It seems the king of e-commerce has made the words true by launching Amazon Go. Dubbed as the future of convenience stores, these are cashier-less stores, the first of which was opened in Seattle last month.
Amazon Go is the outcome of five years of strenuous efforts to morph the traditional brick-and-mortar stores into futuristic experience without checkout lines and cashiers. According to Recode, the e-commerce juggernaut would open six more Amazon Go stores this year. It plans to open a few more stores in Seattle and in Los Angeles.
With Amazon Go, the e-commerce giant is making a tectonic shift to the $550 billion brick-and-mortar retail sector, which is sure to ruffle some feathers (read Walmart) in the US.
How it works?
Anyone with an amazon account may use this technology by downloading Amazon Go app on their smartphone. Enter the store through a glass turnstile by scanning the QR code on your phone app. Then pick whatever you need and just leave the store. Using machine-learning technology, the app would detect the products you picked and charge you the amount.
The future is interesting!
There is a high likelihood that Amazon would expand this concept to Whole Foods stores to test it on a much wider scale, along with its Amazon Book stores.
With Amazon Go, Jeff Bezos is changing the status quo of the brick-and-mortar stores, though it’s too early to comment whether this would create a ripple effect in the retail sector. To put things in perspective, at the end of 2016, Labor Department stats reveal that over 3.5 million people are working as cashiers across the US.
It would be interesting to see how Walmart is going to respond to this.
“Hey Alexa, any guesses regarding this?”