Amazon has opened its first, full-size, cashierless grocery store: Amazon Go Grocery.
The store, located at the Amazon corporate headquarters in Seattle, 610 E. Pike Street, has been in the works since 2015.
At 10,400 square feet, the store incorporates the same technology used in Amazon Go locations. The store will staff a few dozen people to help stock shelves and answer shoppers’ questions.
“You’re seeing a lot of big strides in (this) store,” Cameron Janes, vice president of Amazon’s physical retail division, told CNBC. “Produce is a big example of that.”
Janes declining to comment on how many of these grocery stores Amazon may open, but he said the company is “just getting started.”
“I think what we’re trying to do here — and with all of our physical stores — is really work backwards from the customer, and deliver some differentiation,” he told CNBC.
Smaller than a typical U.S. grocery store, Amazon Go Grocery is intended to stock shoppers’ kitchen cabinets, and help them with dinner, while Amazon Go stores are meant to serve bustling business districts during the breakfast and lunch hours, Janes told CNBC, calling Amazon Go Grocery a “neighborhood market.”
The new store is stocked with about 5,000 items, including produce, dairy, packaged seafood, meat, bakery items, household goods, meal kits and a full liquor selection. Some items are sourced from Whole Foods’ providers. Items from national brands as well as a variety of Amazon’s private labels are also available.
The store also features a self-service coffee bar.
Every item is priced individually, so no weighing is required for produce. Bananas, for example, are 19 cents, and avocados are 49 cents.
Making sure Amazon’s technology could track shoppers picking up and bagging their own produce in this store was the “biggest incremental challenge … to enable customers just to shop and not have to worry about the technology,” Janes said.
The Amazon Go Grocery store is meant to complement the “natural and organic” brands that people can find at Whole Foods today, he said. “We’re not trying to be Whole Foods,” Janes said. “We’re not trying to replace them.”
Amazon is also set to open a first-of-its-kind grocery store in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, without its Go technology and not under the Whole Foods banner, at some point in 2020, according to CNBC. But details are unclear, and Amazon’s Janes declined to comment further.