Amazon's Cashierless 'Go' Convenience Store Set to Open
January 21 2018 - 10:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Laura Stevens
Nearly a year after it was promised, Amazon.com Inc.'s
cashierless convenience store is slated to open to the public on
Monday.
The new Amazon Go store, located in the base of Amazon's main
headquarters in Seattle, uses computer vision and machine-learning
algorithms to track shoppers and charge them for what they select,
thereby eliminating checkout counters.
In an interview last week, Dilip Kumar, vice president of
technology for Amazon Go and Amazon Books, said testing with
employees has trained the technology to work in the store, an
experiment that is part of the company's broader effort to reinvent
how consumers shop.
Mr. Kumar declined to say whether Amazon will expand the Go
concept, although he said the company has developed the technology
to scale.
Amazon announced the new Go store with fanfare in December 2016,
and said it would open to the public in early 2017. The opening was
delayed, however, as the technology proved more difficult to master
than expected, with glitches occurring when too many people were in
the store or were moving too quickly, The Wall Street Journal
reported in March 2017.
Amazon didn't explain the delay at the time. According to Mr.
Kumar, while the store was originally expected to quickly open to
the public to gain extra traffic needed for testing, the company
decided it had enough employees to teach the system instead.
That training helped Amazon Go's technology better identify
objects and follow the different speeds and patterns of shoppers,
tasks Mr. Kumar described as particularly challenging in a
crowd.
Some people "move in very unpredictable ways," Mr. Kumar said.
"You're always bending down, you're examining items, you're picking
things up."
The Go experiment shows how Amazon is trying to transform
shopping in physical stores after decades of pioneering retail
online. Since 2015, the company also has added more than a dozen
Amazon Books stores, which encourage customers to pull out their
phones to scan covers for prices.
In August, Amazon completed a $13.5 billion deal to buy grocery
chain Whole Foods, adding 470 brick-and-mortar stores to its
portfolio overnight.
Amazon Go's technology uses cameras throughout the store to
track shoppers once they are inside, though it doesn't use facial
recognition, Mr. Kumar said. A customer entering the store scans
his or her phone and then becomes represented internally as a 3-D
object to the system. Cameras also are pointed at the shelves to
determine interactions with goods.
Among the challenges for the technology was telling the
difference between similar looking products -- say containers of
vanilla and regular yogurt. Adding to the complexity, when
customers pick up products, they usually cover the distinguishing
aspects of the label with their hands.
Some store associates are still needed. For example, customers
purchasing alcohol must show identification.
Former Amazon executives say it likely would be difficult to
scale the system to track people in a bigger store, and that it
could take years to make it work in a larger store footprint.
Still, they say it may make sense one day for Amazon to try to
implement the technology more widely -- either via additional Go
stores or even in Whole Foods.
Mr. Kumar said there are currently no plans to introduce the
technology in Whole Foods. He added, however, that every project
should be expandable.
"We have this unwritten rule that whatever it is you're
building, you have to be able to scale it so that it covers
significantly amount of more load than what you would normally ever
expect," Mr. Kumar said.
Write to Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 21, 2018 10:14 ET (15:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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