The first supermarket without boxes finally opens to the public

A one-year test for the company's employees alone was enough to open the first Amazon Go store for everyone in the city of Seattle.

Buy a bottle of water, for example, take only one minute watch in hand.

It is located on the ground floor of Amazon's new headquarters on Seventh Avenue in Seattle, Washington.

Although the opening was planned almost a year ago but Amazon has applied to retail its usual method, certainly far removed from the practices of distributors: put on the market in beta or, in this case, in private beta, a "minimum viable product " and proceed by iterations to improve it in contact with reality.

A paragon of a test and learn without taboos that has always succeeded, Amazon has not hesitated to postpone for several months the opening to the public, the time to develop its technology "Just Walk Out" .

After one-click shopping, drone delivery or the order button, this is the first physical store without a queue or cash register.

The Inteon Recode, the store looks like a classic 7-Eleven, a supermarket very common in the United States.

There are salads, sandwiches, drinks or some prepared dishes. The only difference: simple gantries that replace the boxes at the exit of the store

The operation is simple. You enter, take the item of your choice and come out. All without going to checkout or having to steal the product.

But for such a "miracle" to come true you get the app Amazon Go that you have previously loaded and you will be able to beep to access the first physical supermarket of the famous online merchant. Hundreds of cameras, painted in matte black to blend in with the ceiling, and sensors on the shelves will have seen the products seized and added to the virtual basket of the customer's app that, when going back through the porticoes, will be charged and debited , way "zero click".

"Five years ago we wondered if we could create (...) a store where customers could simply take what they want and pay, we've created the most advanced purchasing technology in the world so that you never have to queue again, " Amazon proudly explained on his site.

This opening to the public is to be seen as extending the test to a more varied sample of users and not as the beginning of a deployment.

It seems that this technology works only on a small assortment and is not developed for a hyper of tens of thousands of references currently;

Indeed, only products of fixed size and weight are marketed. No fruit or vegetable in sight, the sandwiches are in plastic trays, and each product exists only in a format and price. The computational power required to interpret the sensor data and the filmed images is probably already significant.