Customers in Amazon‘s “regular” Fresh supermarkets will soon be able to walk out without having to go through checkout. The e-commerce giant plans to roll out its Amazon Go technology at other locations as well.
Cameras and gates
All the signs indicate that Amazon plans to build a new Fresh supermarket in Connecticut in the US, but one with a striking novelty: the branch will be equipped with the “Just Walk Out” technology pioneered by Jeff Bezos’ company in its Amazon Go convenience stores. The till-less stores use sensors and camera recognition to scan and check out their customers automatically.
Until now, this exciting technology has not been present in the more than 12 larger Fresh supermarkets – of which at least 37 are still under construction in the US alone – but that is about to change. Licensing plans show at least a dozen different entrance and exit gates, as well as rails on the ceiling for hanging cameras. Until now, this kind of setup was only found at Amazon Go, tips Bloomberg.
However, tracking dozens of customers at once in large stores of thousands of square metres poses a serious challenge, both technically and in terms of cost. A convenience store could do with about 20 cameras, but a full-fledged supermarket would need exponentially more cameras and servers. Competitors and start-ups working on similar solutions admit that they are still a year or two away from an actual rollout.
Years of preparation
Is Amazon ahead of its competitors by any means? Even when the company was still opening only small convenience stores, engineers were asked to build a version of the technology that would be scalable to stores of 2,500 or more, according to Bloomberg. The plans in Connecticut nevertheless also show a range of conventional cash registers, giving customers a choice. Amazon’s name is not mentioned in the plans, “but the similarities between the documents and others the company has submitted across the country leave little doubt as to who will be the tenant”.
Currently, Amazon is already working with smart shopping carts in its Fresh supermarkets, the Dash “smart cart”, which automatically scans whatever customers put in it. Last year, the company also announced Amazon One, which enables customers to – literally – pay with their palms. The science fiction-like technology is now being trialled with thousands of volunteers in its home city of Seattle.
