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Comment by delecti | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I can't imagine trusting it enough to make a purchase automatically, and that's before getting to the reality of how awkward it is. Which brand? Which quantity? Which style (extra strong, extra soft, etc)? Did the price go up since last time? All stuff that you can visually spot in a half second, but would be a huge PITA verbally.

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That AI is clearly a product imagined by wealthy tech executives who have personal assistants who shop for them, who trust those personal assistants to buy what they expect for them. The use case doesn't resonate for us normal people, because we do our own shopping, are price sensitive, and typically don't just buy things without doing basic research about what they cost.

I'd never made that connection before. This whole category of tech company offerings makes so much more sense now.

Might be a bit reductive, but I think you can probably explain >90% of modern business decisions this way. Being completely out of touch with how a normal person lives seems to have serious impact on just about everything they do.

These people have very different problems than normal people, and they solve them in very different ways. And most of them were born rich, and have always been rich, so they can't even imagine what a normal person's life and needs are. If your target market is also rich executives, then by all means, have your rich executives dream up product features. But now, most of tech are producing solutions for rich tech executives, but hoping that normal people buy them, and they are wondering why normal people don't care.

And it doesn't help that Amazon often doesn't have great pricing on bulky, often fairly low value, consumer staples. (And, in my case, I have a Walmart just down the street so I'm not going to order my Bounty or Charmin from Amazon. The case may be different if you live in a dense city without a car but that's not most people.

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