Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

Perceived Failure of “Just Walk Out” Technology

• Many see the closures as inevitable once it emerged that “just walk out” relied heavily on human reviewers (often in India) rather than fully automated AI.
• Commenters debate the extent of human involvement (claims of ~70% vs ~20% of transactions; unclear who’s right), but agree the narrative of near-total automation was misleading and damaged trust.
• Technically, people describe the CV problem as genuinely hard: occlusion, lookalike items, customers changing their minds, scaling to large stores and varied fixtures.
• Some who worked on or around the project say the system did work for small formats but required ongoing, costly annotation and complex hardware, undermining the economics.

Customer Experience and Adoption

• Reactions to Go and Fresh were polarized: some loved the “magic” of grabbing items and leaving; others felt like thieves or intensely surveilled.
• Many recount confusion at gates, delayed receipts, and fear of billing errors with cumbersome online disputes. Even one incorrect charge was enough to put people off.
• In practice, lines at conventional self-checkout are often short, so the time savings over kiosks felt marginal, especially at airports where existing friction is already low.
• Smart carts in Fresh stores were widely described as glitchy, slow, and inferior to either normal checkout or good self-checkout.

Store Quality, Pricing, and Competition

• Repeated criticism: Fresh was a “bad grocery store” more than a tech failure—limited selection (missing basic pantry staples), inconsistent stocking, average or weirdly mixed pricing, and often empty aisles.
• Some local anecdotes of extremely low prices fueled suspicions of predatory pricing to undercut competitors, then confusion when the economics “didn’t work.”
• In several cities, Fresh/Go spaces felt like mini warehouses dominated by order pickers rather than welcoming neighborhood markets.

Labor, Unions, and Surveillance

• Strong undercurrent of concern about replacing cashier jobs, avoiding unionized labor, and normalizing intensive surveillance.
• Self‑checkout itself splits opinion: some appreciate speed; others refuse to “do unpaid work” for corporations without a discount and dislike exception handling and security theater.

Neighborhood and Strategic Impact

• Multiple stories of local grocers displaced or buildings demolished for Fresh locations that then never opened or were short‑lived, leaving empty shells and perceived “food deserts.”
• Some Fresh sites are rumored or observed to be converted to Whole Foods or pure fulfillment centers, aligning with Amazon’s apparent pivot toward online grocery delivery, big-box retail experiments, and niche use of the tech in stadiums and airports.