Meet Your New Amazon Robotic Everything Store, Coming to a Neighborhood Near You
As many news outlets have recently reported, Amazon is on the verge of launching a brand new grocery concept that appears on the surface to be just an everyday store, except that it’s not. Based on floorplans obtained from the City of Los Angeles that were provided by Amazon Retail LLC to designate exactly where it plans to sell alcohol within its new Woodland Hills, CA location as well as firsthand accounts from visitors, HNGRY has uncovered that the company has built a small-scale, robot-powered version of its retail store that surrounds a hidden perimeter of the store. The permits state hours of operation from 6am until 2am, which would imply on-demand delivery, enabling Amazon to leverage its best in class data about what consumers crave to deliver it with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
The concept, known within the industry as microfulfillment, is the latest advancement within the e-grocery space, which FMI and Nielsen project to quadruple from ~$26bn today to $113bn in just two years. The largest retailers including Walmart, Albertsons, and Kroger have been partnering with various technology firms to enable a 60-item grocery order…
