Amazon is planning to open supermarkets with no cashiers next year, expanding its push into groceries

Amazon.com is preparing to open Amazon Go supermarkets and pop-up stores, an expansion of the company’s cashierless ambitions that includes the possibility of licensing the technology to other retailers.

The new store formats and licensing initiative could launch as soon as the first quarter of 2020, according to a person familiar with the project. Amazon is testing a supermarket equipped with Go technology in a 10,400-square-foot retail space in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighbourhood.

The Go expansion is the e-commerce giant’s latest attempt to compete in the US$900 billion US grocery industry and perhaps other areas of retail, as well. The company already operates the Whole Foods Market chain and last week confirmed plans to launch a separate supermarket brand, starting with a location in the upscale Woodland Hills neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Those stores will have human cashiers. The previously unreported plan to expand Go revives Amazon’s original vision of creating full-size grocery stores without checkout lines. 

Amazon opened the first Go convenience store at its Seattle headquarters almost two years ago and now operates 21 locations around the US. It is not clear how much money the company has lavished on the project, but some of the 1,000 or so people working on it were recently told their cumulative salaries have totalled more than US$1 billion since the project got under way in 2012, the person said.

Customers have praised the Go stores as technical marvels. But retail analysts have wondered whether the low margins at a typical corner store chain would offset the costs of the Go technology, a complicated array of cameras and software that figures out what shoppers have grabbed and automatically charges them when they exit. 

The Go team, which recently folded previously separate hardware groups and engineering support staff into a new entity called Physical Retail Technologies, has spent the past two years streamlining the technology. The efforts were aimed at making the existing Amazon Go stores more profitable and the guts of the system cheap enough to entice other retailers, said the person, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal project.