On February 25, 2024, Amazon launched a smart shopping cart at a Whole Foods store in San Mateo, California, USA. A woman used the dashboard cart while shopping at a Whole Foods store. Scan products directly into your cart and skip the checkout line.
Taifon Coskun | Anadolu | Getty Images
Amazon The company said Wednesday it will start selling its smart grocery carts to other retailers, its latest move to turn its Dash Cart technology into a service.
Amazon said several Price Chopper and McKeever’s Market stores in Kansas and Missouri are testing smart grocery carts that can track and inventory items as customers shop.
Amazon launched Dash Cart in its Fresh supermarket chain in 2020 and then added it to select Whole Foods stores. They use a combination of computer vision and sensors to identify items placed in bags inside shopping carts. As shoppers add and delete items, the display on the shopping cart instantly adjusts the total price.
Amazon is following a similar strategy previously deployed for its “Just Walk Out” cashierless technology. Just Walk Out was originally envisioned for use in Amazon’s Go convenience stores until Amazon began selling the system to third-party retailers in airports, stadiums, hospitals and other venues.
While Amazon has attracted more third-party Just Walk Out users, it has withdrawn the technology from many of its own grocery stores. Earlier this month, Amazon said it would cancel its Just Walk Out program at some Fresh stores and two Whole Foods stores. The company will continue to use the technology in its Go convenience stores and smaller Fresh stores in the UK, while it will expand Dash Carts in its US Fresh stores.
Earlier this month, Amazon teams responsible for Just Walk Out, Dash Carts and other brick-and-mortar technology were also affected by layoffs.
On Wednesday, Amazon said it “firmly believes Just Walk Out technology will be the future of stores with curated merchandise where customers can go in, grab the few items they need, and walk right out.”
Just Walk Out relies on a series of cameras and sensors placed throughout stores to monitor which items shoppers pick up, automatically charging them as they leave. Amazon and other startups that have developed similar cashierless checkout systems have been slow to roll them out in larger stores, initially in convenience stores, because the technology involved is complex and expensive.
The systems came under review earlier this month following reports Gizmodo And others claim Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology relies on human moderators “watching you while you shop.”Many reports cited stories from May 2023 information The report said Amazon uses about 1,000 employees in India to review JWO transactions and flag footage to help train the artificial intelligence models that make it work.
Amazon said reports of employees observing customers from a distance were “untrue,” although it acknowledged that human employees were responsible for labeling and annotating shopping data.
“Employees do not need to watch a live video feed of a shopper to generate a receipt, this is handled automatically by a computer vision algorithm,” the company said. “This is no different from any other artificial intelligence system that places a premium on accuracy over human reviewers very common.”
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