Amazon opened their brick and mortar, cashier-less store of the future today in Seattle. Called Amazon Go, it looks like a very high-tech version of a 7-11 convenience store.
It has a selection of salads, sandwiches and beverages (including beer and wine), ready-to-eat meals, produce and meats.
Recode has a very nice photo tour of the store, which is where the picture below comes from.
To get in and out of the store you need to pass through a subway-like turnstile. You get through the turnstile by displaying your Amazon smartphone app.
After shopping you simply walk back out through the turnstile. The store's technology automatically figures out what you have and charges your Amazon account via your smartphone app.
The goal, of course, is to eliminate the time and hassle associated with check-out lines. Amazon calls this the "Just Walk Out" shopping experience.
Key quote from their website:
Our 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. Our Just Walk Out Technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll send you a receipt and charge your Amazon account.
While just walking out of the store feels like you're shoplifting, actual shoplifting is very hard to do.
Fooling the combination of cameras and sensors will not be easy and the technology will likely lead to a reduction in the substantial "shrinkage" issue - a $50 billion industry problem - faced by retail firms.
It's unclear what Amazon’s long-term plans are for this store concept.
But it is clear brick and mortar retail is rapidly changing. It’s also clear from their various retail efforts that Amazon is aiming to be a major player in brick and mortar retail.
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