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To be a giant of e-commerce, Amazon has a curious obsession with physical stores. Two years ago he opened the first Amazon Go, an establishment where customers can enter, pick up any product and go out the door without having to stop paying .

Now it has more than 25 of these stores scattered throughout the US and, little by little, it is carrying out its future plan to eliminate supermarket workers . The only ones who will enter these stores are those who are willing to buy something.

Your next step is to apply the same technology to large supermarkets. This week has opened the first, Amazon Go Grocery , in downtown Seattle. It is an area of ​​about 1,000 square meters - five times larger than Amazon Go stores - but that uses the same payment system.

To access, the customer scans a QR code on the screen of his phone that identifies him and once inside he can take everything he needs to take from the shelves. Cameras and sensors scattered around the store observe the products you choose or those you simply look at and return to the shelves. Upon leaving, he charges all the ones he has selected to the credit card of his Amazon account and sends an email with the invoice and the list of the products purchased.

Written like this sounds almost magic but the system works extremely well and is very accurate. The difference between this new establishment and the existing Amazon GO 25 is the quantity and type of product they offer .

Until now the stores were focused on workers who were looking for last minute prepared food or non-perishable products. They had a limited inventory, more similar to what can be found in a small neighborhood store. Amazon Go Grocery is, however, a large area to buy the weekly or monthly purchase, with prices somewhat lower than those of the supermarket chain with organic Whole Foods (also owned by the company) and with fruits and vegetables, generally sold at unit price instead of weight.

If the Amazon Go customer is the worker looking for something to eat at lunchtime, the Go Grocery is the same worker "on the way home thinking about what he wants to eat dinner," explains Cameron Janes, vice president of physical stores at Amazon .

This new philosophy forces some changes and there are limitations. The supermarket has meats, sausages and prepackaged or frozen fish, but not a counter to buy these products by weight. Now there are also tables distributed by the establishment for customers to organize the purchase in bags. But at the end of the process it is the same, you just have to go out the door. There are no ATMs, not even automatic payment machines. No one stops you to check what you carry in the bag. You have the feeling that you are stealing. Within a few minutes you receive an email with the total and payment confirmation and the feeling is the opposite. It is done.

These stores do not completely eliminate staff but do clearly reduce the number of employees needed to keep the operation running. Amazon Go stores usually have between three and ten employees depending on size . The figure includes security guards at the door, shelves, storage or cleaning personnel.

Although this store is larger and exceeds ten workers, it is still far from the 50 or 60 jobs created by a traditional food area, not only because of the absence of ATMs but also because of the greater efficiency in storage and storage operations. billing.

The company is studying other formulas of stores and semi-automated stores that could even reduce the number of personnel needed. In Woodland Hills, near the city of Los Angeles, Amazon is set to open a distribution center with a supermarket in which several robots will be responsible for picking up and replacing the different products on the shelves. The customer will only have to wait a few minutes to go out the door with the purchase made or make the purchase a few minutes before on the phone and just pick it up.

The reduction in personnel has aroused tensions between unions and workers' associations just at the start of an election campaign in the US. in which the automation of jobs will have a relevant role. The international union of workers in the food sector (UFCWIU) has accused Amazon of "wanting to eliminate as many jobs as possible." The company, however, defends itself by ensuring that it has created more than 500,000 jobs in the country and that their salaries tend to be much higher than the minimum required in different states. Several analysts say that the company could offer this system to other large supermarket chains in the future.

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