I’m scheduled to head to Florida this week for the Global Organic Produce Expo, so I couldn’t hop a flight to join the lines waiting to shop the opening day of Amazon Go.
The long-awaited prototype store, which has been testing with Amazon employees for about a year, opened its doors to the general public on January 22. Much like an Apple store on the day of a new iPhone release, the lines were spectacularly long. One observer pointed out the irony of a so-called cashier-less, no-line store having a line to get it, but we all know it’s the curiosity and new factor that has people there.
And because I couldn’t be in that mosh pit of retail observers, media and competitors, I took to social media and pulled the best 10 reviews I could find from Twitter and LinkedIn.
See the black squares everywhere? It’s cameras & sensors feeding an underlying algorithm for the detection of products & customers. Black dots on the salad: machine readable information. #AmazonGo #handelsblatt pic.twitter.com/Py0KR37jKJ
— Britta Weddeling (@bweddeling) January 22, 2018
Here they are, in no particular order:
As Amazon Go makes its public debut, job postings point to future expansion
Geekwire’s forward-thinking geeks took a look at Amazon’s jobs page, and found more than 40 positions for Amazon Go projects, from real estate to construction, food service and IT.
Inside Amazon Go, a Store of the Future
This New York Times contributor says shopping there “feels a little like shoplifting,” and “going into a subway station.” Bonus points: he shared photos of the “hundreds” of cameras mounted on the ceiling.
What it's like inside Amazon's futuristic, automated store
CNET got a preview, early look, and wrote up a detailed post of the entire shopping process.
A Field Agent shopper filmed his first experience shopping at the store, with an interesting look at the tagging technology Amazon uses to track items purchased.
Check out the Twitter’s reaction from the #AmazonGo hashtag
There’s some great posts here. Some users are pointing out that the “cashier-less” store opened not too long after Seattle passed its minimum wage increase. I think we all knew this kind of technology was coming, regardless.
“Leave it to Seattle to create another way to avoid human interaction.”
We’ll see how long it takes before another retailer launches their own version of this technology. Walmart’s already working on in-residence kiosks. Who else will step up?