Amazon has opened a small convenience store in Chicago, called “Amazon Grocery”. The e-commerce giant is still searching for the winning formula for profitable high-tech physical supermarkets.
Pay by palm
The new store is only 350 sqm in size and sells a range of 3,500 products. The offer is mainly focused on quick groceries and food on the go: customers will find things like snacks and pastries, meals, coffee and other drinks, Supermarket News reports. The shop does not sell Amazon’s private label brands, rather selling well-known brands such as Lays, Fritos or Coca-Cola.
Amazon Grocery has four self-scan checkouts and an Amazon One kiosk, where Prime members can pay by scanning their palm or by scanning a QR code to add the amount to their Amazon account. There is also an area where customers can return items they bought on Amazon.com.
Experimenting
The shop is located in a building that already houses a Whole Foods Market, Amazon’s (larger) organic supermarket chain. The new format seeks to complement the existing store: Whole Foods Market customers often visit other shops for their favourite national supermarket brands or household essentials. This new concept allows them to do so at once, saving them time and earning Amazon more money.
Amazon has been busy experimenting with physical grocery and convenience concepts over the past year. The retailer closed several branches of its cashless convenience stores under the Amazon Go flag, partly because rents were too high in these respective locations. At the same time, the company did open more Amazon Fresh supermarkets where customers can use “Dash Carts”, smart shopping carts with a built-in scanner.
Whole Foods Market also recently opened a smaller shop concept itself, under the name Whole Foods Market Daily Shop: at less than 1,000 sqm, it is much smaller than a regular Whole Foods – but significantly larger than this Amazon Grocery.
