|
Opinion
|
| Amazon opens cashless supermarket without tills where customers ‘just walk out’:-Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith | | | |  Amazon has officially opened its first cashless supermarket, Amazon Go, where tills have been replaced with turnstiles that scan people’s phones to charge for grocery items. The store has opened on the bottom floor of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. Shoppers must scan their Amazon Go smartphone app at a turnstile when entering the store, pick up their items from the shelves, and “just walk out”, according the brand’s messaging. Cashless but not without staff By combining computer vision, machine learning algorithms and sensors, Amazon is able to tell what people have picked up from a shelf and charges the items to their credit card when they leave the store. If someone puts an item back, the system recognises it and the customer is not charged. While the supermarket is cashless it is not without staff.
Amazon said there will be people in place to help customers, stock shelves and make food as the company will be offering ready-to-eat breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks. It will also sell Amazon Meal Kits, which contain ingredients and recipes for particular dishes, and grocery staples such as bread, milk, cheese, and chocolates. The tech company announced plans for the artificial intelligence-powered store over a year ago but the roll out of the concept has been delayed while Amazon ironed out glitches with the technology. Fixing glitches The store has been opened to Amazon employees since December 2016, but problems arose with technology when it became confused by shoppers who had similar body types and children who picked up items from one shelf and put it back on another, the BBC reported. But vice-president of Amazon Go Gianna Puerini said the supermarket worked well during its test phase due to the four years of work put into the technology. “This technology didn’t exist,” she said. “It was really advancing the state of the art computer vision and machine learning.”
| | | | |
|
|
| |
| |
|
|