A few days ago, Amazon announced their grand experiment in brick and mortar grocery and light food shopping called Amazon Go. Basically a shopper checks into the store using the Amazon Go app, puts their items in their bag and “just walks out”. Their items will be tallied and charged when they leave the store.
Of course this seems like the future of shopping to me. I personally like to limit my human interaction when doing things like grocery shopping which is why I use Instacart several times a week. But it does have scary implications for removing the human out of the shopping experience. There will still be jobs for people to stock shelves and prepare food but no more baggers, no more neighborhood checkout girl. We’ll have to see how well the technology works and whether or not people end up wasting time with a buggy UX but for now, it’s a pretty neat idea and I’d love to see how it can be implemented to other traditional retailers.
