Depth report

　　

Five years ago, Amazon began to study a secret project: how to eliminate checkout queues in stores. Amazon executives believe that physical store shopping is perfect, except for one thing-no one likes to wait in line. The result of this project is Amazon Go, a futuristic convenience store with hundreds of cameras on the ceiling to track shoppers, and computer algorithms analyze their every movement and check out when they leave. Amazon calls it "just walk out" shopping, because there are no cash desks, no queues for checkout, only a few turnstiles like those in the subway.

    The store started trial operation in December 2016 and opened to the public this Monday. It represents Amazon's most radical effort to reshape the future of physical retail.

    The store is located in a first-floor retail point in the center of Seattle's Amazon campus. Posters promoting the "get it and go" shopping experience are displayed in the window. To emphasize this point, each receipt comes with a "trip timer", so shoppers can see exactly how many seconds it took for them to buy an item. The store sells goods similar to deli or street shops, and there is also a kitchen for making fresh sandwiches and salads.

    Although Amazon was only an online bookstore when it was founded, its aggressive entry into the physical retail industry has made many retail competitors surprised and nervous. The company now operates 13 physical bookstores and several grocery pickup locations. After acquiring Whole Foods for $13.7 billion last year, it also operates hundreds of Whole Foods stores across the United States.

However, the design of Amazon Go is complicated, which means that it is currently more of an experimental concept than a mature technology that can be easily and cheaply replicated. The store was originally scheduled to open to the public in the spring of 2017, but according to media reports, the progress was not as smooth as expected, so it was delayed until this month.

    Dilip Kumar, the head of technology at Amazon Go, explained that stores use computer vision — hundreds of cameras mounted on the ceiling — to determine what shoppers are picking. He said: "When we started the research five years ago, we said: Can we use computer vision and machine learning to provide customers with this easy experience of coming in and taking what they want?"

    Kumar pointed to cameras almost all over the ceiling and explained that computer algorithms use these cameras to determine which customers are holding which products. There are also weight sensors on store shelves, but these weight sensors are not very useful because different items can have the same weight, such as different flavors of yogurt.

    He said: "Video understanding is the key. To be able to understand and explain and know exactly what is happening. The challenge of this technology is to apply it on a large scale and achieve transaction-level accuracy."

    He explained that one of the most difficult situations the algorithm has to deal with is when the store becomes crowded. He said: "When there are 50 people picking up multiple items or browsing, things are a lot more complicated. They are blocked, blocked each other, the items are blocked, and the items are small."

    In the past year, Amazon Go’s technical team has been improving the algorithm and training it to deal with these situations, including situations where a customer’s hand may partially block the product when it is taken from the shelf. In order to facilitate identification, some products in the store (such as sandwiches) also have a special dot code on the top, which is similar to a barcode, but is designed in a circle and diamond shape to facilitate remote reading by the camera.

    Although Kumar vowed that the technology was "very, very accurate," he declined to say when the company opened other Amazon Go stores. He said: "We really want to open more stores," but did not elaborate. Kumar also said that the company "has no plans" to launch skip-the-line checkout shopping services in any Whole Foods stores or Amazon bookstores. However, in the year since Amazon first announced its plan to reshape grocery stores with Amazon Go, competitors have invested in similar technologies to compete for a share of the US $800 billion grocery market.

    Since Amazon acquired Whole Foods last summer, similar plans have increased substantially. In the months following this acquisition, bankers worked closely with their physical store customers to help them build technology-centric defenses.

    Some of these initiatives have already been achieved, and Kroger, the largest independent food chain in the United States, is launching its own cash-free shopping experience this year. In Kroger supermarkets, customers can scan the bar codes of food with their smartphones while browsing the shelves, and then check out at the self-checkout machine when they leave the supermarket. The company said it will roll out this technology to 400 of its more than 2,700 stores in 2018.

    Of Walmart's nearly $500 billion in annual sales, more than half come from food sales. Wal-Mart is trying to introduce a shopping experience without cashiers in places like Dallas and Orlando. The company said that by the end of this month, 100 supermarkets will allow customers to buy goods through smartphone apps—the only time to deal with people is to show employees a digital receipt before going out. Wal-Mart CEO Doug McMillon describes himself as a “tool man,” and since he took the helm of Wal-Mart in 2014, he has promised to make Wal-Mart more like a technology company. Dong Minglun summarized the challenges and motivation of retailers competing to reduce queues at a meeting last week.