While in London at the weekend, I decided to venture into Amazon Fresh. Billed as the supermarket of the future, the way it works is that you pick up your shopping and simply tap your card on the way out to get past the barrier.
Cashless is one thing. But it’s also cashier-less and till-less. It’s an experience devoid of any human interaction. “Just walk out shopping” is written on the wall – customers don’t have to queue. Forget about the kebab mafia or the sea of Turkish barbers slowly taking over our towns and cities – as bad as that may be – there is something ominous about these new stores which have popped up across London and may be on their way to Ireland soon.
Amazon Fresh was first launched in LA and Chicago four years ago. Jeff Bezos had quietly begun building the futuristic grocery chain during the first eerie phase of Covid lockdowns. It’s a distinctly dystopian retail experience, where you’re watched by a plethora of surveillance cameras. The idea of the “Just Walk Out” technology is that it knows what you buy without your purchases being individually scanned. You tap your card on the way out, and the Amazon email linked to your card appears on the screen. Not long after my visit, I received a receipt to that email, detailing how much I was charged after Big Brother totted up the bill. The narrative seems to be that this is all totally normal, and that you’re some kind of conspiracy theorist or digitophobic social pariah if you feel a bit uneasy.
Ireland’s shopfronts, in many places which were once booming, north and south, are now increasingly shuttered, but I can’t think of anything worse for our high-streets than one of these vibe-less warehouses becoming the norm. On one level, the death of physical stores due to online shopping has been somewhat exaggerated, because people still place great value on being able to go shopping and interact with real humans. I’m perfectly happy buying clothes online, most of the time, and until I’ve racked up a stash of expensive ASOS returns that I can’t be bothered to take to the post office. But am I really happy buying other stuff this way? Probably not.
Figures show that all is not lost for the high street – for example, during 2023, sales volumes in physical clothing and footwear stores rose up 4.5 per cent. Sales in physical household goods stores, however, were down by 3.4 per cent, meaning the easy lure of Amazon Prime has likely captured a big part of that market. People are likely happy not to have to visit large hardware stores because they can get just what they need online. When it comes to clothes, the big handicap of online shopping is that you can’t try before you buy.
You can try them on at home – but the time and effort invested in having to send them back is annoying for many people. I worked in Next for three years as a student, and I remember countless customers who loved having someone on the other side of the dressing room to give an opinion on how something looked or hand in extra sizes. Beyond all of that is the fact that you can’t put a price on human interaction.
This all brings me back to why I hated Amazon Fresh. There’s a dystopian edge to the whole thing. An ominous ‘Big Brother’ quality that really leaves you feeling, as a consumer, like just another number. The idea of yourself being monitored on camera made me feel uneasy. Yes, the whole concept may protect the industry from things like human error and cut costs, but what it gains in efficiency, it loses in character. It’s actually interesting that just a year after its initial launch, in 2021, a class-action lawsuit was filed in New York with Amazon Fresh accused of not alerting customers that it was monitoring their body shapes and handprints. At its peak, the grocery chain had 19 locations across London, after first opening in the English capital in Ealing Broadway in March 2021. While additional stores opened their doors, it is interesting that others closed. Its store in Richmond next to the tube station recently closed after three years, with the company saying that “some locations work better than others.”
My friends tell me that there are plans in the works to bring Amazon Fresh to Ireland. Amazon says that in the future, it may expand its grocery delivery service to Ireland. I haven’t seen it confirmed, but it’s the last thing the Irish high street needs. At a time when a number of major Irish retail chains have closed in the past few years, including New Look, Quiz Clothing, and Frankie & Benny’s, along with some smaller health chains, I don’t see how supermarkets which would lead to more job losses are the answer. Stacking shelves and serving customers might not be everyone’s idea of glamor, but these are hugely important entry-level jobs – or positions where you can progress if you work towards that.
My time working in retail was some of the best experience I ever got, because it taught me about the real world. I learned the names of customers who came in the doors, and I made friends with people. Yes, it could be tedious, but it could also be rewarding. As humans, we can offer a service that machines and self-service scanners simply cannot.
During my own visit, I noticed that nobody was actually shopping there. It was pretty much empty apart from a security guard at the door. The neon-hued sign on the outside gave way to a brightly lit soullessness on the inside. The shelves are so well-stocked that it’s hard not to imagine robots in charge in the future. It’s all meant to be easy, but the whole experience filled me with uncertainty. “I can’t use contactless?” “Do I need the app?” I asked the security guard, finding out that I needed to use a physical debit card which would link to my email address for my receipt.
The experience of paying without tills was a little disconcerting. There’s also the way in which the whole thing just made me a bit nervous. I couldn’t wait to get out – it’s similar to if you imagine someone watching over you as you do a task. It’s bound to make you a bit nervous. And for all the hype and low-energy TikTok videos of influencers doing the “watch me walk through Amazon Fresh” routine in the early days of it’s opening, there’s nothing amazing about any of it, and I very much doubt that Amazon Fresh will ever kill the high street. It’s not exciting as Amazon would have us believe when it opened with great fan-fare. In a way its boring, lacking in engagement and feeling a bit too dystopian.
Around 100 local shops close every year in Ireland, the Convenience Stores and Newsagents Association estimated today – which equates to two a week. But there will always be room for local shops, which offer employment to locals and an atmosphere of interaction. Shoppers don’t always want to be recorded close-up by cameras as they do their shopping, and they want to be able to pay in cash when it suits them. Ireland is rapidly becoming a surveillance society, as is the case with most of Europe and America and the UK. There’s a new obsession with surveillance and automation which ignores the simple fact about customers: We’re humans, and as humans, we don’t like to be watched, surveilled and scrutinised.