USA
In Amazon’s supermarkets, AI replaced the cashiers – now the principle is being abandoned
Amazon Fresh: The internet giant’s supermarkets often manage without a cash register – until now
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In Amazon supermarkets you took the goods off the shelf – and then just left. Payment was made automatically. Now the company is making a U-turn.
It should be a completely new shopping experience: Als Amazon opened the first stores in its Amazon Fresh grocery division, which brought with them a revolutionary concept – and completely dispensed with checkouts. But the company was apparently too optimistic about the technological implementation: instead of being fully automatic, the system only worked thanks to an army of Indian unskilled workers. Now the whole concept is being thrown overboard in supermarkets.
The responsible Amazon manager Tony Hoggett told “The Information”. The previous concept of the stores was based on a principle that Amazon called “Just Walk Out”. Customers could simply take the goods from the shelf and they would be automatically debited from their Amazon account when they left the store. The systems will now be dismantled with a renovation of the existing stores, says Hoggett.
Just Walk Out: Supermarkets without checkouts
The checkoutless supermarket was at the core of Amazon’s plan to reimagine retail. Instead of queuing and having products scanned one by one, customers should be able to concentrate entirely on the shopping experience. Billing was done via an Amazon account, which you had to register with at the entrance. It was an attempt to bring the benefits of online shopping to retail.
But Amazon was apparently too optimistic in its expectations of technical progress. The stores actually rely on AI and a lot of sensor technology in the store to recognize customers and their purchases. But even years after the first store opened at Amazon headquarters in 2016, things were apparently anything but satisfactory. Instead of letting everything happen automatically, more than 1,000 Amazon employees in India have to constantly check the camera recordings to rule out errors.
High error rate
And not just in exceptional cases: out of 1,000 purchases, 700 have to be checked manually, “The Information” reported last year. Amazon had actually expected to be able to reduce the rate to below 50 out of 1,000 purchases with AI improvements. However, Amazon contradicted this representation to “Gizmodo”, only speaking of a small number of purchases for which a human review was necessary.
However, the report would definitely explain the discontinuation of the offer. If so many checks were actually necessary, in practice the cashier would simply have been relocated to India, while at the same time having to operate an extremely expensive infrastructure. This also makes it easier to understand an annoyance for customers: According to numerous reports, the billing often only appeared in the inbox hours after the purchase, making it impossible to check in the store. If the invoices were actually only created and released after human review, this delay would be easy to explain.
Amazon is rebuilding
The shops are now being converted to compensate for these disadvantages. Instead of having to recognize the goods when you take them out of the shelf, Amazon’s smart shopping cart now detects them when you put them in. This is no longer a real revolution in the USA: shopping carts there are already often equipped with scanners that customers can use to scan the goods themselves as they walk through the store.
Compared to this technology, Amazon’s approach only has one small advantage: the cart scans the products itself using a laser network, and a scale in the floor records the weight at the same time. A small display on the push bar then shows the total value of the purchase. This is reported by a Reddit user from Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, whose supermarket has already been converted.
However, Amazon does not want to completely give up its automation technology: the Just Walk-Out systems will continue to be retained in the smaller Amazon Go stores and the British branches of Amazon Fresh. They also want to license them to third-party businesses, says Hoggett.
(Not) a new superiority
Amazon sees the foray into retail as the most important way to enter the lucrative food market. The group has been trying to gain a foothold here for years and took over the US supermarket chain Wholefoods in 2017. However, the Internet giant is having a harder time than expected. Amazon boss Andy Jassy explained in a letter to investors last year that they are still looking for “the right formula” to conquer retail. The US grocery market has changed significantly in recent years due to the triumph of discounters; Aldi in particular is enormously successful with thousands of stores.
Amazon, on the other hand, has been more likely to close stores recently. In order to appeal to more non-Amazon customers, the company wants to take its revolution one step further back, Hogett explained to “The Information”: They will again offer the option of paying without an account. At a classic checkout.
Sources:The Information, Gizmodo, ABC, Reddit