I haven't been there in a long time. The founder struggled to convince people to deploy them as the upfront cost with robotics and tech was many times a regular, convenience store. Basically what it is. The majority of store owners would rather pay less money to exploit people with dead end jobs and deal with the shrink from theft. Definitely not a growth business but he's been opening more and more over time.
It was an old interface that wasn't as good as modern self-checkouts at grocery stores. Predated them, though, automating the whole process. You drive up to a fuel pump looking thing, tell it what you want, pay it, the equipment gets the right stuff, and it brings it to you somehow. The only people necessary are those that stock it. Probably just one or two doing a full shift on busy days with a part time one on slower ones. Pretty amazing given big companies were bragging about rolling out self-checkouts that just automated a register when he had people automated a whole store many years before.
Note: Guy's name is Michael Rivalto. He's a VC that my brothers told me. Family friend that used to occasionally take them to school in his supercars. Lasting impression there haha.
I'm surprised that Amazon didn't go this route. With their warehouse logistics expertise they could operate everything pretty much the same except that instead of putting a bunch of stuff into a shipping van it goes in a customer's car.
It blows my mind, too, that Mike is about the only person I've seen do it. It's the kind of thing I'd think Amazon would find obvious. Dollar General and Aldi each make a fortune with DG having several times the margin of much of the industry. Convenience stores are all over the place with all kinds of personnel-driven issues. I'd have thought they'd prove themselves out serving the low end before aiming for the high.
I think maybe it's because they're a technology company aimed at solving big problems for large numbers of consumers at once. They might have not thought of the cumulative effect of a ton of small deployments that their big thinking merely orchestrates and supplies. A weakness, perhaps?
