Dive Brief:

• Amazon is planning to open an Amazon Go store in New York City, according to multiple media reports that were later confirmed by Amazon.
• The company posted at least four NYC-based Amazon Go job openings late last week, according to The Information, which first reported the news. The job titles mentioned include store manager, among others.
• New York City is the fourth market in the U.S. in which Amazon has either opened or confirmed plans to open Amazon Go locations. The company has opened three stores in Seattle, and also plans to open at least one store each in San Francisco and Chicago, in addition to New York City.

Dive Insight:

For several months after Amazon opened its first Amazon Go brick-and-mortar location in Seattle last January, all was quiet. But, now the gloves are off. In less than three weeks, Amazon has opened its second and third Amazon Go locations in Seattle, and has now confirmed plans to come to New York with the cashierless convenience store concept.

If the planned stores in San Francisco, Chicago and New York all open before the end of 2018, the e-commerce giant will make good on rumors that earlier this year suggested six Amazon Go stores would open in 2018.

Amazon is leading the cashierless convenience store model, but other companies are quickly following in its footsteps. For example, Standard Cognition last week announced plans to open a pilot cashierless store in San Francisco. Zippin, another automated checkout technology company, has already opened a test store of its own in San Francisco, with plans to expand the location in the months to come. Yet another startup, Inokyo, has unveiled its own spin on the concept in nearby Mountain View, California.

With all of this activity, it’s looking like the Bay Area will become the first real market battleground for cashierless convenience stores — although that’s not surprising given the region’s reputation as a tech capitol. While Zippin may have won the race to enter this market first, losing that title to a startup likely won't irk Amazon much. At the rate that Amazon is opening new stores in its home market of Seattle, and confirming plans for more stores in other cities, it doesn’t seem like smaller competitors will catch up to Amazon Go anytime soon.