Day #8 - Seattle Boeing Factory, Westfield Shopping Mall, and then onto San Francisco...

This morning before the boys all woke for breakfast, I walk down the road to see the 'future'... the future in retail. Amazon Go is a futuristic store developed by Amazon. It is a new kind of store with no checkout required. Amazon created the world’s most advanced shopping technology so you never have to wait in line. With its 'Just Walk Out' Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go! No lines, no checkout. (No, seriously.)

How does Amazon Go work? The checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. The 'Just Walk Out' Technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll send you a receipt and charge your Amazon account. Amazing.... and I just bought a coffee mug.


What an exciting day followed... Boeing's Factory is located about 40mins north of the city. It is home to the 747, 767, 777 and 787 Dreamliner production lines and is the world's largest building by volume, and driving into the place you can see why.... it just goes and goes for miles. An enormous structure. The tour took us for nearly two hours through the entire building process of their airplanes. Amazing sight.... BUT unfortunately for those looking for phones.... NO CAMERAS allowed. This meant that none of what we saw was 'recorded'. Apparently there are heaps of YouTube videos though on plane building at this factory... :)

Following what seemed like a five minute tour, because it was so interesting, we jumped back onto the bus and headed south towards the airport. With our flight not till 5pm, some lunch and retail therapy was available at an Australian shopping mall, owned by Westfield. The Westfield Group was an Australian shopping centre company that existed from 1960 to 2014, when it split into two independent companies: Scentre Group, which now owns and operates the Australian and New Zealand Westfield shopping centre portfolio; and Westfield Corporation, which owns and operates the American and European center portfolio. Apparently though, only a few weeks ago, it was all sold for 73 Billion $.... so there you go.

The flight was good to San Fran and we got in and to the hotel at around 830pm. To fill the boys up, we went to California Pizza Kitchen for dinner before hitting the sack at 10pm.

Big day ahead for all tomorrow... with the temp around 19, definitely going to be nice and cool for us as well.

Finally sorry about the lack of pics today.... Boeing and their rules. :) cheers IB