Amazon Go

Yeah,

I'm surprised because we have such a record of Amazon experimenting and trying new things here with Amazon Fresh, Amazon Go, Amazon Books.

And I'm surprised that they wouldn't test something out here.

So, yeah, they must know something we don't know.

'Cause you made, you've said no to certain things.

What is it about the experience even of Amazon Go that maybe didn't quite work? I mean, give me a sense of what you're thinking around that, 'cause certainly was cutting edge, right? You could go in, you could ...

It would automatically deduct money from your wallet, you know?

Yeah.

Even Amazon has reconsidered its physical store ambitions.

This year, it announced the closure of its Amazon Go and Fresh stores, saying it hadn't found the right economics for expansion.

Its Just Walkout technology does continue in other business locations.

Meanwhile, three-quarters of the retailers in Toast's survey plan to increase technology spending.

It has locations across the country and markets itself as a supermarket, mini department store, and catering service.

All Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores closed last year, and many of them around the Seattle area remain empty.

Check back for more headlines on tonight's episode of Seattle Now.

Two years ago, the city of Seattle signed a contract with a virtual therapy company called Talkspace to provide free counseling to young people.

guys.

Speaking of Seattle, Seattle had that Amazon Go store where you would walk in and you would have your shopping cart and you would put everything in the shopping cart.

And as you put it in the cart, it would, you know, it would scan it.

And then as you went and then you went, you went, it would charge you.

And don't get me wrong, Walmart is also a big player in e-commerce, but the business first and foremost runs through their stores.

Whereas Amazon only has really Whole Foods and to a lesser extent, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, which I think are now being phased out as stores for customers to physically walk into.

And a Walmart super center can be 180,000 square feet.

And then multiply that by the fact that there are over 5,000 Walmart locations in the U.S. And you get an idea of their footprint.

The reality is that retail can only take you so far.

And believe me, it's taken Walmart very, very far.

But Amazon got into streaming and cloud computing.

And then MercadoLibre, which people refer to as the Amazon of Latin America, they got into fintech.

And don't get me wrong, Walmart is also a big player in e-commerce, but the business first and foremost runs through their stores.

Whereas Amazon only has really whole foods and to a lesser extent, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, which I think are now being phased out as stores for customers to physically walk into.

And a Walmart super center can be 180,000 square feet.

And then multiply that by the fact that there are over 5,000 Walmart locations in the US, and you get an idea of their footprint.

The reality is that retail can only take you so far.

And believe me, it's taken Walmart very, very far.

But Amazon got into streaming and cloud computing.

And then MercadoLibre, which people refer to as the Amazon of Latin America, they got into fintech.

We were, um, working on the, the Just Walk Out technology.

So I don't know if you've seen, like, Amazon Go and-

I remember it.

I think they sunsetted it recently, like in the last couple years, but-

December 2016.

Amazon drops a promotional video for Amazon Go, and the narration is almost poetic.

What if we could weave the most advanced machine learning, computer vision, and AI into the very fabric of a store so you never had to wait in line? That's the pitch.

the world's most advanced shopping technology.

There's a joke in tech circles, the Actually Indians meme, which started as a riff on the Actually Finnish Developer joke and got repurposed for this.

The pattern is, company claims AI, actually there are people.

Amazon Go is the famous case, but there's also Nate, the shopping app that raised a lot of money on the claim that it's AI-completed purchases for you, and which allegedly involved humans in the Philippines doing the ordering.

And there was a fintech app found to be humans in the Philippines as well.