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Comment by donmatito | Hacker News Reader

This is a very fun bit of PR, but it represents a very common mistake from corporate innovators.

1) Successful business model (retail)

2) Smart iteration on the business model (Monoprix livraison a domicile +)

3) For legacy reason, do not upend the whole business model, do not put it front and center, limit it to some categories / users

4) Watch a younger competitor, not uncumbered by legacy, focus solely on that service

5) Get shocked when they get PR. Release a video to say you've done it for 10years

6) Go bankrupt as the new service spreads like wildfire

Monoprix home delivery is great, my grandmother uses it quite a lot, but retailers are still totally going to get taken over by Amazon

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I'm afraid you may be right, and it makes me sad.

I like shopping online with Amazon, but I would hate seeing groceries taken away with unmanned dystopian and probably very dysfunctional automated outlets like on the Amazon video.

What happens when something goes wrong? -- The automated video system thinks you have taken two products when you have taken just one; or it thinks you have taken one and you took two, and a security guy who has zero authority over how the system operates, or understanding of it, accuses you of stealing; or a discount was advertised on the shelf but not implemented on the system; etc.

What happens if Amazon decides, for some reason that they will not explain and that you can't appeal, to cancel your account? Then you can't even go grocery shopping?

The future is much less exciting than it used to be.

> What happens when something goes wrong?

Personally I've found Amazon's customer service is pretty reasonable (sometimes you need to dig in the site to find something). I know they aren't a great company in other ways - their workers are poorly paid and overworked, but that's one thing I'm not worried about.

> What happens if Amazon decides, for some reason that they will not explain and that you can't appeal, to cancel your account? Then you can't even go grocery shopping?

Only if they have a monopoly, if this proves successful I expect other shops will start investing in this too (or licence the technology). You're just as likely to have an issue currently if you live in Bumfuck, Nowhere and the only store around refuses to serve you because they suspect you of stealing.

The only store in Bumfuck doesn't operate a giant online marketplace and therefore is very unlikely to refuse to serve me because of a computer glitch, or because someone somewhere hacked my account, or because I changed the username on my Kindle (https://www.reddit.com/r/amazon/comments/5gvgdl/using_a_amaz...)

In any case I can always walk up to the manager at Bumfuck General Store and resolve any disagreement we might have, simply by... talking. Also, said manager is in charge, he can make decisions and reverse previous decisions.

Amazon employees aren't in charge of anything, the system is. They can read what's on their screen, and press a few buttons on screens that have choices, and that's it.

The problem with automation isn't only that robots are displacing humans, but that at the same time it's changing humans into robots (dumb ones).

Amazon's pursuit of the grocery business is precisely the opposite of focusing solely on one product. The direct line from books to bananas runs through the land of conceit. Amazon's legacy infrastructure is built around the long tail items that can sit on a warehouse shelf for five years without spoiling.

Amazon is not a plucky young startup. It's a twentyfive year old enterprise that hires MBA's in the hope of staying relevant. It's last major success was AWS, a product that scratched its own itch and monetized necessary but idle capacity. Most importantly it was B2B.

In B2C Amazon has been incrementing extraction since the original Kindle. Prime is Sam's Club + Netflix + arcane pricing and shipping terms. Echo is Siri for shopping. All of it comes on the back of higher prices whenever Amazon's algorithms suggest it can get away with it.

And that's the real way to judge the status of Amazon. It structures transactions in its favor and requires consumer vigilance. The Monoprix pitch is really about that more than anything else. The pitch provides a plausible explanation of how the transaction works and implies that the ordinary norms of human transactions are at work. The cashier is going to charge everyone the same price that's on the shelf and the delivery person is not going to implement surge pricing.

How so? I live in Seattle, and Amazon's placement of their test stores has been quite poor (picking a roadway on the wrong side of a major bridge, where from 2pm to 6:30pm its a parking lot), they have set them up exclusively for people who drive, and their previous efforts of grocery delivery have fizzled out, with Amazon Fresh having significantly declined in usage to the point that Amazon Prime customers are getting $50 free vouchers to use on Amazon Fresh on a monthly basis.

Amazon can't push the volume needed to compete with the heavyweight in this region (Kroger, thru their Fred Meyer, Safeway, QFC & Albertsons brands control 90% of the grocery volume in Seattle) thus their prices will always be significantly higher. That combined with poor location and a core misunderstanding of their market (eg. who in your average household is buying groceries and what goods/price point will they buy at) will limit their potential market.

Safeway/Albertson's isn't owned by Kroger FWIW.

Ah shoot, that is right! Safeway and Albertsons merged, don't know why I thought they'd become part of Kroger. That being said, in the Puget Sound Region (where Amazon is trying to launch this) 90% of the market is controlled by the aforementioned players. It'd take massive volume to get close to the price points any of them can hit, cause SuperValu and other wholesalers are not gonna give Amazon volume discounts otherwise.

> Monoprix home delivery is great, my grandmother uses it quite a lot, but retailers are still totally going to get taken over by Amazon

In the USA and the young population. Maybe.

In the rest of the world and population. Not so sure.

I assumed it was a demo of tech they expect to sell to other retaikers, kinda like AWS

I have the same opinion, actually. I was commenting on the state of mind of the Monoprix executives who probably thought "how unfair it was that Amazon got all the PR".

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