The future of supermarkets and physical stores for Amazon is to eliminate intermediaries, in this case humans. You enter the establishment, take the food or product that interests you and leave the store; to charge you are the dozens of cameras and sensors that track you and connect to your Amazon account. Amazon Go was announced in December 2016, after a year in tests with the employees of the company finally opened to the public.
The goal of Jeff Bezos with Amazon Go is to reduce labor costs to the minimum, to get an important step is to get rid of dependents. Instead, Amazon has used artificial intelligence applied to dozens of cameras and sensors throughout the facility. When you arrive at the store you are automatically associated with your Amazon account and any product you take from the shelves is charged when you leave the store. You do not have to go through the cash, because there are neither boxes nor employees that charge you.
No employee? Actually the store does have an employee facing the public, is close to alcoholic products and check if you are of age to catch a bottle of wine or a can of beer for example. The sale of alcohol in the United States is not a game, although Amazon could easily identify if you are of legal age with the data of your account, by law there must be a human who verifies it by asking for the identity card. In addition to this human, the store also has retailers and cooks. Finally there is a person at the entrance to help (at the beginning) the users and answer their questions.
How Amazon manages to make sure you're paying
To develop such a reconnaissance system, the company has installed dozens of cameras mounted on the roof of the premises, each centimeter is covered from different angles, so there is no blind spot. These cameras are complemented with other depth detection and with weight sensors on the shelves that recognize the exact weight of each product. All information is processed in a central unit, but curious as it may seem there is no facial recognition as such, the system detects your entry and according to the appearance of your clothes and where you move associated with your account, but not by your face.
The roof of the establishment consists of these cameras capable of taking any point of the premises from any angle. Via The Seattle Times
The interest of all this is if you can cheat the system and take a sandwich for free or not, it is not so easy. To enter you must do it by bringing your phone to the security passes, so since you enter you are already identified. You can take a drink and put it directly in your bag, in a hidden way if you want, but from the moment you take it from the shelf Amazon already knows it. And if somehow someone managed to cover a camera (or several), the system is able to continue working, as Amazon has indicated to TechCrunch, have found that the system continues to work even if several cameras stop working. Anyway and according to the people in charge of Amazon:
Most people are not store thieves, and the system is designed for most people.
There are some aspects of security that despite everything still worries. While the identification is by scanning the phone when entering and not by facial recognition, what happens if someone steals your mobile and goes shopping with your Amazon account? At the moment it may not be so worrying because the items that can be purchased are of little value, but the day they start selling products that are not a simple sandwich, this system should be improved.
** This is the first Amazon Go in Seattle **
For more than a year, the Seattle store has been open to company employees, a kind of beta phase to fine-tune the recognition system. From today anyone can enter, just need an Amazon account and scan a code when entering.
At the entrance doors you must identify yourself with your mobile and the Amazon Go app, only when entering. Via Recode
This first store offers mainly semi-finished food and drinks for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Pastries, sandwiches, wraps, salads, soups, prepared dishes, fruits, soft drinks, juices, beer, wine ... At the moment they have started with food, but they hope to open up to other sectors such as the pharmacist (for example, in the United States). they also sell in supermarkets).
This first store offers mainly semi-finished food and drinks for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Pastries, sandwiches, wraps, salads, soups, prepared dishes, fruits, soft drinks, juices, beer, wine ... At the moment they have started with food, but they hope to open up to other sectors such as the pharmacist (for example, in the United States). they also sell in supermarkets).
At the moment the first store has focused on semi-finished food. Via Recode