Oliver Haslam·

Amazon’s Checkout-Free Go Store Comes To San Francisco

If you’ve always wanted to be able to walk into a store, pick something up and just walk right back out again, you’re not alone. If you live in San Francisco, you can now live the dream after Amazon opened its latest Amazon Go store. The checkout-free store joins similar stores in Chicago and Seattle and is located at the corners of California and Battery in the financial district of the city.

Just like the stores that came before it, the San Francisco Amazon Go store focuses on Amazon-branded food, snacks, and more.

While that in itself is fairly interesting, the lack of any checkout is obviously the biggest draw here, with cameras and sensors tracking customers’ movements as they move throughout the store. Before they enter, patrons scan their Amazon account on their way through the door, with Amazon’s tech then tracking what they take from shelves and, eventually, leave the store with. Customers simply leave the store and receive a digital receipt via the Amazon Go app.

There are of course plenty of potential ways for this to all go awry, but that’s unlikely to either stop Amazon from forging forward or customers from wanting to test the store out. Amazon Go stores stock the company’s ready-to-cook meal kits too, another potential draw for those wanting to give something new a try.

While Apple also offers something similar that requires customers to scan items using their iPhone before they leave the store, this approach by Amazon is on a whole new level.

We’ve not had the opportunity to test it out ourselves, but we will absolutely be doing that as soon as one opens within a few thousand miles of us.

You may also like to check out:

You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and the Web.