When Amazon launched its Amazon Go convenience store concept, it was hailed as a revolutionary cashierless and frictionless shopping experience for the U.S. market. A decade later, Amazon is closing these stores, and I think it’s fair to say this was not a surprise—nor is it a failure.
When the concept rolled out it didn’t just turn heads and pique curiosity. It spurred other tech solutions and POS providers to innovate, not replicate.
The interesting part about Amazon Go wasn’t the concept itself. Autonomous, cashierless retail had already gained traction in Asia. What these stores showcased was Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, with cameras and sensors capturing customer movements, purchasing patterns and transactions. At the time, the life cycle for this type of tech was much younger in the U.S. This tech has since continued to evolve and scale into what some may consider table stakes in retail today.
The type of tech Amazon launched 10 years ago has been refined and redefined. At NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show in January, numerous companies showcased some type of artificial intelligence-backed point of sale and AI-commerce solution designed to improve the speed of service at checkout, reduce theft/shrink, capture shopper behaviors, reduce out-of-stocks and deliver frictionless purchasing experiences.
With myriad emerging and available AI capabilities in both physical and digital/mobile retail today, I think back to the 2016 NACS Show. Vish Ganapathy, who was the VP and CTO of IBM Global Consumer Industry (he has since retired from Google), delivered a keynote that stuck with me. He said disruption will always happen, and that our mobile devices would change how we shop.
He also spoke about Amazon’s soon-to-be-released Just Walk Out tech, noting that the POS would be disrupted because, at the time, Amazon didn’t have the legacy systems in place that other brick-and-mortar retail had. Also, the POS would become a mobile solution.
“We need to design solutions that can be leveraged way beyond the original context in which it was imagined,” Ganapathy said.
Amazon Go was not meant to take the No. 1 spot on the top 100 c-store chains list—it was an innovation hub for the Just Walk Out technology, which has expanded into positive use cases at locations like sporting arenas—see this NACS Ideas 2 Go video—airports, college campuses, convention centers, hospitals, and other grab-and-go-very-quickly locations that do not require human interaction or a plethora of SKUs.
Amazon’s Just Walk Out tech is now a scalable checkout-free solution operating in over 360 third-party locations across five countries.
In hindsight, what I find impressive is that Amazon chose to test its Just Walk Out solution in a tried-and-true retail concept that caters to nearly 160 million customer a day in the United States: the convenience store.