As a rule, in supermarkets we are stressed either by huge queues at the checkout, or by the process of communicating with other people who are not very pleasant for us, or by the need to hand over our things to the lockers. Yes, this is Russian reality, and in the next ten years the situation is unlikely to change dramatically. But the residents of the United States are much more fortunate.
What is it
The world's largest Internet retailer decided to try his hand at offline sales and opened Seattle, Washington, its first 1,800 square meter offline supermarket called Amazon Go. Of course, Amazon could not do with an ordinary grocery store and approached the issue in an extremely non-trivial way, practically going to change the main field of the company's activity. The main difference Amazon Go from the shops we are used to is … the complete absence of cash registers.
Now the novelty is working in beta mode and is currently available only to employees of the corporation – but this is only for now. The concept of Amazon Go looks like this: customers simply enter the store, take the goods they need and leave quietly, bypassing queues, paying in cash and the like.
How it works
The implementation of this miracle is entrusted to a variety of sensors, cameras that monitor all movements of visitors, RFID tags (in a nutshell, the latter are used for automatic radio frequency recognition of objects, in our case, goods) and machine learning, which has been very widespread in recent years, which improves algorithms. the whole network Amazon Go. Thanks to such a scheme, a person will be able to enter the store and stuff everything they need into their pockets, and not put the food in the basket of the trolley, in order to repeat these manipulations at the checkout or in the parking lot. Thieves Amazon Go are not scary at the entrance there is a special turnstile with a QR code, having scanned it through the application familiar to many Americans Amazon, you will open the turnstile. Accordingly, only those who have an account Amazon will get into the store, and, as you might guess, purchases will be paid through the same account.
Perspectives
What does all this give to the IT industry, and to all mankind, in principle, Let's start with the sellers. Firstly, the system of cameras and tags on products allows not only tracking who bought what, but in combination with data on user activity on the company's website, it serves to create more relevant advertising for a particular user (or even a group of people). which actually takes targeted advertising to the next level.
Secondly, although the construction of such a market will cost significantly more, in the long term, due to the absence of the need to pay cashiers, service cash registers, order cash collection and other similar expenses, Amazon Go pays for itself with interest.
For the average consumer, the first and foremost reason to go shopping in Amazon Go is, of course, a tremendous time saving. For most people, all the processes described at the beginning of this article take at least 60-70% of the time they spend in the supermarket. The second plus for buyers is that no one will cheat you, will not ask for a tip, and so on. However, it should be borne in mind that in such a store you can spend much more and that, no one limits, take what you want, hide it in your bag / backpack / pocket and leave without saying a word to anyone.
As I said, at the moment Amazon Go is represented by one store, and only employees of the Amazon itself can use it. But a full-fledged launch is scheduled for early 2017, and then it is planned to deploy a chain of stores throughout the United States. By this time, the company will have to deal with the issue of tracking goods in a really large crowd, which is much more difficult compared to the current few buyers. It should also be noted that at first there will be workers in the stores, placing goods on the shelves, but in the future they will have to be replaced by automation.
Is it worth waiting in Russia
When Amazon Go or something similar will appear in our country, it's hard to say. Everything rests on a very unstable economic situation (and, as a result, low purchasing power of the population), the high cost of equipment and the specific mentality of the same population, most of which are simply not ready to realize the fact that you can come to the store and take the necessary products and leave without taking out your wallet. On the other hand, could you, say, 10 years ago, imagine that in Russia one day it will be possible to call a taxi just by clicking on the phone screen a couple of times?