Amazon Is So Confident About Its Automated Store, It Doesn't Care If People Steal By Mistake

When Amazon Go, the e-commerce company’s checkout-free convenience store, opened up in Seattle earlier this week, it was met with equal amounts confusion and awe. Not only are there no cashier lines to wait for, you don’t even have to scan a single item to actually buy them.

All you have to do is scan the QR code in your Amazon app to enter, and then walk out with the items you want to buy, which are later automatically charged to your account. How exactly does that work? Well it’s all thanks to the plethora of cameras and sensors within the store keeping track of items you pick up and carry out. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t work as planned.

Within hours of the store’s opening, CNBC tech correspondent Deirdre Bosa became the first person to shoplift from Amazon Go. While trying out the store for the first time, she accidentally left the store without being charged for a cup if yogurt.

On being notified by Bosa, Amazon Go’s vice president Gianna Puerini’s response was “First and foremost, enjoy the yogurt on us.” Puerini in fact when on to tell CNBC that this kind of thing “happens so rarely that we didn’t even bother building in a feature for customers to tell us it happened.” Puerini says she hasn’t seen it happen herself in the past year that Amazon Go has been in beta among company employees, but the attempt has been to let users just enjoy the free treat.

This is a pretty important stand for Amazon to take, considering that would-be shoplifters now know they can get away scot free if they succeed in lifting items from the store. Just how they would go about doing that however is why Amazon exhibits such overwhelming confidence in its system. Not just what happens to the items themselves, but Amazon isn’t making any differentiation between between actively trying to steal from the store and others who happen to walk out with something accidentally not charged. That shows a great amount faith in the camera and tracking systems at play here.

First of all, a thief would still have to scan your Amazon account before you can even enter the store, which would make it suspicious if you left without anything. Secondly, It’s not as easy as you’d think to lift a product without the system tracking your hands doing it, as well as the change in store inventory. After all, Amazon Go has more cameras in the building than the number of customers allowed at a single time according to fire safety rules. 

Right now, it’s unclear whether Amazon intends to keep track of habitual shoplifters in future and penalizing them somehow. For now, in cases like Bosa where it’s the shop’s system that goofed up, the company believes it’s only fair to let the customer be compensated. And what about if you want to return an item, either because you’ve changed your mind or it’s not fresh?

For that, you don’t even need to return the item you bought. Just tap on it in your app and hit cancel, and you’ll have your refund. If you do decide to return the thing anyway, one of the few employees usually outside the shop’s door takes it off your hands. And that’s based on good faith as well, though it’s likely customers that frequently refund but don’t return items in future will be penalized somehow.