Amazon is coming for retail
Emailed on March 13th 2020 in The Friday Forward
Amazon has begun shopping its cashierless checkout tech to other retailers. Called “Just Walk Out,” the technology lets you just walk out of a store without paying, or more importantly talking to, anyone.
How Just Walk Out works:
You swipe your credit card at a turnstile to enter.
The technology that powers self-driving cars (“computer vision,” “sensor fusion”) keeps track of what you take off the shelf and put in your shopping cart.
Then, you walk out and your credit card is charged.
Amazon already uses this tech at 25 Amazon Go convenience stores and a full-sized, cashierless grocery store it opened in Seattle last month.
For Amazon, this is a repeat playbook: First, you build a tool that’s useful for your own operations, like a cloud computing platform. Then, make that tool so powerful everyone else wants a piece. Toys R Us knows this move...
On that note, Bezo's classic move is concerning to some labor groups. “This so-called cashierless technology is nothing but a Trojan horse that will let Amazon control and monopolize competing retailers,” said the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.
