USA TODAY International Edition
Amazon opens two click- and- collect grocery stores
E- commerce giant will even put the goods in your trunk
The future of grocery shopping opened in what once was a sleepy Scandinavian neighborhood in Seattle this week, and it looks very Amazonian.
The company unveiled its long- rumored grocery pickup concept store in two Seattle locations, though for now they’re only for employees as the online giant works out the kinks.
AmazonFresh Pickup locations allow Amazon Prime members to order groceries online, make an appointment to pick them up and then drive through and have the grocery bags loaded into their trunk by an Amazon employee.
No money changes hands as the entire transaction takes place via the Amazon app or at home on the customer’s computer.
The two sites are in the north Seattle neighborhood of Ballard and south of downtown in an area called SoDo, called that way be- cause it’s south of the domed sports stadium that once stood there.
The AmazonFresh Pickup stores are different from Amazon’s other recent brick- andmortar concept store, the Amazon Go convenience store.
In that one, cameras, sensors and other technology tell the store which items a customer has slipped into their basket, then deducts from their credit card as they leave, requiring no checkout lines.
The first of these stores is located just north of downtown, near Amazon’s concentration of office buildings at the south end of Lake Union.
Groceries are the biggest untapped opportunity in e- commerce, and it makes sense for Amazon to find ways to disrupt it, said Cooper Smith, an Amazon analyst with business intelligence company L2.
Multiple supermarket chains offer online ordering and drivethrough pickup, including Amazon rival Walmart.
What’s different is that Amazon has “an unprecedented installed user base of shoppers — 30 million people use Amazon’s mobile app every month. That’s how this click- and- collect is going to take off,” Smith said.