Amazon Delays Opening of Cashier-Less Store to Work Out Kinks – WSJ (Mar 27, 2017)
There’s a certain amount of schadenfreude around about this story this morning, both from tech observers and I suspect from other retailers smirking at Amazon’s apparent inability to deliver on its store of the future concept. The idea of tracking products as they’re taken off shelves, placed in baskets and then ultimately carried out of a shop has seemed enormously ambitious to me from the start, because there just seemed to be so many ways it could go wrong. And now it seems that Amazon is holding up the launch of its Amazon Go store to regular customers because the technology can’t handle more than 20 people in the store at once, people who move too quickly around the store, or products which get moved from their original locations. These all seem like obvious bugs to have been worked out early on in development, and also ones which will all get worse when you go from friendly employee testers to real-world customers, so it’s a bit baffling Amazon would have whiffed on this so badly this late in the game. I’m very curious what happens from here on: whether we see Amazon launch just a little later than planned, with the bugs fixed, whether it launches despite the bugs (and risk of under- or over-charging customers), or whether it keeps the store employee-only for quite a bit longer. The last scenario seems most likely at this point.
via WSJ
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