Hey, Tech Bros: Shopping Is Not Just About Efficiency.
About that “AMAZONIFICATION OF WHOLE FOODS” (see article below), I’ve got some thoughts. Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology – enabling shoppers to avoid lines entirely – could indeed prove transformative, in terms of sheer convenience. Unlike so many other tech innovations these days, it is actually a solution to a problem worth solving, addressing a real “pain point” that consumers would love to alleviate. The store-level economics are not yet clear – the tech is costly – but Amazon is all about perfecting over the longer term and can afford to be patient. Besides, fixating on such mundanities might be missing the signal in the noise: just as other retail formats like Amazon Books were meant partly as trojan horses for showcasing and selling its hardware (e.g. Echo) so as to get you into its “ecosystem”, the use of Just Walk Out in Whole Foods, Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh is also a clever way of marketing the tech – with the help of tons of free press (thanks, New York Times) – to other businesses, like Hudson News and TD Garden. And as Amazon has learned with cloud computing and its third-party Marketplace, its in those B2B customers where the real money lies. In my mind, though, this is all missing the real signal, the one that much of the tech/VC world never seems to catch. Shopping is not, and never has been, just a utilitarian pursuit that needs to be “maximized.” Amazon can make it as efficient as can be, and yet it will still be missing something essential. Retail, at its best (and still today), is also about theater, even a bit of magic. John Wanamaker’s department stores. Steve Jobs’ Apple showrooms. Indeed, John Mackey’s Whole Foods. I will never bet against Amazon’s ability to learn and refine – that’s its genius – and I had assumed that it acquired Whole Foods partly for this reason. But its attempts thus far at brick-and-mortar fail to engage the senses, to tap the deep-seated psychological forces that animate the in-store shopper. My visit to an Amazon Go left me cold, while Amazon 4-star felt a bit like a glorified dollar store. Meanwhile, Whole Foods has stagnated at best under its leadership.