After months of speculation regarding where and when the next Amazon Go store would officially open, the e-Commerce giant has opened its second cashierless convenience store in its hometown of Seattle. The store is smaller than the first location — 1,450 square feet versus 1,800 square feet — and is open on weekdays from 7 am to 7 pm.
With less space than its counterpart, the new downtown store does not sell milk, bread or liquor. There’s no in-store kitchen; the new location will instead have its fresh food supplied by an Amazon kitchen facility in Seattle, according to The Seattle Times. Ready-to-eat meals for breakfast and lunch, snacks and Amazon Meal Kits will be available.
Amazon expects the store will attract a higher proportion of office workers compared to the initial location, according to Gianna Puerini, the Amazon VP who oversees Amazon Go.
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Earlier this year, Amazon confirmed plans for Go stores in Chicago and San Francisco, but there has been no official timetable for their opening. Additional stores in Seattle and Los Angeles had been expected, with Amazon reportedly seeking to add six more Go locations this year after the initial store opened.
The second location’s opening signals that Amazon is comfortable expanding its cashierless concept to more shoppers, even if only on a store-by-store basis and close to the company’s headquarters.
The Go store’s system includes a number of overhead-mounted cameras that track shoppers’ movements, weight sensors on the shelves, and the Amazon Go mobile app, which shoppers swipe on the way in to automatically charge them for whatever they take. With its technology integrated with the mobile app, Amazon can collect data from all entrants based on in-store shopping decisions and modify store inventory to better serve consumer tastes.
Amazon’s expansion comes at a time when competitors are building their own forms of cashierless/checkout-free technology. In particular, Zippin became the first company to build a cashierless store in San Francisco. Other companies such as AiFi, Aipoly, Inokyo, Standard Cognition and Trigo Vision have made similar investments, or have partnered with unnamed retailers, on in-store checkout-free projects.
