This Tuesday , February 25 , Amazon opened its first grocery store without a cashier . Based in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, the new Amazon Go Grocery store lets customers shop for everyday groceries . So they can find fresh produce, meat, seafood, baked goods, household items, dairy products, beer, wine etc.
The store measures almost 1,000 square meters. It therefore becomes the largest store with Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology to date. In fact, the first stores measured between 150 and 200 square meters.
As with Amazon Go convenience stores, buyers first use the Amazon Go app to scan on entering the store. Indeed, there are terminals at the entrance of the grocery store, where visitors must identify themselves via the dedicated application and its QR code. Then they make their purchases as usual. Cameras and sensors track items removed from the shelves. They then add them to the buyer’s virtual basket. When the customer leaves the store, Amazon automatically debits their account using their registered payment card.
AMAZON GO WANTS TO EXPAND ITS TECHNOLOGY
The end result is a no-queue grocery store . Meanwhile, store staff are liberated to take care of other aspects of the business. Like restocking of shelves and customer service. This model has worked for Amazon Go, where customers quickly check out items.
It seems that Amazon wants to test the capacity of its technology without a cashier. But the number of stores without a cashier that it wants to open in the near future is not yet known.
Amazon plans to open up to 3,000 new cashless supermarkets by 2021. Customers go in there, grab the desired products and pay automatically when they leave, without having to stand at the checkout for a long time. But unfortunately they didn’t think about people who don’t have a bank account and can’t pay automatically via their Amazon account.
In recent months, Amazon has received more criticism for this and now, and according to CNBC, also wants to accept cash for payment in the future.
In the US, discrimination against people without bank accounts is frowned upon, since around 6.5 percent of households (8.4 million people) do not have a bank account.
