if you're the operator of like a local
convenience store or corner shop or
bodega and an amazon go opens up just
around the corner you might want to look
over your shoulder Amazon first
announced its Amazon go project in 2016
the first store didn't open until 2018
January there now for Amazon go stores
in operation three of them are in
Seattle and one of them is at Chicago
reportedly they want to open at least
3,000 stores in three years
that's it seems a little optimistic when
it took so long for them to open the
first one
they're pretty small stores to start out
with they're only a couple thousand
square feet which is kind of closer to a
convenience store than a full-fledged
grocery store and was about ghost stores
are the famous thing that Amazon liked
to say is that it just has just walkout
technology where you can go in you can
scan your app you take whatever you want
off the shelf and then you just walk
outside and then it charges you for
whatever you took it uses sensors and
cameras to kind of tell what customers
are taking in order to charge them
correctly there's two kinds of Amazon
ghost stores there's a more grocery
oriented where you can go in and get you
know some like groceries and there's
another format that's more oriented
towards prepared foods it's kind of like
a lunchtime spot you can just go in and
grab a sandwich or a salad so this isn't
stuff that you really want to wait for
right it's maybe like a candy bar that
you just want to grab you know something
that you're gonna go and you're gonna
kind of consume immediately or a grocery
item that you need for a recipe that you
want to cook you know that night they
also sell their amazon meal kits in
these stores which are frigerator kits
with a bunch of different ingredients
that you can cook 90 percent of all
retail sales are offline kind of
staggering when you think about it you
think about like the fast growth of
online is still like still only suddenly
announced at 10% even in 2018 so there's
kind of like a lot of room to run there
most estimates peg Amazon as taking up
basically half of all e-commerce there's
some room for them to grow and estimates
by analysts show that they will grow but
they're looking for other avenues of
growth to kind of maintain the velocity
that they have
the one with a peg right now is bricks
and mortar when Amazon moves into a
market they kind of operate with this
low margin mentality where you know
profitability doesn't really matter
until they kind of achieve mass scale
and they can kind of tinker with the
levers as far as Amazon making money off
of these stores that's kind of TBD
there's a report that the technology
that went to the first one costs a
million dollars to install that adds a
big additional cost to opening the store
in the first place as far as the
break-even point you know we don't
really know you know what the economics
of these stores even are so it's hard to
say if they're making money or they're
not making money Amazon uses what
customers are already buying online -
guess what customers want to buy and
their Amazon go stores so that's kind of
like a reminder of what they have on you
right it's a reminder of what they know
that you already like to kind of entice
you to buy it again in a store so if
they know that a specific neighborhood
or city likes a certain kind of sell sir
they're gonna stock more of the sell sir
they're gonna have more flavors of the
sell sir whether or not that's a good
thing I mean it's it's serving customers
right it's what customers wants putting
it in front of them in a new way but it
might make some customers uncomfortable
other retailers are trying to come up
with things to compete with Amazon a lot
of them have new pickup options that
they can order online and then pick up
in store or can deliver right to
customers some even with autonomous
vehicles but no grocery stores have that
kind of data to draw from that like a
big ecommerce giant like Amazon has
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