A new and exciting cashierless way to shop for essentials
If you’re a fan of self-service checkouts and contactless payments, you’ll be pleased to know that the UK’s first Amazon Go store is all set to launch in London. It’s a new and exciting cashierless way to shop for essentials, but is it for everyone, and will it prove popular enough to make its way out of London and onto Hull’s streets?
Currently a service only available in the US, Amazon Go is a chain of grocery stores where customers shop by scanning their smartphones at a turnstile when they enter the building, using the dedicated Amazon Go app. Once inside, you’re free to grab whatever you want, as a number of cameras and sensors dotted around the store identify what you take from the shelves in real time.
Though there are no cashiers, there are still plenty of staff on hand to prepare food, check ID and offer their assistance. When you’ve got all you need, there’s no need to stand in a queue and wait to be served; Amazon uses the information they’ve gathered to bill your credit card through your Amazon Go account. The store takes the concept of a self-checkout to a new level, as it eliminates the sometimes stressful step of scanning all of your items at the end of your trip and saves you the hassle of fumbling in your bag for your credit card or a handful of loose change.
We’re no strangers to using Amazon to purchase food here in the UK, as we can currently get our weekly shop through Amazon Fresh, Amazon Pantry and Amazon Prime Now in the same way we’d order from supermarket chains like Asda and Morrisons. But though the concept is similar, the major difference is that to use Amazon Go’s services you would actually need to go to the store physically; an activity that has been on the decrease ever since the rise in popularity of online shopping.
Still, with many flagship retail chains closing down due a negative balance between staffing costs and customer footfall, Amazon may have found the perfect solution to the problem with a venture that perfectly combines the simplicity of queue-free shopping with the age-old act of popping out to the shops for a wander around.
The very first Amazon Go store opened in Seattle a year ago and has since expanded, with nine other stores dotted around the US. Due to the successes of these stores, the company is aiming to have around 3,000 of them around the world by 2021; depending on how well the London store does, hopefully several of the stores in the pipeline will be based in the UK. Though they’re likely to start by expanding to bigger cities like Manchester and Leeds, there’s no harm in hoping for an Amazon Go to open in Hull in the near future, with a central area such as Whitefriargate being the perfect location.
For more information on how Amazon Go works, you can find more information here.
