Few days ago, I came across a YouTube video. There was this man, a Pakistani in New York City hailing the courtesy of Amazon of introducing the first ever fully automated store. The guy gave his viewers a decent tour of how everyone can easily be picked and charged by the artificial intelligence savvy surveillance system.
One would simply take out a bottle of Coke and would be charged from the bank card inside his wallet without even taking out.
Back then Amazon was aiming to diminish the traditional grocery store cashier system. Everyone on the internet commended the retail giant. It was a revolutionizing step taken in hope to change the entire grocery shopping ecosystem by turning it into a faster and convenient experience for the customers.
The idea probably kick-started in 2017 when Amazon acquired Whole Foods grocery store chain for $13.7 billion.
Everything seemed perfect for Amazon until a few years later they discovered that it wasn’t. Turns out, the aspect Amazon was aiming to kill was the very thing keeping the grocery stores afloat.
The special cashier-less stores resemble a cool experience at first, but not the one you would want to visit everytime.
When Amazon removed cashiers from these stores, it also eliminated the chance for the people to socialize, spend time searching for the right meat piece, and gossip. The exchange of talks through real time human interactions. It was all missing in this new gimmick.
When Tony Hoggett, a former Tesco executive was hired last year by Amazon, he soon realized how artificial it all seemed when the visionary executive visited a store in a Los Angeles store. Most of the outlet seemed like a recently abandoned store due to an all of sudden hit apocalypse.
It seemed all too quiet. It was depressingly quiet and scary. There were zero customers in the meat section. He even purchased some of the chicken for the sake of courtesy. It was evident that people were simply not visiting this silent creepy store.
Tony Hoggett started his career as a trolley boy at Tesco at the age of 16 in the UK. Fast forward to today, he has the responsibility of transforming arguably the biggest grocery business in North America into something lucrative.
As I write, Tony Hoggett is busy with the task of making Amazon’s Fresh stores more appealing to visit. It has been proved that the “walk out” technology just doesn’t fit right in as the optimal solution for bringing in more shoppers.
Additionally, the retail giant is planning to rethink many of its Whole Foods stores location as it ventures on into a mission of making grocery Shopping at Amazon as common as in its competitors like Walmart.
This seems far-fetched given the 596 (22 Go shops, 44 Fresh, and 530 Whole Foods outlets) stores of Whole Foods and 4,700 of Walmart’s in America alone. This also includes the price of some products which are higher in Amazon Fresh as compared to Walmart’s.
Speaking of Walmart, the business has been covering milestones with online sales reaching up to $82 billion (4 times more than previous year).
Walmart is catching up gradually with Amazon. It has initiated its operation based on a similar model of the latter by attracting third party sellers. Furthermore, its online advertising revenue has also witnessed a steady and promising increase.
For Amazon to maintain its streak of market dominance, it is crucial that it takes its grocery division seriously instead of brandishing it with various bells and whistles.
The speed with which a market business takes over its competitor’s share is ridiculously fast. What Amazon executives fail to realize is the hgh competitiveness nature of the grocery business. And with what the current scenario represents, it won’t be long before Amazon sees itself at the end of the room.
