Rumours that London would be the site for Amazon’s first fully automated, cashierless Amazon Go supermarket outside of the USA appear to be well-founded based on recent reports the U.S. tech giant has all but agreed to lease a 20,000 sq ft site in Notting Hill. The Times reports contracts are close to being exchanged on a site owned by property developer Enstar Capital near the Notting Hill Gate tube station in west-central London.
Enstar seemingly let the cat out of the bag with a quickly deleted Instagram post which read:
“The first Amazon store in the UK is coming soon and it’s coming to our site on NHG.”
Amazon Go stores use an array of cameras, sensors and artificial intelligence to track what shoppers pick up, put back and leave the store with. They scan a barcode on an app on entering the store and are automatically charged for their groceries after leaving.
The tech stack, which costs around $1 million to fit out each Amazon Go store, is named ‘Just Walk Out’, and is also, being licensed to third party supermarket chains around the world, with several deals reportedly already struck. Whether one of the UK’s major supermarket chains had agreed to license the technology now seems less likely, if Amazon has plans to roll out more of its own-branded convenience supermarkets in the country.
Notting Hill seems like a natural choice for the first Amazon Go store to be opened overseas. The area’s chic charm and well off residents, whose spending power is around twice that of the UK average, look like a perfect fit to position the brand in the UK ahead of a wider expansion. The first full-size UK Whole Foods store, the upmarket groceries chain acquired by Amazon for $13.4 billion in 2017 as its first step into bricks and mortar retail, was also opened just around the corner on High Street Kensington.
There is speculation that UK supermarket Morrissons could supply Amazon’s UK stores. The two already have a tie-up through the tech giant’s Pantry and Fresh online-only groceries delivery service in the UK.
The Notting Hill site agreement seems to be almost signed off is larger than most of the earlier Amazon Go stores to open in the USA. It is similar in area to the larger store format recently debuted in Seattle.
Despite the fact that Amazon is far and away the biggest ecommerce company in the world, CEO Jeff Bezos has for a long time stated his ambition to take a piece of the bricks and mortar retail pie, which still accounts for around 90% of retail spending in the USA. More elsewhere.
However, how well the Amazon Go format will be received in London may be open to some question. Last year Sainsbury’s abandoned a trial cashierless store in the city due to poor sales, saying “not all our customers are ready”. That didn’t put Tesco off though, which is now running its own trial of a cashless store with only one till for the purchase of alcohol and tobacco products, where there is a legal requirement for staff to check ID if the customer looks like they could be under 25.