(PCM) Amazon has recently revealed that they are currently in the testing phase for a completely new type of shopping experience. The company unveiled Amazon Go which will act much the same as your typical brick and mortar grocery store, however there is one major difference. There will be absolutely no check-out process. Pretty much you just walk in, grab the stuff you want and walk out. Sounds pretty nice, right? We can only imagine a store with no lines and no cashiers. It is definitely going to be the retail model for the future, so long as Amazon is able to work out all the kinks.
Thus far there is only one working location operating in a beta phase in Amazon’s home base of Seattle, Washington. The 1800 square foot location has all the grocery store basics such as bread, milk, cheese, prepared snacks and fresh meals. The company claims that you will only need the Amazon Go app to enter the store and then just start shopping, it’s really that simple. Currently, Amazon Go is available only to Amazon employees in the beta testing phase, with the public launch date set for early 2017. The company says they plan to open nearly 2,000 store across the country if the testing turns out to be a success. In fact, they are even looking at drive-thru shopping options as well.
Amazon is calling the technology “Just Walk Out Shopping” and it supposedly uses computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning to allow the shopping process to work properly. The store will be equipped with multiple cameras and use RFID technology to be able to tell just what items a customer is picking up. We had questions such as what would happen if we accidentally dropped a jar of spaghetti sauce and it broke, would we still be charged? Also, what happens if we changed our mind about an item and placed it back in the wrong section of the store? More than likely Amazon has answers for these scenarios, but we will just have to wait to see how it plays out.
Wired Magazine questioned some retail experts about the plausibility of Amazon’s supposed plan for Amazon Go Stores and they claim that “Amazon’s advertised system is entirely plausible given the state of artificial intelligence, RFID, sensor and machine learning technologies today.” It appears they must have found a way to put all the pieces together in the correct way to make this work smoothly and efficiently. It is mind-blowing!
Check out the video below: