Amazon opens store without cashiers
Online retailer trying to shake up grocery industry
NEW YORK – Amazon wants to kill the supermarket checkout line.
The online retailer is opening its first cashier-less supermarket, where shoppers can grab milk or eggs and walk out without waiting in line or ever opening their wallets.
It’s the latest sign that Amazon is serious about shaking up the $800 billion grocery industry.
At the new store, which opened Tuesday in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, shoppers scan a smartphone app to enter the store. Cameras and sensors track what’s taken off shelves. Items are charged to an Amazon account.
Called Amazon Go Grocery, the store is an expansion of its 2-year-old chain of 25 Amazon Go convenience stores. It’s 10,400 square feet, more than five times the size of the convenience stores, and stocks much more than the sodas and sandwiches found at Amazon Go.
Cameron Janes, who helps oversee Amazon’s stores, said the technology had to be tweaked to account for how shoppers squeeze tomatoes to test for ripeness or rummage through avocados. Nothing at the store is weighed. One blood orange goes for 53 cents; a banana is 19 cents.
Amazon made a splash in 2017 when it bought Whole Foods and its 500 stores. It’s also been expanding its online grocery delivery service. But it’s still far behind rival Walmart, the nation’s largest grocer, which has more than 4,700 stores. Walmart’s online grocery service has also been popular with customers who buy online and drive to a store to pick an order.
Amazon also plans to open another type of grocery store in Los Angeles this year, but the company said it won’t use the cashier-less technology at that location and has kept other details under wraps. The company declined to say whether it plans to open more Amazon Go Grocery stores, and said there are no plans to bring the technology to Whole Foods stores.
Much of the fruits and vegetables come from the same suppliers at Whole Foods, Janes said. And it has products from the Whole Foods store brand 365, such as organic oatmeal and bagged baby carrots. But it also sells Oreos, Cheezits and other items banned from the natural grocer.
Families can shop together, with just one phone scanning everyone in. Anything they grab and leave the store with will be added to the tab of the person who signed them in. But shoppers shouldn’t help a stranger reaching for the top shelf: Amazon warns that grabbing an item for someone else means you’ll be charged for it.
Hoping to catch up to Amazon, other retailers and startups are racing to bring similar cashier-less technology to stores. This month, 7-Eleven said it is testing a cashier-less store for employees at its offices in Irving, Texas.
Cashier-less stores have come under scrutiny from lawmakers and advocates who say they discriminate against low-income people who may not have a credit card or bank account. Amazon has since let customers pay with cash at its convenience stores, and the company said shoppers can do the same at the grocery store by alerting a worker to let them through the turnstile.
The stores also eliminate the job of cashiers. Janes declined to specify how many people the store employs, saying it is “several dozen.” Workers greet customers and walk around aisles restocking shelves. One employee stands by the alcohol section, checking IDS of shoppers.
While a cashier-less store removes the annoyance of waiting in line to pay, it also kills some joys of the supermarket. There’s no one to bag groceries. Instead, Amazon gives out reusable bags that shoppers can fill as they shop. And there’s no deli counter, butcher or fishmonger. Instead, sliced ham, steaks and salmon fillets are already packaged and found on refrigerated shelves.
“Just walk-out technology is kind of cool, in theory,” said David Bishop, a partner at retail consultancy Brick Meets Click, but shoppers decide where to shop based on other factors besides how quickly they can get in and out of the store.