This is your host, The Badger, providing you with the top Amazon news stories this week. Welcome to Amazon Weekly Digest!
This week, scientists have developed a way to detect food poisoning using a smartphone, robots have been taking over the Olympics, and Amazon plans to open six more cashierless stores.
The locations would be on the West Coast and most likely stay in Los Angeles and Amazon’s hometown of Seattle.
If you were wondering, the Amazon Go stores work like so (according to Bloomberg):
“To enter the Amazon Go store, customers download a smartphone app and scan a QR code to open a glass turnstile. Those shopping in a group scan the account holder’s phone once for each person entering and sensors will associate them with that account. From there, machines take over, watching the items plucked from shelves and adding them to a shopping cart. Shoppers are billed once they leave and if there are any mistakes or the customer isn’t happy with an item, you push a “refund” button to have that item removed from the bill. Shoppers don’t have to return an unwanted item to the store to get a refund.”
Is offering Amazon tax breaks to move their new headquarters to your city a bad idea? Generation Opportunity, an activist group within the Koch network, says cities shouldn’t offer the company a cheap deal when Amazon could fail to deliver jobs and economic growth.
One-third of Woot!’s traffic comes from Amazon.com. Now the eCommerce store is offering free shipping through its site for Prime members.
Amazon offers NRA TV and is receiving backlash for it. The channel is on other platforms like Apple, Roku, and YouTube as well.