The diverging future of customer service

Customers want genuinely personal service. They also want to be left alone.

A cashier and a self-checkout.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Bigmouse108/iStock, OstapenkoOlena/iStock)

Amazon opened on Tuesday its first full-size cashierless grocery store, dubbed "Amazon Go Grocery," in Seattle's trendy Capitol Hill neighborhood. At 10,400 square feet, it's comparable in size to a Trader Joe's and substantially larger than the two-dozen other Amazon Go locations, which are more like a 7-11 in scale. Shoppers use an app to scan items as they put them in the cart, and the app automatically bills the purchase to their Amazon account when they leave the store — no checkout needed.

"I think what we're trying to do here — and with all of our physical stores — is really work backwards from the customer and deliver some differentiation," Cameron Janes, vice president of Amazon's physical retail division, told CNBC. This is at best half-true, of course. Whatever their other reasons, retailers are interested in cashierless stores because they have lower operating expenses long-term.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.