The future of retail — one where smartphone apps take the place of the familiar rows of cashiers and registers — may soon touch down in San Francisco’s Financial District.

Amazon.com, the Seattle e-commerce giant, long eschewed bricks and mortar. Lately, though, it has expanded in the physical realm, from its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods to its fast-growing Amazon Books chain. Its new San Francisco outpost, revealed through permits and job listings, will make its vision for the merger of digital and real-world shopping a palpable presence in the heartland of technology.

The company received city approval in August to install an “Amazon Go” electric sign at 300 California St., according to property records. The documents strongly suggest that a store will open in the office building’s ground-floor retail space, which is along a busy downtown thoroughfare. Amazon Go is listed as a lessee, or tenant, in the permit application.

Amazon has five Go stores in Seattle and Chicago, which sell prepared food and groceries — no checkout required, as shoppers use an app to enter the store. Cameras and other sensors monitor the items shoppers take, which are charged to their Amazon account.

The Chronicle reported in May that Amazon was in talks with San Francisco officials to open its first Amazon Go store in California. The company’s website has job listings for a San Francisco Amazon Go store manager and for multiple retail associates; while Go stores don’t have cashiers, workers prepare foods and stock shelves. Amazon declined to comment.

Besides its Whole Food stores in the Bay Area, Amazon operates Amazon Books stores in San Jose and Walnut Creek. Amazon is also planning to open an Amazon 4-star store, which sells a variety of goods rated highly by online reviewers, in Berkeley, according to signs first noted by Berkeleyside, an online news site.

Existing Amazon Go stores in other cities sell prepared food, alcohol and non-prescription medicine. If the new store stocks similar goods, it will compete with drugstores Walgreens and CVS, which have multiple locations in the Financial District, as well as the TargetExpress on Bush Street, a smaller-format outpost of the discount retail chain.

Amazon Go could also compete with numerous downtown delis and casual restaurants. The San Francisco job listings say stores include “ready-to-eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack options made by our chefs and favorite local kitchens and bakeries,” including bread, milk, cheese and chocolate.

The 300 California St. space is at Battery Street and near major office hubs like the Embarcadero Center. The intersection sees steady foot traffic throughout the workday, particularly during lunch. But the retail space has been vacant since 2014, when Staples closed. The office supply store has struggled with declining sales — and, yes, competition from Amazon.

On Wednesday, the retail space’s windows were almost entirely covered up, and it wasn’t possible to see any activity inside. Signs on the building list Kazuko Morgan and Mary Kate Banchero, brokers with Cushman & Wakefield, as marketing contacts. Morgan didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The property is owned by the LeFrak Organization, a 113-year-old family firm that is one of New York’s largest landlords. LeFrak did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Three Amazon Go stores opened this year in the company’s hometown of Seattle and two in Chicago, with another planned for the Windy City. The company told the Information, a technology news site, that it is looking at New York for expansion. Last month, Bloomberg reported that the company is aiming for 3,000 or more Amazon Go locations by 2021. Amazon declined to comment to Bloomberg on expansion plans.

Amazon would have to invest an estimated $500 million to $3 billion for the stores, Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a research note last month, but they said the effort would pay off by providing Amazon more data on shoppers.

Amazon has thousands of employees in the Bay Area, from warehouse employees to Kindle hardware engineers to video game designers. In 2017 and 2018, it leased a combined 300,000 square feet at San Francisco’s 525 Market St., about three blocks south of the Amazon Go location, according to real estate brokerage data. The Twitch video-streaming site, which is owned by Amazon, is headquartered in the city, and the division leased half of a new tower at 350 Bush St. in 2016, with space for over 1,000 employees.

Roland Li is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rolandlisf