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Amazon May Open Up To Six More Automated Stores This Year (engadget.com)
Amazon may have opened its automated convenience store a year late, but it looks like it's been a pretty big success. From a report: Recode learned that the company plans on opening six more of its Amazon Go stores in 2018. It's not clear where these stores will be located, though Recode reports that more locations are likely in Seattle, and Amazon is in talks with the developer of The Grove in Los Angeles. Amazon Go is billed as the convenience store of the future. There are no checkout lines; you can simply walk in, grab what you want, and leave. You scan in with a smartphone app, and then an AI tracks what you take from the shelves and automatically charges you for them.
It's not clear where these stores will be located
Hint: You wont find them in Inglewood. These stores will show up some place with a lot of upper middle class white people who dont mind paying more to avoid the usual drolls of a convenience store. homeless beggars arent slumped against the side of the building, and there isnt a stench of fetid trash from the parking lot.
convenience store of the future
Ive been to a go store. theres about a 30-40% markup from what you might find at a CVS or 7 eleven. they dont take cash , they dont sell fresh fruit, and everything is armoured in plastic wrap and polystyrene to ensure it gets a good barcode or nfc sensor. Its the future, if the future came with a "no poor people" label. Security stands at the ready by the door and many items are out of stock.
Go is a branded lifestyle experience, not a convenience store.
Good people go to bed earlier.
You also need to handle:
- people that put the product back on the shelve
- people that put the product back on the WRONG shelve (by laziness or mistake)
- people that pick up this wrongly placed product and complain its price doesn't match the one on the shelves
- people that try to cheat system by putting something similar to the product on the shelve
and probably a million other strange cases. Maybe amazon will suceed where others failed, but I wouldnt hold my breath.
Maybe they could invent something like a sticker to put on the product that used radio frequencies to communicate with a system to track stuff. With AI.
- people who pee on the floor
- people who open packages and use the product right there in the store
- kids grabbing things off the shelves
There are about a bajillion things that could happen in a store that none of this silliness has accounted for. We are decades away from having employee-less retail stores. This is just a dumb PR stunt to keep the dumb Amazon customers drooling.
I don't respond to AC's.
Wow, AI tracks what you take and automatically charges you? The advances in AI are incredible! Hopefully it records the purchase in a blockchain ledger too. That would be TOO COOL.
We can mock this technology all we want, but two facts remain; it works, and it's likely a HELL of a lot cheaper than the traditional method of purchasing and managing cashiers, baggers, and cash register hardware.
You should expect this kind of store concept to become infectious, and not just with Amazon Would a grocery chain be willing to license this Amazon solution if it proves to be 30% cheaper than the traditional method of transaction management? You bet your ass they would, and Amazon would be stupid not to oblige.
Cashiers make up over 3 million jobs in the US. Let's see how well we manage unemployment in 10 years, along with managing the unemployable.
Yes AND leave the store without having to interact with a cashier or use a badly designed self-checkout station that takes two minutes to properly classify the bananas you bought.
Such a shame small-minded people like yourself cannot imagine even the simplest of improvements this will bring, you can practically see the vibrations from the gears in your head attempting to turn but failing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We already need US citizens to pick the fruit. They don't want to. Expect fruit prices to rise as either fruit goes unpicked or picker wages increase (or both).
It's all fun and games until you go in there to buy a can of soft drink, can't find the one you want, and on your way out the system mistakenly charges you for twelve large cucumbers, a packet of condoms and an extra large bottle of Crisco.. and you can't find the tame store human to sort it out.
And THEN you're cornered by a drone shaped like a Dalek equipped with a taser, and the drone growls in an ED-209 voice, "Put down the, $tables_Xref, you have $timer_what_the_hell_fill_this_in_later_dude_its_never_gonna_happen seconds to comply".
Yes, I'm sure someone's going to break into our building and mug employees in the break room. Not the ones sitting at tables, just the ones browsing the merchandise, of course.
I wonder how the Amazon store would deal with a flash crowd of about a hundred people all dressed like the tame store human?