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| Amazon employees outside the Amazon Go store. David Ryder for The New York Times |
SEATTLE — In the latest in its expanding set of experiments
involving bricks-and-mortar retail stores, Amazon has created a small grocery
store in Seattle that will allow customers to pick drinks, prepared meals and
other items off shelves and walk out without having to wait in a checkout line,
the company said.
A smartphone app and various other types of technology in
the store will eliminate the usual bottleneck of cashiers and registers that
typically stand between shoppers and the store exit.
For now, only Amazon employees can shop in the
1,800-square-foot store, which is on the ground floor of one of the company’s
new office towers in downtown Seattle. The company will open the store to the
public early next year and will offer chef-made meal kits with ingredients for
quickly preparing dinners at home.
Amazon did not say what its expansion plans were for the
store concept, called Amazon Go. If they are anything like what the company has
done with its other bricks-and-mortar stores, new locations will open elsewhere
slowly over time as Amazon learns how customers use the first one.
Amazon opened its first physical bookstore just over a year
ago in a Seattle shopping mall. It has added others in the San Diego and
Portland, Ore., areas and will open new bookstores in Chicago and Boston.
It is also working on another grocery store concept that will
allow customers to order food items online and then pick them up quickly by
pulling into parking stalls. Two such stores are under construction in Seattle.
In the grand scheme of Amazon’s business, analysts consider
the retail stores to be an infinitesimal portion of the more than $135 billion
in sales expected from the company this year. But the plans reflect a growing
recognition by the company that certain categories of shopping are unlikely to
move completely online. In some cases, it is simply more convenient to buy
items in a store or more attractive to browse for them on physical shelves.
“The way we think about it is the size of online retail is
going to continue to grow dramatically but there will always be an offline
option,” said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. “They’re trying to
streamline and capture a portion of that offline experience.”
Amazon still views technology as being useful in overhauling
shopping in traditional retail shops. While the company has not said exactly
how the Amazon Go stores will work, visitors will gain entry to them through a
smartphone app. The company said the stores relied on a variety of technologies
similar to those in self-driving cars, including those defined by buzzwords
such as “computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning.”
Unanswered for now are questions about how the stores would
handle shoplifting and whether there would be employees on hand to check
identification cards for alcohol purchases.
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Article edited from The New York Times
