Ángel Jiménez from Luis USA

USA

Updated Wednesday, April 3, 2024-00:13

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The most surprising development of Amazon Fresh

and

Amazon Go

supermarkets ,

experimental supermarkets that the company has installed in several cities, was

Just Walk Out

("Just Walk Out", in English), an automatic payment system that transformed the experience of grocery shopping. buys.

Instead of having to go through a checkout before leaving the store, the shopper, after identifying themselves at a turnstile at the entrance with a QR code,

could simply grab everything they needed from the shelves and leave.

An advanced sensor and camera system under remote supervision was responsible for tracking what he had purchased during his visit and charged the final amount to the card associated with the Amazon account.

The technology worked surprisingly well and Amazon has also implemented it in the stores of some partners, such as the American airport store chain

Hudson Nonstop.

But now she seems determined to change the model. According to The

Information publication,

the company has begun to eliminate the technology from several of its stores. They will still not have a traditional cashier, but now they depend on smart shopping carts in which the user scans the different products as they make the purchase.

These carts have a touch screen and two sensors that identify the products that have been placed in them thanks to a radio frequency identification system. When you finish making your purchase, you can pay on the cart screen itself, without having to queue at a checkout.

The technology is more prosaic than the advanced sensor system that

Just Walk Out offered,

but it reflects Amazon's change in strategy with respect to physical stores.

Before the Covid epidemic, the company seemed determined to expand its operations to traditional commerce. In addition to Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh, it had installed experimental book and fashion stores in some US cities. The company also acquired US supermarket chain

Whole Foods

to accelerate the rollout.

Now, most of these experimental stores have started to close.

Amazon Style,

the clothing store, has been the latest victims. Amazon launched this store concept, which included fitting rooms with

smart mirrors and an advanced inventory management system, in January 2022 but in November of last year it closed the only two stores that existed, in the American states of California and Ohio. At the moment the company has not shown interest in expanding the Amazon Go or Fresh supermarkets, the only thing that remains of its initial ambitious vision for physical commerce, outside the

US.