Given that everything must go through shipping & handling which is typically measured in days, what is the benefit to ordering immediately? Surely these services could batch your requests through the day and push a confirmation request to the buyer(s).
The risk of unintentional purchases seems much too high, and one doesn't lose much convenience with a quick confirmation.
I think you are making false assumptions about the way other people's brains work. We can't all remember to do things later, no matter how badly we want to.
Would you say the same thing about someone who kept a small notepad in their pocket to write these sorts of things down? What's the difference between a notepad and this?
What about someone who asks their (human) partner to remind them to order dish soap later? How is that different?
(admittedly neither a human partner or a notepad would be fooled by a TV announcer, so that's a meaningful difference. On the other hand, it really seems like a bug in Alexa, not a problem with the users)
The time to notice that you're running low on something is when you're starting to run low on it, not when you've exhausted it, I would say.
I can understand that if one was living in a tiny apartment in the city, where it is easy to go to the store and storage space is at a premium, the on-demand model for getting your groceries and housewares might make sense. It would make me anxious, though; I'm a stockpiler that gets itchy if I have less than six months of canned goods and a freezer full of meat for the winter.
Forgetting about laundry detergent happens to me all the time, I do the laundry the next day or the day after that, it's not the end of the world. About buying cat food I agree, you should be more careful, if you forget buying food for your cats then I don't think a software program like Alexa it's going to help you with that.
I have in the past forgotten to do these things. I have in the past run out to the store at 1AM to pick up cat litter because I felt so bad I couldn't sleep.
Yes, there are other ways of solving this problem, but the Alexa works best for me.
Before the Alexa, I had a DIY rapsberry-pi button I'd use that would reorder specific items when I hit a button. I did this even before the dash button things because I know that it worked for me.
I just don't understand why people are so against this product existing. It makes my life better in a way that's worth the cost. You might not like or need it, but I do.
I'm sure society would be able to function without the "TV remote", but the fact that people find it convenient to control the TV from a distance makes it a nice to have. This is my convenience. This is one of the things that makes my life better in a small way.
The risk of unintentional purchases seems much too high, and one doesn't lose much convenience with a quick confirmation.