The smart shopping carts are the new bet
Just Walk Out Technology in Amazon Fresh Grocery Stores: Towards Opening New Stores in the UK and in the U.S.
The company’s well-known technology lets customers pay for items without standing in line and sends them receipts afterwards. Amazon says it will now be replaced by smart carts that allow customers to skip the checkout line but also see their spending in real time.
Amazon got into the game late with launches of Amazon Go minimarts, Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh grocery stores. There are now more than 40 Fresh stores, and just over half use the “just walk out” technology.
In the past few years, some of the company’s stores have been shuttered and workers laid off. It’s also changed its design of the smart Dash Cart, reeling in its tech complexity.
In November, the company reopened three Fresh stores in Los Angeles, California. Golden said that Amazon is now focused on opening fresh stores and remodeling a majority of its existing stores.
The Just Walk Out technology will continue to be offered in Amazon Go stores and some smaller Amazon Fresh stores in the UK. It will continue to offer the technology to third-party retailers.
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The tech is expensive and complex. The fitting of every part of the store was not reasonable. And it still required some human involvement, with people behind the scenes helping machines learn to interpret video and clarify uncertainties.
The consumer expectations of accurateness are high, says Hariharan. Is it correct, 100% of the time? If it’s not, then it starts to lead to consumer trust issues.”
The Dash Carts are only available in a few Whole Foods stores, but they’re not saying when or if they’ll become ubiquitous. The small companies were competing with 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.
Lately, retailers have been reconsidering their approach to self-checkout because it’s prone to thefts and mistakes by shoppers. Ananthakrishnan says it is difficult to introduce new tech in grocery stores.
“There is so much product variety. Not everything 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 felt tired as they passed through entry gates and were tracked. Amazon says people also wanted to see the running tally of prices and discounts as they shopped — not later, after leaving.
“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. It’s the ironic part of it.
That’s a big admission of defeat, though certainly the company does not accept that term. The technology will still live on at Amazon Go convenience stores and dozens of other smaller shops at airports, arenas, amusement parks and hospitals.
“Just Walk Out” is considered one of Amazon’s gee-whiz technologies, as early shoppers were taken aback by how easy it was to grab stuff off the shelf and simply leave.
