Inside Amazon Go

Giant has that here and it’s a huge pain in the ass and takes way more time than just going through the checkout line to scan everything while you’re shopping, if you’re buying anything more than a few items.

My cousin showed me that system back in 2009 when I was visiting. Fantastic system.

He said that around 1 times in 10, the cashier would actually check your items to make sure you weren't stealing anything- and if you had any discrepancies, you could expect to have the cashier check you every time for the next 2 months.

The main principle is that the workload of scanning the items is spread out to the customer, who isn't being paid for their time, rather than the cashier, who is.

Costco had something like that a few years ago. It would not save much time because in the end someone would need to check if you were not stealing anything. After maybe less than a year in operation they returned to old cashiers.

Sam's Club has an app like this for some stores. Works really well for large bulk items.

The system will not work in many places. It is based on honor code i.e, no body will take an item without scanning it. Most supermarkets have razor thin margins - add theft and they will not be able to make money.

Safeway in the UK had it at some of their stores 20 years ago. I think it all got removed when they were acquired by Morrisons. Here's an article from 1998 talking about how they were introduced in 1995!

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/shoppers-to-check-out-sup...

What happens when you bag something without scanning?

That's something Walmart or anyone else could do. Doing it without compromising on losing items to theft, that's where Amazon is trying to create its moat, and that is where their competitive advantage lies. They have the technology to go completely employee-free. So while it was enlightening and impressive to read about the Waitrose system, it makes it sound like Amazon is being naive and did not think about this simple solution, which I believe is not the case. Amazon could easily do that, but then everyone else could easily copy them. This technology though, Walmart is going to have a really hard time replicating it.

Stop & Shop in the US has the same system, for a similar amount of time (about 10 years).

Even down to the "rescan" audits by an employee. The only downer with Stop & Shop is the audits went from something I'd encounter a few times a year, to something I'd encounter every other visit.

> They are only one step away from allowing you to pay with your smartphone and walk out...

Apple does this for items below a certain value – you walk in, open the Apple Store app, scan the barcode on the product, then walk out with it.

The marketplace today is hardly the place for meaningful interaction, whether with employees or other shoppers. What it seems like to me is unpaid emotional labor. To have interesting social time, we need less hours at work and more public (non-commercial) spaces to meet. For example, where are children supposed to meet?

I understand how you feel that way. It feels like Amazon, and others, are creating a wholly atomized society. Where people exist without having to admit that other people exist. Where people are stripped away from society for profit.

But... what if I want that? What if I don't want to be coerced into social interaction, every day, just so I get get my basic physical needs met? What if I want to engage with society and humans on my terms, rather than on yours?

Who gets to decide? I welcome this because it gives me another choice. It moves me one step further away from the coerced-social-interaction experient you envision as heavenly and towards a world where I get to make one more of the choices that matters to me.

> Throughout history, "the marketplace" had been one of the major centers of interpersonal interaction

If you shop at Whole Foods, Target, Trader Joe's, Kroger, etc. this has never been true for you, unless by social interaction you mean handing your card to the cashier or asking someone a question. Even in my local, family owned grocery store I don't see this "marketplace" attitude. I doubt it exists anywhere outside of small communities nowadays in the US. Most people work 8 hours a day and hang out at home or in bars/coffee shops; we don't really want to hang out in a marketplace.

Note that I don't disagree with your overall point... I just don't think this is a good example.

I don't bother the opposite sex while shopping. But when it comes to just normal convo about good foods that me and another shopper are both buying, it's usually a short-lived "Isn't that ice cream awesome?! Hi five!." Nothing profound but I can see the positivity from even a small event of mutual love for the small things in life. :-)

I will admit though - Whole Foods and Trader Joes' employees are some of the nicest and down to earth people I've ever met. They definitely add to the experience of shopping.

But it appears that Amazon still has those type of people that will roam the store - just not cashiers. And they are probably a lot more grumpy and treated like crap, 'cuz Amazon.

I think you're right, and I haven't seen the answer from our society yet. If you can sit at home and get things delivered (which is easier and addicting), you do miss out on different experiences (some good, some bad). You can imagine a world where many of our storefronts could empty out.

If you work from home, get Amazon deliveries, go to school online, etc... what will you do and what storefronts do you need? Are bars, restaurants and barbers enough?

One of my favorite anecdotes that makes me think... has our whole society evolved incorrectly?

"In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one."[1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluen...

I think the standard HN reaction isn't to celebrate this, but rather to bemoan how technology takes us further from some non-existent utopian ideal where rose-tinted glasses replace reality. Like how "real social interaction" only exists at a supermarket checkout lane.

So your comment checks that box perfectly. Whining about the death of tradition is basically the "free" square in Hacker News Bingo.

The revolution here isn't self-checkout. In my country most stores already have that, which means all social interaction is eliminated already. So your argument is less about Amazon Go and more about self-checkout. The revolution is that you don't need to scan any items yourself or do anything at all. Just pick your items and go out.

Interesting, I saw this as the opposite. Without the existence of centralized checkouts, retailers can craft totally different experiences for shoppers. It's in their best interests to keep shoppers in stores for longer. A great example is wine tastings at Whole Foods locations - it's clearly a social event within a grocery store.

I'd say there's going to be even _more_ opportunities for social interactions at grocery stores like Amazon Go.

To your point, though, the "marketplace" you're talking about is the ambiguity between the consumer and the worker, aka Marx's point about the commodity fetish. That's something that's existed since the late 1800's, though. I don't think that's going away anytime soon.

Although I can see something similar to a farmer's market run in the same format as Amazon Go. I haven't thought through all the edge cases yet, but it feels like a solvable problem.

Here in Amsterdam I can step into the supermarket, pick and scan items with my phone, put them on a bag, pay with contactless and leave without any human contact. I’ve been doing this multiple times a week for the past 4 years, so nothing new.

I think you’re dramatising what is a natural step as shopping evolves with technology. If you value social interaction you can always spend more time with friends you appreciate, go to public spaces, head to the bar. The supermarket has hardly ever been a source of good times anyway.

Yeah, marketplace is great for "interpersonal interaction", except for tourists or people unfamiliar with the societal norms of the market. In that case, they're often getting ripped off or slowing down the process for everyone. Not as relevant for supermarkets but I think the overall trend of seamless and transparent transactions make (almost) everyone's lives better off.

I think the word is "provincial". Thanks for making that connection for me, that our lack of personal interaction is leading to the extremely polarized views we're witnessing. I almost feel like whoever finds a way to connect us all in real life without staring at a screen is going to make a billion dollars (and save the world or whatever).

> where there is even less real social interaction

Good?

I'm an introvert. I don't value random, superficial interactions with people I'll never talk to again. In fact, they cause me anxiety & I dislike them.

I do value the time with a select group of people.

And by reducing the time I spend in the supermarket it allows more of the human interaction I do value.

My social group has a wide assortment of views, from Muslim to Catholic to Athiest, to #TrumpTrain2020 to #NotMyPresident.

I've never witnessed nor heard of people having meaningful discussion with the checkout clerk. I've never seen nor heard of someone, after that brief interaction, saying "You know, you're right. I'll reconsider my position on the person of the opposing political party."

The statement marketplaces may have been true when we in the barter system, but it certainly hasn't been president in modern society for sometime. And I say that as someone who grew up in a town of 2,000 in the 70s and has lived in a large urban area for the last 20.

> a society where there is even less real social interaction,

Every time I shop at my favorite store, I encounter InstaCart employees more than regular shoppers.

Technology is not an issue related to this problem. Bigger corporations in general make this inevitable. How meaningful of an interaction do you have with the tired cashier at Walmart or any other big retailer? Even at Trader Joes, the few minutes of interaction are rarely meaningful, even if I try to make them so, and that is the absolute best example. Small talk is not that engaging.

Even more so, technology for not having to interact with cashiers ever already exists: the self-checkout system. If I walk into a chain store like Meijer, people will be piled up at the self-checkout even if there is a completely free human cashier waiting for customers!

But even so, people are not checking out to socialize. Even what they do say isn't so substantial. Things move too fast, there's too many customers and too little time. How often do you remember the name of your cashier? How often are they still working there a year later?

Amazon's store actually represents a potential departure because as they say, they introduce humans in ways they think will improve the customer experience. Quote:

>“We’ve just put associates on different kinds of tasks where we think it adds to the customer experience,” Ms. Puerini said.

So there are people. And those people, with their hopefully less hectic roles, are almost certain to interact with customers in ways that will be more meaningful than the overworked cashier with a line of 10 carts and a full bladder. And perhaps, if the job doesn't suck (unlike many of Amazon's jobs, unfortunately,) they might actually stick around to become a normal you can interact with.

Of course, that's completely just conjecture. I actually believe Amazon's store will be around the same as any other in terms of the social value you get out of it, which is to say minimal at best. If people actually had meaningful value to get out of visiting marketplaces in modern times, they'd look forward to it instead of looking for how to eliminate it.

Retail is not a place where you will find a "real social interaction".

>Throughout history, "the marketplace" had been one of the major centers of interpersonal interaction

If you mean "the coffee shop" (there's a long history there) or "the pub" (a longer history, in the western tradition there) sure, I agree. I'm not saying randos approach me all the time when I'm in those sorts of places, but it happens. It doesn't happen at the grocery store hardly at all.

It happens a lot more often in the ride sharing services than even the pub; Yesterday I took my Saturday afternoon ride to Fry's for sandwiches, (The Fry's Sunnyvale Cafe is passable. Not bad. Not as good as the dedicated food places on Murphy, say, but it is super nostalgic for me, so it's something of a weekend tradition.) and while nobody talked to me in the Fry's cafe (I mean, aside from the procurement of food. I have met other interesting people there in the past.) the driver actually apologized to me because he spent most of the ride there speaking with another rider in a foreign language, which was mostly interesting in that he seemed to think that I had some expectation of being included in conversation as he drove. But yeah, I talk to the drivers often, a lot more than talking to strangers in retail spaces.

I guess what I'm saying is that social spaces need space for idling. Sitting in the back of the car does this, as does serving food or drink. Buying groceries, I think, does not.

Most American tribalism is already geographic enough that forcing people to interact in shops won’t do anything to fix it.

Every modern good, service and machine is helping to create a society with less real social interaction, and has been for decades. We're only feeling it now because we're reaching the horizon of not having to directly interact with another human being, ever, while still being able to take advantage of many other aspects of modern life.

The real lamentation is that the lack of interaction is perhaps less of a "choice" and more of a necessity for many people. Casual socialization is becoming a privilege reserved for the people who can afford to indulge. Everyone else is too busy getting by, and will choose the path of least interaction because they can't afford the inefficiency. Economic pressure over generations may make introverts of us all.

How about freeing you to have the social interactions of your choice?

There's always farmer's markets. And hardware stores, butcher shops, clothing stores, cafes, bars, and boutiques of all varieties.

In fact, I can't think of any staff I interact with less than a cashier at a convenience/grocery/big-box store. Except maybe toll workers, a job that is already becoming automated.

The place I interact with people the most is at a farmer's market by a large margin

Or maybe we're just returning back to normal. Consider: historically, in hunter-gatherer societies for example, everyone knows everyone, and that's their social circle. You don't really interact with random strangers, except in very few, usually very formalized ways (or warfare).

Compare this to our existing society: most of the people that you're expected - in fact, required (at work etc) - to interact with, are strangers. Most of our communication protocols deal with various aspects of that.

With this kind tech, we retreat back to our comfy bubbles of familiar people that we've known for a long time, and away from the strangers.

I think it comes down to respect and social status. In the times that the marketplace was a place of meaningful interaction, the vendors were merchants or tradesmen selling their products and those were relatively respected stations in life. They weren't nobility, but they weren't at the lowest strata either.

Today, retail is a near-zero-skill job that's manned by people who are either young or uneducated. When I worked retail between high school and college, I remember there being a glaring mix of people like me who were transitioning through it and lifers who'd been there for a decade or more. And you could see it in the interactions with customers. When dealing with the younger employees, customers often adopted an avuncular style that's used when dealing with people of the same class but different generation. But when I'd see people talk to the lifers, the interactions were more mechanical and less personal. It was almost as if customers felt that there wasn't any shared context and so a conversation that went beyond the immediate transaction was pointless.

I contrast this with my experiences going to farmer's markets. There, vendors are viewed much more as equals. They're largely respected and often own their own business. It's much more common to see people having conversations that feel like they're between equals than it is to see those conversations at a traditional supermarket.

Maybe, maybe not. Less cashiers can mean more floor staff. Even at a place like Target, I need help now and then and the few floor staff are running around like crazy. And they already have self-checkout scanners.

Citation needed on the tribalism. 55 years ago the white tribe and the black tribe had separate schools. The percentage of Americans identifying as Christian is going down about a percent a year.

>Seems like the total investment in this store/technology is probably in the single digit digit millions (or maybe low double digit).

It was much more than that. They bought Whole Foods which was worth 13 billion.

I always assumed the whole thing was mostly to demo the tech, which they will then sell to other retailers.

Bias note: I work at Amazon but I don't actually know anything or speak for Amazon. I'm guessing just as much as you are.

I knew people who left to go work on this project in I'm going to say early 2013. Lots of them. Assume Amazon put 100+ engineers on it, each probably making 200k/year in total comp. For five years. So that's a low ballpark of $100 million just for the engineer salaries. Now add in hardware, real estate, etc.

This was not a $10m project. But this is Amazon, where big investments in crazy ideas that might fail is normal. Just look at that friggin' Fire Phone.

Edit: and for the record, all those people who left to work on it were bastards and wouldn't tell us what they were building. Not even if you bought them beer.

> Seems like the total investment in this store/technology is probably in the single digit digit millions (or maybe low double digit).

I honestly think you're underestimating this by an order of magnitude. Salaries, market research, prototype hardware for a project of this type in $10 million? Not a chance.

But won't someone please think of the poor, unemployed "end of line" sign holders? Whatever will they do!

Why not use these people as cashiers?

I wonder if this endless line thing is something typical in the US. I've been to many European countries and other than before Christmas, you never feel like staying in line is something to even think of, because the longest you usually wait is maybe 5 minutes.

In Switzerland, now that in many shops you get to scan the cart yourself (after shopping or during it) there is just no congestion at all, even on a busy Saturday.

How is it in your countries?

I avoid Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s because they are almost the only grocery stores without self checkout. Even Uwajimaya has self checkout now (ok H mart doesn’t, but they are rather quick anyways).

Trader Joe's NYC is cramped for space. It's unlikely Amazon's system would help, since it requires a lot more space to separate product SKUs.

The "Our AI/ML technology is in Bangladesh" rollout

Heh I bet you’re right.

>“We’ve just put associates on different kinds of tasks where we think it adds to the customer experience,” Ms. Puerini said.

I imagine it's similar to the below video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeS8TJwBAFs

Even if this is the case, it gives them a more straightforward path to incrementally improving the automation behind the scenes without having any visible customer impact.

I thought they were going to use some kind of RFID system.

Using cameras and shelf sensors seem a little archaic for tracking retail purchases in real time. I wonder what happens when the store is extremely busy or people are taking things off shelves and putting them back.

Because YouTube just realised they have to exactly this to keep advertisers happy.

> But they have taken it a step further, there aren’t even any gates... scan it with the app

I consider that strictly inferior, not "one step forward." The genius of Amazon Go is that no scanning is involved. You just take things off the shelf and they're automatically charged to you as you walk out.

They also have this at most (all?) Apple stores in the US. You can scan and pay with the Apple Store app on your device and walk out, no fuss. It did feel amazing the first time I did it.

However, the Amazon Go solution is even more seamless, more quick, and more natural.

Imagine when Amazon sells this system to Palantir and police departments for use all over town.

Plus Amazon Go eliminates the payment process. When you think how much time you lost by scanning every item and paying via cash or credit card. Amazon Go is much more easier and quicker.

Many stores in the USA already have self checkout, and have had it for a decade or so. Go just eliminates the checkout process all together.

I'll note that many Whole Foods stores, which Amazon now owns, got rid of all of their self checkout lanes about a year or so ago.

My guess is that there was a much larger amount of loss at self-checkouts, especially given the amount of produce WF sells (e.g. I bet you would see the ratio of organic to conventional sales much lower at self-checkout lanes)

It's not about self checkout, its about no checkout. I get really irritated when stores try to outsource their work to me. If I'm going to be scanning items myself, they better pay me for it. Ditto with restaurants expecting me to clean their table up after eating.

Kind of confirms what I'd always thought, that they'd associate a face/person with an account/shopping basket then track that through the rest of the store instead of doing any phone based tracking.

For the first time in history we have a grocery store without cashiers, and you’re nitpicking that there’s no shopping carts?

It’s an urban small market not a wholesale store.

There’s not enough space for shopping carts to make sense.

It looks like you need to scan in on the way into the shop. If your phone runs out of the battery, is it impossible to eat?

I don't think we're that far away from not even needing the phone at all - it might actually be a "privacy feature", ie: give you the illusion that they don't know already who you are.

This is totally a real problem. I just celebrated my grandmother's 90th birthday. She still lives independently and regularly goes shopping. She doesn't own a mobile phone, let alone a smart phone.

In a world where services that require phones are dominant, choice narrows for elderly and low income persons.

That sounds like a premise for the next black mirror episode.. though they will make it a lot more scarier!

Jordan from Standard Cognition here (we're building a competing autonomous checkout system).

Not having a phone is definitely a big worry. Not all people even have a smart phone, even in the US, and of the people that do a lot don't have credit cards. One feature we're working on is a fully anonymous and phone-free checkout process if you don't have a phone. You walk up to a kiosk that tells you what you have and then you just insert your cash.

AFAICT, the only role your phone plays is to display a some sort of QR code to a reader when you enter the shop, after which you can literally put your phone into airplane mode and it wouldn't matter. I don't see why you couldn't just as easily punch in a code, swipe a card, or just show your face to a camera upon entering.

[edit] I don't think that's how Amazon implements it at the moment; it just doesn't seem like there's an inherent limitation in the technology that would require customers to have phones. It's just that it's only open to Amazon employees at the moment, so pretty much every "customer" is guaranteed to have a phone.

You need an Amazon account just to get in the door. I imagine the group of people with Amazon accounts and without cellphones is small enough to ignore.

I haven’t the foggiest about the first two, but I’m going to guess that one of the workers would notice you cover yourself up with a blanket.

Amazon has had this store open for employees to use for some time. Think of that time as a massive bug bash hacking project where really smart people are encouraged to try to find ways to wreak havoc with the system. There are undoubtedly attacks still to find but Amazon is definitely not being clueless about this.

A similar attack at a normal grocery store is to grab an item off a shelf and walk out the door. Another attack is, if an employee asks you to stop and show your receipt, just keep walking.

But yeah, the cops tend to frown on shoplifting. It's actually a crime in many places, believe it or not.

Just save your containers from your last visit, bring them with you in your shopping bags, pull an item off the shelf and replace it with an empty container from your bag so that it looks like you changed your mind.

I'm sure there are lots of clever ways to trick the system, but do you really want to try that when you're under constant and ubiquitous surveillance and you had to reveal your name, address, and credit card number to enter the store?

They announced support for Go in AWS Lambda a week ago

The smart-cart seeems a much simpler, cheaper solution than the smart-store, doesn't it? Scanning cart items is trivial in comparison to tracking objects moving through the whole store

RFID tags have a lot of problems among them that unless you get every manufacturer on board for labeling all the products in your store you're going to have to spend a lot of time labeling products before shelving. It's also a continuous cost per item either from the manufacturer or from the in house labeling process where a static system like Amazon Go can track without adding a per item cost. It's also not good enough to be the only system in a store because it's easy to block the signal using a foil lined bag so the store will already need another system at least as good as RFID at tracking things coming off the shelves.

As for what they look for that's the secret sauce but there's a few things that are pretty clear from descriptions. They seem to be using mainly (only?) cameras for the identification. Luckily branding is pretty prominent so they have a pretty convenient thing for their item labeling to look for in the feeds. For cart shopping there's some simple things like tracking people with their faces from when they enter then adding items to their cart when they move an item outside a defined shelf region.

It is because we have no scalable mechanism in society to provide for the basic needs of the "emancipated." Sure, in theory the automation yields a surplus, but in practice how do we actually allocate the surplus? Not to the economically useless, that's for sure.

>Why is this the knee-jerk response of many journalists in response to technological progress?

Maybe because our society isn’t ready for such changes. The American system especially lacks safety nets and social security systems to support those without a job. The way things are now is that one needs to have a job to be able to “play”.

One solution would be to tax the robots that replace the working class. Otherwise the only ones to gain are the ones who own the robots.

Because to both customers and employees of grocery stores, this doesn’t seem like “technological progress”; I think it’s unclear if this experience is better.

But it’s certainly being viewed as a costsaving measure by Amazon.

I hope you're not assuming that everybody is in agreement with this questionable proposition. 'Destroy' sounds like a call to battle given the world as it is.

Workers whose jobs we have automated did not become "emancipated."

They were completely forgotten by society, government, and the private enterprise as the spoils went to the top 20%.

What about this particular shearing indicates a difference in the way "progress" is made?

> True progress would emancipate people from this drudgery entirely.

This sounds like a "Let them eat cake" response. What do you propose is the solution then for giving these people a viable lifestyle if they don't have any competitive skills? A lot of potential ideas, like basic income, have been discussed on HN, but this should be considered a pretty scary problem because there aren't any immediately obvious solutions.

Because the politico-economic system Asimov referred to is still intact. Our society does not use technological advances to emancipate the general populace.

It would be amazing if McDonalds fully automated their stores and allowed their current employees to work one day a week for the same pay they receive now, but we both know that's not how it would work out.

The economic system is a cycle. What is produced is then consumed. It is consumed by using the same money which is paid for its production. Without that cycle of production and consumption the system is short circuited. In that you have products, but no logical way to distribute them and therefore no reason for their production. Therefore consumption drops and less products are demanded by the system. Therefore less labour is used and required. That's a downward spiral of employment the end result of which is that only things which are necessary are produced like clothing, food, and shelter and only enough money is in the system to provide those things. The only way to "fix" this is to short circuit the system again and provide money to people who have not earned it so they may buy goods. But how do you decide how much money everyone is entitled to so that social classes exist? You don't. Everyone is the same, so everyone is pretty much low class barely making more than poverty. Like for instance if you do this globally, everyone would be living in poverty as there isn't that money money or products to go around to make everyone rich. There is simply not that much money in the system meaning that there isn't that much production to make everyone rich.

How about a future where the masses live like Amish, but with more free time. Sure you can play... but exactly what does that mean is a different question. I imagine housing developments in rural areas that cost very little and very little economic activity takes place there. Like for instance say small houses for 1 or 2 people for $25k in the middle of nowhere which you can support on your 20k minimum income. Place provides very few municipal services as well to keep the costs down.

Loved this comment. What does real progress look like? Paradigm-shifts take a lot of time to happen but need to start somewhere.

Except this only works if we can flip a switch at some point in time to automate everything. Otherwise people will still have to work maintaining robots, building new robots, or working on the technology that powers the robots.

So, now when people are all out there 'playing', the ones enabling the playing still have to work. Good luck encouraging people that is a good idea, when they could just quit and go play themselves.

> Why is this the knee-jerk response to technological progress?

because people lose jobs and then they elect people who promise to bring back jobs.

Next level magic: you enter the shop and a little robot hands you a bag with what you were going to buy anyway.

That will probably be an option, but I'd wager that a lot of purchases are snap decisions. You want hungry people in your store, looking at all your attractively packaged food.

I don’t see this being viable. Most people shop with at least a small amount of whimsy. This is why end-caps and samples and grocery store psychology exist. And I think this is a feature, not a bug: there is something satisfying about picking out the right bananas, realizing Brussels sprouts would go well with dinner, substituting ingredients on the fly, etc.

the online shopping experience has none of this, which is why I think grocery delivery has not yet taken over. Food is visual and visceral, and doesn’t lend itself to drop-down menus.

Amazon sort of does that with freshly. Same with instacart

They are testing that in Seattle as well.

https://www.amazon.com/afx/nc/aboutpickup

Huh. Is there a year/source for that data?

It's interesting Boeing out employees Amazon still in Washington. I also didn't realize Intel's Hillsborough office was that big! At least compared to their office in Folsom.

The latter point isn't an innovation. My local grocery store (not a big franchise) doesn't sell nasty snacks, either. They've been in business a lot longer than Amazon.

The HN policy on paywalled articles in general is clear. 'dang has commented specifically on the NY Times as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003345

So no subscriptions, no anti-AdBlock...I guess that leaves us Buzzfeed journalism for free?

It says right at the beginning the concept is like a 7-11. Are there carts in a 7-11?

I've noticed several grocery stores in the largest cities I've been in (Shanghai and Tokyo) lack carts both due to space constraints and because people visit on their way home either to or from the train station. Shopping carts are mostly necessary/convenient in suburban environments where you have to drive to bigbox stores because you live too far away.

Judging by the area of the city that Amazon Go is in and the ubiquitous housing nearby. I suspect this is the model they're going for.

galaxy brain

It definitely will. Self-checkout is widely available in Europe. The laws about data and privacy will be different but this is a customer experience / labor cost play, not a ploy to get data.