The retail workers tasked with helping you shop for clothes get a bad rap, from the bitchy shop girls in Legally Blonde to the bitchy shop girls in Pretty Woman. Even if you know the value of talking someone out of a truly heinous angora sweater, you might not like the idea of Amazon's latest retail concept that downplays the role of human shopping associates in a big way.
On Friday, Amazon announced that it is opening a store in L.A. called Amazon Style. The idea is to combine physical shopping with an app-based experience.
The Americana at Brand shopping center is an outdoor mall that embodies capitalist hell so much that it has inspired a meme account with the same name. Jeff Bezos is doubling down on his mall real estate footprint with Amazon Style, because he already has an Americana tenant with his Amazon 4-star store.
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You can open the Amazon Shopping app when you enter the store. If you see something you like, you can use the item'sQR code. You can select the size or other details on your phone, and send the item to a dressing room, where all the clothes you've picked out will be waiting for you.
This could solve a few problems. The first thing you have to do is look through a clothing rack for your size. It eliminates the awkwardness of walking around a store and trying on clothes.
When you get to the dressing rooms, you'll enter the queue on your phone, and a room will be ready for you. You will be welcomed by a screen. This is similar to when Anthropologie employees would write your name in chalk on your dressing room door, so that associates could attend to you by name.
The Amazon robots are here to help. Credit: Amazon, Inc.
You will be able to shop for clothes on that screen and request other sizes. When you have to wait for someone to get you a bigger or smaller size, this could take some of the awkwardness out of shopping.
The fitting room experience was described as a "magic closet" by a corporate director. Your clothes appear thanks to the back-of-house Amazon workers who will likely see what you've ordered, get those items from the store's warehouse space, and deliver them to dressing rooms. A process that is truly magical. If you don't pay attention to the human labor behind it all.
Amazon uses invisible human labor to power shopping experiences that make it easy to spend your money. Human interactions with shop workers can be helpful or uncomfortable. It's unnecessary. The human's expertise? Imprecise, expendable. Amazon Style is similar to in-person shopping by making it recommendation based and only using human labor for the jobs it hasn't figured out how to get a robot to do.
Hundreds of employees will work at the store, and Amazon says retail workers will be a big part of the experience. Humans may not be the go-to source for clothing recommendations, but Amazon assures us that they'll still be important.
"Amazon Style's personalized shopping experience would not be possible without our employees who are dedicated to helping customers find looks they love and feel great in," an Amazon representative said over email. The store will employ hundreds of employees to provide customer service, deliver items to fitting room closets, merchandise the store to inspire discovery, help customers at checkout, and much more.
Get me that lewk, stat! Credit: Amazon, Inc.
It might be unfair to view this app-centered experience as a loss of the human retail touch that can help you find items you like, and more than that, perhaps even constitute an actual human connection that leaves both parties feeling fulfilled. If you go to Amazon Style instead of going to a high-end department store, you'll get a more impersonal experience. At places like those, associates are usually stretched too thin, with paychecks that don't compensate them enough, to provide that hands-on experience. It's no wonder that those kinds of jobs are hard to find these days, and why Amazon might be giving those tasks to robots. Maybe Amazon Style can give people who wouldn't get a personalized shopping experience some of the same feeling.
It is sad that the move to replace retail associates with algorithmic recommendation and reduce the amount of human interaction in brick and mortar shopping is happening. The glamor of the shop girl job may have waned. I'm not sure if an app telling me I'd look great in this top would give me the confidence boost that's part of the fun of in-person shopping. I guess that's expendable too.
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