Amazon’s new smart shopping cart lets you pay without an ATM

Amazon is expanding its presence in the real world with another unconventional physical product: a shopping cart. While it certainly looks like an aesthetic upgrade to your standard grocery cart, the Dash Cart, as it’s called, is indeed a smart version of the tried and true food transport vehicle.

It is equipped with a touchscreen and various other hardware components to automatically detect what items you are placing inside and even how many of those items you have picked up from the shelf. When you’re done shopping, you can take the cart through a special lane that checks it digitally without requiring a human ATM to call you.

The idea is based on Amazon’s approach of trying to take advantage of the comfort that dominates in the digital sphere and take it to the real world. For years, Amazon has been trying to apply all the learning it learned from developing Alexa-powered products, including microwaves and wall clocks, and establishing a physical presence through its acquisition of Whole Foods and the growing network of stores. Amazon Go. Those efforts are now resulting in hybrid products that unite the digital and the physical, if only in small, experimental bursts.

The Dash Cart arrives first at the Amazon grocery store in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. The store, first confirmed last year, is not an Amazon Go store, meaning it doesn’t have cameras, sensors, and other equipment built into the ceiling to automatically detect items it removes from shelves. Instead, this is your standard everyday grocery store, only it has smart grocery carts made by Amazon for you to use. The store is operational to fulfill online grocery orders, but the physical space is not yet open to the public; Amazon says its goal is to open the store later this year. The store joins Amazon’s Whole Foods location network and its largest-format Amazon Go grocery store that opened in Seattle in February.

It’s unclear why Amazon is opting for a more traditional store, given its more than two-dozen Go stores and a second Go grocery store in the works for the Redmond area of ​​Washington. For one thing, it could be that the Go model is difficult to scale to the size necessary for a full-service grocery store; Go Grocery in Seattle is on the smaller side, while the new Woodland Hills location sits on the site of an old Toys “R” Us, which is certainly much larger. There is also the issue of privacy, and whether the Go format monitoring and surveillance approach may not be as acceptable as a smart shopping cart that a consumer should choose to use.

Photo: Amazon

That said, it seems that scaling your cashier-less approach, whether from a privacy or technical perspective, is a challenge Amazon is trying to overcome, and the cart is one to do it in a small and manageable way. For now, Amazon is not ready to use Dash Cart technology beyond low-key supermarket travel. Therefore, the device can handle up to approximately two bags of items, but cannot yet make a complete cart. That means the Woodland Hills store will have standard carts and checkout lanes for all customers who buy more than the Dash Cart will allow.

But aside from that, Amazon’s Dilip Kumar, the company’s vice president of physical sales and technology, says The edge everything else is fair game, including products and other foods not found in traditional packaging. “[The Dash Cart] It has a camera ring, a scale, and computer vision and weight sensors to determine not just the item, but the quantity of the item, ”he says. For an item such as an apple, the cart’s touchscreen allows you to enter the item’s price search code before placing it in the cart to be weighed and added to your order.

The cart processes your order at the end of the trip only because you first logged into your Amazon account on your phone and scanned it at the beginning of the supermarket trip. The cart also has a built-in coupon scanner and supports Amazon’s Alexa shopping list feature. When you’re done shopping, Amazon says Dash Cart’s dedicated lanes allow you to leave the store without having to pay or wait in a checkout line.

Amazon does not say whether this cart will leave the Woodland Hills store, as the company generally does not discuss new locations or even future plans regarding the physical expansion of its grocery store. But there is a good chance that in case the Dash Cart is a hit with consumers, Amazon could be implementing this elsewhere. It’s easy to see, for example, how such a device could work in a Whole Foods store and help reduce checkout times, although there may even be waits to use the carts if it works as well as advertised.