Amazon Still Wandering in the Grocery Desert As It Walks Out Of Another Investment

I am reminded of a quote from Jeff Bezos in 2019 as I think about "Just Walk Out" technology. You know, the system that made it difficult to just walk into a store.

During Amazon's re:Mars conference in 2019, Bezos told his employees: “We need big failures if we're going to move the needle — billion-dollar scale failures,” Bezos said. “And if we're not, we're not swinging hard enough.”

In that sense, JWO was a smashing success of a failure. Not only is the idea worthy of Amazon-scale ambition, but it was likely over a billion dollar failure in terms of development time, resources, opportunity cost, and failed potential.

So perhaps Amazon can be forgiven for swinging hard. However, swinging hard without thought is not a virtue. The idea made it out of the lab too quickly, and sometimes it felt like the inmates were running the asylum here.

After all, Amazon could not even keep Just Walk Out Amazon Go Stores going in downtown Seattle. Nevertheless they persisted.

"Look, it didn't work for us, but trust us it will work for you!" Wrong. Because of Amazon's struggles to scale either its convenience store or grocery concept, it tried to resell this failed JWO idea to others -- to limited success.

An even bolder new approach is needed, and I'm not even talking April Fool's here.

If Amazon wants to reinvent the grocery market, I suggest it think much differently. Perhaps in much the same way that it thought when Kindle disrupted the publishing world and created a revolution. How to get food directly from the farm to my mouth.

Jeff Bezos took the Alexa idea from Star Trek. While this has been interesting, I'm not sure what money it has generated. What I really want is the "replicator" in Star Trek to make food for me, and for that device to be scalable in the home.

That would be another Amazon-scale ambition that would disrupt an entire food supply chain in much the way Kindle did to publishing. Of course, it sounds silly right now. But artificial proteins are already being created today.

It's only a matter of time before the idea of a 3D printer and a total disruption of the food supply chain are combined into one idea. Perhaps that would be another multi-billion dollar swing that Amazon might attempt in a few years.