The online retailer Amazon has brought its technology for shopping without cash registers to a larger supermarket in the USA for the first time. The new grocery store in Seattle has an area of over 960 square meters – which is about five times the size of the previous stores under the Amazon Go brand.
The size of the shop space is no longer a problem, the responsible Amazon manager Dilip Kumar emphasized in the “Wall Street Journal” (Tuesday). “There is no upper limit.”
In the Amazon Go stores, customers simply take items off the shelf and leave the store. Cameras and other sensors such as scales in the shelves register who took what goods with them. The price is subsequently debited via the app. In years of technology development, media reports have found it challenging for Amazon to work with larger numbers of customers. The first stores were also rather small and with a manageable range of goods.
There are now a dozen or so stores in the United States. The new, larger store is called Amazon Go Grocery and, according to Kumar, has around 5,000 products on offer. There customers can also buy unwrapped goods such as apples or pears individually for the first time.
Amazon also bought the organic supermarket chain Whole Foods, but has so far kept the traditional checkout concept there. (Dpa / KLE)
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