Amazon has been waiting for this day for four years.

At the end of February 2022, Amazon finally completed the “unmanned” transformation of a whole foods whole food supermarket in Washington, D.C., allowing it to welcome customers with a new look.

Customers can log in to Amazon account with their mobile phone or their own “palmprint” at the door of the supermarket, enter the supermarket, buy goods, and then leave directly. In the process, Amazon’s “just walk out” system will automatically track and identify the goods purchased by customers, complete the checkout deduction in the background, and realize “senseless payment”.

In fact, the initial development of this unmanned retail system has been completed as early as 2016. In January 2018, Amazon opened its first physical store focusing on the concept of “unmanned retail” in Seattle, Amazon go. At the beginning of its launch, Amazon was ambitious and claimed to open 3000 unmanned retail stores in the United States within four years.

The four-year period has come, and the total number of Amazon go stores is still only 30. It was also four years later that Amazon first deployed this technology in its whole food supermarket, symbolizing a big step forward.

Domestic e-commerce giants, including Alibaba and jd.com, have also explored the technical direction of “unmanned retail”, but they soon gave up. Today, there is almost only one company in the world, Amazon, that still insists.

What’s wrong with “unmanned retail”? It is far behind the development progress of the plan. Is there any chance to accelerate it?

A wonderful beginning

Unmanned retail technology originated from a very simple idea: if you go to the supermarket, you don’t have to queue up to check out.

Sounds like an impossible task. However, with the development of various sensors, image recognition and machine learning, Amazon gradually has the confidence to solve this problem.

In December 2016, Amazon announced the Amazon go unmanned retail store for the first time and began internal testing for internal employees.

In order to create a “checkout free” shopping experience, Amazon has designed an extremely complex sensing system to track customers and every item they buy.

First, the ceiling of Amazon go store is equipped with numerous cameras to track the location of customers and identify what goods customers have taken away; In addition, each product also has a built-in sensing label, which can be sensed and identified by the shelf. Some shelves also have built-in sensors that can detect weight to cross verify what goods have been “taken away” or “put back”.

When shopping at Amazon go, customers only need to scan the QR code of their Amazon account when entering, and then they can buy goods at will, and put unwanted things back on the shelf at any time. Everything will be recorded silently by the system. After shopping, you can leave directly.

Multiple cameras hang from the ceiling of a whole food supermarket in Washington, D.C

In January 2018, Amazon opened its first open Amazon go retail store in Seattle. At the beginning of its opening, it almost caused a sensation. All kinds of curious customers, technology lovers and Youtube bloggers went to “explore stores”, almost all of them were surprised by the magic of this system and praised the convenience of this experience.

Amazon also gained confidence and internally proposed a plan to open 3000 Amazon go unmanned retail stores in the United States. Amazon didn’t comment when Bloomberg verified the news.

Even so, the market is still confident in the future of “unmanned retail”. In addition, in 2017, Amazon just acquired whole foods, a high-end supermarket focusing on organic food. Many people in the industry believe that Amazon will transform whole foods supermarket into a “next generation unmanned supermarket” with a strong sense of future.

Moreover, the “check out free” technology is not only available to Amazon itself. In that year, Amazon built its own server system to meet the needs of its e-commerce business. After obtaining technical leadership, it will provide services to other enterprises and gradually develop into AWS cloud computing services.

Similarly, once Amazon’s unmanned retail technology becomes the technical benchmark of the retail industry, it can also be authorized to other retail enterprises to help them transform their stores into “unmanned”, which has full potential to become a cash cow business like AWS.

Amazon seems to be on the eve of the next “outbreak” and has mastered the weapon of “dimensionality reduction attack” on the physical retail industry. At that time, the stock prices of a series of traditional retail giants, including Wal Mart, fell.

Convenience and resistance

But things don’t seem so simple. After the first wave of madness, the popularity of Amazon go, like many “online Red stores”, has fallen thousands of miles.

Although compared with most retail stores, Amazon go’s performance is good, which is higher than the average level of the U.S. retail industry. But it didn’t “redefine the supermarket” as many people expected.

Among them, the most critical issue is the convenience brought by “free checkout”, which may not be so important.

The first experience of “leaving without checkout” is magical, but “checkout” is a less critical link in the supermarket shopping process after all. After the enthusiasm, Amazon go is still just an ordinary grocery store.

Moreover, many customers feel uncomfortable with the “sense of surveillance” brought by a large number of cameras in the unmanned supermarket. Previously, according to business insider, Amazon has been monitoring the work efficiency of whole food supermarket cashiers and tally clerks through cameras, putting pressure on relatively inefficient employees to “work harder”. Similar systems have also been deployed in Amazon’s e-commerce warehouse, which has caused no small social controversy.

Since the first day of Amazon go’s opening, there have been doubts that Amazon will use this system to “monitor customers”. Although Amazon announced that it would strictly protect the personal information recorded by customers in unmanned supermarkets and would not use this information to “analyze the behavior” of users and optimize advertising push. But this will not completely solve the problem of “trust”.

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