SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the amazon-knows-your-spouse-better-than-you-do dept.
Amazon is testing a brick-and-mortar concept store that would allow shoppers to pick items off the shelf and leave without waiting in a line:
Amazon.com Inc said on Monday it has opened a brick-and-mortar grocery store in Seattle without lines or checkout counters, kicking off new competition with supermarket chains.
Amazon Go, the online shopping giant's new 1,800-square-foot (167-square-meter) store, uses sensors to detect what shoppers have picked off the shelf and bills it to their Amazon account if they do not put it back.
The store marks Amazon's latest push into groceries, one of the biggest retail categories it has yet to master. The company currently delivers produce and groceries to homes through its AmazonFresh service.
"It's a great recognition that their e-commerce model doesn't work for every product," said analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research, noting that physical stores would complement AmazonFresh. "If there were hundreds of these stores around the country, it would be a huge threat" to supermarket chains, he said.
Also at CNBC, Bloomberg, and The Verge:
It'll feel like shoplifting, except you're actually being watched by more cameras than you can imagine.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:20PM
1,800-square-foot
first of all that's a small convenience store like a gas station, not a supermarket.
I shop at a "modified warehouse model" independent-ish supermarket every week that's 225000 square feet. Yup better part of four hundred feet on a side internal volume. And its not the biggest store in the area either.
The capital costs and sheer bandwidth to spy the hell out of a tiny little 1800 sq ft store times maybe 200 to be a real supermarket... its gonna be an issue. Its not impossible but I see why they're starting small and emulating the gas station quikie mart model.
One interesting advantage of quikie-mart is people are probably there to buy one or two things tops, not an entire shopping cart. I don't think my local gas station sells enough "stuff" to actually fill a shopping cart with one of everything. People on other sites over the last day or two insist on discussing this convenience store as if it were a supermarket before Thanksgiving and how will the technology handle people buying 400 pounds of crap at a time, when the reality is it'll be for people to by a sandwich or an energy drink or maybe a bag of chips, or sometimes two. That's a much easier step.
Personally I like the idea of vending machines and microtransactions. You take whatever you want out of the vending machine and are charged when you take it.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:33PM
Cost may not be an issue. The camera and processing power are relatively cheap, and employees are expensive.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:35PM
Possibly you overestimate the pay of your average stock clerk or cashier.
Surely they need more than one HD webcam per 10 sq ft. Probably one cam per sq foot is about right if they want to literally watch every shelf space and create 3-d models of the shoppers.
Also the margins are extremely low in the retail business. 100% markup sounds like a lot but somehow by the time you're done paying the bills, single digit profits are where its at. That in itself is disturbing as low profit high touch businesses are where capital goes to die, its not really a "start-up tech skys the limit" field. Its like a bank going into Real Estate investment in Florida or Arizona (notorious bank-killing states during the last bubble pop) moth to a flame.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:15PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @09:40AM
It's their first vaguely (because it's employees only right now) real-world test of the concept. It would be surprising if it were bigger than a tiny corner store.