Amazon Go

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The first Amazon go store.

Amazon Go is an American supermarket chain owned by the US group Amazon , whose stores do not need cash registers or self-service tills. After selecting the goods, customers leave the shop without a checkout process, the items purchased are recorded by sensors and cameras and automatically calculated after leaving the shop. Currently (as of 2020) 26 branches are in operation.

The first store, located on Seattle's 7th Avenue , opened to employees in December 2016 and to the public in January 2018. Food, “meal kits”, limited food and spirits are available for purchase there.

development

Amazon claims to have developed the concept for cash-free supermarkets over four years. Initially, the store should open to regular customers in March 2017. However, this deadline could not be kept, as considerable technical problems emerged in the test phase as soon as more than 20 customers were in the shop at the same time and were using the service.

In June 2017 it was announced that Amazon had already started looking for additional locations in the USA and Europe.

Anyone who wants to shop in the Amazon Go stores must have an Amazon profile and download the Amazon Go app. So far, Amazon has delivered groceries within selected cities as Amazon Fresh , which amounts to an annual surcharge of US $ 15 on the partially flat-rate shipping costs of US $ 99 a year for Amazon Prime .

Technique and procedure

Exit area

On February 20, 2014, Amazon filed a corresponding patent with the US Patent Office under the title Transitioning Items from a Materials Handling Facility . The details of shopping technology are rather nebulous at Amazon and they speak of computer fusion , deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion . Amazon propagates the system as a "just walk out" technology. According to Amazon, the “connection of several sensors” that are used works similarly to self-driving cars (see also machine vision ). At the entrance, customers would only have to identify themselves with a QR code , which is generated with the Amazon Go app on the smartphone. After that, their purchases would be recorded automatically; the costs would be billed to the customers' Amazon accounts when leaving the store.

In the online magazine e-tailment , Olaf Kolbrück describes the technology as follows, based on the US patent application for Amazon Go: “Cameras and a combination of different sensors feed [...] a learning algorithm that is supposed to recognize which products customers take from the shelf - or put it back again. Amazon is likely to build on a technology that, similar to facial recognition, recognizes objects from a wide variety of angles and uses models such as we know from RFID to determine the respective position of customer and product. In addition, sensors can be used that recognize the weight of the products on the shelf - or even the weight or size of the customer. ”Oral comments from customers can also be saved.

Market position

Abolishing checkout areas is not a new idea in the industry: IBM , for example, had already tested a model with RFID radio tags, but failed because of the cost of the tags. Overall, Amazon's checkout-less supermarket concept follows a general trend in retail that aims to increase efficiency through digitization measures. The reason behind the abolition of checkout areas is that they are personnel and cost-intensive for dealers and that customers often have long waiting times. In January 2018, Amazon Go needed more staff than comparable stores of the competition due to the sales concept in the same shop size. The Chinese retail chain BingoBox , which in 2018 also operated 200 small markets with no staff open around the clock, uses RFID tags on every item of merchandise, records and collects customers via WeChat . The RFID labels can be found in the surcharge for the goods compared to other retailers. Alibaba opened a Tao Café shop in Hangzhou in July 2017 without any cashiers.

criticism

According to a report from Zeit online, the former federal data protection officer, Peter Schaar, considers Amazon's project to be problematic and incompatible with European data protection regulations. After all, it is impossible for the customer to understand which data is collected when shopping and whether automatically created images are saved or emotions recorded when shopping. Since the data to be recorded by the system is bundled and stored on servers, Schaar assumes that an exact profile is compiled for each customer: “The data from the network is linked to the data from the sensors, which means that consumers are identified and their movements are recorded in the shop. ”The concept is based on“ totally controlling people ”.

literature

  • Gianna Lisa Puerini, Dilip Kumar, Steven Kessel: Transitioning Items from a Materials Handling Facility . Amazon Technologies, Inc. Seattle, WA. US Patent & Trademark Office. Patent Application Full Text and Image Database. January 8, 2015. Full text

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unmanned stores: What the local supply of the future could look like. Retrieved July 23, 2019 .
  2. ↑ 3 more Amazon Go stores on the way in Seattle and Chicago, bringing total footprint to 17 locations. July 22, 2019. Retrieved July 23, 2019 (American English).
  3. ↑ First Amazon supermarket without checkouts opens in Seattle , Handelsblatt, January 21, 2018
  4. ↑ Kristina Beer: Amazon Go: Amazon opens a till-free grocery store , heise online from December 6, 2016
  5. ↑ "Amazon Go" - Amazon opens supermarket without cash registers , RP-Online December 7, 2016
  6. ↑ Golem Media: Amazon go: Cashless supermarket fails in practical test , March 28, 2017. Accessed May 19, 2017.
  7. ^ US Patent & Trademark Office , accessed January 8, 2017.
  8. ↑ We May Have Just Uncovered Amazon's Vision for a New Kind of Retail Store www.recode.net, accessed January 8, 2017
  9. ↑ Olaf Kolbrück: This is how Amazon Go works: The technology behind the magic word "Sensor Fusion", accessed on January 8, 2017
  10. ↑ Amazon Go. Shopping without cash register: Amazon's grocery store. Archived from the original on December 21, 2016 ; accessed on January 11, 2017 .
  11. ↑ Panos Mourdoukoutas: Amazon-Whole Foods Deal Is Bad News For Store Cashiers And The Fight For $ 15 Minimum Wage . In: Forbes . ( forbes.com [accessed June 24, 2017]).
  12. ↑ Jochen G. Fuchs: Amazon Go needs more employees than a normal supermarket In: t3n.de , January 26, 2018.
  13. ↑ Crazy China: The Supermarket Without Staff , Pro7 Galileo, Season 2018, Episode 93, April 3, 2018
  14. ↑ Should German supermarkets take China as an example? Retrieved July 23, 2019 .
  15. ↑ Bastian Brauns, Veronika Völlinger: Supermarket of the future zeit online.de, December 6, 2016, accessed on January 8, 2017

Coordinates: 47 ° 36 '58  .9 " N , 122 ° 20' 23.9"  W.