Review: Amazon Dash Smart Shelf

I don’t know what possessed me to buy an Amazon Dash Smart Shelf, but it happened near the end of 2020, and 2020 was a very strange year. On November 25, I ordered the $20 “auto-replenishment scale”—size large—and by December 1 it had arrived. In a customer support email, Amazon urged me to get started with the Smart Shelf, which is to say Amazon wanted me to get shopping.

The point of the Amazon Dash Smart Shelf is that you don’t actually do the shopping. Like all of Amazon’s Dash products, which are linked to the company’s Dash Replenishment Service (DRS for short), the shelf is supposed to be smart enough to know when you’re running low on whatever you might find on Amazon. It senses when the load is getting too light and automatically re-ups without you having to do anything. In October 2020, after nearly a year of testing the Dash Smart Shelf with the help of small and medium-size businesses, Amazon made it available to all customers.

Behold, Amazon’s vision for our interface-free future of shopping: You need not even utter a sigh in the vicinity of an Alexa speaker or press a garbage-bag-branded dongle. Your appliances just know. The Dash Shelf is like an empty Amazon warehouse shelf, begging to be restocked; only in this case, it’s in your office. Or your home. Or your home office.

Photograph: Amazon

The Dash Smart Shelf assumes a lot. Its purpose is to replenish nondurable goods—items like printer paper or pet food. So it assumes you want that product to show up on your doorstep on a regular basis. But it also defaults to the same product again and again, and it’s not necessarily scanning for the best deal. In Amazon’s world, convenience is so delicious that you don’t bother to glance at the menu—never mind the shock when the bill comes. (What’s that saying about those who assume?)

The Dash Smart Shelf comes in three sizes: small (7 by 7 inches), medium (12 by 10), and large (18 by 13). Interestingly, each shelf costs $20, regardless of size. Still, this is cheap. It is so cheap that it’s hard to qualify this as a standard gadget review. Should you buy one? Sure, why not! Should you really, though? That is the question.

There’s not much to say about the hardware. It’s a flat, black plastic scale, and it comes with four AAA batteries, which should last for around two years. My editor is probably annoyed I’ve already spent this many words describing it. (Ed. note: Carry on, Lauren.)

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The large-size Smart Shelf occupies about half a shelf in my linen closet, which is where I decided it should live. It relies on a couple different signals to determine whether you need more product invisibly reordered. Amazon learns from your reordering habits over time, so it starts to anticipate when you might need more. But the primary signal the Smart Shelf uses is weight. Once you’ve established which consumer good you’re going to store on the Smart Shelf, Amazon notes the weight of that, and when the load lightens past a certain point, a new order is placed.

From Amazon’s initial email urging me to get started, I was led to a webpage where I could browse products compatible with the Shelf. There are thousands of options, neatly organized into categories: Office and IT Supplies, Food and Drinks, Personal Care, Pet, Baby. At first none seemed appealing. I try to avoid drinking out of plastic bottles; I like to poke around the internet for obscure beauty products; I order my pet supplies on Chewy.com; I don’t have a baby. But there on the tile for Popular Items was a graphical roll of toilet paper. Everyone needs toilet paper! And the early 2020 Mad Dash for Paper Goods was still fresh on the brain.

It became evident when I started scrolling that Amazon was showing personalized recommendations, not just generally popular ones. What else could explain the website’s suggestions of Razer keycap upgrade kits for mechanical keyboards, Olaplex hair oil, and natural deodorants? Shopping within the Dash Smart Shelf product category was just as befuddling as going directly to Amazon.com. I landed on a 24-pack of Cottonelle mega rolls of toilet paper, for a grand total of $26.13.

Determining whether I was getting the best deal with the Smart Shelf took a lot of back-of-the-envelope math. I found another 24-pack of Cottonelle mega rolls on Walmart.com for $19.99. But those were equivalent to 96 rolls of regular toilet paper, while Amazon’s offering claimed to be equal to 128 rolls of toilet paper. An almost identical listing for a Cottenelle 24-pack of mega rolls on Amazon would also cost me $26.13, except this was marketed as “cushiony” toilet paper, not “active.” (I’m almost afraid to know what “active” toilet paper is.) And this Cottonelle 24-pack was equivalent to 108 rolls of toilet paper—so, 32 cents per every 100 sheets, instead of 27 cents per every 100 sheets.

Meanwhile, Target was selling a 24-pack of Charmin mega rolls at a comparable price, but the $5.99 delivery fee would push the total past $30. Amazon had me: If I wanted a 24-pack of mega roll toilet paper—a thing I didn’t even know I wanted minutes before!—then Amazon’s top recommendation was the one to order. I subscribed. And when the first box of toilet paper arrived, I dutifully stacked the rolls on my Smart Shelf. They didn’t all fit.

Photograph: Amazon

Six weeks later another giant box of toilet paper arrived at my front door. I checked my email and saw that on January 25, 2021, another pack of mega rolls had been automatically ordered on my behalf. Had I opened the email that day, given it a cursory glance before moving on to the other emails in my inbox? Maybe. I don’t remember. I asked Amazon what the options are for canceling or changing an order. You have a 24-hour window to make changes once the Dash Shelf places an order for you. After that, the shipment starts being processed and you can’t alter or cancel it.

I was also curious what would happen if I put weightier products on the Shelf—like if I threw some other toiletries on there, or my cat decided to take a nap on it—as well as whether I could trigger a reorder by just removing everything from the Shelf. David Jackson, the director of Amazon’s Dash program, said that there are means of detecting unusual activity on the Shelf, but ultimately, “if the customer puts other things on the Shelf, the Shelf won’t know what that product is. It can only read the weight.”

In other words, the smart shelf is dumb in that way. But then I removed all remaining toilet paper from the Smart Shelf, and within 36 hours, a new order had been placed.

I asked Jackson whether Amazon had considered other means of making the Dash Smart Shelf more customer-friendly. What if there were more obvious notifications that an order was being placed, or a longer window of time in which to change the order? What if Amazon actively suggested better deals to the customer? What would happen if there were major supply shortages of the kinds of goods Amazon is promoting as part of the Dash Smart Shelf program?

Jackson avoided specifics, saying Amazon is always improving the experience. And he acknowledged that there may be consumers who don’t want to shop this way—and that’s OK. “I would say most of the kinds of products that the Dash Smart Shelf is geared toward are the ones that customers don’t want to think about. They’re not browsing to make a different choice each time. The most common use cases are things like toilet paper or pet food or coffee.”

So if you don’t love the idea of outfitting your home with sensor-laden shelves that invisibly reorder products for you, well, don’t. I’m both uneasy with and intrigued by the Amazon Dash Smart Shelf. Technology is ever-present in our lives now. And it’s not only present, but it nudges us into decisions we might not even be fully aware we’re making. I feel the urge to cling to the areas where I can still be an active, knowing participant; to not take at face value the assurances of technologists who believe they know what’s best for us.

Then again, I haven’t run out of toilet paper since I installed the shelf.