Go to store , take what you want in store onwards and leave .
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The retail giant Amazon.com opened a new convenience store to the public here on Monday with none of the hurdles of a traditional supermarket: At Amazon Go, there are no cashiers, shopping carts or checkout lines to slow shoppers down.
But there's a trade-off. In this store, the shoppers are on display too, tracked by hundreds of cameras and sensors from the first swipe of their phone to their last step out the door.
The futuristic grab-and-go market represents a test of new technology that could soon spread nationwide, as Amazon and other grocery giants seek to win business from shoppers craving selection, ease and speed.
"The number one problem for people is time poverty," said Dilip Kumar, vice president of technology for Amazon Go, while standing in the store during its grand public opening. "People want good food fast and they want it to be convenient."
The store relies on a vast and sophisticated data-gathering operation to transform the shopping experience, and privacy experts worry Americans may not fully understand what they're giving away in every aisle.
"It's not just the transaction," said Danielle Citron, a law professor and privacy expert at the University of Maryland's law school. "Powerful companies like Amazon don't just have what you bought at the grocery store, but they're also connected with and combined with nearly every aspect of your life," including where people live and what they buy, read and watch.
Shoppers walking into the store scan their phone on a subway-station-like turnstile, connecting their presence in the store (as well as their family members or other fellow shoppers) with their Amazon profile.
The boxy, black cameras in the ceilings don't have the look of classic surveillance cameras - a benefit, some said, given that hundreds of them blanket the 1,800-square-foot space - but they operate in a similar way, tracking shoppers' movement and what items they pick up or put back down.
The store's cameras include infrared sensors, which can measure heat, but the company says it does not employ facial recognition. Each item has a large, camera-friendly code to help the cameras understand which item has been grabbed; the computers combine that information with data from weight sensors installed in every shelf.
When shoppers are done, they simply walk back out through the porcelain-white turnstiles - and their phone updates with a receipt, along with a "trip timer" telling them how many seconds they spent on the shopping trip. The process was so breezy that first-day shoppers like Harriet McClain said it felt "like shoplifting."
"Even in a small town, people shoplift," McClain said, before motioning toward the overhead cameras. "But a local grocery store could never afford to put in this kind of stuff."
Amazon has not shared details on the methods involved in its "Just Walk Out" technology, but says it mimics some of the techniques seen in self-driving cars, including machine-learning systems that improve over time as well as computer vision, the image-processing technology used in Facebook photo-tags.
"The majority of sensing is from above," said Kumar, the Amazon Go executive. "Cameras figure out which interactions you have with the shelves. Computer vision figures out which items are taken. Machine-learning algorithms also determine which item it is."
John Verdi, the vice president of policy at the Future of Privacy Forum, a think tank that counts Amazon among its corporate donors, said the data collected by Amazon's store is no more than most people give away at other supermarkets by using their loyalty and credit cards.
"Are consumers comfortable with that level of data collection and use? I suspect many are," he said.
Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University's law school, said "it's highly likely" that Amazon Go collects "more information than any retail setting out there now."
When you shop with a discount card, you know what information the store's collecting," namely what things you just bought, Bedoya said. "But Amazon is tracking you throughout the store. Are they really only tracking you when you lift the item off a shelf? Or are they tracking where you move throughout the store, what you're looking at, what sections you're dwelling in?"
If the cashier-free technology expands, the stores could deeply erode the need for America's second-most common job: About 3.5 million Americans work as cashiers nationwide, federal data show. Amazon and other retailers say employees will work on different tasks, including helping guide shoppers to the right items.
But the store's format, consumer psychologists said, could also help Amazon redefine one of retail's core moneymakers, impulse buying, by eliminating the few lingering barriers that might make shoppers rethink what's in their bag - a process Amazon has already mastered online through techniques like one-click purchasing.
"The less time we have to think about how much we're spending, the more removed we are from the process," said Kit Yarrow, a professor of psychology and marketing at Golden Gate University. "What Amazon Go does is take away all of the negatives. It doesn't give you time to consider how much you'll be spending or how that will impact your budget. It puts all of the emphasis on the pleasure of what we're consuming in that moment."
Amazon has not shared any plans of a nationwide rollout, though some analysts expect it: The company now runs roughly a dozen brick-and-mortar bookstores and spent $13.7 billion last year buying hundreds of Whole Foods grocery stores nationwide.
