My Amazon GO Store Experience

(This post started as a LinkedIn.com update, but I quickly ran out of character space, so here's my full review).

UPDATE for 2/13/2018:

• I stopped by GO on my way into work and picked up a Blazing Bagels breakfast sandwich and protein fruit drink. Total time in-store: 1:10 min. 

ORIGINAL POST:
On Friday (2/9), I stepped out of my new Belltown office for lunch and an experiment: my goal was to successfully navigate the new Amazon GO store in Seattle and emerge with a meal.

Before going any further, I need to recognize the amount of work that obviously went into getting the venture up and running. Creating the world's first cashier-less store for a non-membership store was clearly no easy feat. All of the Amazon engineers, product managers, and user experience experts should be commended for their great work.

I tackled this experiment wearing my user experience hat, which is a blend of a decade of writing for broadcast news, another 2 decades working in digital, and insights gleaned from various experience experts, not to mention Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things."

The first requirement of using the store is to download the Amazon GO app, for which you need an Amazon account. I subscribe to Prime so all my account information; name, address, purchase history, debit card, etc, is on file with Amazon. The app has a really good primer on what to expect with the experience: launch the app and scan your phone upon entry in the store, take what you want, return what you don't want, don't take objects off the shelves for others, and walk out when you are done. Easy enough.

Amazon stations employees at the entrance to hand out shopping bags. Having not experienced it before, I wondered if the bags were somehow required for the experience. Were they tagged with sensors? No, as it turns out. Just a convenience. Right outside the store was a line of stanchions--not in use that day--which is kind of funny; you may have to wait in line to enter the store that doesn't have checkout lines. This was my first indicator that Seattle has a new tourist destination.

So upon entering the store, I was immediately struck by the number of people who were shooting video and taking pictures, rather than shopping. It reminded me of Times Square in NYC with people spending more time getting a photo than watching where they are walking. The amateur photographers were the second indicator that this is a new tourism "must do" in Seattle.

So, with my phone in one hand and shopping bag in the other, I conducted tour of the store perimeter. This didn't take long because it isn't a big store. But it is new and clean and nice. Think of it as a high-end convenience store. A Better Bodega. A Super 7-11. Or a Half-sized Whole Foods. The offerings include a wide-selection of pre-made sandwiches and meals, alcohol, sides, and various other foods. I went with an Italian Grinder and bag of Half-pops. Along the way, I experimented with removing items from the shelves and returning them to see if the app would show the changes, but nothing ever appeared on the app to indicate that I have made any selections, which led me to wonder if I was doing it correctly. I was, in fact, and had to rely on my memory of the app demo and my own sense of right and wrong to get through this first time. I would recommend an improvement to the app in a future release that displayed customer selections in real-time.

A ceiling of sensors

After wandering the store a little more, I decided to test my comfort with walking out the door without the cash register experience. It was... weird. No alarms went off, expect for what was programmed into my mind through a half-decade of commerce. It was when the French TV news crew approached me outside the store that I suddenly felt like that this was a big Candid Camera joke.

But no joke, they were interviewing all sorts of customers. They did have to show me where to find the record of my transaction in the app. Again, this is a natural opportunity for the app to give me a "transaction complete" alert once I'm free and clear of the store. As it was, the receipt was emailed an hour after my visit. Immediate gratification for acknowledgement of the transaction will be needed for this to really take off.

So if there's a word I would use to describe this experience, it would be "novelty." This is not to denigrate in any way all the work that went into the store, but it introduces a new way to shop that is one-of-a-kind, and it feels very much like a pilot of what could be a larger and more immersive experience.

So how was the lunch? It was OK. I don't think the grinder was made by someone who ever had a real East Coast grinder; a few slices of salami does not a grinder make. But I'm going back again, you can be sure. I'll try other foods and bring friends and family.

What else would you do with a tourist attraction?