Ten seconds to pay! This is what Carrefour promises via its new Carrefour Flash 10/10 store which opens this Thursday morning in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. Here, you go in and select your products like anywhere else. It is at the time of payment that the magic operates: no need to take the items out of your bag, you just have to stand in front of a tablet and it displays its content directly. Goodbye, therefore, the scanning step at the checkout. You validate your basket on the screen and you pay in contactless directly on the tablet, or on an automatic checkout.
To find out which products have been selected, 60 cameras observe the customer from the walls and the ceiling, using technology developed with the Californian start-up AiFi. An algorithm then represents the customer in the form of dots and lines, like a little stick man, who can be followed in the store, all the way to the checkout. Nearly 2,000 weight sensors placed on the shelves complete the system, to define exactly which products have been taken.
Above all, do not go shopping with your children
“The system is estimated to be 96% accurate,” explains Miguel Angel González Gisbert, director of technology and data for the Carrefour group. Small panels explain the rules to avoid mistakes: if you come in a group, it is the one who pays who must take the products and you must avoid passing the products from hand to hand, or the system may run out of products. .
In this new store, which was previously a Carrefour Express, there is no cashier or cashier. The four employees have been trained for three weeks in the technology and are now responsible for correcting the baskets in the event of a problem, advising customers and maintaining the premises. If you want to buy alcohol, it’s up to them to validate that you are of legal age. Otherwise, the order is automatically blocked. The employees are also in charge of the store’s other services, such as the pedestrian drive.
Carrefour Flash 10/10 has already been tested for a year at the group’s headquarters in Massy. This first store open to the public constitutes a new test phase for the group, which has not yet planned to develop it elsewhere in France.