Amazon Go Opens As World's 1st Offline Supermarket With No Cash Counter Or Billing Lines
23 January, 2018
Amazon has been planning its futuristic store for five years now, and it’s finally ready to be unveiled.
Amazon Go, which the company began teasing in earnest in 2016, is the first brick-and-mortar convenience store from Amazon, minus the checkout lines and cashiers.
It opens to the public today, on the ground floor of Amazon’s new headquarters in Seattle. The store is positively brimming, with cameras, depth sensors, and other sensor arrays, all working towards a single purpose; so that you can just walk in and take what you like without having to stop to generate a bill.
On the surface, Amazon Go just looks like a chromed-up version of a regular supermarket. But underneath that, it’s powered by the same technology behind self-driving cars; computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning, and the online shopping you’re so familiar with.
You need the Amazon Go app to even enter the store, scanning a QR code on your smartphone to be let past the barricade. Once in the store, you can walk to any section and grab whatever you feel like, a salad, a drink, a meal, or whatever else, and just walk right out. No scanning your phone anywhere else, tapping to make a payment via NFC, or even punching in a credit card number. Instead, the cameras and sensors track whatever items you’ve picked up and taken out of the store, and automatically charge them to your Amazon account.
To enter, just scan the code in your Amazon Go app on the terminal - Reuters
Not only does that make payments so much easier, it also means no waiting in line to have your items scanned, and no awkward conversation with the cashier about all the junk food you’re buying. And true to form, there aren’t any of those at Amazon Go, but there are a few employees on hand. One to check IDs in the alcohol section, a greeter at the entrance, cooks in the meal section’s kitchen, and a couple of others to help shoppers locate what they need.
As it stands right now, the technology works like a dream, but the real test will come when Amazon Go faces heavy shopping days, with lots of customers crowding the store. Whether the cameras and sensors can still identify what each person is buying will be the most important question. And if it can, we might just have our next supermarket chain on our hands. Or at the very least, technology Amazon will lease to others worldwide.
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