Member-only story
Amazon Go’s faltering start doesn’t mean cashier-free stores are no-go
Amazon announced the opening of its first cashier-free Amazon Go store in Seattle on December 5, 2016, operating exclusively for employees, finally opening it to the public on January 22, 2018, after a long period of testing and training its algorithms, as well as ironing out glitches
The company presented Amazon Go as the future of retail: walk in, choose the items you want, put them in your bag, and walk out the door; just like that. An evolution of shopping based on the incorporation of a series of technologies (computer vision, deep learning and sensor fusion) that could be considered a retail equivalent to such as self-service or bar codes.
After testing the technology in the original convenience store model and announcing an ambitious expansion plan to no less than 3,000 stores by 2021 in locations like , Amazon decided to go one step further: to , with , and begin its already proven to other players in the large-scale distribution environment, with .
Then came the pandemic: , the number of stores and …
