Actually Existing Automation
In March 2017 Amazon launched its Amazon GO store in downtown Seattle. Using computer vision, deep learning algorithms, and sensor fusion to identify selected items the company looked to build a near fully automated store without cashiers. Here Amazon customers would be able to buy items simply by swiping in with a phone, choosing the things they wanted and swiping out to leave, their purchases automatically debited to their Amazon account.
Several months later Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for \$13.7 billion. While that might have appeared a strange acquisition for a company whose core business is online retail, the purchase provided them with the supply chain capabilities to support Amazon GO and take aim at the \$800 billion global grocery market.
Company management plans to use six people per shift in each Amazon Go store compared to the seventy-two employees found in the average US supermarket. When you consider the labour costs as well as Amazon’s singular advantage in high automation warehousing – here too they are a world leader with their ‘KIVA’ robot – it quickly becomes clear the company could come to dominate areas of ofline retail just as they presently do online. That is, except in China, where in late 2017 the local retailer JD.com announced the opening of hundreds of ‘unmanned stores’ ahead of anyone else.
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