Amazon's cashier-less grocery store

[John F]

That's an actual store, bricks and mortar (or whatever it's built with), with actual groceries in it. But there any resemblance to reality ends.

The Amazon Go Store is Here: Everything We Know About the Cashierless Grocery Store of the Future
Charlie Heller
January 22, 2018

The first Amazon Go store has finally opened in Seattle. Could it be the future of grocery shopping? With new cashierless technology, app-based billing, and more, the New York Times reports today, it's certainly different from what shoppers are used to. Here's everything you need to know about what Amazon Go has in store for you:


The Amazon Go store's entrance features a row of electronic gates, similar to a subway station. To enter, you need a smartphone with the store's app, which you scan at the gate to enter. And when you leave the Amazon store, you're billed not by a cashier, but by the app, a few minutes after you've already exited.


The 1,800 square foot Amazon Go Seattle store features both classic convenience store items like chips, soda, condiments, and beer, and Whole Foods staples like salads, prepared meals, sandwiches, and baked goods like muffins and cookies. And yes, you can get Amazon's own meal kits too.


The Amazon grocery store has no cashiers, no registers, and no actual checkout process. Instead, you simply put whatever you're going to buy into your bag, and leave the store when you're done. To facilitate the Amazon Go cashierless store experience, each product you put in your bag will also be placed on your online Amazon shopping cart, and removed when you take it out.


Even without cashiers, the Amazon Go store still uses employees to restock shelves, help customers deal with technical problems, assist in finding items, and check ID's in the store's beer and wine section. They also cook prepared meals in the kitchen next store.


As the Times found when they tried it, shoplifting seems just about impossible here, because Amazon is watching with arrays of hundreds of small cameras above store shelves. The cameras are able to analyze what items you're putting in and taking out of the bag, which should make things convenient, provided you're okay with hundreds of cameras analyzing your every move through the store.

Amazon won't say whether it plans to make more Amazon Go locations, or license its technology to other stores, so this could potentially be a one-off. The company does say it has no plans to use the system at Whole Foods though, so don't get you’re your hopes up on that front.

https://www.foodandwine.com/news/amazon ... cery-store