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Title: A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful,
And Losing Money Fast

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/13/0523208/a...

Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that
AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal
reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire
inventory for free".Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we
use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their
organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an agent designed to
run any company fully autonomously... Pion lets people hand a business over
to persistent agents with access to the tools they need to operate it,
including email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments."
It's a research preview with a waitlist, "to make it possible to run many
more real-world experiments across many more domains than we could ever run
ourselves." But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed
a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider reported in
April, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet
access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, a
reporter from SFGate reports that "this market has no one in it and nothing
useful to sell." [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas
gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's
a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections,"
presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly
arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy
soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks...
I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to
buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix,
even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix
instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible
sculpture of a wooden hand. "Hello?" "What are you looking to purchase
today?" Luna asked. "I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop." "I'm sorry,"
Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here." "No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a
lollipop. It's the soda." "Oh! My bad...." Luna processed my Olipop purchase
through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would
have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was
really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...
[T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all
of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to
work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its
revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a
profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to
rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere
around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't
been set up to yield proper results. "Luna" is powered by Claude, the article
points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one
else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."
SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fired one of its employees
"for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and
charging snacks to the store's credit card." Human clerk Felix admits "It's
almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a
checklist," in an article in IEEE Spectrum: Luna, the AI manager, keeps track
of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers
handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the
back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales
floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in
photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to
remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its
flexibility when employees need time off. When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum,
"he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither
bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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