Did you know adults waste 32.89 days of their lives standing in grocery store lines? Have you ever wished that you didn’t have to wait in line at the grocery store? Who hasn’t! Now, thanks to cutting-edge technology, your wish has come true – depending on where you live and decide to shop. However, the trend will likely spread worldwide very quickly.
Amazon Go started the trend by opening the first queue-less convenience store with ‘just walk out’ technology on January 22, 2018, in Seattle, Washington, United States. If you shop there, you don’t even need to scan the items you want or interact with people or machines in any way – you just walk in, grab what you want, put it in your bag, and leave.
Following Amazon’s lead, Sam’s Club, 7-11, Tesco (GetGo), Sainsbury (Pick & Go), and Aldi (Shop & Go) also opened branches offering this convenient shopping experience. In addition, it saves the supermarket money on staff costs and could potentially be a source of revenue via data sales. Some BP gas stations are also retrofitting shops in Pennsylvania and California in partnership with Grabango to be ready by mid-2022.
You’re probably wondering, “How does it work?” The store relies on cameras, machine learning, and shelf technology that involves motion detectors and weight sensors. All these elements work in tandem to track the items you (the customer) pick up and take away.
There’s only one step you are required to do beforehand; download the app linked to the company’s store and register. From then on, you can scan yourself in to get through the gates at the door. From that point on, you can shop as you usually would, and the app tallies every item you take, and payment is contactless and automatic. Then, when you leave the shop, the app sends you a receipt via email.
While there may not be any cashiers anymore, these stores aren’t human-less. There is staff ready to help answer any questions or solve any problems you may have. The alcoholic sections of these shops also have someone there to check the ID of people that look younger than 25 years old. In Amazon Go, Alexa devices are also available to help you find what you need or report a problem with the technology.
Checkout-free technology is making its debut right as the world starts reopening the economy. Citizens are more than ready to attend events, shop, and travel again. However, there is still a risk of infection, and people are more cautious overall about what they touch and how many people they come in contact with. Checkout-free stores are ideal because they make it easy to adhere to social distancing and the buying procedure is contactless. The post-pandemic future of retail is cashier-less.
Meanwhile, there’s another advancement in shopping designed to make the experience frictionless: dash carts available at Amazon stores and offered alongside checkout-less shopping. These high-tech shopping carts are fully automated and very efficient. It uses sensors and cameras to keep a tab of everything you put in or take out of the cart. Shopping in this mode, you scan your QR code to activate the cart. In addition, the cart has a monitor to see your bill and track your spending. It’s exact and helpful.
We covered last year the idea is like the smart shopping cart concept Mobi by designers Choi Chan Young, Park Chan Woo, and Lee Eun Ji, from Seoul, Korea. The team developed Mobi to avoid the unpleasant, enclosed environments of a shopping experience during the pandemic.
Like Amazon’s dash carts, Mobi eliminates unnecessary processes and makes shopping efficient, fast, and fun. However, Mobi even follows you around, so you don’t have to push it, and it automatically returns to the docking station that’s also a charging point.
This innovative shopping cart is great for anyone, especially for customers with locomotion deficiencies. If it’s challenging to push a cart, an invention such as Mobi would be a dream come true! But unfortunately, the device is still just a concept.
