Amazon Go Teamed Up with Starbucks for Self-Serve Lattes
This week, Amazon opened its 13th location of Amazon Go — the online giant’s brick-and-mortar take on a convenience store sans cashiers (but now accepting cash). The new store, located at 300 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, is New York City’s second Amazon Go store — so your initial reaction may be that there’s nothing to see here. And yes, for the most part, this unlucky number 13 is business as usual. But Starbucks’ fans take note: Something new actually is brewing. In a just-revealed partnership, this Amazon Go location is the second to offer self-serve Starbucks drinks.
Amazon quietly added Starbucks brewed coffee and espresso at one of its existing Amazon Go stores at 300 Boren Avenue N. in Seattle recently, according to a representative. And now, that same self-serve Starbucks system has arrived on Park Avenue. Amazon says it will use these two initial locations to test the partnership and see how customers respond before potentially expanding it further.
“We partnered up with Starbucks to make sure we're offering really great coffee,” Cameron Janes, Amazon's vice president of physical stores, told Business Insider. “It's all up to Starbucks standards… And we think it's going to be a great offering.”
More specifically, BI reports that the self-serve Starbucks kiosk will have three different roasts of coffee — blonde, medium, and dark — brewed fresh in the store every 45 minutes. Meanwhile, for you latte loving types, 12 different espresso drinks will also be available: an Americano, cappuccino, latte, double espresso, cafè mocha, cinnamon dolce latte, vanilla latte, caramel latte, hazelnut latte, sugar-free vanilla latte, hot chocolate, and Vanilla Steamer — all made with two-percent milk.
CNBC suggests that Amazon could be looking at opening as many as 3,000 Go stores across the country by 2021, growth that would put them in competition with the big boys like 7-Eleven. Clearly, partnerships with beloved brands like Starbucks could help give them an edge over the competition. But asked if Amazon has any other big-name plans up their sleeves, they declined to comment.
