Amazon has opened the first Amazon Go store in Seattle, the city in the state of Washington (United States) where it has its main office. It is a supermarket that allows you to take products off the shelves, put them in your bag and go out, without having to go to the cashier.
Amazon Go's opening hours range from seven in the morning to nine in the evening, Monday through Friday; the store is 167 square meters large and sells the usual things you find in supermarkets of that size. The big difference is that customers can identify themselves at the entrance by scanning a code through an application linked to Amazon Go. of Amazon Go creates the account of your purchases and loads the shopping on your credit card, the same one already registered to make purchases on Amazon.
Inside Amazon Go, hundreds of cameras and sensors have been placed on the shelves, in order to keep track of the products that are taken by customers. If someone takes a product and then thinks about it and puts it back on the shelf, sensors and cameras understand it and let the app know, which then removes the product from the list. More than to save on cashiers and cashiers, Amazon Go was made to be able to better trace the paths and purchase choices of customers, and to understand how much the elimination of the passage from the cashier – and the related queue, and then put everything on the tape, and then pay, and then envelop, etc – make you want to buy things more.
Amazon Go started talking five years ago. Over the past year, the supermarket has been open on a trial basis for Amazon employees so that the company could notice and correct any problems. For example, there was a need to solve some problems due to children (children of Amazon employees) who, after taking a product, put it back on a different shelf, or due to people of the same size and similar appearance who made purchases in the same moment.
Among those who have already shopped on Amazon Go is Nick Wingfield, a technology reporter for the New York Times. He said that the initial feeling is to enter a subway station, due to the turnstiles, but then it is a supermarket like any other: except for the “hundreds of cameras around the shop”, especially on the ceiling. Wingfield also wrote that taking things and putting them in your pocket, backpack, wherever you want, feels a bit like you're stealing; “Just a couple of minutes after you leave the store, when the purchase receipt arrives, that feeling is gone.”
#AmazonGo #Amazon #Amazonstore #Seattle #justwalkout
To see if stealing was possible, Wingfield said he tried, after asking Amazon for permission, to trick the cameras: before taking the drinks, when they were still on a shelf, he covered them with a plastic bag. He then kept them hidden in the bag and left the supermarket. The cameras still managed to see it.
Amazon's new convenience store, opening today in downtown Seattle, enables a shopping experience like no other! There are no cashiers or registers anywhere. Shoppers leave the store through gates, without pausing to pull out a credit card. Their Amazon account automatically gets charged for what they take out the door! #hellofuture #amazongo #shoppinglikethis #technology #nofuss #noqueues?
Not many details are known about how Amazon Go works – only that artificial intelligence is involved and the products do not each have a specific chip – and it is not even clear how and how much Amazon wants to develop this idea. At the moment, Amazon has very few physical stores but a few months ago it bought Whole Foods, a large supermarket chain of organic foods that has almost 500 points of sale between the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Gianna Puerini, head of the Amazon Go project, said that for now “there are no plans” in this regard. Wingfield instead wrote that “there are rumors that Amazon could sell the technology to other stores”.
