Amazon.com Inc.'s new state of the art Amazon Go store reportedly will sell both beer and wine to customers.
The e-commerce giant confirmed to Recode on Monday that it plans to sell beer and wine from the Seattle store.
Recode said Amazon’s confirmation came after it inquired about a flyer spotted on the Seattle store’s window that mentioned its application for a liquor license.
“When we start offering beer and wine, there will be an associate checking identification,” an Amazon spokesperson wrote in an email to Recode.
“Dubbed Amazon Go, the store concept allows shoppers to grab prepared food and drinks off of shelves and automatically be billed without stopping to pay on the way out. Amazon accomplishes this feat by making shoppers scan an app on the way in, and then uses a mix of sensors, cameras and computer vision to track the items that each customer takes. When the computers can’t figure it out, humans step in,” Record reported.
Meanwhile, with a current market cap of $390 billion, the Seattle-based retail giant is now worth more than the top eight traditional brick-and-mortar retailers combined, as Credit Suisse analysts led by Eugene Klerk mentioned in a recent note, Yahoo Finance reported.
For the record, that roster includes Best Buy (BBY), Macy’s (M), Target (TGT), JCPenney (JCP), Nordstrom (JWN), Walmart (WMT), Kohl’s (KSS) and Sears (SHLD).
“That’s an impressive, even astonishing feat, no doubt, given Amazon was founded in chief executive Jeff Bezos’ garage in 1994," Yahoo Finance reported.
"But it’s not exactly shocking, given the rapid transition over the last 20 years away from shopping in physical retail stores in lieu of online shopping, where retailers like Amazon can offer lower pricing on products and services because they don’t have to offset the costs of also paying for physical stores," Yahoo Finance reported.
For its part, Amazon recently said it would create more than 100,000 full-time jobs in the United States over the next 18 months.
The staffing will help the e-commerce giant as it pushes into categories from groceries to hardware, online video, fashion, cloud services and multiple tiers of delivery services. Many of the jobs will be in new fulfillment centers, the company said in a statement.
Amazon said it plans to increase its full-time U.S.-based workforce to more than 280,000 by mid-2018 from 180,000 in 2016. Amazon had about 230,800 full-time and part-time employees as of Dec. 31, 2015.
“These jobs are not just in our Seattle headquarters or in Silicon Valley—they’re in our customer service network, fulfillment centers and other facilities in local communities throughout the country,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder and CEO.
Bezos said he plans to add another 100,000 new jobs "across the company over the next 18 months as we open new fulfillment centers, and continue to invent in areas like cloud technology, machine learning, and advanced logistics.”
During the past five years, Amazon has created more than 150,000 jobs in the U.S., growing it’s workforce to 180,000 at the end of last year.
Amazon businesses like Marketplace and Amazon Flex will also create hundreds of thousands of jobs for people who want the flexibility to be an entrepreneur and set their own schedule, the Seattle-based e-commerce giant said.
(Newsmax wire services and Reuters and Bloomberg contributed to this report).
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