It was bound to happen. The model wasn’t that reliable, and Amazon was basically paying so many people to double-check the model, they may as well have staffed the store the traditional way, with a self-checkout.
Plus, in the eyes of much of the public, those people they hired to double-check the model were instead hired to act as traditional cashiers working remotely behind an impersonal, semi-friendly dystopian interface.
There’s also an argument that if the business was that reliant on free things to start with, then it shouldn’t be a business.
No-one would bat their eyes if the CEO of a real estate company was sobbing that it’s the end of the rental market, because the company is no longer allowed to get houses for free.
They didn’t learn from all the previous times someone tried to train a bot on the internet.
They’re not joking about a hypothetical. It was a real thing that happened.
A portion also associate EVs and their ilk with environmentalists, and would probably not buy one even if their very lives depended on it.