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A Cashier-Less Future Is Coming to a Store Near You
Retailers are skipping queues for convenience, but at what cost?
When Amazon launched its first cashier-less store in 2016 — a ‘just walk out’ store as the company prefers — it blew people’s minds. Was it an end to the dreaded supermarket queue? The ability to walk into a store, do your shopping, and leave without standing in a queue to pay seemed like nothing short of magic. While you should never reveal a magician’s secrets, in reality, this trick is lots of cameras and sensors that track the movement of items into a customer’s trolley, which has been activated by a QR code linked to their Amazon account. Still, the technology is impressive. By combining a variety of computer vision, sensor fusion and deep machine learning, the system worked near flawlessly. It correctly identifies items almost 99.9% of the time, and can even detect when a customer changes there mind and places an item back on the shelf.
The experiment was such a success that Amazon began rolling out more cashier-less stores. By 2020, there were over 25 in the US and plans to roll out 3000 stores over 2021, though Covid impacted that growth. The company was looking further afield, too; it announced that 10 Amazon Fresh convenience stores — again, till-free — would be opening in…
