Amazon opens its first Go store out of the box outside Seattle

Amazon opens its first unboxed grocery store outside of its home town of Seattle. The new store opens in Chicago today. Like the other previous stores, it is open long hours (from 7 am to 8 pm), with no payment lines.

Amazon has three other Amazon Go stores, all in Seattle, launched between 2016 and this year. They each have the size of a small convenience store, much smaller than the average American supermarket. Similar to a 7-Eleven, Amazon Go sells mainly ready-made lunches, drinks, snacks, frozen dinners and basic groceries.

Stores use hundreds of cameras and sensors to explain what people are buying. Users simply need to use their Amazon Go app to enter the store, retrieve what they need and leave. Items are automatically uploaded to their Amazon account as they exit. The process removes the need for human cashiers and also reduces the waiting time of customers.

Amazon has also named San Francisco as another city where it wants to grow. Earlier this year, recoding Amazon reportedly plans to develop another six stores in 2018, including one in Los Angeles and possibly more in Seattle.

In China, where Amazon has limited access, cashless stores have already taken off, although the technology is slightly behind. Dozens of venture-backed startups have launched their own convenience stores where customers are using product RFID tags for self-service shopping, compared to machine learning and Amazon image recognition. .

Better still, tech giants like Tencent, Alibaba and the ecommerce company JD have also thrown their hats into the ring. JD plans to deploy hundreds of such stores that use face recognition, QR codes, and RFID tags to successfully bypass receipts and ad selection for users. Until now, his figures are in more than 20 stores, including one in Indonesia, the first outside of China. Alibaba opened last year a temporary café called Tao Cafe and, more recently, a convenience store in its headquarters in Hangzhou, nicknamed "Futuremart". Alibaba can refine the technology while planning a nationwide expansion.