This week, Amazon showed that it would launch a new basket at its next grocery store in Woodlands, California, scheduled to open later this year. The basket, called Amazon Dash Cart, works like this:
Wow, there’s a lot to digest there.
But don’t worry, you can also see that all of the above comes to life in all its glory on the Amazon website, a high-value production video, full of fundamental animations and without a genuine human user.
If the latter seemed a little sarcastic to him, it was.
The Amazon Dash Cart is, in undeniable terms, one of the worst concepts in Amazon’s history. In the years to come, other people will see the Dash Cart as a failed device in the most productive or even worse, as the grocery store a GPS formula that was based on car boards around 2005.
The Amazon Dash Cart doesn’t make sense for reasons.
First, for the Amazon website, the cart is “specially designed for small to medium sized grocery purchases and can hold two grocery bags.”
Yes, wow, two shopping bags in total? Aren’t you, Joe?
The small length of the cart might not seem like a challenge at first glance, but keep in mind that the Amazon Woodland Hills grocery store is not meant to be a convenience store, but a large-scale grocery store of approximately 30,000 to 40,000 squares. feet. Array as reported through Bloomberg earlier this year. According to an Amazon spokesperson, it will also have “traditional checkpoints,” so the basket will only serve a portion of Amazon’s target population, and anyone who wants to do a full week to make their purchases (which is rarely the purpose of the store?) through Dash Cart would probably have no hope of doing so if it can only involve two bags.
Secondly, the design of the basket delights itself, wrapped in the general shopping delight of the store, nor is it easy to use.
The good look of Amazon Go is that it’s easy. Just go in and out, like its successful generation platform, “Just Walk Out,” he says it works. In Woodland Hills, however, the stage is another. One can only “just pass out” if his or her adventure is limited to two suitcases and he or she also chooses to be informed about what, essentially and as described above, is not a very intuitive generation. You must sync it with your phone, wait for beeps, discern among other color signals, enter PLU items, check barcodes, etc.
All of this is frankly confusing and far from the fashionable grocery operation that has been well represented in everyone’s brain since Piggly Wiggly first invented the sacred in 1916. Today’s grocery outlets don’t require consumers to do any of those things. stupid color-coded things. Customers simply place the pieces in their cart, then examine the check lines for cashiers to scan, weigh and bag all their parts. The Amazon Dash cart, on the other hand, is like asking consumers to play a Simon game from the early 1980s while shopping.
Third, buying automotive groceries is not reliable equipment in all contexts. They are taken to car parks, removed from points of sale for various purposes, and the weather can also wreak havoc on their operation, without saying anything about how this could have effects on reliability and capacity when they are also replaced through technology. .
Have you ever had one with an ass wheel, for example?
Now think you’re using a touchscreen at a Phoenix temperature of 120 degrees in summer or negative temperatures of 32 degrees in Minneapolis in winter. The concept is likely to be to encounter a total diversity of disorders on a giant scale. And you don’t even go to the maintenance and conservation burrow either. Amazon Go cameras, on the other hand, remain well placed on the roofs of the shops, while carts collide with each other, collide with cars, rain, snow, and God knows what little Johnny can do to them.
Fourth and last, there are more important ideas.
Mobile and ready scanning is an option, for example. Sam’s Club, Walmart Canada, 7-Eleven and many other stores are testing those types of systems lately. They paint in the same way as the Dash Cart, only consumers take their own cart to a store, scan barcodes with their phone, and then exit through a controlled exit to pay electronically, just as described above. Systems can also paint with classic PLU weighing stations.
Hell, even Walmart’s new automatic payment check shop in Fayetteville that debuted last month (video here) and operates popular auto-payment machines necessarily gives you a pay price as you move on to more people than having to use a cart that only has two bags, makes a user waiting for a green sign means they pass by and want an instruction manual to use it.
But, more importantly, Amazon has already invented the option for Amazon Go, but for some reason Amazon has selected not to reflect the joy of Go at its first large-scale grocery store. Is it because of the length and scale of the store? Maybe.
Some experts have argued over the years that it is difficult to run PC vision AI formulas beyond 10,000 square feet (which, coincidentally, is roughly the length of Amazon’s largest Go Grocery facility in Seattle). With this length of a store, tracking other people and products increasingly adapts to a PC complex and more sku becomes more difficult to manage for many reasons, and especially if the PC Vision AI-based formula on which an operation is based will also have to be modernized buildings that are full of already designed corners and cracks that can obstruct the camera angles. and enlightenment.
I asked an Amazon spokesperson if the length of the store was taken into account in the resolution to opt for the classic check lanes and the two-bag cart and they said, “The Just Walk Out generation can have compatible outlets of any length: the resolution of putting Amazon Dash Cart in the Woodland Hills store was not a consideration of square footage. The store has incorporated classic checkpoints, and we believe it was a wise opportunity to innovate and verify new technologies like Amazon Dash Cart.ArrayArray As with everything we do on Amazon, we are looking for tactics to innovate and test new technologies to make life less difficult for customers. That’s just another way.”
Although technically this may be true, there is still something that does not match.
If Amazon can evolve its generation so easily, why wouldn’t it? Why, on the other hand, would there be only one Nearly 10,000-square-foot Go Grocery store in Seattle open at the moment, with only two other similar-type retailers advertised at an undetermined time in the future? Woodland Hills is Amazon’s first large-scale grocery experience, but it maintains its generation, a generation that “can have compatible retail outlets of any size” and has a score of 4.7 out of 5.0 stars on Google.
The resolution is meaningless, and even more so when it is said that those same problems arise at a time when this counterattack is in the midst of the largest pandemic that has ever noticed and that gives stores the largest step of experimentation in retail history. If consumers ever wanted to visit a large-scale Amazon Go grocery store, the time has come. But instead, the opening date of the Woodlands Hills store is a cryptic saga and has been happening since late last year that looks more like something from the Da Vinci Code than a fully developed idea.
I asked an Amazon spokesperson for more information about the store’s opening date in response to today’s wise basket announcement, but Amazon presented little to say the store “opens this year.” Amazon would not provide a specific month, let alone a seasonal forecast, and only six months left in 2020.
The mystery surrounding this store is simply strange, and the total logical string simply doesn’t load.
And maybe it’s just that. Maybe the basket announcement isn’t about the basket.
Read between the lines, and there may be a lot more here. It’s not the car itself that deserves to be scary. What is worthy of fear is that the basket raises questions about what Amazon really has to offer in this new concept of groceries that, six months a year, no longer has transparency around its opening date, Americans want less difficult access to food and COVID-19 as well. giving Amazon more margin of error in its experimentation than ever before in history.
No, instead of opening the store, which, according to some reports, was intended to take place from February, Amazon has practically left online order processing black so far and is now informing the public of a wise basket. All of this raises the question: what is the hook? Why is it planned grocery shopping on Amazon will be bigger than any other classic street grocery shopping option?
It’s hard to say what the answers to those questions are, and the basket is decidedly alien to Amazon. It’s a conflicting concept from a company that prides itself on having no friction.
But it’s just that.
Maybe the cart isn’t smart at all? He may be a fake smart for the nation’s collective intelligence, when in fact it’s Amazon’s reimagining of the grocery store that may not yet have a smart leg to rest on.
I am an expert and influential leader in omnichannel retail, with nearly 20 years of experience in almost every retail discipline. Currently, I am CEO and
I am an expert and influential leader in omnichannel retail, with nearly 20 years of experience in almost every retail discipline. Currently, I am CEO and founder of Omni Talk, one of the fastest developing retail blogs, and Third Haus, a retail generation and coworking lab in Minneapolis. I also participate in the advisory forums of Xenia Retail and Delivery Solutions. Previously, I was vice president of Target’s Store of the Future assignment and also vice president of furniture sales at Target.com. I started my retail career at Gap, Inc. and have a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.