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Amazon's much-heralded convenience store of the future, Amazon Go, may seem like a crazy experiment. But the company plans to open as many as six more of these storefronts this year, multiple people familiar with the company's plans have told Recode.
Some of the new high-tech stores are likely to open in Amazon's hometown of Seattle, where the first location is based, as well as Los Angeles, these people said. It's not clear if Amazon will open up Go stores in any other cities this year.
In Los Angeles, Amazon has held serious talks with billionaire developer Rick Caruso about bringing a Go store to The Grove, his 600,000-square-foot outdoor shopping Mecca, two of these people said.
And in Seattle, Amazon had identified at least three locations for additional Go stores as of last year, according to one source.
[...] News of the planned expansion of the Amazon Go concept is sure to set off fresh concerns about the great societal challenges that come with the type of automation that Amazon is inventing. Since the Amazon Go model does not involve customers checking out, there are no cashiers working in the stores.
Source: ReCode
Also Amazon reportedly plans to open more of its futuristic, cashierless stores this year
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday February 26 2018, @02:24AM (2 children)
i dunno about you, but in this neck of the woods, even self-checkout counter can have a queue - and more often than not I run into problems with the weight scale and have to hand wave a store rep over.
With the amazon app you can see exactly what you're charged if you want to in the app and get a receipt after you pass the scanners. You are paying before you walk out, just not directly into your bank account but your amazon account much like a credit card account.
The credit card model have been working for decades, this is no different, just no need to do explicit scanning as their tech does continuous scanning while you're in store and no actual person and machine to feed in a physical token like a credit card as it is done remotely via the app in your device in your pocket.
Yes, there's a small chance you may be billed incorrectly, though haven't seen any news reporting that yet. Yes this is a big leap if you're still on cash, but that can be said of moving from cash to cashless via credit card. From credit cards to this? I'd say this beats the experience of credit cards.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @02:52AM (1 child)
You speak of cash as though all other forms of payments are upgrades.
Cash is to sysvinit as credit card is to systemd.
If I have a credit card, MasterCard or Visa can prevent me from paying any vendor they don't like, and I have no recourse.
When Amazon accepts bitcoin (openrc or runit), I might consider going to their store.
(Score: 1) by Woosh on Monday February 26 2018, @05:08PM
I agree a little. Cash has benefits. For example lower income families can more easily control their budgets when they have cash. If you have $20 in hand and the bill is $20.01, you put something back. On debit/credit you you pay $20.01 plus interest, overdraft fees, etc. However card service companies aren't activists. Certain vendors get better rates to accept Visa, Mastercard, etc. but its based on the volume and value of transactions, not whether or not they like them. I bet Planned Parenthood and the NRA both accept Visa payments. You can always go prepaid if you like that certain degree of anonymity.