Amazon Doesn’t Think It’s A Big Deal If You Accidentally Shoplift From Amazon Go

Amazon Go stores look exactly like a traditional supermarket except for one little wrinkle: there are no cashiers. Shoppers walk into the store with their Amazon app ready on their phone, then put their groceries in their specially-marked bags to have a credit card charged later. A mixture of cameras and other high-tech, anti-theft systems that only could’ve been implemented by a monolithic company like Amazon have been put in place to make sure the human-less store isn’t cleared out by looters within seconds. Everything that goes into the bag is accounted for and billed to your Amazon.

But somehow, Deirdre Bosa of CNBC was able to “accidentally shoplift” some yogurt on one of the store’s first days in business. Surprisingly, there’s no recourse for this situation. Gianna Puerini, the VP of Amazon Go, reached out when Bosa wrote a story on the incident and let her know that the yogurt was no big deal.

“First and foremost, enjoy the yogurt on us. It happens so rarely that we didn’t even bother building in a feature for customers to tell us it happened. So thanks for being honest and telling us. I’ve been doing this a year and I have yet to get an error.”

The Here’s how it went down for her somewhat in real-time:

New York Times journalist Nick Wingfield actually went into a store and wrapped a plastic bag around a four-pack of vanilla soda in an attempt to game the hundreds of cameras placed along the aisles, and he was accurately charged for every item placed in his bag. So either this actually was a rare event, or we’re about to hear more stories about people getting away with free yogurt from Amazon.

(Via Thrillist)