Amazon trends

babyme

Brick and Mortar from Amazon,  with a twist.
Supermarkets please watch out,  it is COMING.
No check out lines to wait for check out.  Where most bottle necks are.  No credit card or cash needed.
Only Amazon account linked with credit card.  So wallet.


By Narottam Medhora and Jeffrey Dastin

(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc said on Monday it has opened a brick-and-mortar grocery store in Seattle without lines or checkout counters, kicking off new competition with supermarket chains.

Amazon Go, the online shopping company's new 1,800-square-foot (167-square-meter) store, uses sensors to detect what items shoppers have picked off the shelves and sends a bill to their Amazon accounts if they do not replace them.

The store marks Amazon's latest push into groceries, one of the biggest retail categories it has yet to master. The company currently delivers produce and groceries to homes through its AmazonFresh service.

"It’s a great recognition that their e-commerce model doesn’t work for every product," said analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research, noting that physical stores would complement AmazonFresh.

"If there were hundreds of these stores around the country, it would be a huge threat" to supermarket chains, he said.

The S&P 1500 food retail index, which includes Kroger Co, Whole Foods Market Inc and other companies, was down 0.5 percent at the close. Shares of Amazon closed up about 2.6 percent.

Amazon Go is available now for employees of the company and is expected to be open to the public early next year, Amazon said.

If tests are successful, Amazon plans to open more than 2,000 grocery stores, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing sources. The company is considering other store formats, including one that would let drivers pick up goods at the curbside, the report said.

Amazon declined to comment on the report.

"The checkout lines are always the most inefficient parts of the store experience," said Neil Saunders, managing director of retail research firm Conlumino. "Not only would you save a lot on labor costs, you actually would make the process much quicker for consumers and much more satisfying."

Still, the grab-and-go experience would take getting used to, he said.

Some people may "feel like they stole" an item, Saunders said.

Apart from groceries such as bread and milk, the store also offers ready-to-eat meals made fresh by on-site chefs and local kitchens and bakeries, Amazon said.

That would make Amazon Go a potential competitor to fast-casual dining chains like Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc as well.

Amazon Go is not the first physical store for the e-commerce company to open.

It has a book store in Seattle, as well as pop-ups at malls where it displays Amazon devices such as the Kindle.

(Reporting by Narottam Medhora in Bengaluru and Jeffrey Dastin in New York; Additional reporting by Lewis Krauskopf in New York; Editing by Andrew Hay and Matthew Lewis)
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babyme

Amazon's Next Act: Amazon Go And Frictionless Shopping
Dec. 7, 2016 3:25 AM ET|
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About: Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN)
JP Mark
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Farmhouse Equity Research
Summary

'Amazon Go' represents an enormous growth opportunity for Amazon.

Grocery retailers will be faced with hard choices.

Frictionless shopping will likely come to dominate other retail categories.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) released a video yesterday which introduced the world to its new advanced shopping technology and retail concept, which the company is calling Amazon Go. Any companies selling groceries at retail, including Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT), Target (NYSE:TGT), Costco (NASDAQ:COST), Whole Foods (NASDAQ:WFM), Kroger (NYSE:KR) and thousands of convenience stores (just in the US alone), should take a moment and decide whether they can afford to disrupt their own business model or look for the nearest M&A exits. Those appear to be the only two choices: Invest in new technology or sell/merge while you still can.

What Amazon plans to do in grocery retail represents a true turning point in retail by taking what is arguably an unpleasant shopping experience and making it truly frictionless. How many grocery store retail sales are lost because the check-out lines are too long? How many shoppers decide not to go shopping at all, just because they dread facing long check-out lines? How much time is wasted standing in long grocery lines? If you give consumers a choice between shopping in a store that requires them to scan a bar code for a second on their smartphone, or stand in line for many minutes while a grocery store check-out clerk goes through the laborious process of scanning each item before completing the payment ritual, my bet is that they will move in droves to the former.

Amazon has a long way to go before claiming victory in the multi-trillion dollar grocery market, and significant obstacles remain. Yes, they need to find great locations; yes, they need to build brand new stores from the ground up; yes, they are entering a highly competitive market where margins on lots of products are already razor thin. What does Amazon really know about running retail stores? Is friction-less shopping such a big deal? These are all valid points, and worth considering. In my opinion, Amazon has the resources, technology, knowledge and intelligence to surmount these and other unforeseen hurdles.

The Wal-Marts and Safeways of the world won't go down without a fight, of course, but in my opinion the result is inevitable. Amazon is not just planning to build grocery stores, rather, the company is planning to build a frictionless retail selling experience. That technology will make their retail stores scalable in a way that no other brick and mortar stores can match.

If a thousand shoppers suddenly all show up at Albertson's at exactly the same time to buy potato chips that are on super sale for $0.10 per pound, the store would essentially shut down. There is no way they can handle that crowd. An Amazon Go store, however, assuming the technology being built is robust (which is a fair assumption given that Amazon powers the Web), would easily manage. They call it Grab and Go for a reason…

Let's look a few years down the road, and assume that Amazon builds out its grocery store concept across the US. How much business will they have taken from incumbent competitors? Perhaps they manage to take only 10%. Wal-Mart could take a 10% hit and still be OK, but can grocery chains, supermarkets and convenience stores? Unless those companies invest and re-build their stores to compete on an equal footing, which seems like it would be hard to do given that Amazon is a premier technology company, the retail landscape will start to look radically different.

Which other companies should be looking over their shoulders right now? In my opinion, dollar stores would likely be the next logical market, followed perhaps by office supply stores, drug stores, pet stores, and wholesale clubs (e.g. Costco), to name just a few. Any retail store in business right now as a standalone concept in which consumers don't need to interact with salespeople to make a purchase (which, for now, leaves out furniture stores and department stores) would appear to be ripe for the picking.

Yes, it's hard to pull the trigger on Amazon and buy the stock at these lofty valuations, but I would rather own Amazon today, knowing that the next few years portend tremendous growth opportunities, than to own any retail grocer, knowing that the next few years will likely require massive investment in technology infrastructure just to stay in the game.

babyme

Guess who made the first Successful DRONE delivery.

7-11,  not Amazon, not Google.   Surprise.

babyme

Meant for USA,  UK Amazon tried it.

babyme

Amazon Restaurants in selected zip codes in US.

Basically signing up restaurants, give them a Amazon Kindle and start taking orders from Amazon Prime now.

Only Amazon prime customers can order items from those signed up restaurants.
So Amazon basically provide hot food delivery services from selected restaurants.

babyme

Another benefit for Prime members only.

Reward card with 5% back from Amazon purchases.
Even got promotion Gift Card 70$ as bonus.  Again this card is only for PRIME members.