Amazon Revisited: Just Walk Out vs. Amazon Go Stores in the U.K., Under the Presence of the Smart Shopping Cart
Even though Amazon scales back on its push for automate the supermarket experience, it still has plans for cashier-free grocery. It’s now betting that the smart shopping cart could still change how we shop for food.
Amazon has dozens of Fresh grocery stores in the country, most of them in California, Illinois, Virginia and Washington state. The company also owns Whole Foods, which was purchased for $13.7 billion.
In recent years, the company has been overhauling Amazon Fresh, laying off workers at the stores, closing some stores and revamping others. It’s also changed its design of the smart Dash Cart, reeling in its tech complexity.
The company reopened three Fresh stores in the month of November. Golden, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company is now focused on “selectively” opening new Fresh stores and remodeling the majority of its existing stores.
Just Walk Out technology will continue to be offered in Amazon Go stores and some smaller Amazon Fresh stores in the U.K., the company said. In addition, it will continue to offer the technology to third-party retailers.
Digital Transformation of the Grocery Industry: How Digital Self-Checkout Can Lead to Consumer Trust Problems and Thermodynamics
The tech is also expensive and complex. The large store has a smart computer vision, and it proved unreasonable to fit every facet of it. People behind the scenes help machines learn to interpret video and clarify uncertainties.
“The accuracy expectations from the consumer on this are unbelievably high,” Hariharan says. “Is it 100% accurate, 100% of the time? If it’s not, then it starts to lead to consumer trust issues.”
Dash Carts have been rolled out to a number of Whole Foods stores but they have not commented on when or whether they would become a ubiquitous feature. Smaller companies offer smart carts, and they would face competition from the high-tech carts.
All this, of course, depends on shoppers’ learning curve with new technology, says Uttara Ananthakrishnan, who teaches about the digital transformation of the grocery industry at Carnegie Mellon University.
Retailers are rethinking their approach to self-checkout because it’s prone to theft. Ananthakrishnan says grocery stores are a particularly hard place to introduce new tech.
“There is so much product variety. Not every thing has a code. A lot of things need to be weighed,” she says. “And then you kind of place the onus on the customers, and a lot of people don’t like that.”
The marvel did not draw crowds. Shoppers said they were so tired passing through entry gates that they felt like they were invisible. Amazon said people wanted to see the running tally of prices and discounts before they left.
“This is a failure; however, let’s not forget that Amazon’s success is built on failures,” says Guru Hariharan, CEO of CommerceIQ and a former Amazon manager. “That’s the ironic part of it.”
The company doesn’t accept that term, though that is an admission of defeat. Amazon Go convenience stores and dozens of other smaller shops will still use the technology.
Early shoppers were interested in the idea of grabbing stuff off a grocery shelf and walking off with it, tracked by cameras that will calculate the receipt.
