Thanks to an infestation of rats and a dispute between tenants and landlords, progress comes first to Washington, in this particular case at least.

The result is that organic supermarket chain Whole Foods, part of the Amazon empire, is opening its first cashless store in America's capital, at the same time as a store in California.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos lives just a six-minute drive away when he's in the capital.

That may have helped with the choice of location.

Winand von Petersdorff-Campen

Economic correspondent in Washington.

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It really is amazingly simple: you walk into the supermarket, have your previously Amazon-registered palm scanned, fill your bag with items from the shelves, place your palm on a scanner again, and wing gates unlock the exit.

Alternatively, the gates open with the QR code of the Whole Foods app, which almost every customer has because it gives them discounts.

The debiting of a credit card, which has already been deposited for Amazon purchases, is granted with the heel of the hand or the app.

It's really easy to walk out, as Amazon promises in its "Just walk out" slogan.

The surveillance system sees everything, doesn't it?

Amazon had introduced the system to various customers in small convenience stores and supermarkets, but not yet in its organic stores with 2,000 square meters or even more of retail space.

Whole Foods has up to 55,000 items in its range.

The Glover Park store is smaller than conventional outlets, though probably the largest where such an experiment has ever been attempted.

Without the rat infestation, there was no argument between Whole Foods and the owner about remodeling the place, which lasted at least three years.

When the dispute was settled, the plan for cashless supermarkets had matured at the Amazon headquarters in Seattle.

The conversion of the old store, where today the products are neatly lined up in rows and monitored by a surveillance system that sees everything, took another two years.

Everything?

Not quite.

In order to put the system to the hardest of all tests, the wife came along for the third test purchase.

She set out on her own, fished biscuits, apples and parmesan from the window displays to later put them in the shopping cart they shared.

The system must therefore identify the wife as an entity and assign the products purchased to this entity in order to debit them correctly.

This worked very well, but not perfectly: two apples were mistaken for a more expensive variety, a package of biscuits was overlooked.

Test phase to cure teething problems

Another small bug for Amazon's claims department to deal with: Whole Foods offers a hot buffet.

Customers shovel warm food into sealable cardboard boxes in self-service.

For reasons that have yet to be investigated, the observation system assumed that the test customer had two small boxes, when in fact he only filled one large box to the brim with a curry tofu dish and chicken cutlets.

He had first picked up a small box, but then put it down somewhere else to reach for a large one.

Hence perhaps the confusion.

But the system is still learning, "Deep learning" is what the Whole Foods statement on cashless supermarkets says.

The distinction is not irrelevant because Whole Foods does not price by weight,