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Enrique Dans

On the effects of technology and innovation on people, companies and society (writing in Spanish at since 2003)

IMAGE: A photo of the entrance on the first Amazon Go store in Seattle on its opening day.
IMAGE: SounderBruce (CC BY-SA)

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Amazon Go is going to shake up retail, big time

3 min readNov 20, 2021

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Since it launched in beta format in 2016, and then opened to the public a year later, Amazon Go, the online retail giant’s stores without checkout lines, provides a textbook illustration of the use and development of technology.

Amazon’s plans to expand its network of stores, formulated before the pandemic, were ambitious: in locations including international airports, expanding the concept to larger and more sophisticated outlets, and above all, adapting the model into a technological platform for third parties.

Out of these original plans, the expansion of company-owned stores, hit by the pandemic lockdowns, : by March, only : 32 in the United States, and three in the United Kingdom. But the company was able to scale up the model from its original convenience store concept to , as well as packaging it and turning it into a platform that has already seduced several major customers, such as in the United Kingdom — , with — Starbucks, which is , and the U.S. chains and .

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Published in Enrique Dans

On the effects of technology and innovation on people, companies and society (writing in Spanish at since 2003)

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Written by Enrique Dans

Professor of Innovation at IE Business School and blogger (in English here and in Spanish at )

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