Amazon GO | The Future of Supermarket

Amazon Go

In the recent years, supermarkets/convenience stores have been replacing traditional grocery stores and are gaining a lot of popularity among the advancing society. These stores feature least human interaction and more freedom to the buyers. Guess what would be even better than this…

The global e-commerce giant Amazon has come up with the Amazon Go Stores.
What is the Amazon Go Store? How does it work? Is the Amazon store open to public yet? Keep reading to find out what we have to say.

Amazon Go is a chain of convenience stores in the US. They offer ready-to-eat food and snacks and also groceries ranging from bread and milk to locally made chocolates. The special thing about it is, you don’t have to wait in the line in order to pay for your purchases.

 

All you need to do is have an amazon account and Amazon Go app installed on your phone. Use the QR code generated in the app to enter into the store through the turnstiles, pick up what you need and walk out of the store. No waiting in lines (You may call it Amazon Grab and go).

The amazon account in the app is the primary method of payment alongside cash payments allowed in some locations. The app also allows addition of other users to one user’s Amazon account, in order to charge a family's purchases to the same bill. 

Now for the How It Works part, here is how amazon go stores work.

The checkout free shopping is made possible using some of the high end technologies like computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning. Camera continuity technologies keep track of the customer's movements, activities, what they pick up and also what they put back. (In case they were just looking at the product). This is made possible by the number of cameras and trackers mounted on the ceiling of the store. 

There are visual cues imprinted on some products to be detected by the cameras. The store shelves are equipped with weight sensors to detect what product the customer picked. Sensor fusion automates most of the purchase, payment and checkout steps in the transaction.

As of now, there are 18 Amazon stores established across the US in the cities Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco and New York City. The first one established in the amazon tower, Seattle back in the December of 2016, was open to only amazon employees. Then it became open to public on January 22, 2018.

Along with all the benefits the Amazon go provides, there are many flaws in the system too. There have been attempts of shoplifting in the stores and Amazon doesn’t seem to care about these as of now. There have also been issues where picked items are not being billed sometimes due to inaccuracy of the sensors. Also all the unemployment automation causes is in debate. 

Even though as of now, the system isn’t reliable enough to keep it entirely automated, it isn’t a long term problem. The public rollout of the first amazon go establishment was delayed due to the sensor's inability to track many number of users and objects in the store or if items are moved to the shelves they didn’t belong to. As of now, the Amazon go stores work up to the mark  and rely on human assistance once in a while.