So Amazon finally let regular people into that grocery store, the one with no checkout lines. Amazon Go opened to the public today in Seattle, on 7th Avenue downtown, after keeping it employee-only for over a year while they apparently worked out the kinks. You open an app, scan a QR code on your way through a turnstile, grab whatever you want off the shelves, and just walk out. Cameras and sensors figure out what you took and charge your Amazon account. No registers. No line. No person asking if you found everything okay.
I've got complicated feelings about this and I want to talk through them instead of just saying "wow, the future."
First, the obvious thing: I hate self-checkout machines with a specific, personal passion. The ones at my local Safeway beep at you for "unexpected item in bagging area" like you personally offended it, and there's always exactly one employee hovering nearby whose entire job is now apologizing to a machine on your behalf. So on paper I should be thrilled that Amazon just skipped the whole charade and removed checkout entirely. No belt, no scanner, no beeping. Just leave.
But here's the thing that's been rattling around in my head all day: getting rid of the checkout line didn't get rid of the surveillance, it just moved it. To make "just walk out" work, the store has to watch you constantly — every shelf, every angle, tracking which hand you used and whether you put the yogurt back or swapped it for a different flavor. That's not a cashier glancing at your basket for four seconds. That's a building full of cameras that has to know exactly where every item and every person is at all times, all day, just so you don't have to swipe a card. I don't think that's a fair trade, or at least not one anybody sat me down and asked me about.
And then there's the staffing question nobody at Amazon seems eager to answer directly. Yes, there are still employees in the store — someone's stocking shelves, someone's checking IDs at the beer and wine section, someone's making sandwiches in the little kitchen area. But the cashier job, specifically, is gone from this store by design. That's not a hypothetical "robots are coming for jobs someday" thing, it's a live decision made this month, in a real 1,800-square-foot store, that a whole category of retail work isn't needed anymore. Convenience stores and gas stations employ a lot of people whose job is standing at a register. I don't think Amazon owes the world an apology for building efficient technology, but I also don't think "look, no lines!" is the whole story, and most of the coverage I've read today reads like a press release with quotes swapped in.
Also, small aside, but: the store is tiny. It's convenience-store sized, not full-grocery sized. Think prepared meals, snacks, some produce, the stuff you'd grab on your way home rather than a full week's shop. So this isn't replacing your Saturday grocery run yet. It's replacing the Walgreens run. Which, fine, that's still a real category of shopping, but every headline today makes it sound like the death of the supermarket and it's really more like the death of the 7-Eleven line.
I'll say this much in Amazon's favor: they didn't rush this. It's been testing internally since December 2016, which in tech-launch years is basically a decade, and from what I've read the delay was because the system kept getting confused in a crowded store with people moving fast or grabbing multiple things at once. That's a genuinely hard computer vision problem, and getting it right before letting the public near it instead of just shipping something buggy is, honestly, more restraint than I expected out of Amazon lately given how much else they ship half-finished.
I don't know if I'll ever actually walk into one of these. I'm not in Seattle and there's no announced timeline for anywhere else. But it's the kind of thing that's going to quietly show up in more places over the next few years without anyone really voting on whether they wanted it, the way a lot of tech ends up working.