NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Ecommerce giant Amazon expanded its no-checkout concept to its first “full-sized” supermarket Tuesday, in its headquarters city of Seattle, enabling shoppers to scan an app upon entering, pull products off of shelves and “just walk out,” with hundreds of cameras and numerous sensors having recorded everywhere the shoppers went in the store and everything they put into their shopping carts. A card on file in the app is charged as the customers leave.
While millions of retail cashiers in the U.S., not to mention contactless POS terminal salespersons and many others in the ecosystem, don’t have to worry about their jobs just yet given how expensive the checkout-free technology is, Amazon, a trillion-dollar retailing colossus, appears intent on seeing it deployed widely. Besides expected plans to continue to open more of its own Amazon Go Grocery stories, the company also reportedly plans to license the technology to other retailers.
The new 10,000-square-foot (929 m2) cashier-less supermarket Amazon opened Tuesday is small by American standards, but is at least four times larger than the two dozen convenience stores the company rolled out with the concept over the past two years in Seattle, New York, Chicago and San Francisco.
