Amazon debuts its Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle
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Amazon Go Grocery in Seattle will bring the e-tail titan's autonomous checkout technology, which had previously been used in over 20 convenience-size stores, to a grocery store format, per The Wall Street Journal.
Customers check in via app upon entry, pick their items throughout the store, which is outfitted with cameras, sensors, and computer vision, and leave without physically checking out - instead their account is automatically charged. Amazon Go Grocery appears to be a separate effort from both Whole Foods and the e-tailer's forthcoming rumored grocery store in Los Angeles.
With the new Amazon Go Grocery store, Amazon may have successfully handled two key obstacles faced by its Go technology:
- The new store's larger size indicates the technology is able to scale to bigger locations. Amazon Go Grocery stands at 10,400 square feet, compared with the 1,800 square feet of the original Amazon Go. For context, Amazon Go Grocery fits the size of a standard urban grocery store, which is between 5,000 and 15,000 square feet, on average, according to Kantar figures cited by the Journal, though it remains smaller than the 25,000 to 50,000 square feet Whole Foods generally looks for. This size increase - which is unmatched by all other publicly open and announced stores operated by other players in the autonomous checkout space - is significant because of the challenges autonomous checkout technology has faced in tracking the higher volume of consumers and products that come with a larger space.
- Amazon Go's wider product selection indicates the tech's potential for expanding into new categories. The grocery concept includes two categories that, in theory, could introduce friction to the shopping experience: produce, which can need to be weighed, and alcohol, which requires identification. To address these issues, Amazon Go Grocery prices produce per item and requests that consumers show ID to an employee upon entry if they want to purchase alcohol. Accommodating difficult offerings shows that the technology can be flexible, which is necessary if Amazon wants to expand the types of products or stores Go technology can handle.
These advancements could mean that Amazon is poised to license its Go technology to other stores, but it still has one major hurdle to overcome - retrofitting existing stores. Amazon is reportedly interested in licensing its technology to outside retailers, which could prove lucrative since it could capture fees or a percentage of revenue from thousands of existing stores if they use its technology, bolstering its physical retail segment.
But it's still hasn't retrofit an existing store - instead it has built stores so they could deploy its Go technology. Learning to retrofit stores may slow any licensing plans since it will need to make its technology work for stores, rather than the other way around.
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