Trying, and failing, to sneak into Amazon’s Skynet take on grocery shopping

How does Amazon's "no clerks," camera-filled grocery store look from, er, the outside?

Sam Machkovech

"Let's go shopping!" "No, let's Amazon Go shopping." "Dave, I hate your puns."

Sam Machkovech

SEATTLE—Amazon's foray into the world of brick-and-mortar grocery shopping has been all but confirmed for nearly a year thanks to leaks such as spotted permit applications. The rumor became reality on Monday with the announcement of Amazon Go, an experiment in grocery shopping that removes the clerks.

This is not just another idle announcement, either: the company's pilot store is now open for business. It's attached to one of Amazon's headquarter buildings in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood and is already stocked with food options (and a giant staff of cooks and food preparers). There's just one catch—only full-time "blue badge" Amazon staffers can get in right now.

Never one to take "no" for an answer, I grabbed a camera and walked up to the front door with hopes that my shining blue eyes would make up for my lack of a blue badge. That didn't work out, but I did gather a few more details while receiving death glares from staffers and security personnel.

Not for sale: puffy, orange jackets

• The view from across the street (which is currently a construction pit for another Amazon building).

  Sam Machkovech

• Another wide-angle view.

• How the shop looks from the front door. I took this while a plainclothes security guard asked me a number of prying questions.

• Another shot near the front door, so that customers can grab things like napkins.

• Free samples! Aw, man, I want in.

• Lots of kitchen workers can be seen from the outside.

• Lots of equipment.

• Jer-ry, makin' pas-tries in his Ama-zon haaaat.

• Close up of some of the window graphics; this room appears to be a break room. I'm sure these staffers are thrilled about being seen during their downtime.

  Sam Machkovech

• This was the nicest look anyone manning the front door gave me while I took photos.

Amazon Go is advertised as an app-specific brick-and-mortar store, because it requires a smartphone app to enter and exit. Shoppers are expected to load an Amazon Go-specific app and then tap their device to a sensor on a turnstile. The turnstile I saw at Amazon Go's first pilot store doesn't have a turning, mechanical gate; people just walk into the shop once the turnstile's sensor lights up green.

Instead of pre-loading a grocery list on an app before visiting the shop or placing orders through an existing service like Amazon Fresh, customers grab whatever products they want to buy and toss them into a bag. I saw shoppers use their own personal bags and Amazon's official, bright-orange bags to do this. There's no clerk or checkout process. Shoppers walk past the same turnstile, without pausing or waiting for a light or sound signal, and their purchases are logged and charged to their account via the smartphone app.

• This dude looks at his options.

• With his meal chosen—perhaps a "fiesta"-worthy one—the customer walks out.

• No break in his stride. His purchases have been billed to his Amazon account.

I tried to ask reps at the Amazon entrance—and there were a bunch of them, some wearing puffy orange jackets and others offering menacing looks while wearing plain clothes—about what wireless communication interface is being used or whether multiple people could walk through the turnstile simultaneously without messing up the wireless handshake process. I was told to check the company's announcement website, but it didn't answer any of my technical questions. One PR representative actually walked up to me and specifically offered to answer my questions, only to immediately refer me to this public-facing website once I asked a few.

Lucky for me, I got a little more information from an Amazon staffer down the block who I spied with an orange Amazon bag. The purchase-tracking sounds pretty intense, from what little the staffer told me. After saying that the store combines "machine learning and deep learning," he admitted that "we use a combination of cameras and sensors." So, you're being watched while you shop.

The 1,800 square-foot grocery space appears to take up about a fourth of a city block, with giant, logo-covered windows surrounding the exterior. Most of those windows look straight into a kitchen facility, where I saw staffers prepare basic ingredients and form oven-ready pastry servings. The only windows that currently peer into the grocery shopping space itself don't reveal a ton of space, so it's hard to tell how much of the shop is dedicated to items like fresh produce, frozen foods, or other boxed and bagged items. All I could see were plastic containers that contained single-serving, custom-made foods; their contents were labeled by stickers on the plastic containers, as opposed to with more prominent branding. (I could also see a bunch of cheeky advertisements for cuisine suggestions, such as, "Who knew bacon and kale could be friends?")

Amazon already owns and has permits for another building in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, and the public has speculated that this will become an Amazon Go location, as well. More information will surely trickle out before the company purportedly opens the shops to the public in 2017. (That friendly staffer from earlier said that it could happen as early as January.)