Sources: Amazon plans to open up to six new Amazon Go cashierless stores this year, with most in Seattle and one in Los Angeles' The Grove mall
New futuristic convenience stores could appear in Seattle and Los Angeles. — Amazon's much-heralded convenience store of the future, Amazon Go, may seem like a crazy experiment.
Context & Ripple Effects
At the time of this report, Amazon Go was a single experimental store in Seattle; the plan for up to six more locations — including a first site outside Seattle at The Grove mall in Los Angeles — was the moment the company stopped treating cashierless retail as a one-off demo. Within months Amazon had confirmed a second, larger Seattle store, and by that fall it was reportedly weighing a network of up to 3,000 Go stores by 2021.
First-order effects
- Shoppers and conventional convenience retailers in Seattle and at The Grove get their first exposure to checkout-free stores beyond the original pilot, with most of the new capacity concentrated in Amazon's home market.
- The Grove location is Amazon's first test of whether the Go format works outside Seattle, in a high-traffic Los Angeles mall rather than near its headquarters.
Second-order effects
- Convenience-store operators and mall landlords in those markets face pressure to respond to a format with no checkout lines, either by matching the technology or repositioning around what automated stores don't offer.
- Scaling from one store to a small fleet forces Amazon to prove its camera-and-sensor stack works reliably across different layouts and customer volumes — the prerequisite for the much larger rollout it later considered.
Third-order effects
- The pattern held beyond convenience: Amazon went on to open its first full-size cashierless grocery store and then bring the tech to a 25K-square-foot Amazon Fresh location, suggesting the endgame is licensing or embedding checkout-free systems across grocery formats rather than running only small Go shops.
- If the fleet economics work, physical retail splits into retailers who own checkout-free infrastructure and those who lease shelf space inside someone else's automated store — a structural shift comparable to what cloud computing did to data centers.
The trend: Cashierless retail is evolving from a single Seattle experiment into a multi-format platform, with each store opening serving as a stress test for scaling the technology into full-size grocery.