E-commerce giant cuts out cashiers

Amazon Go has no tellers, no queues and no fuss — and a bold new vision of how shopping could look in the future

Last month I walked into a food store, helped myself to a meal and a beer, then walked out without paying. This was no ordinary store; it could be the future of shopping. The store, Amazon Go, is run by the American e-commerce giant opposite the iconic domes of its downtown Seattle headquarters.

To get into the store, you download the Amazon Go app, which displays a QR (bar) code that you scan on a transit-like turnstile as you enter. In the ceiling and above the shelves is an array of sensors and cameras that monitor what you put into the bright orange bags you’re given upon entry.

Only the products you put in the bag are eventually billed to you — which the store did automatically, minutes after I left. While looking through the salads, sandwiches and microwave meals in the refrigerated section, I had picked up a number of packages and put them back on the shelves. I wasn’t mistakenly billed for them.

Amazon calls this “just walk out” technology, and it appears to work as advertised. The company 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”.

The downtown store offers a range of basic groceries and a liquor aisle (a shop assistant asks for proof of your age) that includes house wine sold in soft-drink-sized cans — something that could itself be the innovation of the year, according to the people I’ve told about the experience.

Also on offer is a new food trend that’s big in the US and starting to appear in SA: meal kits with all the ingredients to make your own dinner.

Simply download the app (for which Amazon offers Wifi), accept the Ts&cs, link the app to your Amazon account and off you go.

When Amazon Go opened last month, Internet memes picked up on the irony that a store designed to do away with queues had generated one stretching around the block.

For a store that eschews traditional trappings such as cashiers, Amazon Go does appear to employ a lot of people. There were two assistants outside helping shoppers download the app and handing out shopping bags, while others inside were packing shelves and helping the flow of customers.

There’s excitement that this store is the future of retail — and it certainly does fit into the tech-savvy middleclass environment within which 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 Spheres, the five-storey glass biodomes housing 40,000 plants in the middle of Amazon’s Us$4bn headquarters.

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 shopping — and lunch.

Amazon’s ‘just walk out’ technology appears to work as advertised