According to Bloomberg, Amazon plans to open up to 3,000 automated supermarkets by 2021 without cash registers, sellers and queues. The company opened its first automated supermarket Go in Seattle, Washington at the end of 2016. A month earlier, a second such supermarket appeared in the same Seattle. The third was opened last week in Chicago.
The company plans to open another store in Chicago, and then in San Francisco in 2018-2019, according to media reports that have reviewed the vacancies. In general, by the end of the year, Amazon is going to open 10 stores, another 50 in various cities - next year, the rest, according to the plan, will open throughout the country in the period 2020-2021.
To get into such a store, a person needs to install a free application on his mobile device, and then bring the gadget to the reader at the entrance. After that, you can simply select the product you like and add it to the basket. A system of smart sensors and scanners installed throughout the store will determine the product and its value, and will also add the product to the account "basket". When leaving the store, the total cost of the purchased goods will be automatically debited from the buyer's account. You can refuse to buy a product simply by putting it back on the shelf. The whole process is similar to going to a regular supermarket, if you do not take into account the lack of cash registers, as well as the fact that a huge number of cameras will monitor the buyer.
How purchases are made in such stores can be seen in the video below:
According to the company's website, such supermarkets use the same technologies as self-driving cars. We are talking about computer vision and data processing from various scanners and sensors. Deep learning is also used.
Nikolay Khizhnyak