Amazon’s Ealing surveillance shopping studio

Lockdown Britain, it seems, is not without its ironies.

Amazon — the global online retail behemoth and major corporate beneficiary of forced domestic isolation — has deemed it the opportune moment to transmute its online delivery business into a bricks and mortar one.

It has done so, of all places, in leafy suburban Ealing. A West London borough best known for its eponymous film studios (which catapulted Peter Sellars, Alec Guinness and Jamie Powell to fame), a large Polish community and, more drearily, as the old stomping ground of former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, tennis champion Fred Perry and err, this here editor of FT Alphaville.

As Amazon’s new shop was both in walking range and I was missing a number of essential larder items — Peri Peri sauce, Blue Cheese dressing, Bitesize Shredded Wheat and a bottle of Sherry, to be precise — I thought it rude not to pop in and have a gander. The store, which is branded Amazon Fresh in Europe, is the first shopping outlet outside of North America that features the platform’s much-hyped automated checkout technology.

And the news was not overlooked by the nation’s journalists, who quickly outnumbered conventional shoppers by at least two-to-one:

Here’s how it works in theory: you walk right in, pick up anything you like and just walk out. The bill then comes straight out of your Amazon account. Allegedly you can’t cheat the system. This is because the eye in the sky — a complex web of suspended cameras evoking a Truman Show-style surveillance studio in its own right — keeps a watch of everything you touch, pocket or consume on site.

So how effective was it? Was it convenient? And was the surrender of one’s digital privacy worth it?

In practice, the “just walk-in walk-out” PR felt a bit disingenuous. You cannot actually just walk in. A shopper needs a phone, an Amazon account (and by proxy, a bank account) as well as some iota of digital competence. This, I’d argue, is potentially a bigger turn off than the intrusive nature of the surveillance tech within. It also clearly substitutes walk-out friction for walk-in screening.

Some might counter that it’s not as if this sort of screening is new. Membership-based stores have been around for ages. Costco is one famous example. The store is analogous on the data mining side too since the whole-selling business has always kept reams of data about members’ purchases, using the information to learn more about its customers preferences as well as to score them in terms of value to itself.

Another popular argument is that private retail establishments are entitled to bar problematic customers (specifically shoplifters) or to dictate terms and conditions for entry.

But in reality such practices are not the norm. Discriminating against certain customers because of their low economic worth or poor shopping track record is socially taboo because it reeks of a class versus underclass system.

We work hard in Britain to make basic essential services such as the NHS accessible to everyone, irrespective of their background, financial position or their behavioural records.

Should shopping really be any different? It’s a murky and uncomfortable proposition in my mind that retail outlets more broadly should introduce such gated systems. Is the inconvenience of checkout really so great that such universal freedoms should be abandoned?

This a deep and philosophical point. And as it happens also the subject of the Ealing Comedy classic Passport to Pimlico, all about the unexpected trials and tribulations facing would-be breakaway republics within the framework of mightier jurisdictions. Because that really is what the experience of shopping at Amazon Fresh equates to: a temporary migration into a technocratic digital state with its own rules, standards and privacy norms.

Does the small convenience of avoiding the check out process really merit the data and privacy handover? I’m not so sure it does.

But enough of the philosophy, how was it in terms of user experience?

The first friction I came across was the simple learning process of understanding the mechanics of getting in.

Luckily, a helpful Amazon staff member dressed in green was on standby outside the front door. Unfortunately, I made the error of asking if I could record her as she did so. This prompted an immediate hesitation. Amazon’s PR was called in pronto to resolve both the permission issue and the ethical quandary of whether a journalist would be violating their employee’s right to privacy if I recorded them (in a public walkway and in front of a dozen other media cameras I should add) explaining the process? It was concluded, without a dash of irony, that I probably would. So for the time being it was back to old school pen and pad note-taking and memorisation.

Soon enough I was through the turnstiles and ready to report on the range and pricing of the goods available, as well as the technology itself.

I had dressed as cryptically as possible:

But facial recognition was not really the secret sauce in play. As I’d learned from reading about people’s previous experiences in America, the cameras are more interested in one’s pathway through the venue and related activity. This is why the best known duping of Amazon’s States-side outlets was by people who had thought to change their outfits surreptitiously in the customer toilets.

It was going to be highly unlikely that I could con the system the same way, not least because there were no public conveniences in sight.

An immediate concern, however, wasn’t the complex web of cameras dangling from the ceiling but the lack of trolleys. And no baskets. Customers have to get a bag – paper or fabric, very woke – or carry items in their arms. This felt restrictive in terms of what a customer can purchase because if one is forced to carry a bag, or perhaps two, at all times there are no hands left for picking out items. Surely this is not demand optimal?

The better new was that human staff had not been entirely disposed of by Amazon yet. Alongside the supervisors, there were still the shelf stackers, entry helpers and the managers of the parcel pick-up point.

So what about alcohol? If you can just walk out, how is access to restricted goods controlled? The answer, it turns out, is the old fashioned way: a staff member stands at the ready to monitor the ages of those grasping for alcoholic goods. It is probably not a coincidence that the higher value goods, such as Kindles and other electronic items are also positioned within this staff member’s view. An indicator perhaps that the system isn’t as robust as the platform would have you believe.

It soon occurred to me that a better test of the system would have been conducted by the best known would-be thief I know: my three-year old daughter. Like most children, she likes to pick up random things in the supermarket and either stuff them surreptitiously into my trolley or eat them on the go. In Tesco or Sainsbury, this sort of activity usually results in an honesty system at the point of check out. But what about at Amazon Fresh?

Well, for a start, there was confusion at the door about what age a child should be scanned independently as part of a parental account. Babies, I was told, did not need scanning. A mother with a small baby, however, told me she had not been able to get the entry scanning system to work for her at all.

By the time I came out, it was clear that there were probably more journalists in the shop than customers. In the end, I picked up a Peri Peri sauce, a coffee and a croissant because the other items I had been after were unavailable and I walked out. The gate opened. It all worked as anticipated (even if it took 20 minutes before the receipt turned up in my Amazon account).

Will I be going again? Probably not. The convenience of having stuff delivered to your door trumps the inconvenience of having to lug your shopping around in carrier bags just to dodge the checkout process.