Amazon is working to expand its grocery business, not Whole Foods, which already has more than 500 stores, but its unregistered line of stores with the Amazon brand. While it’s easy for a customer to carry a small bag of items around a convenience store like the first Amazon Go, it’s much harder to skimp on the volume of food he often buys at a regular supermarket. So Amazon is doing what Amazon does and is making the shopping cart an essential part of your high-tech retail experience.
The Amazon Dash car will launch alongside the company’s Los Angeles supermarket later this year, the company said today. The smart cart requires a customer to log into the cart using the Amazon app on their phone, then uses a camera and sensor system to take stock of what a buyer puts in the cart. It also has a touchscreen panel on the front handle, so consumers can buy items that don’t have barcodes, like fresh produce. When a shopper finishes his grocery trip, he pulls the cart out of the “dash lane,” grabs his now-paid groceries and walks away.
Amazon’s cashierless convenience stores, weighed by cameras, first opened to the public in 2017. Earlier this year, the company did the same with a slightly larger Amazon Go Grocery location in Seattle than it did. Sam Machkovech from Ars tested to see exactly how exact the panopticon supermarket setup is. (Spoiler: It’s not completely foolproof, but it can identify if you’re trying to steal a banana.)
The cart basically takes the technology behind Amazon Go stores and makes it mobile, using “a combination of computer vision algorithms and sensor fusion” to identify and scan items as you put them inside the cart. “Our main motivation for building this was to be able to save customers time,” said Amazon vice president Dilip Kumar. “Alternative solutions are to stop in the fast pay lanes or search the self-service stations.”
The implication is that the stores in Amazon’s impending supermarket chain, there are five more planned locations after the Los Angeles store, which has not yet opened, are simply too large to fill every square inch of the ceiling with cameras, as the smallest … the Amazon Go and Amazon Go Grocery footprint stores are built. Instead, the cart-based shopping option basically works like the Scan-It app in use at traditional Giant and Stop & Shop grocery retailers, except that it’s built into the cart. Those systems, however, are far from perfect, and it seems like cars might have some exploitable bugs, too.
Perhaps the biggest unanswered question Amazon left hanging: Are cars smart enough to sense when they’ve been left in the middle of a parking space or at a bus stop, as it seems to be the destination of most standard supermarket carts?
