Amazon Go, he dead. The Future, R.I.P.

 "I spent 53 minutes in Amazon Go and saw the future of retail."
        -Matt McFarland, CNN Business.

That was in 2018, when the first Amazon Go store opened in Seattle.  Less than 8 years later, Amazon today declared, "Never Mind." Original ambitions saw the concept spreading to thousands of locations, but it seems to have peaked at under 50.  By 2024, after closing locations in New York and San Francisco, it was down to 17.  Soon it will be zero.  On-line, the Amazon rules.  Bricks and mortar, consumer reaction seems to have been a collective "Meh". (Remember the Amazon store on Southport?). Today, Amazon announced it's closing all 70 Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh outlets.

We were there back on September 17, 2018, when big media coverage marked the debut of the first Amazon Go in Chicago, in Franklin Center on LaSalle Street.  

Amazon Go was conceived as a self-contained super-surveillance state, with hundreds of cameras in the ceiling tracking every move shoppers made - in 3D. When they picked up a package and put it in their basket.  When they put an item back on the shelf.  Which hand they preferred for scratching.

The shelves had weight sensors to monitor inventory and shopper activity.  200 bits of biometric data, eveything going into a "virtual cart" in the high-end computer system.  

The payoff?  You bagged your stuff and walked out the door.  No checkout. 

In minutes, you got a receipt in the mandatory Amazon Go app, which also told you how much time you spent in the store, in case you were keeping score.

Amazon promised personal data was retained only as long as it took to generate the receipt, but technies drooled at the prospect of eventually generating an ongoing encyclopedia of your buying habits for their databases - think what AI will be able to do with that!

But now it seems like so much overkill.  Some of locations will be re-opened as Whole Food markets.  In 2024, at Chicago and State, they opened something called "Amazon Grocery" on ground floor of One Chicago Square, a 7-11 wannabee stripped of all the high falutin technology, selling a panoply of all the junk food you can't buy at the 65,000 square-foot Whole Foods upstairs.  Could this have been a prototype for what today's announcement described as a "new, smaller spinoff called Whole Foods Market Daily Shop"?

Strangely enough, Amazon just got approval for a 35-acre 230,000 square-foot superstore in Orland Park, Think a no-membership-required Wal-Mart, with a distribution center attached. And then the future of retail will be here again.

Monica, opening day, Amazon Go, September 17, 2018

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