Amazon expands shopping in “Just Walk Out” stores

Amazon continues its run of brick-and-mortar stores by integrating cashier-free “Just Walk Out” technology into two new Whole Foods supermarkets opening next year, one in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington, DC, the other in Sherman Oaks in California. The “Just Walk Out” mode allows you to enter the store by scanning an app and exit without going through the cash desks. Cameras and sensors track the items removed from the shelves and automatically make the billing at the exit, crediting it to the connected payment method. In the two new Whole Foods stores, customers will have various options to skip the line at the checkout: the QR Code of their app, the insertion of the credit card linked to the Amazon account, or the scanning of the palm of the hand with the proprietary system of Amazon, Amazon One. This latest technology, introduced last fall, uses the user’s biometric data by linking it to a payment or choice card. Once the handprint is associated with the card, you can pay simply by placing your palm on the dedicated scanner. Faced with privacy concerns, Amazon reiterated the great security and data protection provided by the handprint compared to other data biometric. Not only does it respect privacy better when compared to facial recognition but, they say from Amazon, it is impossible to trace the identity from the palm of a hand if the data is encrypted and can be removed at the user’s request at any time. But there will also be the possibility of shopping in the traditional way, without being tracked inside the store and passing the items to the automatic checkouts or customer service. The novelty is not so much in the technology, already tested in various stores of the Amazon Go Fresh chain, and not even in the uniqueness. Other chains are also debuting cashierless stores. Just in these days in Dubai Carrefour has opened a mini-market, Carrefour City +, which works exactly the same way: it is accessed with the app, the sensors detect purchases taken from the shelves and at the exit they are charged to the connected credit card Here, however, Amazon plays bigger, greatly increasing the scale. In fact, until now, use in regular-sized supermarkets had been difficult due to the problems of tracking purchases. This reopens the conflict with the trade unions, which for some time have warned against the use of technologies that aim to eliminate the human element. Amazon on its website counters by talking about the quality of work: if the machines perform the most repetitive tasks, the human employees can devote themselves to other things. And he points out: “These stores will employ roughly the same number of people as existing Whole Foods supermarkets of the same size. The way they will spend their working hours simply shifts to tasks that are more focused on interacting with the customer and packaging a better shopping experience. “