What it’s like to shop in Amazon’s version of the convenience store

BERKELEY, CALIF. — Amazon has been aggressively courting students as part of its experiment to bring its enormous online shopping operation into the bricks-andmortar world. Now, the company is launching Amazon Instant Pickup, a service that allows customers to order certain items from their smartphones for pickup within minutes of purchase.

Essentially, Amazon has launched its own version of the convenience store.

Five college campus locations will introduce Instant Pickup this week, including the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Maryland at College Park.

I tried out the new service at Berkeley’s student union, where Amazon already has a storefront where students can pick up their Amazon packages. The company said it plans to expand the service to non-campus locations by the end of the year, starting with Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.

In Berkeley, Ripley MacDonald, director of Amazon student programs, lent me a phone for a few minutes to browse through the store’s collection of goods and then place an order through an Amazon.com account. I selected a bottle of San Pellegrino. While my order was processing, I added a bag of Hot Cheetos. Within three minutes, I received an alert that both were available for pickup.

I scanned a bar code on the phone’s screen at a scanner located on a bank of lockers, and one of the lockers popped open with my order inside. (The goodies I ordered as part of the demo went to the store’s staff.) In a real-world situation, I could have placed the order from my phone before getting to the location so that I wouldn’t have to stand in front of the locker while waiting for my items.