It has often been rumored that Amazon wants to start a chain of grocery stores and yesterday the company confirmed its vision for the grocery store of the future. The first store has already been set up in the company’s hometown of Seattle but it’s only open to Amazon employees right now. The store features no checkout lines or cash counters, it relies on some sophisticated technology to enable customers to quite literally grab and go. According to a report, Amazon wants to open a chain of more than 2,000 grocery stores.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon’s retail plans include setting up 2,000 retail stores across the United States. The stores will be a mix of the Amazon Go cashless stores it announced yesterday as well as convenience stores in different formats.
The cashless stores will let customers just walk out with the products they want to buy. It tracks the items that they take off the shelves and sophisticated technology which includes artificial intelligence and computer vision works in the background to automatically charge their purchase to their Amazon account once they step out of the store.
Additional retail plans are said to include a massive discount chain and prototypes of drive-thrus that might actually be unveiled in the near future. The discount chains might see Amazon opening stores spanning up to 40,000 feet that will stock a wide variety of products.
Amazon hasn’t confirmed its future retail plans as yet but its announcement of Amazon Go shows that it’s serious about this space and is going to do a lot more to challenge the existing players in this market.
Filed in . Read more about Amazon.