September 2022: When to Just Walk Out on an experiment

27 Sept

Written By Leslie Barry

Pretotyping in action

When to Just Walk Out on an experiment

Spotted in the wild:

Amazon Fresh: an expensive solution to
a problem that may not exist.

Image source

With the popularity of its 'Just Walk Out' technology in the USA, Amazon Fresh began its overseas venture with the rollout of its first store in London in March 2022, "aggressively" followed by 17 other stores. But, after just a few months of operation, according to this article in Charged magazine, "disappointing sales figures amid the cost-of-living crisis" is seeing "the company walking away from plans for dozens of potential sites".

So, what's happened?

Amazon Fresh exists to remove some key pain points for consumers, namely avoiding long queues and getting through the checkout with ease. But as Charged asks, is the way Amazon is going about it really what shoppers want?

While 'Just Walk Out' is some seriously revolutionary tech, it's simply not removing enough pain points for consumers as they thought it would. As retail expert and consultant Ged Futter says, "If we think about it as a consumer, then Amazon Fresh is saving you a matter of seconds — if those seconds are important to you."

And from a business perspective, it just isn't saving that much money on labour either. There may be no checkouts, but they still need plenty of staff around to stock shelves, pack deliveries and help out confused customers who don't have any clue how to navigate the system.

In the face of inflation, most shoppers cannot afford Amazon Fresh, which has proven to be far more expensive than just shopping at the local grocers. "The customer doesn't want all this innovation, all this technology; of course they want to keep costs low but they also want to actually talk to people when they go and do their shopping," says Futter.

At the end of the day, while it's an exceptionally interesting premise that clearly has had success in the US, in the UK it's clearly been a very expensive endeavour with minimal ROI.

What's the Pretotype?

Amazon Fresh being rolled out into London is a big and expensive Provincial Pretotype. Why? Because it's testing in the context of the new location to understand how people engage and behave.

Provincial

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What’s working well? What could be better?

Rolling out the solution with enough scale based on positive early signals is the right approach, but it's tricky to experiment quickly and cheaply where hardware and new technology are required. The data in the USA rollouts must be positive for Amazon to roll this out in the UK, but there could be the YODA issue — getting your own data in your own context is always a good lesson. The UK isn't the USA and shopping is not the same everywhere. People behave uniquely in their local environment, so test for it.

And don't try this at home! Luckily for Amazon, they are Amazon, so they can afford to expend exorbitant resources on these experiments where smaller enterprises can't.

What are the takeaways?

Test for where you are, not where you've been.
Learn when it's time to bow out — if you've got the data and it says to stop, stop. You can try a new experiment, or accept the idea has failed and move on. Don't break your bank trying to make it work.
When something goes "wrong", it doesn't mean you've done the wrong thing. Experiments can and will fail. In fact, most of them do. So, you either experiment and risk failure or don't experiment and learn nothing — if you want to grow your business, always go with the former.

In the field

We've trained another 60 Pretotypers this month! I love the "aha!" moment when people realise there is a practical, easy way to prioritise ideas, agree on what they are, and then quickly test them with customers.

Check out our busy pretotypers' experiment velocity over the past 90 days!