| network sniffing, device activity monitoring across all
| wifi/bluetooth connected networks.
|
| - Sidewalk (remember this? Amazon "borrows" your wifi, for
| free...)
|
| Unplug Alexa devices. Remove the Alexa app from your phone, and
| factory reset. Otherwise you remain complicit in Amazon
| surveillance of you and everyone that interacts with you.
| 6ak74rfy wrote:
| Sure. What do I do with all my devices that don't turn them
| into e-waste?
|
| I've looked for projects but haven't found anything yet.
| advisedwang wrote:
| I'm not saying that smart home stuff isn't amazing for the
| surveillance state... but I am quite happy to believe a company
| just made a strategy mistake, no behind-the-scenes government
| deals needed. We've seen companies build expensive products
| without monetization plans, especially when they are worried
| about getting cut-out by a compentitor many times.
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| If that makes it more palatable for you, then I understand
| why you need to prioritize this level of reasoning.
|
| Amazon culture is fail fast. Not many products at Amazon last
| this long, boasting multi-billion dollar losses YoY. Name
| another product at Amazon that does this, for this long.
| bryananderson wrote:
| This is hysterical. I never owned one until I worked on the
| product because I worried it was always recording/transmitting.
| Turns out it's not. Promise.
|
| You don't need a shadowy government cabal to explain Alexa
| persisting too long in the strategy described in the article.
| Just a powerful chief executive with an attachment to the
| product, the sunk cost fallacy, a company with too much revenue
| to know what to do with, some gameable downstream impact
| metrics, the inertia of large institutions, and empire
| building.
|
| It still could've become an incredible product if they'd gotten
| on the LLM chat/agent train early enough, but alas. I mostly
| use mine to set timers when my hands are full in the kitchen.
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| To be sure, it's not shadowy. You can track awarded
| contracts. You can track employment of persons from 3-5
| letter agencies into private sector. You can look on Amazon
| Science page from 2019, where plans for "ambient
| intelligence" begin.
| bryananderson wrote:
| If you're right, they did a stellar job of hiding it from
| the engineers working on the devices!
|
| Or maybe I'm one of the deep state cutouts. One never knows
| for sure.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| My kids use Alexa for listening to (spotify) music more than
| anything else. If Alexa could convince my kids that Amazon music
| is better than Spotify, then I'd pay for amazon music instead of
| spotify. So far, there hasn't been any serious attempt at getting
| us to embrace amazon music.
|
| If I was amazon, it would look like this. "Oh hey, you want to
| play Taylor Swift? Well, it looks like your brother is playing
| spotify on a different Alexa device. Would you like to play
| Taylor Swift using Amazon Music?" No ads. No bullshit. For 1
| month.
|
| After that month, then it would say "It looks like your Brother
| is playing music on a different Alexa device. Sign up for Amazon
| music to play up to 5 different streams on alexa and elsewhere."
| (something that is possible, but more challenging to do with
| spotify on alexa devices).
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| The Alexa leadership at Amazon has been a waste since day 1 (pun
| intended).
|
| Shopping with Alexa is easy to fix!
|
| Reorder what I want, not the most popular item. When I say, order
| diapers, use the last brand and size that I ordered. That would
| actually be useful! Who wants to say "get my diapers" and get a
| random box of random sized diapers? Do the Alexa leadership even
| use their own product?
|
| Distinguish regular orders from one-offs. I _never_ want a one-
| off order from a category I don 't regularly order from. But I
| very much want to be able to reup regular orders.
|
| Let me order incrementally from Fresh as I cook. I would order
| from Fresh more often if I could just say "Alexa, we're out of
| red wine vinegar". Again, I have to know 100% that it would get
| the item that I want, not some random item. Then, let me say,
| "Ok, pull the trigger on all of the pending fresh orders Sat at
| noon".
|
| Voice identification is a must. I don't want random people
| ordering. And I don't want my kids ordering. The first thing
| everyone with kids does is turn off ordering. The fact that they
| can't sort this out is crazy!
|
| Their half-hearted attempt to create an ecosystem was completely
| wasted. No one wants to use a wake word, then another command
| word, and another word, just to access a skill. They need to
| figure out how to route to skills automatically based on what
| someone is asking. This isn't rocket science they're just
| incompetent.
|
| Also, has anyone seen the website to install new skills? It could
| win an award for worst UI.
|
| Skills can also charge you while using them! The skills store is
| full of 1 star reviews from people saying they got charged
| against their will for months in some cases.
|
| It feels like the Alexa team just doesn't talk to consumers.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I unplugged my Echo years ago. I was getting 0 value out of it.
| Talking to your computer is an amusing novelty, for a while. But
| at the end of the day I prefer forms and buttons. I can open the
| Wikipedia app on my phone and type "Llama" just as fast as I can
| say "Hey Siri", wait for the beep, "tell me about Llamas", all
| without disrupting anyone else around me. Plus, I get the full
| Wikipedia article and not just a summary.
| alexa_throwaway wrote:
| Throwaway here.
|
| I'm the CEO of a fast-growing AI startup. Alex asked to meet with
| us about a year ago (when we were about 1/10th the size), and
| after asking us to prepare lots of materials, they indicated they
| wanted to buy us or invest in us. People warned us not to talk to
| them because they have a reputation for gathering technical
| detail, and then trying to copy it rather than striking a deal.
| Our software could have _radically accelerated and improved_ the
| Alexa experience basically overnight.
|
| At one point in the meeting, the head of Alexa's M&A/investment
| team said "tell us how much you think you're worth." I threw out
| a number, and he laughed and left the room.
|
| Today we're valued at more than that number and Alexa's core
| experience hasn't changed in the past year. They haven't been
| able to copy us. The Alexa leadership team has some hubris IMO.
| enlyth wrote:
| > Our software could have radically accelerated and improved
| the Alexa experience basically overnight
|
| By improve the Alexa experience, do you mean make it more
| useful for users or help it shift more chineseware for Amazon?
| Because as a user, I will never order anything without seeing a
| picture and reading reviews, voice shopping is dead on arrival
|
| If it's the former, I imagine it's Alexa hooked up to some
| gimmicky LLM, and I don't see where the actual profit comes
| from, I would have laughed and left the room too
| alexa_throwaway wrote:
| It's not Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LLM. I don't want
| to give away too many details given that this is a throwaway
| account, but the way Alexa's ecosystem works is they have
| "skills" Alexa users can instantiate. Our API would have
| increased the utility (and therefore usage) of some of the
| top skills by quite a lot.
|
| I think of the Alexa team the same way I think of juiced up
| bodybuilders who think they can beat up anyone even though
| they've never trained MMA. The Alexa team looks in the mirror
| and sees big muscles, but they don't know how to use those
| muscles to fight. Yes, the strength and muscle helps, but
| ultimately to do well at MMA you have to develop specific
| skills, and you need to start with humility.
|
| Anyway, the past is the past. It sounds like Jassy is focused
| on turning around this division, which is a good thing IMO.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| >Anyway, the past is the past. It sounds like Jassy is
| focused on turning around this division, which is a good
| thing IMO.
|
| If you got 10x bigger aren't they your competitor now or
| are you still tiny relatively speaking?
| alexa_throwaway wrote:
| We're still tiny compared to Alexa, but we have over a
| million MAUs so we're not tiny for a startup.
|
| At present, Alexa itself is not a direct competitor,
| although a large and growing use-case for Alexa skills
| would benefit directly from our tech. This may change if
| Alexa gets its act together, but based on the past year
| I'm not holding my breath!
| OrigamiPastrami wrote:
| > Today we're valued at more than that number and Alexa's core
| experience hasn't changed in the past year. They haven't been
| able to copy us. The Alexa leadership team has some hubris IMO.
|
| I can't really evaluate you since you want to stay anonymous,
| but you're not really giving any credibility here. FAANG being
| arrogant isn't really any different than flavor-of-the-year
| tech startup being arrogant. There are numerous stories of
| high-flying startups that went bankrupt a few years after
| rejecting an acquisition offer, including significantly
| multiplying their valuation and raising capital along the way.
| You're also in an infamously overvalued sector.
|
| I wish you all the best but try not to fall prey to the same
| mindset you're criticizing Amazon for.
| alexa_throwaway wrote:
| Thanks for writing that. It may be that Alexa made the right
| decision to pass (time will tell, you're right the valuation
| itself isn't the best barometer) but the point of my post was
| simply that the Alexa leadership team felt very arrogant and
| disrespectful regardless of whether they made the right
| decision. They acted like we needed them, whereas in my
| opinion time has shown it was more the opposite.
|
| I can't speak for all startups, but at my company we treat
| even the tiniest startups with respect, and even if we can't
| work together we wouldn't approach that decision the way
| Alexa did.
|
| Anyway, as I mentioned in another comment, the past is the
| past. The Alexa leadership team is being shaken up and I wish
| them the best going forward. Just sharing my experience here
| because it's relevant to the thread.
| Shocka1 wrote:
| This is wonderful to hear thanks for mentioning it. My last
| position as a software engineer at a very well known
| company I was in countless meetings where third parties or
| contracting companies were treated downright
| disrespectfully. Any time I brought this factor up to
| management or co-workers I was looked at like I was
| speaking a foreign language. Even in fast paced engineering
| environments, there is never room for disrespect. I enjoy
| stories like this and wish you and your company the best.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| I call businesses like that Llama's. When a Llama (the
| creature) generally starts getting friendly towards someone it
| means they are about to get nasty and attack/spit in your face.
|
| Amazon and Microsoft are two great examples of this. When they
| get close to you be weary. Go for the buy out or watch out for
| them trying to get ideas to steal.
| wiether wrote:
| > When a Llama (the creature) generally starts getting
| friendly towards someone it means they are about to get nasty
| and attack/spit in your face.
|
| Is that why Meta decided to call their _open source_ LLM this
| way? It would make a lot of sense!
| smolder wrote:
| It's called Llama because it has L L M in it and is cute.
| stacktrust wrote:
| Practical Alexa use cases for elderly: 1.
| Schedule/ask cooker to start, then stop after fixed time.
| 2. Blind person can control microwave with voice. 3. Blind
| person navigation via prompts from multiple Echo devices.
| 4. Blind person notification when doors opened or motion
| detected. 5. Blind person item locator, via Tile + Alexa.
| 6. On-demand instructions for caregivers. 7. On-demand
| physiotherapy exercise instructions. 8. On-demand streaming
| radio and podcasts. 9. TV voice control via Logitech
| Harmony or Android Fire TV. 10. Call PSTN phones via VOIP
| (10 number limit). 11. Zigbee devices with USA-based cloud
| security (Echo4 is a hub) 12. Arm/disarm Blink cameras.
| 13. AC/heat control via temperature sensor in Echo devices.
| 14. Announce notifications from Google Calendar.
|
| If Amazon would open up their devices and/or APIs, much much more
| is possible. There are some workarounds via HomeAssistant.
| ynac wrote:
| I haven't used Amazon since about 2000 (kung fu movies for my
| brother-in-law). My current process for shopping online cascades
| from the actual manufacturer / source, eBay, specialized
| clearinghouse (e.g. www.Biblio.com for books) and as a last
| resort, Costco / WalMart - these last two often have hard to find
| items I need quickly (or so I think - I'm looking at you Black
| Cuman powder).
|
| All in all, I shop stress free in this decision tree. Oddly happy
| with eBay over the years. It may be because of their lack of new
| features and old UI that keeps things simple and quick / it just
| works. Yes, there are oddball things about each of these, but
| compared to AMZN...it's all bliss.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| When you are worth trillions, what are a few billions if some
| C-suite occupant decides it doesn't matter.
| throwadobe wrote:
| I think the fundamental issue with Alexa is that Amazon is trying
| to answer the question "how can we use it to sell more shit?"
| instead of trying to answer "how can we make people's lives
| better by adding more value than any other assistant in the
| marketplace?"
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Siri: hold my beer
| Zenst wrote:
| The amount of awareness and integration with its revenue streams
| makes it a loss leader. It equally helps tie people into that
| ecosystem. So it's an underrated appreciated marketing budget
| more than a loss.
|
| Now they can and should have added functionality(worthwhile pay
| for add ons) earlier and then, Alexa does have some basic flaws
| in dialogue, like try and ask it for the wind direction without
| being subjected to a weather forecast that tells you everything
| but the wind direction. Then the pet peeves for example - Ask for
| the time, you get the time, and you politely say thank you, to
| which Alexa responds "Anytime".
|
| But with the processing done at a backend, they do have an
| opportunity via ease of access and user-base to jump into the AI
| personal assistant race, if they price it right. Which is what
| seems afoot, though the price will be key here.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| Its like advertising. We know that half of it doesn't work, we
| just don't know which half.
|
| Alexa is one of those things that keeps Amazons presence in
| mind.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Cancelled Amazon two years ago after they banned me because the
| Amazon credit card on file was expired and they continued billing
| it.
|
| Woke up to a house full of Alexa devices that couldn't tell time.
| A banned account is the same as no internet access. Actually we
| overslept because none of the alarms worked.
|
| None of this really surprises me but Amazon's walled garden has
| really went down in quality.
| osigurdson wrote:
| People don't really want an always on, live mic reporting back to
| the mothership anymore - at least I don't.
| Underphil wrote:
| But they've sold millions so that sort of squashes that
| argument.
|
| (I'm with you though. It boggles my mind.)
| osigurdson wrote:
| Are they still selling however? It seems like everyone had a
| Google home or Alexa ~5 years ago (including myself) and now
| no one does.
| dietsprite wrote:
| If Amazon wants to continue to recoup this investment from Alexa
| sales, Amazon needs totally different leadership on the Alexa
| team. Alexa's app and user experience are terrible. Adding a
| skill is a highly convoluted process.
|
| Most notably and most recently, the decision to drop access from
| 3rd party apps to its lists is an incredibly short-sighted idea.
| No one wants to use Amazon's software. Make Alexa effortless to
| use with 3rd party software.
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/31/24168681/amazon-alexa-thi...
| edgefield wrote:
| The UI is hilariously bad. I'm playing a NY Times podcast and
| say "Alexa, pause." Two minutes later, I say "Alexa, play" and
| it starts playing some random news clip from ABC News.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| With the latest open-webui, I have an always available voice mode
| assistant with a real LLM that is smarter than Alexa running
| locally. And I can be sure I'm not being spied upon.
| chamanbuga wrote:
| IMO Alexa is just a bad product, which Amazon thought scale scale
| scale instead of finding value and product market fit. So many
| things that it does is better than predecessors, but overall is
| subpar and didn't get better over time.
|
| Ex. Music. Bread and butter for Alexa. Conversion opportunity to
| Amazon Music. Conversion opportunity for podcasts, news, so
| much... Try asking Alexa to play new music, something different,
| slow jazz, I didn't like that song, play something like blah,
| etc... Most of these queries do not work. It's such a POS.
|
| Ex. Proactive notifications. Alexa routinely informs me that
| diapers or something else from my routine purchases is likely
| running out and I should refill them. I've used this feature 100s
| of times in the 7+ years I've owned Alexa. I'm sure the LTV I've
| given Amazon is hell a lot more than most Alexa users. That being
| said, I can get so many more recommendations than just the 1-2
| things in my routine purchase history.
|
| I could go on and on. Ultimately, like many products by large
| companies, Amazon had a product that received early success
| because of novelties like hands-free music, alarms, timers - but
| never found more utility beyond that. Instead of doubling down on
| discovery, they worked on scaling out the platform and opening it
| up to 3P developers. The platform they exposed was limited in
| frustrating ways, and ultimately did not help them discover any
| hidden gem skills.
|
| IMO the smart home virtual assistant is ripe for easy disruption.
| Throw out Amazon's model and use ChatGPT / Anthropic instead.
| Keep the 3P plugins. This fusion would be a sufficiently better
| product than what's in the market today.
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| Simple fix - First 2 years of Alexa are free, then you have two-
| tier pricing for prime / non-prime members for annual fee. In a
| few months, they can start getting revenue for any device that's
| been active more than 2 years.
|
| Best case scenario - it turns into a profit center.
|
| Worst case scenario, the platform is abandoned, and Amazon can
| stop bleeding.
| doubtfuluser wrote:
| smart-home stuff was always a bit ,,off" to me and. Why would I
| want to control light by voice? It's much better to do this by
| motion detection. Same for shutters: time + light detection is
| much better than saying anything. I want the smart-home to
| automatically do stuff not just a different ,,switch"
| igammarays wrote:
| Sometimes I think about the billions of dollars invested in
| stupid marginal tech like voice assistants, or boilerplate
| spreadsheet replacement SaaS and wonder if capitalism has failed.
| Why is this money not being invested in something that is
| obviously more desperately needed, like building more housing? As
| this article pointed out, some of this stupid marginal tech like
| Alexa isn't even making a profit, Amazon is *loosing* billions on
| it. Then why do this? We have real crises facing us, like climate
| change and the housing crisis and war, and meanwhile YC is
| funding "developer tooling". As if what society needs most right
| now is that developers with 6-figure salaries need to make their
| already cushy jobs slightly easier with some IDE widget.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| What happened to all the stuff about relentless custom focus?
| bogota wrote:
| I hope the product burns. For the simple fact that it was such a
| huge oversight to use a popular human name for a home assistant
| product. Really just such an extremely stupid thing to do.
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| Your name is Alexa, isn't it?
| bogota wrote:
| It is not but i know two people who are named that. The jokes
| get old and it's even worse when you have the stupid devices
| go off all the time when people use their names. One of them
| just switched to using their middle name because they got so
| sick of it.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Do people use alexa for anything else but controlling audio? That
| is the only usage I have witnessed in housholds that had it.
| jjeaff wrote:
| also good for setting multiple cooking timers.
| rob74 wrote:
| Amazon is _not_ losing billions, Amazon is still wildly
| profitable! And the "loss leader" devices like Kindle, Alexa
| etc. helped to get it where it is now, even if the devices
| themselves generate losses. I think this new strategy is more
| "now that we are the undisputed online shopping monopolist, do we
| still need these loss leaders, or can we eliminate them in order
| to be _even more_ profitable? "
| mattr88 wrote:
| Amazon must create a need in the marketplace for people to want
| to use and buy these products in order to be profitable. Like
| Apple with Apple watch or Airpods.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Lose a bit on each unit but make it up in volume
| HTG43 wrote:
| Won one at a work raffle. Only reason I have one. Good for
| timers, weather checking, Amazon notifications like package
| deliveries, and some quiz games are decently engaging while you
| wait for food to saute.
| honkycat wrote:
| A former company I worked at made a TON of money by providing
| radio over the internet, and Alexa was one of our big money
| makers.
|
| We had a partnership with Amazon to be THE radio provider.
|
| ...Then Amazon released their own internal version of our product
| and kicked us off of keywords.
|
| Our revenue tanked due to this, and I ended up getting laid off.
| Because Amazon saw an opportunity and betrayed their partner.
|
| Get bent amazon!
|
| Why would anyone ever integrate with Alexa if they are just going
| to steal the idea?
| fredgrott wrote:
| same mistake as HP with cooltown push something to sell hardware
| without adequate consumer research to back it up.
|
| I use to get requests to interview with Amazon monthly until the
| hardware head got let go....it was somewhat comical....
| DragonStrength wrote:
| > Amazon's devices operation was a pet project of Bezos
|
| And he saw it as his way to be Steve Jobs instead of Sam Walton.
| Bezos got bored with it when it was clear it wasn't working and
| left the hard work of cleaning up his mess to his successor. It
| seems clearer than ever that the low interest rates and creative
| accounting which let Amazon grow like this is not something to
| admire.
| bentt wrote:
| My kids have grown up with Alexa devices. They use them as
| speakers, to listen to Audible, and as ways to communicate with
| us. I've been under the belief that the devices do not spy on us,
| based on a few test articles I read. If I ever heard that that
| was not the case I'd jettison them all from the house.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| You're very trusting. I won't let alexa in my home, let alone
| near my kids. How do you trust something that you can't know
| what is being done (ie recorded for later, later use - see the
| github nodelete stories) with it?
| nelsondev wrote:
| Yet in your house you likely have a mobile phone, a computer,
| perhaps a Smart TV; all with microphones and a long history
| of privacy breaching hacks.
| bentt wrote:
| I'm not that trusting. I just think that if it came out that
| Alexa devices were recording outside of their wake word then
| it would do tremendous damage to the brand and they'd not
| want to risk it. I feel like the incentives are aligned in
| this case.
|
| I don't consider data collection and targeting from data
| collected during the wake word to be spying.
| itscrush wrote:
| I think it's a subjective call on what you consider spying.
| Amazon and its integrations / 3rd parties are certainly using
| what they can gather based on Alexa interactions to better sell
| and serve their ad ecosystem at minimum right? And I've never
| seen someone leave theirs muted/red in practice.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10920 among others are certainly
| available in this question space to help navigate your own
| tolerances.
| dboreham wrote:
| MBAs eating the world again...
| dylanwenzlau wrote:
| I'd love to have spent more on Alexa, but having trust in the
| quality and pricing was critical to me so I stopped ordering
| after they messed it up a few times. I now verify my purchases on
| the website to ensure the bulk facial tissues (or whatever) are
| actually the cheapest and most legitimate listing for the brand I
| want.
|
| Our company was acquired by Amazon in 2017 to help power Alexa's
| general knowledge / informational answers, and that's pretty much
| what we did. I only stayed for 15 months after acquisition
| though.
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