Shortly after Amazon opened its first Amazon Go mini-mart to the public in Seattle last year, the company privately mapped out its ambitions for building more of the high-tech, cashierless stores.   

It projected that annual revenue from all Amazon Go stores would balloon from a mere $28 million in 2018 to as much as $639 million in 2020, according to internal Amazon documents from April 2018 that were viewed by The Information. It also projected that the annual cost of launching and operating the stores—including corporate employees on the project—would swell from $224 million in 2018 to as much as $474 million in 2020. And it predicted the total number of Amazon Go stores would hit 56 by the end of this year and as many as 156 next year.