
Amazon stops selling Dash buttons - jonbaer
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47416440
======
pjc50
There is probably a multi-billion dollar opportunity in home inventory
management. This wasn't it.

I can see two big reasons why nobody's taken this opportunity yet:

\- data entry. The button simplified this in one axis, but people in this
thread are listing the problems: access control, ordering more than one kind
of thing, acceptability of substitutions.

\- adversarial relationship. Nobody sensible is going to surrender their
inventory management to a retailer, unless convenience really trumps cost. See
also HP "infinite ink".

If you were willing to cover your store cupboards with cameras (!), you could
track potentially track everything in and out. Maybe scan receipts as well.
But this amounts to a lot of information about your home life and domestic
economics, and I don't want to just turn that over to a company who'll exploit
it. Perhaps what I want is "YNAB, but for food".

Edit: see this comment on "supplier-funded promotion":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19300292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19300292)
; the inherent tension of the Dash button is that it's convenience through
disempowerment, it only "works" for the supplier if you buy more, or more
expensive brands, than otherwise. That's what I mean by adversarial
relationship.

~~~
cptskippy
> If you were willing to cover your store cupboards with cameras (!), you
> could track potentially track everything in and out. Maybe scan receipts as
> well. But this amounts to a lot of information about your home life and
> domestic economics, and I don't want to just turn that over to a company
> who'll exploit it. Perhaps what I want is "YNAB, but for food".

The problem with these solutions is that they'll never be close to accurate
because they don't reflect how people function. We don't keep pristine
pantries with nicely organized shelves and perfect containers. We don't
purchase the exact same foods consistently and without variation. And there's
the unpredictable nature of life.

People's pantries are a mess from an inventory perspective and it's not
necessarily because people are messy. Food stuffs come in a varying array of
packages from the easily tracked (e.g. soup cans) to the difficult to quantify
(e.g. potato chips). You would need a dizzying array of image and weight
sensors to quantify things and even then you'd run into issues with things
like rice, beans, or flour which tend to be put into custom containers.

People's eating habits, tastes, and cravings change almost on a daily basis. I
might go through 8 jars of salsa in a month or spend 3 weeks two bananas a day
and then not touch either of them for over a year. I might start a new diet
that changes how I eat and then abandon it a month or two later. Keeping track
of and automatically ordering items based on ever changing habits is
impossible.

The unpredictable nature of life might result in my order of 3lbs of chocolate
chips because I'm baking cookies for a school function and then not using them
again for half a year or more. My mother might come visit for 2 or 3 months
resulting in a routine purchase of certain foods right up until she leaves. I
might have to go out of town for a few weeks and so I might stop buying
perishables well ahead of my departure.

The reality is that no amount of monitoring is going to be 100% perfect and at
the same time it adds mental load to the consumer because they need to
remember to manage the process lest the end up with 8lbs of bananas the day
after their craving ceases.

~~~
pjc50
Perfection is certainly impossible. Is there a "good enough" solution that's
worth the hassle?

> Keeping track of and automatically ordering items based on ever changing
> habits is impossible.

Yes. That's why I think the system shouldn't automatically order anything, but
provide you with stock level, usage information, and "hints".

------
misingnoglic
Amazon wants to make people avoid checking prices on items with features like
this, and that seriously scares me.

~~~
gkoberger
Eh, sure, they want to lower the cost of friction. But I don't think their
goal is to ramp up prices. For many things (toilet paper, detergent, etc),
it's really nice to not have to think about it.

~~~
dingaling
Toilet paper and detergent are prices that my wife watches like a hawk and
then buys in bulk with BOGOFs or othet offers. They have incredible markups
otherwise.

~~~
lotsofpulp
I trust Costco to have appropriate price/quality ratios. Not so low that
manufacturers are cutting quality, and not so high that it would be a good use
of my time to research elsewhere.

~~~
lazerwalker
I dunno if this is still true, but it used to be the case (10+ years ago?)
that Costco's pricing model was transparently "charge X% over cost", with X
constant over all items.

This meant some items at Costco were expensive relative to what you could find
elsewhere on sale, but it also meant it was phenomenally useful to figure out
what items other retails were making obscene amounts of profit on.

~~~
pier25
I live in Mexico and the Costco products I regularly buy have barely changed
their price in years.

------
setquk
One less IoT destination landfill product off the market. Can’t be a bad
thing.

------
whoisjuan
I have one that I use to re-order Soylent and I love it. It's a super simple
experience that ties two micro-moments. The realization that I run out of
something and the intention to restock that item.

That being said, I can see why they stop selling them. An Echo Device can do
the same. But I still think nothing beats the simplicity of just pressing a
button. It's seamless. I hope they keep supporting them.

~~~
PascLeRasc
The first paragraph is one of the most SF things I've read in a while. Most
Americans have to check their bank balance (if they have a bank) to see if
they can afford to get more essential things like toilet paper and laundry
detergent - it's absolutely not a micro-moment for them. Only a small subset
of the population can hit "re-order" without thinking about it.

I love the way European grocery stores are set up, especially the ones I've
been to in Munich, where most people stop by on their way back from work to
get food just for that night's dinner and tomorrow's breakfast. Super fresh
produce every day without needing to make it a multi-hour chore one day a
week.

~~~
jamesrcole
> _Most Americans have to check their bank balance (if they have a bank) to
> see if they can afford to get more essential things like toilet paper and
> laundry detergent_

Is that really true? I am not American and have never been there, and I don't
know, but I wouldn't have imagined things were like that. I'm interested to
know.

~~~
PascLeRasc
There are a bunch of excellent articles exploring the concept of "it's
expensive to be poor" but here's my favorite:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/01/25/why-
it-costs-so-much-to-be-poor-in-america/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c3b3c4998724)

~~~
jamesrcole
I'm aware of that. I'm asking whether the " _Most_ Americans..." claim (in
relation to essentials like toilet paper) is true.

The closest that article gets to that is "More than 40 percent of Americans
say they struggle even to make ends meet each month and would be unable to
cover an unexpected $400 expense without real hardship" but to me that's not
really answering the question

------
busterarm
Two years ago I met some guys with an Icelandic startup to help autoshops
manage their parts inventory. One cool thing they were doing was using these
Dash buttons to let the shops reorder parts like filters, etc.

I can't remember the name but I wonder if they're impacted at all...Then
again, two years is an eternity in early-stage startup time.

~~~
tfolbrecht
Amazon still sells the developer Dash Button as AWS IoT button. Thats probably
what your friends are using. They're going to be alright anyway, because if
that gets discontinued you can build your own around the ESP8266. Its just a
button that makes a curl request.

~~~
ddeokbokki
The AWS IoT button is 22GBP, I got 6 dash buttons for 99p each (on Amazon). :(

~~~
joshstrange
Yes and while you _can_ do some wifi tricks to make a dash button work
_similarly_ to an IoT button it's not easy nor reliable.

That said, the price is ridiculous, If they had made the IoT button
rechargeable or have a removable battery then I wouldn't have a problem.

------
johnnycab
I bought a few of these (JK29LP) to use as IoT buttons when they were on an
offer. I found that not associating them with a product, the credit could be
used for normal Amazon purchases.

I am now using a couple of these to control Yeelights via Node-Red, the
latency is similar to a IFTTT recipe.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=65G7ApQYlmA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=65G7ApQYlmA)

[https://ifttt.com/yeelight](https://ifttt.com/yeelight)

------
new_guy
I think they would have been more successful if you could have actually gotten
them for the products you wanted, not just a random selection of stuff you
probably never ordered.

~~~
KingMachiavelli
Exactly, why not sell a generic version? You could limit it to products where
the vendor has uploaded the appropriate logo/image that will be displayed on
the Dash button but that would shift determining what products consumers would
use a Dash button for onto the Vendors.

Then again, I agree that most people willing to use a Dash button are also the
kind of people willing to use an Echo, save the uber privacy concious
minority.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
Well, they did have a generic version. The “Enterpris” button is designed to
work with AWS IoT, you press it and it publishes an MQTT message to your IoT
Core ARN. What you do from there is up to you - usually you would invoke a
lambda to go do something.

------
fxfan
Can you 'root' them to do your bidding? For 5usd they don't sound bad.

~~~
blackfawn
You can reprogram the STM32 microcontroller in them[0]. It's a fairly decent
Cortex-M3 processor and it additionally has WiFi and a few other features.
Some people went an easier route and just watched for the ARP request the dash
button would send[1]. $5 isn't bad but when you could buy them from Amazon,
you'd get a $5 credit when you used it the first time, essentially making it
"free" if you needed the purchased item anyway.

[0]: [https://learn.adafruit.com/dash-hacking-bare-metal-
stm32-pro...](https://learn.adafruit.com/dash-hacking-bare-metal-
stm32-programming) [1]: [https://github.com/hortinstein/node-dash-
button](https://github.com/hortinstein/node-dash-button)

~~~
Hortinstein
author here of node-dash-button...i have let support lapse a little bit, but
it still should work. Might be time to go in for a maintenance release.

Glad people are still finding a use for it!

------
purplezooey
They were fun to hack around with, that's all I heard anyone using them for.

------
Touche
I still use mine. Especially for laundry detergent, I'm going to miss this.

Subscriptions are something I've tried a couple of times but have this
problems for me:

\- I don't know how often I need a lot of products. I could keep a spreadsheet
for 6 months and figure it out but I don't want to do that.

\- It's hard to remember "do I have a subscription for this?" so I wind up
ordering anyways.

~~~
ericcholis
100% this. I really want to take advantage of the subscriptions. But, I find
it hard to "know" when I need to have something delivered. Plus, despite the
very fast shipping for most things, I still need those baby wipes NOW.

~~~
Touche
Yeah this is something I should have mentioned. If you run out of something
before your subscription redelivery date then the subscription is basically
pointless. The entire point is to not have to think about buying something.

------
tanilama
With Alexa devices, Dash button does feel redundant.

------
djhworld
My issue with them is you couldn't set an Amazon locker as your delivery
location, so I never bothered using it.

Instead my dash buttons have been repurposed as a control switch for my lamp
that sits across the other side of the room

------
tapland
Yeah. Alexa makes ordering items like this much easier and flexible (different
products, sizes, adding to cart).

It was always a pretty cool thing though. Something to remember about the
start of IoT

------
gumby
They sell a much more expensive one ($18) for use with AWS btw.

~~~
riffraff
"order a new EC2 small instance now"?

~~~
btgeekboy
Sure. You can define what happens when the button’s pushed, such as triggering
a lambda.

------
GuillaumeBrdet
I have to say I always found it quite intriguing but never actually got one. I
am quite positive this will eventually come back, in some way by Amazon or
not.

It could be interesting if it was direct with the merchant, on a Shopify kind
of level or even from bigger suppliers. All while bypassing Amazon pretty
much.

The irony in this working would be wonderful.

------
2_listerine_pls
Alexa made it worthless

~~~
PascLeRasc
regarding "should have called it Bezos", I think there's some subconscious
sexism in home assistants that they're all female voices. We like thinking of
our Google Home or Alexa as a secretary/homemaker, which have traditionally
been female roles.

~~~
belorn
It is sexist that in apple, microsoft and googles user tests, both women and
men prefer the female voice over the male voice.

There is also a lot of sexis found by the Stanford University study which
revealed that preferences for male or female voices depend on the subject
matter. Both men and women prefer a woman voice when talking about people and
how things relate to each other, but prefer a male voice for bare facts about
objects. Additional there is also some racism in there as some nationalities
go against this preference in user tests, leading to apple to have male as the
default home assistants if you are British, French, Dutch or Arabic.

