It's interesting that they rolled this out as a thing, but didn't start retrofitting all of their Whole Foods with it. Does it have problems with grocery stores? How does it handle fruits by weight, etc.
Amazon probably doesn't want to radically rock the boat when it comes to Whole Foods at the moment. It is an established well-working business, and they don't want another wave of "WF went to shit after Amazon bought it out, just look at all those changes they've implemented!", given that Amazon's reputation has already been kinda questionable in the public eye recently.
Last Thanksgiving, I visited my parents in the town where I lived before college, and we went to the Whole Foods where we used to shop at all the time.
It looked basically the same, except that there were these huge, bright blue Amazon Prime ads everywhere. It felt vaguely dystopian—a store of my youth invaded by the giant tech monolith.
If Amazon is trying to not noticeably change Whole Foods, they're doing a pretty lousy job.
Well, i didn't say they weren't changing anything at all. Given how perturbed you are by those Prime ads that don't functionally affect anything, imagine the magnitude of the public outcry if Amazon implemented something as radical as "just walk out" tech at Whole Foods.
See, I was thinking of it the other way around. If you're going to change things, you might as well go all the way. Because it's not like they're fooling anyone right now.
If the end goal was to transform all WF stores in the near future, I agree. However, I don't think that is what's happening here. For that transformation to work well, the whole "cashier-less shopping experience" needs to be normalized with the general public, and that's where the brilliance of Amazon's strategy with this tech can be observed.
WF has already served Amazon well by being a test bed for grocery delivery optimization, no need to screw up a profitable existing business with any additional radical changes. That's what Amazon Go stores are for, and now they can sell that tech to other stores. Once the tech is mass-adopted, they can smoothly switch all WF stores to "just walk out" tech with very little complaints, as that's the experience people would be already used to at all the other stores
On the other hand, if they did pull off a seamless integration of the tech into WF, it would be a massive selling point. Amazon Go demonstrates that the tech can work in a store designed around it, WF would show that it can be integrated into an existing business. But they have no reason to rush and use themselves as the guinea pig if they can offload that risk onto literally anyone else. Moving WF over will be the signal that they consider the tech mature enough for large-scale businesses to consider.
>But they have no reason to rush and use themselves as the guinea pig if they can offload that risk onto literally anyone else.
Not only that, Amazon would be literally paid by others to take over Amazon's own risk. This is such a nice play all around, they just need to manage not screwing it up somehow. But execution never was a weakness for Amazon imo, so I bet it will mostly go smoothly.
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maybe it's just a coincidence, but I've noticed all kinds of everyday things being out of stock (eg, brussels sprouts and lettuce) at whole foods since the purchase. I'm wondering if amazon is getting more aggressive with the JIT inventory strategy.
I'd guess that that one's down to increased usage of grocery delivery services, rather than logistical optimization.
If you've got a Whole Foods and a less-upmarket grocery store equally far from you, you're gonna get your staple foods from the less-upmarket store, and just go to the Whole Foods for the things only they carry.
But if you're making an online order with a fixed-overhead delivery fee from Whole Foods, you're not going to make a separate online order with a fixed-overhead delivery fee from the less-upmarket store; so you're going to end up ordering the staple foods from Whole Foods, too.
> you're not going to make a separate online order with a fixed-overhead delivery fee from the less-upmarket store
If I were doing this, I would be far more likely to make a separate order online than physically. It takes no effort to do it online, but to shop at more than one physical store is additional inconvenience.
Part of Whole Foods experience is the customer experience. The cashiers pack your bags and overall try to engage you in a conversation. The "just walk out" thing would make it less personable.
Based on the video below, it would seem there are a few bugs to work out. For example, never pick up a whisk at an an Amazon Go Grocery store unless you intend to buy it. You will always be charged. [1]
> How does it handle fruits by weight
Fruit aren't priced by weight. This is also covered in the same video.
I know they have scales in the produce section, but I don't think I've ever actually used one. It's something I'll do occasionally if I'm buying from a bulk bin, but fruit or vegetables I just grab however many I think I"m going to need.
I buy my produce "just in time", so I'm frequently using those scales to be sure that I've purchased as close to exactly what I need as possible for what I'm making that day. I don't want leftover produce.
For example, I made two apple pies the other day. The recipe calls for 2 lbs of apples each, so I bought 5 lbs of apples (to account for the weight loss from coring and peeling).
