Innovation kills, we’ve heard that before, it kills jobs, it kills industries, but with the fall of every opportunity a new one rises.

Today the buzz is on Amazon Go the newly announced grocery killer.  If Amazon has not killed retail already they are gearing up to take on the grocery/supermarket industry. 

Amazon Go could also obviate the cashier in the way self-driving vehicles threaten jobs in the taxi and trucking industries. It could make digital payments more common than cash or plastic, while turning the retail store into as much a data-driven environment as Amazon’s checkout card is today. If any of this comes to pass, it will happen only gradually. Amazon prefers to scale its innovations slowly, reiteration by reiteration. 

Can the grocery industry beat amazon at their own game? Probably not on their own, but it is an opportunity for a tech company step in and create a similar system that an existing supermarket can plug into their existing infrastructure and offer the same self checkout technology as a service to plug into any retail store or will amazon license their technology and collect fees from brick and mortar retail?

For a supermarket implementing such technology will reduce labor costs and improve the customer experience while keeping an edge in the industry and embracing the opportunity rather than seeing it as a threat.

Do you have what it takes to create this? Let us know!