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The first Amazon Fresh grocery store in London opens in 2021. The company is replacing its “Just Walk Out” technology with smart shopping carts in its US stores, but is leaving it in the UK.
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The first Amazon Fresh grocery store in London opens in 2021. The company is replacing its “Just Walk Out” technology with smart shopping carts in its US stores, but is leaving it in the UK.
Leon Neal/Getty Images
When it comes to Amazon's technological genius, “Just Walk Out” is in the pantheon. Early shoppers were amazed at the concept of simply picking up an item from a grocery shelf and leaving, being tracked by a camera that tallied the final receipt.
Amazon has invested big money to push its emerging grocery business past competitors and transform the industry in the process.
The technology is now being removed from Amazon Fresh stores in the US. (It's staying in the UK.) Many experts wondered why it took so long. The experiment clearly did not spread widely. The ‘Just Walk Out’ revolution didn’t come to the industry, let alone Amazon’s own Whole Foods.
Certainly the company doesn't accept that term, but that's a huge admission of defeat. The technology will continue to be used in Amazon Go convenience stores and dozens of other small stores in airports, stadiums, amusement parks and hospitals.
But Amazon's ambitions for cashier-less grocery stores are only changing shape, even as the retailer scales back efforts to automate the entire supermarket experience. Now it's expected that smart shopping carts could change the way we shop for food.
“This is a failure,” says Guru Hariharan, CEO of CommerceIQ and a former Amazon manager. “But don’t forget that Amazon’s success was built on failure.” “That’s the ironic part.”
Technology hasn't yet helped Amazon win the grocery race.
Grocery, a multibillion-dollar market that requires physical stores, has long been Amazon's final frontier.
The retailer got into the game late, opening Amazon Go minimarts in 2016, acquiring Whole Foods in 2017, and launching Amazon Fresh grocery stores in 2020. There are now more than 40 Fresh stores, more than half using “Just Walk Out” technology.
The wonder did not attract crowds. Shoppers often said they were tired of walking through doors and being tracked by omnipresent cameras and sensors. Amazon said it wants to see a running tally of prices and discounts as people shop and later after they leave.
![Amazon may have found its match in the grocery store.](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2023/07/28/amaon-fresh-ap_sq-b8e129f9828f1b9ca57013e3ed43f45874ff1ec0-s100.jpg)
The technology is also expensive and complicated. Equipping every nook and cranny of a large store with smart computer vision has proven unreasonable. And it still required human intervention, with people behind the scenes helping the machines learn how to interpret the video and disambiguate uncertainty.
“Consumer expectations for this are incredibly high,” says Hariharan. “Is it 100% accurate, 100% accurate? Otherwise it starts to lead to consumer trust issues.”
Enter your smart shopping cart
The smart shopping cart provided Amazon with a scaled-down technology solution.
In recent years, the company has overhauled Amazon Fresh, laid off store employees, closed some stores and renovated others. Additionally, the design of the smart Dash Cart has changed due to technological complexity.
Carts are now essentially self-checkout machines on wheels. Shoppers can hold products on a built-in scanner, weigh produce on a scale, and display real-time updates on their receipt via a touch screen.
Amazon has rolled out Dash Carts in a small number of Whole Foods stores, but hasn't said when or where they will be available. High-tech carts will face competition from several smaller companies offering smart carts.
![Retailers complained about theft last year. Why not now?](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2024/03/07/ap24023011288391_sq-1f1dcc4b53b3a47452ce515e027bd8a646c4d9ed-s100.jpg)
Amazon could potentially sell its cashier-less carts to many retailers, including competing grocers. And Hariharan saw a big financial opportunity in marketing through the shopping cart screen, as advertising became one of the fastest-growing businesses on Amazon.
Of course, it all depends on shoppers' learning curve of new technologies, says Uttara Ananthakrishnan, who lectures on digital transformation in the grocery industry at Carnegie Mellon University.
Recently, retailers are rethinking their approach to self-checkout, which can be prone to theft and mistakes by shoppers. Ananthakrishnan says grocery stores are particularly difficult places to adopt new technology.
“There are so many different products. Not all of them have codes. There are a lot of products to weigh,” she says. “Then you put the onus on the customer, and a lot of people don’t like that.”
Editor's note: Amazon is one of NPR's financial supporters.