SEATTLE—A little more than one year ago, I tried, and failed, to sneak into Amazon Go. The pilot version of Amazon’s first grocery store experiment advertised a first in the world of brick-and-mortar shopping: if you want to buy something, just pick it up, toss it in your bag, and walk out. A camera system watches you and uniquely tags every item you pick up, then the store automatically charges a pre-registered credit card for the purchases. No clerks, no check-out aisles.

Amazon’s late-2016 announcement of this store was more about building buzz than letting the public in, however. Initially, it was limited only to Amazon employees. Worse, promises that the shop would open for average consumers in “early 2017” didn’t come close to fruition, with insiders indicating to Ars that the store’s camera-tracking system didn’t hold up to larger testing scrutiny as anticipated. But with only 24 hours’ notice, that changed on Monday. That same Seattle pilot shop—the one Amazon staffers refused to let us into in December 2016—finally opened its doors to anybody with a smartphone and the Amazon Go app.

Meaning, customers didn’t even need an Amazon Prime membership. If you want to stroll into the world’s first Amazon Go store, all you need is an Amazon account with valid credit card information and a working smartphone. Turns out, I had both of those, so I walked, bleary-eyed, into the shop shortly after it opened at 7am Pacific time on Monday.

First impressions

Having already downloaded and installed the associated app, I walked up to the store’s entrance with zero queue. “Welcome to Amazon Go!” a few cheerful people in official attire said as I approached, nearly in unison. “Are you familiar with the Amazon Go app?” one asked. I waved my phone at them, showing my unique QR code attached to my Amazon account, and they waved me in. Another staffer handed a more confused passer-by a pamphlet and explained how it worked.

From there, I had one of three turnstiles to choose from, at which point I put my phone, with the barcode loaded, face down onto an iPad-sized countertop. I waited for about two Mississippis, about as long as the same interaction at a TSA checkpoint, and an LED-lit “Go!” popped up, punctuated by three pleasing beeps. I was in. How well this slight-delay and “ugh I need to check my screen” interaction will hold up to larger lines and confused shoppers remains to be seen, but that part worked easily enough for me on day one.

When I entered, I immediately noticed two things. This is a totally average, clean-looking convenience store, measuring roughly 1,800 square feet and containing a reasonable variety of “everything for everyone” food and drink.

Additionally, there’s a John Connor nightmare looming in the ceiling.

Last year, we took a pretty hard look at how we believed Amazon Go worked. The short version: cameras watch your every move from the moment you walk in and scan your smartphone. Every item you pick up and put down is then tracked to you as an entity—not by your face, but by your body and hands milling about and grabbing stuff.

The number of cameras installed in the ceiling easily outnumbered the fire marshal allowance of 90 people, and they all looked mostly identical. Each was roughly the size of a 2.5-inch drive on a computer, and they all had a tiny LED light indicating that they were on. Camera clusters were typically flanked by network switch boxes, and each refrigerated shelf had its own flat, wired box wedged into its back half. These little boxes look similar to, but not identical to, the ones covering the ceiling.

This appears to be the entire beginning and end of Amazon Go’s camera-tracking experience. Very few of the products appeared to have unique barcodes or stickers, the sole exceptions being fresh-made goods. Even those barcodes appeared to be more about internal processing than about being camera-friendly. There are no specially marked cans of Coke Zero Sugar at Amazon Go. There are just regular Coke cans.

The idea is to grab whatever items you want, toss them in a bag of your choice (Amazon has tons of free, bright-orange canvas bags available), and leave without once manually scanning items or interacting with a clerk. Your smartphone app will immediately confirm that your shopping trip has ended, and it’ll share a notice that your receipt will arrive soon—mine took about 15 minutes. That’s it. Amazon will bill a credit card of your choosing.

En route to completing my first Amazon Go purchase, I tried oh, oh, oh so hard to trip up the watching-me-all-the-time system. I took items out, perused them as if I cared about their ingredients, and put them back. I picked up an item, examined it, then reached deeply into the shelf to get the “fresh” item in the back. I juggled my DSLR camera, my smartphone, and various products. I picked certain stuff up, picked the same thing up again, then went back to put all those multiples back on the shelf. (Update: I went back to Amazon Go a second time while drinking a Coke I’d purchased during my first trip, then picked up and returned the same type of can while sipping on my paid-for drink.)

But really, there wasn’t much I could do to mess the system up outside of putting things in the wrong place. Amazon Go, for the most part, is designed to make the process of “oh, I changed my mind” very visually clean. Shelves are stocked with shape and color variety in mind, and they have rigid item-placement spots. Those factors combine to make it very difficult to put stuff where Amazon doesn’t want you to. Got the wrong butter? There’s only one reasonable place to return the butter of your discontent.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1247281