Amazon's cashierless "Go" markets have popped up in San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago, promising patrons the "future of shopping": a frictionless grocery buying experience that relies on high-tech tracking technology instead of human interaction to get products off the shelves and into your canvas totes. This indeed may be the supermarket of the future, at least as Bezos envisions it, but not one that we couldn't have predicted. The development of the Go shopping experience is little more than the latest step in the logical evolution of retail.
In fact, the layouts of modern supermarkets would utterly flummox a shopper from the late 19th century. In the earliest days of retail, shoppers would make multiple trips to multiple shops, each specializing in a specific class of product. You had butchers, bakers, greengrocers, fishmongers, dry goods and general stores, among a litany of others. And that was only for products with an appreciable shelf life. Milk and other quickly spoiled goods were delivered directly to customers' doorsteps by the milkman.
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