See, I was thinking of it the other way around. If you're going to change things, you might as well go all the way. Because it's not like they're fooling anyone right now.

If the end goal was to transform all WF stores in the near future, I agree. However, I don't think that is what's happening here. For that transformation to work well, the whole "cashier-less shopping experience" needs to be normalized with the general public, and that's where the brilliance of Amazon's strategy with this tech can be observed.

WF has already served Amazon well by being a test bed for grocery delivery optimization, no need to screw up a profitable existing business with any additional radical changes. That's what Amazon Go stores are for, and now they can sell that tech to other stores. Once the tech is mass-adopted, they can smoothly switch all WF stores to "just walk out" tech with very little complaints, as that's the experience people would be already used to at all the other stores

On the other hand, if they did pull off a seamless integration of the tech into WF, it would be a massive selling point. Amazon Go demonstrates that the tech can work in a store designed around it, WF would show that it can be integrated into an existing business. But they have no reason to rush and use themselves as the guinea pig if they can offload that risk onto literally anyone else. Moving WF over will be the signal that they consider the tech mature enough for large-scale businesses to consider.

>But they have no reason to rush and use themselves as the guinea pig if they can offload that risk onto literally anyone else.

Not only that, Amazon would be literally paid by others to take over Amazon's own risk. This is such a nice play all around, they just need to manage not screwing it up somehow. But execution never was a weakness for Amazon imo, so I bet it will mostly go smoothly.

It will be interesting to see if any large brands take Amazon up on the offer.

If I was a major business, I wouldn't pay Amazon to be a guinea pig, especially when I see them unwilling to do it at their own major retail chain.