Yesterday I went to Andon Market, the store that’s autonomously run by an AI agent called Luna. It’s run by Andon Labs, which was previously best known for having an AI autonomously run a vending machine in a few places. The store didn’t have a lot of customers going through it while I was there.
This place is real! You can just walk in and look around and buy things. They sell various random things, including books, snacks, and random trinkets. Apparently they have free coffee in the morning. I also got a free sticker. At the front there’s an iPad and a corded telephone you can pick up. There were two employees at the store who didn’t seem to be doing anything while I was there. (I heard them talking about figuring out how to ship an order, and an employee handbook written by the AI.)
You can use the tablet to select what items you want to buy and pay for them (card only, they don’t accept cash); you can use the phone to talk to the AI about what’s in the store and your order. The phone interaction works pretty well, I didn’t go too deep but the agent was knowledgeable about everything I asked it about. The UI on the tablet for choosing what to buy is pretty bad (you have to scroll through dozens of items to find the one you want), but after my purchase I learned that you can also just talk to Luna. I considered trying to jailbreak the model over the phone but I was the only customer in the store and it would’ve been awkward to do that with two human employees hearing what I say.
The website for the store lists a bunch of items as being available to buy. But when I went there the selection was much more limited. I think probably it’s still in the process of getting everything stocked?
Going behind the main area
So there’s a side corridor beside the payment area at the front of the store. It’s not marked but you can go through there to get to the bathroom. It’s not really clear if the public is supposed to have access to this bathroom, but nobody stopped me.
The bathroom
This was a much nicer bathroom than I was expecting, it was clean and I had a nice time on the toilet.
Weirdly the soap is just a big container jug of soap, which is inconvenient to actually use when you’re washing your hands:
I complained about this on X, and it turns out the big soap thing was a gift from Andon Labs. Probably Luna didn’t realize it wasn’t fit for the bathroom by itself. I told an employee at the store about this and they told me a solution was in progress.
Storage room
I passed by this storage room on my way to the bathroom:
Uh I guess now you know what it looks like behind the scenes.
