Lending new meaning to convenience: Amazon Dash

A new Amazon product/service has captured my imagination. It’s called Amazon Dash and as can be seen from the image above, consists of a hand-held wand-shaped remote-control featuring a microphone, speaker, and a bar-code reader.

The idea is simplicity itself: you hang the device up in your kitchen and use it to scan the bar code of grocery items that need replacing, or use the mike to tell the device about any other foodstuffs you’d like to buy. The request is sent to Amazon Fresh, and is then dispatched within 24 hours.

For the moment, the product is only available for Amazon Fresh customers, who pay $300 a year for membership, and only in Southern California, Seattle, and San Francisco. But the appeal is clear: a service that makes life as easy as possible should attract a significant number of customers, especially if the service leaves little doubt as to its other benefits (Amazon is not a company characterized by offering poorer or more expensive services).

The move, still in the test phase, is the most aggressive in the distribution sector for some time. Few competitors will be match Amazon’s operative, logistical, and technology infrastructure and thus to meet the same levels of convenience the company is offering.

It’s early to be able to offer any kind of analysis. But for people who are prepared to pay $300 a year (which includes delivery costs), this is the sort of service that could persuade them to pretty much forget about supermarket trips. The philosophy of simplifying everything to the maximum has proved a successful one in many cases, and will certainly put many retailers on the back foot. As Wired has commented about Amazon Dash, it doesn’t always make sense to create a device that does just one thing, except when it does. Buying with a device like this is about as comfortable as it gets, and perhaps as dangerous, too.

No, we’re not talking about the end of the world as we know it, nor about something that is going to be part of our lives tomorrow. There’s no need to shout from the rooftops about the disruption this might suppose: any number of similar services have fallen by the wayside after trial periods that proved their unworkability. For the moment, Amazon Dash is still more a concept than a reality. But given the right conditions, it is a concept that could worry a great many companies.

(En español, aquí)