I went inside Amazon’s first grocery store
Was my recent trip to buy pizza dough and mushrooms — the future of retail?
I went inside the first Amazon Fresh retail store, located in Woodland Hills, California. If you think the future of retail is human-less, think again! There were more humans than a standard grocery store, but they were all Amazon workers, who were fulfilling online orders.
The grocery carts use a combination of cameras, barcode scanners and a scale to determine, everything you put into the cart.
Amazon is likely to roll out more of these stores in the future. Here’s what I thought:
- Your current total is…
Listed on the screen of your smart cart, is your ongoing total. This surprised me. I’d imagine grocery stores are able to charge you more because you don’t really know what the total is until you get to the checkout counter.
2. The ‘dumb’ cart
There is an option to do regular checkout with human cashiers. In fact, less than half of the customers I saw we’re actually using the Smart Cart. But for those of us who are using the Smart Cart, the ending is really anticlimactic because you just walk on a line and that’s it. The screen automatically says “Processing Payment”.
3. Room for improvement
The smart cart took more time than if I were to just get a regular car and go to the cash register and check out at the end. So if the objective here is trying to save us time and make our lives easier, it certainly didn’t do that.
But for all of us who know Jeff Bezos, he’s obsessed with data and research and that’s exactly what this experience was. This isn’t really a grocery store this is more of a testing facility, so that people in corporate can see exactly how customers interact with the products and how we use it and how they can actually improve the experience.
4. Why go to the store at all?
At any time after leaving the store, I can open my Amazon app, and reorder all the same items. So, don’t I just order all this on the app and then have it delivered or come pick it up? Doesn’t this experience dissuade from coming into the store?
Yes. And maybe that’s ultimate goal…
5. The privacy dilemma
Americans take their privacy quite seriously so whether or not people will adopt this way of shopping in masses, we’ll have to wait and see. Inside the store, there was a number of employees and customers who didn’t like being filmed — making me wonder how quickly people will adopt this technology — which gives up more and more data.