Amazon Go’s faltering start doesn’t mean cashier-free stores are no-go
Amazon announced the opening of its first cashier-free Amazon Go store in Seattle on December 5, 2016, operating exclusively for employees, finally opening it to the public on January 22, 2018, after a long period of testing and training its algorithms, as well as ironing out glitches
The company presented Amazon Go as the future of retail: walk in, choose the items you want, put them in your bag, and walk out the door; just like that. An evolution of shopping based on the incorporation of a series of technologies (computer vision, deep learning and sensor fusion) that could be considered a retail equivalent to the impact of other technologies such as self-service or bar codes.
After testing the technology in the original convenience store model and announcing an ambitious expansion plan to no less than 3,000 stores by 2021 in locations like airports or cinemas, Amazon decided to go one step further: to scale up the model to a full-size supermarket, with all its sections, and begin to offer its already proven technology platform to other players in the large-scale distribution environment, with the promise of large reductions in their operating costs.
Then came the pandemic: expectations were brutally slashed, the number of stores only reached around 35 and Cameron Janes…
