Amazon has made another significant incursion into the grocery market with the opening of its first Amazon Fresh store, located in the affluent Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills.
The store offers what the online giant is calling “a seamless grocery shopping experience” whether customers are shopping in-store or online, with click & collect and – for Prime members – free same-day delivery. Shoppers can also pick up conventional Amazon.com orders from the store and make packaging-free returns.
Customers can shop for fruit & veg, groceries, meat and seafood, with a mix of big brands and locally sourced products alongside brands exclusive to Amazon. An in-house team prepares fresh bread and a range of hot food including made-to-order pizzas, rotisserie chickens and hot sandwiches.
As might be expected, Amazon has made extensive use of its own technology to enhance the shopping experience. Owners of Alexa devices can access their shopping list through the Amazon app or via the Dash Cart – Amazon’s souped-up shopping trolley. This lets shoppers navigate aisles and automatically check off items as they placed in the cart, thanks to a combination of computer vision algorithms and something called “sensor fusion”. As the name implies, Dash Cart users can skip the checkout, with their shopping totted up and paid for in the background. Echo Show devices are scattered throughout the store to direct shoppers to items they can’t find by themselves.
The store is currently only accessible to “a select group of invited customers” before it opens widely to the public in the coming weeks.
