Cashierless Stores Are Coming As Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” Goes Mainstream
In early 2020, Amazon unveiled its first full-size, cashierless grocery at Capitol Hill, Seattle. Amazon Go built upon the successes of the tech giant’s earlier concept, which until then were only the size of convenience stores. Its groundbreaking technology Just Walk Out has been in the works since 2015, and allows shoppers to quite literally “walk out” with their items. This concept is powered by IoT, which we also mentioned as a central technology in our piece on Amazon Sidewalk.
This year, Amazon stepped up their game by slashing this technology’s implementation costs by 96% compared to 2017. With this, they’ve been able to branch out across the country and even worldwide with a myriad of locations and partnerships.
As Just Walk Out becomes more mainstream and even gains some competitors, market analysts are predicting that it will revolutionize the shopping experience. But how exactly does it work, and what does it mean for the future of cashierless stores?
Cameras and sensors run the show
Just Walk Out is fully designed to be a simple and hassle-free experience. Upon entering an Amazon Go or Fresh store, you need to either scan a QR code with the Amazon app or insert an Amazon account-linked debit or credit card into the slot.
Among the aisles, you’ll find Alexa kiosks that can help you find what you need and even tell you about ongoing in-store deals. Once you actually pick something up off the shelves, printed circuit boards with high signal integrity help sensor-enabled shelving and overhead cameras collaborate. These sensors help identify items, recall their price, and charge them to your Amazon app. You can then walk out expecting a receipt to be sent to your email.
However, this doesn’t mean stores with this technology have phased out manual jobs completely. There are still options to check out via cashier, and staff is there to help you package meats and fresh produce. These positions are also well paid, with wages starting at $15 an hour — for more than the current federal average of $7.25.
The future of shopping?
Amazon has been so successful with Just Walk Out that it’s been rolled out in various locations in the past year alone. Amazon Go and Fresh stores are now open in California, Illinois, Washington DC, and even in the UK and Germany. At all these locations, 2 to 3 more stores are set to be opened up nearby in the next year.
For the most part, this is thanks to partnerships Amazon cemented with brands like Whole Foods, Starbucks, and even UK supermarket giant Sainsbury’s. Competing chains have begun to take notice. In the UK alone, Tesco, Aldi, and Morrisons are all working on similar cashierless concepts. Among these, Tesco has already launched GetGo stores that also use cameras and on-shelf weight sensors to track purchases.
Today’s surveys reveal that, due to the pandemic, increasingly more consumers now prefer contactless shopping. Amazon is feeding into that demand by offering a seamless experience that has an edge over traditional methods while still creating jobs. Competitors are working to keep up, and even startups like the New Zealand-based Imagr are innovating on the concept by centralizing all item identification in sensor-equipped grocery carts. With this, it’s only clear that cashierless stores aren’t the future, but the now — a now being led by Amazon itself.