The Amazon Go store made us sad
One of the benefits of living in Seattle is bearing witness to the all-encompassing stream-of-consciousness hivemind that is Amazon.
So when Amazon announced that its new grocery store concept, Amazon Go, was open to the public, we decided we had to check it out. After all, the tech they’re demoing is pretty fantastic. The idea is that you can wander into your local grocery store, grab what you need, and saunter on out. No more pesky lines! No more small-talk with human beings! And certainly no more: “UNEXPECTED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA”.
Seems like a good deal to us.
Walking in, at least right now, is a bit of an intimidating concept. To enter, you have to download the Amazon Go app, link it to your Amazon account and confirm a payment method. We’d link a screenshot, but Amazon has wisely blocked people from screenshotting their unique identifiers (which they call Keys), as that links your in-store purchases to your account.
There is a twist, though! If you bring multiple people with you, you have to scan each person in individually using your Amazon Go Key. This was not super clear at the beginning, which led to an inevitable cavalcade of people wandering into the store, only to be tersely told off by Amazon employees standing at the entrance. The whole thing felt odd — if your store is intentionally disrupting the grocery shopping experience as much as possible, you’d think you’d be a little more explanatory about it, right?
Once inside, the store feels like a standard grocery store, albeit smaller, and much more high-end. Interestingly, the layout was slightly counter-intuitive to traditional grocery store concepts. Roughly 90% of shoppers walk to the right after entering a grocery store, following a brief period where they stop and look around to “take in” the store layout.
This is impossible in the Amazon Go store. Maybe it’s a temporary issue — as a demo location, they may have not had enough space to add a decompression zone. But it certainly added to the slight confusion that most people felt once entering — there was a continuous grouping of confused looking people who had just walked in right by the entry kiosks the whole time we were inside.
Once we got situated, the shopping experience was simple. We wandered over to the refrigerators (we had been tasked with buying a quart of milk), and tried to figure out how to buy it. “Do we just pick it up and go now?” I asked my shopping companion. Unhelpfully, the app didn’t tell us that we had anything in our cart, just a running counter of how long we had been in the store.
Next to us, a young couple was having a similar quandary trying to buy a sandwich, picking it up and putting it down at least 5 times in a row, hoping for some sort of cue that they had done something right. “How does it know?” they whispered. Walking by, an older gentleman simply pointed up, which was both an accurate descriptor of where the cameras that track your purchases were located, but also a troubling simile to 1984. In the Go Store, Jeff Bezos is always watching.
Finally, we resolved to walk out of the store and see what had happened.
Nothing.
Not even a little “Thank You for Shopping with Us!” pop-up.
So we wandered off into the city with our quart of milk in a bag, not totally certain if we had shoplifted. If we had, then who would we tell in the store? How would they fix it?
Finally, twenty minutes later, my phone chirped at me that I had spent 4 minutes and 47 seconds seconds in the store, during which I had apparently legally purchased a quart of milk. Relief at last!
Here’s the problem with the Amazon Go store. People still prefer human interactions in their customer service experiences. Per the Harvard Business Review, humans prefer talking to people when making large, comparative purchases. Granted, buying milk isn’t exactly a “huge” purchase, but as the value of people’s shopping carts in the Amazon Go stores increase, so will their desire to have human interaction if something goes wrong. Which it did for us.
This isn’t a radical concept. We’ve been conditioned by years and years of training to understand the shopping experience as having two discrete parts: shopping, and then checking-out. After comparing multiple items, you then are given a final moment in which you buy something and say “hey, is this what I want? Is this price right? Do I need another one?”
In a physical shopping experience, this mental check is critical. For a retailer, it’s a space for high-value add-on purchasing — how many times have you been checking out, only to add a magazine or a pack of gum to your purchase? More importantly, it gives a zone for personal interaction with the consumer. Checking in with the customer provides instant feedback for managers (things were fine, but you’re out of yogurt), a strong positive experience for the customer, and the opportunity to directly connect with the consumer (have you heard about our loyalty program?).
This even extends to online shopping. Even Amazon’s website pulls from the traditional cues of the physical shopping experience. You put items in a cart, and are asked to properly check out when you are ready to buy. In fact, Amazon’s world famous customer service experience is predicated on real humans talking to you to fix any issues you may have had with the shopping experience.
The Go Store has none of this. Save for the few Amazon employees scattered around the store to help make purchases, and the one guarding the wine/beer section from the overzealous looking pack of high schoolers in the store with us, there is no opportunity for customer interaction in the store. The entire experience is a deliberate and intentional devaluing of the benefits of human interaction.
The obvious rebuttal is that the Amazon Go consumer carries around in their pocket a little device that allows direct notifications, instant alerts, and virtually unlimited information. If a customer can’t find something, they can just open up a store map. If Amazon wants to notify people about a sale, they can just send a push notification.
But our issues with the Amazon Go store are a bit deeper than that. Take a look at this picture — what’s missing?
There is no produce. There are no vegetables. There are absolutely no “base” ingredients inside the store.
That’s what makes us sad. Amazon hasn’t made a Grocery Store. It’s made a robotic deli and called it a grocery store. Sure, there’s a section of Amazon’s pre-made meal kits in the back, but those are a poor replacement for the bounties of the average grocery store’s produce sections.
Grocery stores, at some level, are reflections of our society. The first civilizations were built around markets and trading posts; places for humans to come together and interact. Key to that is the fact that everyone needs to eat, and those meals are made with love and affection for time immemorial. Sure, the meals we make for each other are often over-salted or slightly undercooked, but that’s what makes them human. Giving that over to shelves of pre-made snacks and meal kits not only removes the human element from our grocery stores, but also from our kitchens.
Even worse, the Go Store seems to deliberately want to remind you how “Big Brother-esque” the entire process is. Rather than notifying you of the things that one normally hopes to get at the end of a retail transaction (a receipt and, as mentioned, confirmation that we had not just committed a petty crime), the Amazon Go app merely chirps the amount of time you had spent in the store, presumably trying to understand where the cucumbers are.
We believe that tech should be used to work with humans, to make our lives better by augmenting our experiences and habits, not by forcing us to change them. The Amazon Go store operates on an entirely different model. It states that its way, be it for the checkout experience or for basic meal prep, is better, no questions asked, and demands that you adapt to its rules.
We’re confident that Amazon knows what it’s doing. We’re sure that years of analytical data, and the wisdom that comes from having absorbed Whole Foods has led to some pretty interesting conclusions about the way that we shop and buy food.
The thing is, humans made Amazon what it is. Its world-famous customer service experience is built on humans talking to humans about what they can do to make an experience better. Its most famous new product — Alexa, is a robot that has been rigorously and carefully anthropomorphized to imitate the human experience. Even the rainforest spheres we mentioned at the beginning of the article exist solely to make their HQ (the current one, at least) a better place to work for its human employees.
That’s why we’re confused about why they’ve ignored the human element with the Amazon Go store.
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