Just before a trip to Seattle in 2018, Amazon launched its concept store that had no cashiers. The headlines raved about this potentially new future of shopping. I had to check it out. Instead of a cashier scanning items you’ve put in your shopping basket at the exit, the store itself would do that for you – as you shop.
I visited the first such Amazon Go store opposite its iconic domes at its downtown Seattle headquarters – both the architecture and the American e-commerce giant selling a new brick-and-mortar way of shopping that opposed the brand’s usual approach to shopping. Or shopping in general.
With Amazon’s launch in the country imminent, I was reminded of this other innovative shopping solution.
The future of shopping
Getting into the store requires you to download the Amazon Go app, which displays a QR code that you scan on a transit-like turnstile as you walk in. Around the roof and above the shelves of products are an array of sensors and cameras which monitor what you put into the bright orange bag (which you’re given as you enter).
Only the products you put in the bag are eventually billed to you, which it automatically did a few minutes after I left the store, as I wrote for the FM.
Looking through the salads, sandwiches and microwave meals in the refrigerated section, I picked up a number of items and put them back on the shelf. I wasn’t mistakenly billed for anything. Amazon calls this – without any sense that they are joking – “Just Walk Out Technology”. Despite the funny name, it appears to work as advertised.
Amazon says its “checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning”.
Read More: Shoprite is testing a Checkers store concept with no queues, waiting or tills
Wine in a tin?
The downtown store offers a range of basic groceries, a liquor aisle (where a shop assistant asks to see proof of your age) which includes house wine sold in cold drink-sized cans; which itself could be the innovation of that year, according to the people I’ve told about it. Wine in a tin, what took y’all so long?
It also offers a new food trend that is big in the States, and starting to appear in South Africa: meal kits with all the ingredients to make your own dinner.
On the day I went, I had to download the app – for which Amazon offers free WiFi – before you’re allowed in. Accept a few Ts&Cs, link the app to your Amazon account, and off you go.
When Amazon Go opened in February 2018, internet memes gleefully celebrated that the store designed to do away with (paying) queues had a queue down the block to get into it and inspect this new cultural oddity.
For a store that eschews the traditional trappings like cashiers, and therefore queues, it did appear to employ a lot of people. There were two people outside in bright orange jackets (hey, it was still pretty cold) helping you download the app and handing out bags while several staff inside were packing shelves and seemingly helping the flow of customers.
There is a lot of excitement that this Go store is the future of retail – and it certainly fits in the tech-savvy middle-class environment it is located. For office workers or curious tourists, it’s a quick and easy option for lunch; including a quick visit to Amazon’s remarkable biodome Spheres – the five-storey glass domes housing some 40,000 plants in the middle of Amazon’s $4 billion headquarters campus.
Amazon is renowned for pushing the boundaries of retail, first in e-commerce and now in the real world. This may well be the future of buying shopping, and certainly lunch.
