The Story Behind Amazon Go

Recently, Amazon announced the launching of their new walk in stores called Amazon Go.  Many television comedians are making light of the innovative idea of walking into a store, grabbing what you want, and leaving.  The joke is that this is what is known as shoplifting, which of course is not a new idea.  However, the real joke is on us.  How?  Amazon Go marks the end of retail jobs and the beginning of a new kind of stealing.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 2,849,660 persons working as cashiers in the retail industry in November.  With Amazon Go, you have just eliminated the need for any of these costly employees.  The process of going into the Amazon Go store uses sophisticated algorithms that keep track of what you are taking off and putting on the shelf and a smart shopping cart that keeps track of your items charging your account.

This is just the tip of the iceberg however, because the next step will be eliminating the stockers and the inventory personnel.  Robotic machinery and computers can very easily keep track of items on a shelf and how many the store is required to have in stock.  You could run the whole store remotely without any need for a single employee.

Customer service representatives can be replaced by computers or remote persons working at a call center eliminating 336,230 jobs.  Eliminating the stocking and inventory crew takes care of 1,337,300 jobs.  Now to get rid of those costly supervising positions and you just cut 1,083,430 persons out.  Now to take care of the sales persons because a computer and recommender system is so much more efficient and there goes 4,311,040 jobs.  Wow, look at the money we have saved!  And who cares about all those low-skilled employees anyway?  Obviously, I am being sarcastic, so please do not leave me hate messages.

Now for the new stealing.  You could of course get some sophisticated hackers involved to confuse the process of what people are taking out of the store, but I think the meta-materials will be the real problem for these new shops.  One of the uses of meta-materials is to bend light around objects.  There is the famous picture of a spoon placed in a clear liquid which appears that the spoon is backwards in the liquid since the index of refraction is actually negative in these strange materials.  Of course, visible light is just an example and the computers at Amazon Go will be looking for light in other frequencies just like scanners at check-outs do, but essentially, you either scatter or confuse the signals and the computers cannot keep track of what you are taking.  You might line your Smart shopping cart with a bag made of these meta-materials.

Of course, Amazon will notice this, so then you will have to use different accounts probably most effectively by stealing the account information of other users.  Wow, what a bright future!  Let's all Amazon Go!