Amazon brings its grocery shopping offline

After months of seeing enormous surges in online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic, with Amazon’s net profit even doubling in 2020 compared with the same period last year, from $2.6B to $5.2B (https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-doubles-quarterly-profits-5-2b-crushes-wall-streets-expectations-highly-unusual-quarter/), the e-commerce giant has just opened its first Amazon Fresh grocery store to the public. 

 

In Woodland Hills, California, customers can now buy their Amazon Fresh groceries in person, using a physical shopping cart. It goes without saying though that this is no ordinary shopping cart, and we should expect no less from the company that revolutionized the shopping experience – this is the Amazon Dash Cart, integrating new Alexa features that can help customers to more easily navigate the aisles of the new store, as well as help with their shopping lists (https://blog.aboutamazon.com/shopping/amazon-fresh-now-open-to-everyone-in-woodland-hills-california). On top of the Alexa features, the Dash Cart includes a scale, as well as cameras and sensors, meaning that it is able to calculate the total of your cart as you shop (https://www.engadget.com/amazon-fresh-woodland-hills-la-open-to-public-200248518.html).  

 

Another new addition to Amazon’s physical shopping experience that they are testing out in the new Amazon Go Grocery store in Redmond, WA, is their very first hot food bar, which includes items such as oatmeal and breakfast wraps in the mornings, and sandwiches, pizza, chicken wings, and soups for lunchtime (https://www.geekwire.com/2020/testing-amazon-kitchen-heres-hot-take-tech-giants-first-hot-food-bar-amazon-go-grocery/). For now, this doesn’t seem like anything too revolutionary, but it’s a great addition for customers looking to grab a quick bite while doing their shopping.

 

For now, having the option to do your Amazon grocery shopping without the help of a mouse and a keyboard is quite novel and exciting, but we still have yet to see whether regular Amazon Fresh customers will be inspired to do their weekly grocery shopping in person again. Either way, this will certainly be an interesting area to keep our eyes on. Maybe we will even see some of the traditional grocery retailers adopting some of these automated shopping technologies in the future.