AI Store Manager Makes Some Odd Choices

Andon Market on San Francisco’s Union Street bills itself as the first retail boutique run by an artificial intelligence agent. The store opened April 10 under the management of an autonomous AI agent dubbed Luna by its creator, Andon Labs, which is based in the same city. (Luna is powered by Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6,)

Andon Labs says it tests whether such agents can run real-world endeavors. According to its website, the company’s previous along those lines have involved using bots to run vending machines, radio stations and household robots.

But, as The New York Times writer Heather Knight found in visiting and writing about the store, Luna is making some unusual operational and inventory choices, including:

• The front windows are empty, and the facade lacks signs.
• There is an overabundance of candles.
• There’s also too many toilet seat covers; Luna ordered 1000 of those for the employee bathroom, then listed them as merchandise.
• The store does to hire and use humans to do such tasks as place items on shelves, open the store and guard against shoplifters. However Luna fouled up the employee schedule enough that the store had to close for three days.
• There are no price tags.

That last feature, at least, is intentional. The founders told the Times’ Knight that they did not use price tags so that customers would have to interact with Luna. So, to find out how much the items cost, one must pick up a telephone receiver attached to an iPad. “Hey, what’s up?” an automated voice says. “What did you pick up today?”

Once you answer, it gives you a price – usually one that is steep even by San Francisco standards, Knight notes, including a white mug with the smiley-face logo for $28; a handful of pistachio nuts for $14; and a bar of soap for $10.

Not surprisingly, all those missteps have caused Luna to miss out on the prime directive its creators asked it to fulfill: make a profit. But Andon Labs says it will take some time for Luna to show if it can achieve that goal, so they’ve signed a three-year lease for the store.