The cashierless thing is fine, but is never going to be the reason people pick one store over another. The problem with Amazon Go is that they have been trying to target the "upscale convenience store" demographic which doesn't really exist. If getting rid of human labor lowers operating costs then why doesn't that reflect on the price tag on the shelf? Charging 2x what the CVS next door does defeats the purpose. Mor…
> If getting rid of human labor lowers operating costs then why doesn't that reflect on the price tag on the shelf Are they getting rid of human labor? Who is doing stocking, as needed cleanup, opening/closing, and overseeing all that? I'm guessing humans are doing that. And as a customer. It seems to be most of what the people who also work as cashiers are doing, outsidd of a few rush periods where those other tasks…
CVS (a drug store) by me has also gotten rid of cashiers... but for self-checkout. So have Royal Farms, a regional gas station/convenience store chain. At both places, if you really try, you can maybe get a cashier at a single human cashier counter, but it's normally unstaffed, and everyone directed to the multiple self check out stations.
(I think USA readers know what i mean by self checkout station, but it's, where you can items yourself, and place them in bags yourself, and it yells at you if it doesn't detect the right weight of items placed in bags on a platform, and the whole thing is video taped).
Amazon's stre isn't really an alternative to cashiers, it's an alternative to universal self-checkout that everyone else is moving to -- accelerated by the pandemic, but still relatively early on the adoption curve.
I assume universal self-check-out does reduce staffing needs, which is why they are all moving to it?
I suspect the Amazon cashierless stores won't really take off until all their competition is universal self-checkout. (Which may never happen in say NYC, where you have so many independent very-low-overhead bodega-type stores. But in most places, the competition is more like CVS or Royal Farms).
Although I dunno, maybe I'm unusual in prefering human contact to self-checkout, something about the choices being self-checkout with a line or walk out of the store without checking out -- starts to make the Amazon option actually look like something you would want.