Amazon Go: Shopping with no cash, cards or even a checkout

JAMES DEAN
AUGUST 29, 2018
THE TIMES
There is a small shop in central Seattle where customers walk in, drop their eggs, bread, milk and whatever else into a brown paper bag and walk out without paying a cent. There are no checkouts, no cashiers. This is Amazon Go, the grocery store of the not-too-distant future. The shop, at the base of the Day 1 building of Amazon’s headquarters, is the first of its kind.
I began by downloading the Amazon Go app on my iPhone and linking it to my Amazon account. I opened the app to display a barcode and held the screen to a scanner by the gate at the store entrance. There was a beep, a green light flashed and the gate opened.
The store resembles a posh inner-city mini-supermarket. Just inside are neatly stocked shelves of chocolates, sweets, protein bars and other snacks; bottled water, fruit juices and fizzy drinks; salads, sandwiches and pasta. Further through the store are cheese, yoghurt, fruit, jam, coffee, tea and other staples. There are pizzas, ice cream and ready meals in the frozen food section. Alcohol is at the back.
Fairly unremarkable, then — until you look up to see hundreds of cameras and sensors on the ceiling, which track shoppers from the moment they enter the store to the moment they leave.
The premise is simple: fill your bag with whatever you want and Amazon will bill you after you leave, making checkout lines — and, perhaps, America’s 3.6 million cashiers — a thing of the past. The technology — a blend of cameras, motion sensors and advanced artificial intelligence — is rather more complicated. Still, the question remained: would it work?
I dropped an energy bar, crunchy peanut butter flavour, into my bag. I picked up a packet of Haribo gummy bears, waggled it around as I walked around the store, then placed it back on the shelf, wondering whether my artificially intelligent observer had noticed.
Next was a tub of cubed steak, which I snatched from the shelf and buried at the bottom of the bag. Then there was a couscous salad, a bag of Kettle chips, a bagel, a peach yoghurt, a tub of mixed fruit and a bottle of Vitaminwater. To make doubly sure that the sentient shop could distinguish between products, I finished off by dropping another energy bar, white chocolate macadamia flavour, into the bag. The automatic gate opened with a whirr and I strolled out into the streets of Seattle. The feeling was not unlike stepping out of an Uber taxi for the first time and wondering whether the driver would get paid. The feeling passed five minutes later when my iPhone buzzed and a message popped up. My credit card had been charged and my digital receipt was ready for inspection. All was present and correct.
Precisely how Amazon Go works remains a secret. In broad terms, it combines the same computer vision, sensory and artificial intelligence systems that are used in self-driving cars.
When a shopper scans in, Amazon Go creates a virtual shopping basket. Cameras and sensors feed data about the shopper to a computer that tracks them around the store. When they bag an item, the computer works out what it is and places it into their virtual shopping basket. If the shopper puts the item back, the computer removes it from the basket. When the shopper leaves, the system performs an automatic checkout and sends the customer an electronic receipt.
The system tracks multiple shoppers at the same time. It also learns from its successes and mistakes as it goes. As always with Amazon, reams of data from each visit is saved and analysed, helping the company to tweak its in-store experience and learn more about what its customers like to buy.
It appears the experiment is bearing fruit. On Monday, Amazon Go opened its second store a few blocks south of the first.