Report: Amazon to Expand Cashier-less ‘Go’ Stores to Chicago, San Francisco

The cashier-less, checkout-free shopping experience is coming to Chicago and San Francisco.

Five months after opening its first cashier-less storefront in Seattle, Amazon confirmed Monday to The Seattle Times its plans to open new Amazon Go stores in Chicago and San Francisco. The company declined to specify when the stores would open for business.

Amazon Go stores have no checkout lines. Instead, customers use a QR code supplied by the Amazon Go app on their smartphones to gain access to the store. The network of hundreds of cameras takes it from there. Using sophisticated machine learning and a network of hundreds of cameras, Amazon says, the store is able to track which items a costumer selects and places in their bag. When the customer leaves, the system then charges the customer’s credit card through their Amazon account for the items they’ve taken with them.

The first and only Amazon Go store is on the first floor of one of Amazon’s Seattle skyscrapers; it opened to the public in January after years of testing and a 14-month employee-only pilot period. But expansion plans have been rumored since its grand opening. In February, Recode reported that Amazon was talking with a real estate developer in Los Angeles about opening stores in the Southern California metropolis. Real-estate tracker Curbed noticed a building permit issued to Amazon for a small “Amazon Store” in the Loop district of Chicago, plus the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Amazon planned to open a store near Union Square.

The move to open more stores was confirmed after reporters from The Seattle Times noticed job listings for store managers in the cities on the eCommerce giant’s jobs website.