Two years ago, Amazon introduced the idea of high-tech, cashierless shopping with a store that was a cross between a 7-Eleven and a Pret A Manger sandwich shop. Now, Amazon is bringing the same concept to its full-size supermarket. On Tuesday, Amazon will
open the doors to a 10,000-square-foot Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, less than a mile from the tech giant's downtown Seattle headquarters. From a report:
It'll be stocked with 5,000 different products -- from organic fruit to grass-fed beef -- and outfitted with cameras, sensors, and computer vision that eliminate the need for shoppers to fork over cash or plastic before walking out the door with their groceries. The new store, which is the first of its kind in the US, highlights Amazon's unsated appetite for gobbling up market share in the $900 billion US grocery industry, even after spending nearly $14 billion in 2017 to acquire Whole Foods and making same-day grocery delivery a free perk for Prime members last year. At the same time, the expansion of the cashierless store concept raises the question of when -- not if -- the technology will be ready for installation in Whole Foods stores, and what might happen to the chain's thousands of cashiers when it is.
