For a store that is supposed to have zero employees, Amazon Go, the bodega-from-the-future that recently landed on Seventh Avenue, currently has a lot of employees. A humanities major, for example, was now employed as one of several Amazon workers standing outside of “Go” in a bright-orange jacket, handing out tote bags promising “Good food fast” and tutoring people on how to install Amazon Go’s app on their smartphones.
Although the humanities major wouldn’t tell me how much she was being paid, one of the plentiful security guards told me he was making Seattle’s minimum wage. Then, sensing the irony of an employee-free store requiring so many employees, the security guard explained that this was just for now, to help customers get used to something new, and that hopefully, in the future, his job wouldn’t exist at all.
