Amazon is now testing a store in Seattle where customers can walk in, take food off of the shelves and leave, without the hassle of having to wait in line. This new service is called AmazonGo, and it uses Amazon’s “Just Walk Out Technology”.
Is this the result from Lean, checkout waste removal? Or Design Thinking of the most hassle free store experience?
How does Amazon Go work?
This checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. This technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, they’ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.
How big is the store?
The current store in Seattle is roughly 1,800 square feet of retail space and designed so busy customers can get in and out fast.
Disruption yet again, but now for the big foodretailers like Ahold, Walmart, Tesco, Carrefour, Costco.
No more handheld scanners or phones and no more checkouts
Tesco homeplus supermarket experimented in 2011 with a campaign designed by the Seoul branch of advertising agency Cheil. It was a virtual grocery store in a South Korea subway station, permitting users to shop using their smartphones. A large, wall-length billboard was installed in the station, designed to look like a series of supermarket shelves and displaying images and prices of a range of common products. each sign also includes a QR code. Users could scan the code of any product they would like to purchase, thereby adding it to their online shopping cart. After the web transaction was completed, the products were delivered to the user’s home within the day. This strategy made productive use of commuters’ waiting time, while simultaneously saving shoppers time spent going to the supermarket.
Food retail will be an interesting area to watch with Amazon Go throwing their innovative IT in the mix.
