A big appeal of Amazon’s Go stores is the ability to just pick up your groceries and walk out the door without having to wait in a cashier line to pay for your goods. Amazon calls this cashierless technology “Just Walk Out Shopping” and it’s currently found in its Go stores and also in select Amazon Fresh stores. But soon it will come to another Amazon-owned grocery chain.
Amazon has announced that beginning in 2022, Just Walk Out Shopping will come to select Whole Foods stores as well. Well, to start, it will only be two Whole Foods stores: one in Washington, D.C.’s Glover Park and the second in Sherman Oaks, California. As Amazon explains:
Anyone will be able to shop these stores using self-checkout, but customers who want to skip the checkout line with Just Walk Out Shopping can enter in three ways: by scanning the QR code in the Whole Foods Market or Amazon app, hovering their palm using Amazon One, or inserting a credit or debit card linked to their Amazon account. . . . Once inside, customers will shop like normal and at the end of their trip, they simply scan or insert their entry method again to exit. After customers leave the store, those who use the Just Walk Out experience will receive a digital receipt, which will be available in the Whole Foods Market app.
Considering Amazon’s Fresh, Go, and Whole Foods stores have a somewhat symbiotic relationship it’s no surprise that the tech giant is looking to port its cashierless technology from one brand to the other. But Whole Foods has hundreds of locations. Can we expect the cashierless shopping to come to more stores? For now, Amazon says it’s going to see how the experience works at the first two locations, then “we’ll go from there.”
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