Customers hesitate when passing through the turnstiles at Seattle’s new Amazon Go store, as if they’re about to be transported into another dimension. They hesitate even more when leaving.

One can hardly blame them. In what’s being billed as a fully automated, cashier-free shop, Amazon hopes to create the most convenient of convenience stores, a place for anyone who wants to feel like they’re shoplifting, but without all that law-breaking nonsense. The concept seems inherently designed for lunch-goers looking for something with a little more variety and cultural cache than the office cafeteria, minus the minutiae of debit transactions and customization. Those are precious seconds that could be spent taking a selfie at Amazon Go.

Signs all over the store literally say “Just Walk Out.”

The store opened to the public on Monday in downtown Seattle, though the prototype’s been available to Amazon employees for the past few months, like most things (immortality, etc).

Here’s how it works: Prospective customers too lazy for self-checkouts download the Amazon Go app, scan their phone at the subway-like gate on the way in, and proceed to place whatever they fancy into their complimentary orange Amazon bags. No carts or baskets are necessary, because there’s no one to scan anything. The myriad creepy cameras and sensors above track what’s been taken off the shelf, and automatically bill your account when you nervously leave.

“I just walk out?” a customer wondered. “Yeah, you just walk out,” one clerk, whose main responsibility is to help people usher themselves through the gate, responded. There are signs all over the store which literally say “Just Walk Out,” and they mean it. Various employees mill about restocking shelves and answering questions (though they won’t answer questions if you say you’re a journalist, and simply hand you a plain white Amazon PR business card), but none sit at a traditional checkout. Because there are no cashiers, the adorable little alcohol section features a single employee checking IDs. It’s the only thing that gets checked in the store.

Amazon Go’s 1,800-square-foot layout houses all the staples of your prototypical upscale convenience store, including chips, cupcakes, sandwiches, frozen food, those Amazon-branded meal kits, feelings of superiority, prepared dishes, and even, yes, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

The back wall is devoted to grab-and-go meals —the local market Amazon is trying to break into.

But the entire back wall is devoted to grab-and-go meals, a clear indication of the local market Amazon is trying to break into. During a recent Wednesday lunch rush, customers could snatch everything from Turkey Basil Wraps to Butter Chicken with Cilantro-Mint Chutney to a Simple Salad, or even a Half Simple Salad. Most meals are made fresh in the window-lined kitchen at the front of the store. It’s something to stare at while you wait in line.

Whenever an item runs out, a small orange “So Good It’s Gone!” sign takes its place, and one wonders if the items remaining aren’t good enough to be gone. I wanted the ones that were gone, which in this case included the Mediterranean Lamb Sandwich, Steak Nicoise Salad, and Molly’s PB&J.

Demand in this neighborhood is high. The downtown core of Seattle has gradually reformed to suit the colonial influx of Amazon employees and other office workers, producing all the requisite lunchtime options, including Evergreens Salad, Poke Alice 2, Great State Burger, Skillet Regrade, and various upscale cafes and restaurants. It’s common to see Go customers springing out of the store with grab-and-go meals, and then quickly darting into one of the adjacent buildings, many of which are owned by Amazon: The corporate giant now occupies about 37 offices, including the Bond-villainesque Spheres, a few hundred feet away from Go.

While the current opening-week line undermines any kind of “convenience,” its eventual dissipation will make the store highly competitive during lunchtime — like a better version of a work snack room or a very elaborate hotel mini-bar.

In the meantime, the customers are a bit of a jumble, mostly comprised of Amazon employees, tourists, people who feel the need to buy something they don’t need just to be part of something new, and those who actually need things. The ones who actually need things are hard to find.

“It’s pretty much just a grocery store,” says Taeho, a customer who walked out with Haribo gummies, chocolates, and a Coke (my kind of guy). “But it’s cool.” I asked if he plans on returning.

“Yeah, I’ll come back.”

While’s there’s no immediate plans for additional Go stores, the grocery industry is clearly keeping an eye on this little social experiment, one of the initial salvos Amazon is making into brick-and-mortar territory, along with its recent purchase of Whole Foods, all in an effort to create an in-store shopping experience as seamless as its online one. It will certainly have plenty of data from the Go store to use.

And so remains the contrast between the bright, picturesque convenience store and the comically dark sea of cameras and sensors hanging above, all powered by thick bundles of wires, seemingly carrying every human morsel of information back to the hive mind. I thought of these things while staring endlessly at the ominous ceiling, until a clerk walked up and said, “Can I help you?”

“Just browsing, thanks.”

Chason Gordon is a writer whose work has appeared in Vice, The Globe and Mail, and Paste Magazine, among others. He currently lives in Seattle, but is on a month-to-month lease.