Amazon Fresh opens 1st till-less store in UK.

[vaud]

poo at Paul's said:

Very clever, if a little scary, technology.

It is, but no more so than the evolution of self scanning, contactless payments, robotic warehouses, etc. It's just a bigger and quicker evolutionary leap than prior ones.

[lord summerisle]

johnboy1975 said:

So do we go from 10 til girls to 10 security guards? Progress i guess. But yeah on balance, it would probably be easier to lift a bottle of vodka out of Asda than Amazon

Think of it more like: for someone working in Lidl where they need to sort stock in the backroom, stock the shelves, sweep the floor & operate the tills. Amazon's store means they can cut out the "tills" bit of the job (altho i believe these stores will have a pick up point for your online amazon orders)

As they are smaller in size - aimed at the city center Tesco Metro/Sainsburys Local types places i can see the pluses - They'll be opening lots of little stores all over, rather than a low number of big shops (ie not aimed at someone going round with a trolley doing their weekly shop) so, really: more job opportunities.

when it comes to lunchtime office workers - the bottle neck is always the paying bit. the Aldi near to my office used to have 15 basket checkouts open at lunchtime (and 1 trolley conveyorbelt) had still had a huge queue (you moved forward constantly with that queue feeding into so many checkouts - but could still be a 10-15min wait at times.) Was even worse when they reconfigured the store to take out the basket checkouts and replaced with the conveyor belt checkouts - while you had lots of smaller queues for each one, you could guarantee that which ever line you'd pick there would be someone in front of you who, when it came to pay would start fishing around in their coat and pulling out a money bag of coppers, 5p and 10ps and make a meal of trying to pay for £17.86 worth of shopping with it.
Same with going to pret or any other supermarket: you waste your lunchtime queuing. So have a place i can walk in. grab something and walk out without having to wait in a queue to pay for it.

Hope to see them in places like Euston, Piccadilly or Glasgow Central

[milkround]

hyphen said:

milkround said:

They are still going to need someone to check ID for even an energy drink.
.

If they check ID at the point the user first downloads the app, would they need to do any future physical checks?

Yes they would.

For a start how would an app stop one 18 year old coming in with his/her 16-year-old mates and buying for the lot of them? You can create an algorithm but I can't see it working.

Plus I think it's technically illegal to sell alcohol to a person already drunk. So unless the app/cameras/AI can work that out they can't just ignore it.

Obviously, they could just not sell alcohol and other age-controlled stuff - but I don't think the punters would be too impressed on a warm summer's day on the weekend.

[Wills2]

AJL308 said:

Just random thoughts but how does this fit with the notion of Legal Tender; the definition of LT is, as far as I recall, an amount which can be offered in cash (Sterling) to satisfy a debt. Now, legal precedent (Pharmaceutical Society of GB and NI v Boots Cash Chemists) tells us that selecting goods from a self service shop and presenting them to the shop constitutes an offer to purchase and the shop giving you a price is their acceptance of the contract of sale. You are then contractually obliged to pay and they are contractually obliged to sell the goods. However - if they accept only cards and not cash then how can they insist on cards only (admittedly, I may be wrong on the card only thing, their tills might accept cash)? If they refused cash then you would not be guilty of theft if you left the store with the goods as you had no intention not to pay - they just won't let you. As long as you paid on receipt of their bill you'd be fine.

The shop can dictate the payment method, they can be cash only or card only or whatever they choose they can refuse to sell you items, the product on the shelf is not an offer of sale but an invitation to treat.

legal tender only comes into force for the payment of debts, as you stand at the till with the goods in your hand you are not in debt as no sale has been agreed, you cannot stand there in a card only shop waving tenners around saying but this is legal tender.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/knowledgebank/what...