Amazon is currently testing a new corner store named ‘Amazon Go’ in Seattle downtown that allows customers to walk in, take whatever they want, and walk out without having to queue up and pay at a checkout counter.
Shoppers at Amazon Go will have the cost of whatever they choose to buy billed automatically to their Amazon Prime accounts after using the Go app from their smartphones to log them to the store’s network and allowing them to enter inside. Once they are inside the store, various sensing and computer monitoring devices will keep track of them as they go about the store picking or returning goods to the shelves. When customers leave the app, it adds up everything that was taken by the customer and proceeds to charge their respective Amazon accounts.
Amazon said that it had been working on the idea since 2012 and is currently being tested by the company’s employees at 2131 7th Avenue Seattle Downtown near their offices and will be available to the public in the early months of 2017. As it is now, the store mainly focuses on ready-to-eat meals and snacks that have been prepared by Amazon’s cooking staff.
The company, which began offering its fresh food services in some densely populated areas of the US since 2007, has been rapidly expanding its grocery delivery service titled ‘Amazon Fresh’ adding new cities just recently across the US. The Amazon Fresh services are now available in Boston, Washington, Seattle New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Baltimore, Connecticut, and larger areas in California. In June this year, the service was launched outside the US for the first time and now offers its grocery delivery services to homes in various parts of East and North London.
However, this is not Amazon’s first attempt at offering retail services as last year, the company opened a one-off bookstore titled Amazon Books that is based in Seattle as well and the company is also looking to expand the bookstore line in a big way.
Amazon Go is expected to use a combination of the efforts from Amazon Fresh and Amazon books and with that, it may just become a very noticeable presence in a recent trend that aims to remove checkout queues from grocery shopping including other companies such as Instacart and Selfycart which have also announced their intentions to move that way. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this move by the company is perceived to be a threat to some of the 3.4 million cashier workers in America. The stores will be available to all Amazon customers in the US early next year and it is expected to have a big impact on sales and product distribution worldwide.
Source: TechCrunch