 So, you're pretty familiar with that name behind me. It's Amazon. It's a trillion-dollar company, one of the most reputable businesses in the world. It's the largest online retailer in Europe and America. And they trial this concept of Amazon going Amazon fresh. In 2017, they rolled out in a few select stores in the United States, focusing on major cities, LA, New York, Seattle. This is their first store here in the UK in Ealing, West London. We're going to go and see what it's like, whether the concept works, whether this is the future of retail, and most importantly, how tasty is their cheese sandwich? Let's go. Sure. You're going to be using one account? Yeah. Perfect. So, I'm going to ask you to kindly scan it to you. Thank you. Thank you. It's like a salad. All the ready-made kind of prices, what you'd broadly expect in Tesco or Sainsbury. I think looking at their fruit and veg, looking at their meat, looking at the milk, these guys are serious, aren't they? I mean, you only start making supply chains for milk and meat if you're serious about economies of scale. You don't do it for a little store in Ealing. While most of the food products are competitive with Tesco, Asda, Little, this was interesting. There are a few that aren't. Max three, four blades, nine pounds. Now, I know they're not cheap at the best of times, but if you actually go online, I just did a go into the Amazon store. Four pack of Max three blades is 770. Here it's nine pounds. Thank you. Thanks. I think the first thing I'd say is we've got the coffees. All the coffees there are made with oat milk, and they had lots of plant-based products too. And it feels like, yeah, of course, we'll be talking about whether or not they can go into supermarkets and electronics and all these things. I think the people that should be most worried are those guys over there, Greggs or Pratt, because they're offering relatively convenient products. Is it cheap or not yet? But it shows the ambitions of Amazon to be going for coffee, for cakes, for sandwiches, as well as what we normally associate them with. So the company that came to mind when we were inside Amazon Fresh, and I'll bear with me a second because this might sound a bit strange, was Uber. When Uber was getting valued in the tens of billions of pounds, when it was seen as this huge success story amongst a number of big digital companies, Airbnb and so on, it was often because it was selling hype, not just to investors, but also to consumers and to users. That is to say, we're going to transform how you get from A to B. And that was true, but it also meant there was a huge political response from organised labour, mini-cabs in London, or not just London. In many cities around the world, politicians and also consumers said, we want a level of regulation and safety, you'll get in a black cab here in London. That was ultimately what saw for them here. And I think what Amazon have learnt from that debacle with Uber is if you're going to disrupt an industry, don't talk about it, just do it. And one of the interesting things about the launch of this was that, yes, it got press attention, the BBC were there, the papers were there, but it still felt quite underwhelming. Given the extent to which this could disrupt the high street groceries, look, not in the next five, 10 years, but in the long term, I felt that story was underreported. I think probably because Amazon weren't pushing it. Amazon, unlike Uber, aren't interested in telling everybody how disruptive they are. They want to keep a low profile and they want their actions to do the talking. Now, for me, that's interesting when you put it into counterpoint with 101 companies you're probably aware of that happily pitched themselves as innovative disruptors. They're kind of getting high on their own supply. Amazon have learnt over the last two decades. If you're serious about doing that, keep it to yourself. Yeah, maybe go the other side. It seems a bit less busy. So let's see what we got from Amazon Fresh. Croissant, nothing special. It was made today. Let's get the sandwich out. So this is the plowman's by Amazon on multi-seed bread. It's really tasty. It's really fresh. Much tastier than the sandwich you get at Asdor or Tesco. This was made today. And the reason why we've picked a few items that you'd cook at home, but also a few items for a takeaway lunch is just to work out the supply chains that Amazon is operating with, what kind of sectors they want to go into of the retail market. So you've got the croissant. All goes into a croissant. You've got dairy. You've got grains. It's got to be baked, but it's also got a shelf life of maybe one day maximum. That was baked today, by the way. In terms of the sandwich, all the same is going on, but also you've got veg, of course. I'll be honest. This is the freshest salad I've had in a sandwich in a really long time, which suggests a few things. Amazon may want ultimately not just to go after the lucrative city shopping sites, the retail sites, the small sites, your co-op, your Tesco extra. That's obviously where they're going to start, judging by this first site here in the UK. They're also obviously going to go for the biggest sites you imagine, electronics, stacked high because they've got those big advantages in warehousing, economies of scale with suppliers. For them to go for something like this would suggest that they're not happy with just that. They want to even go potentially after the likes of Pret or Greggs with a really affordable lunch option. Maybe I'm being a bit over the top here. Maybe this is an exaggeration, but judging by this product, it kind of suggests that they have really big ambitions for what they want to do over the next couple of years on Britain's high streets. They don't just want to sell you a loaf of bread and a can of beans. They want to get as many of your purchases as possible. Yes, online, if you're buying a book or you're watching a film on Amazon Prime. Yes, offline, buying a consumer durable, but also groceries and also maybe even food to go. That was something I didn't expect. Mmm, delicious. So I've got my invoice and you can see all the prices here. You've got the trip time, 10 minutes, three seconds. And what we've seen so far is people complaining about some things were ordered but not included, some things were included but not ordered. What we've got here, item for item is everything we took. There's nothing that we didn't take here and they've not forgotten anything. All the prices are there. We can send feedback, £15.37. It's 100%. It seems to work incredibly well. The technology needed to do this, real-time cameras and sensors across an entire store, you cannot do that in a Tesco Superstore. It would be so astonishingly expensive. So that's the first thing. In terms of the future of this product, Amazon Fresh, at least in the UK, those out-of-town shopping centres, Tesco, ASDA, I don't think that's going to be touched by this technology for a while yet. Although I think ultimately Amazon will want to go in there too, but I do think they're going to have a huge comparative advantage when it comes to kind of city shopping, people spending 20, 30 quid a time. And that's very scalable. And what was really revealing to me was the kind of products which had, by Amazon, right, you're talking milk, you're talking bread, you're talking pasta, you're talking fruit and veg, which suggests they've got really refined and detailed supply chains in quite a few areas, which given Brexit has just happened, is even more impressive. I mean, this has been in the offering for a really long time. I think the first Seattle store was 2017. This is the first one here in the UK, almost four years later. And they've kind of delivered the technology works, the supply chains work, the products we tried were very good. The question is, I suppose twofold, to what extent is this technology applicable across kind of the high street? You know, is this the future of the high street? Yes and no. Yes and no. It's important to say that the exact same technology is in use by JD in China. So it's not that Amazon is the only business that can do this. Tesco could do it too. What I would say is that the idea that these kinds of stores are going to go on to create new jobs, net new jobs over the next decade, two decades, three decades, I think that's really, really, really unlikely. I don't think it's going to happen. And I think as a society, you probably need a broader conversation about where's job creation coming from? Over the last 30, 40 years, it came from services, it came from retail, that's gone. That has gone looking at this technology, right? Because you're not just losing jobs in the shop, you're also losing them in warehousing and so on. And if you're looking forward 10, 20 years, automated driving, I know some people are very skeptical of that. In the long term, I'm not. Often we tend to overstate things in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. I think that's the case with automated self-driving cars. Drones, warehousing, logistics, you can see how huge amounts of human labor are taken out of that. And I think the same applies also to these stores. So it's the future. Yes. Is it going to come in the 2020s? You know, is this going to be what all shops look like by 2030? No. But it's a huge political challenge, I think, for those in charge. And I think the rest of us have to wake up to some big questions. What kind of jobs do we want? What kind of high streets do we want? And do we want businesses that aren't ethical, don't pay living wage, don't pay their taxes to be the ones benefiting from this? My personal view is no. I think very few politicians would overtly defend that, but it's got to be raised. Because ultimately, if a business like them aren't paying taxes, aren't giving jobs, then what are they doing and why are they here?