The Sunday Times* reported that Amazon are scouting locations for an Amazon Go store in London. According to the paper, Amazon have eyed up a couple of dozen potential locations.
Amazon already registered the Amazon Go trademark in the UK back in December, so it would be no surprise to see them open a London store. Building on the success of Amazon Now which offers one hour deliveries, Amazon Go would fulfil the need for immediate purchases and doubtless be attractive to lunch time shoppers on a tight time scale during their lunch hour or for shoppers wanting to grab some essentials on the way home at night.
With the Amazon Go app on your phone you check into the store as you arrive. You then simply pick up what you want and put it into your bag while motion sensors and cameras detect what you take. When you’re done shopping you just walk out and Amazon Go will automatically charge your account for your groceries.
Having had the normal nightmare of an experience with the self service checkouts in my local Supermarket this weekend, where first of all it refused to scan goods and insisted on signalling for an assistant, the robo-checkout then decided that it’s card reader didn’t want to work leading to the whole machine being reset. Self service checkouts are slower than human operated scanning as they refuse to scan another item until they’ve weighed and accepted the previous one. Amazon Go instantly gets rid of all these frustrations.
If an Amazon Go store opens near me I’m using it. Not because I particularly want to shop at Amazon, just because anything that makes shopping easier is welcome. I suspect I won’t be the only one and it’s likely that the major supermarkets will swiftly see their passing trade drop if an Amazon Go opens up near by unless they up their game and make checkout in physical stores just as easy as Amazon aim to do.
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4 Responses
I’m just going to wow. If there’s one thing Amazon are great at it’s innovating and leading.
Sounds like a nightmare to me. If Chris has had so many issues at his local self-service checkout then this opens up an extra level of potential chaos. The Amazon forums are full of many seller suspensions that take place due to automated bots. And recently sellers have had different languages taking over their front page and metrics going wrong.
maybe it’s just the kleptomaniac in me, but i cant help wanting to go in there armed with mirrors and a bag of sand, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, trying to indiana jones my way to some free beans or feminine hygeine products, just to see if i could.
What if you’ve got your kids with you?