Unmanned Supermarket

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Executive Summary

In recent decades, the concept of “unmanned supermarket” has been put forward. Amazon becomes the first company in the world to bring the idea in practice (Yu, 2016). This essay on one hand describes the motivation and conditions which enable Amazon to create this groundbreaking grocery store, as well as the technology behind that supports the whole shopping experience.

Being an e-commerce company over 10 years and acting as a significant role in the evolution of retail industry, Amazon has always possessed the vision “to be an everything store”( D'ONFRO, 2014). With its passion on creativity and data, according to Jennifer Cast, together with experiments of thousands of technologies which are available in the market, Amazon realized the problem of the traditional grocery store, which is long check-out time and not profitable to benefit people in rural area. Hence Amazon worked in partnership with few third – party providers and convinced them to outsource the necessary technologies that form the backbone of this unmanned supermarket (Yu, 2016). They are embedded sensors, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

A specific ID QR code is required when enter the store which contains the facial recognition and customer’s personal information. The embedded sensors are used to identify the products that a customer picks up, with the measure of the weight, pressure, scale etc., in order to allow the customer just grab the item and go (Bishop, 2016). Machine learning system would track the customer through the store and the entire shopping visit.

On the other hand, the paper will carefully examine challenges of this innovation. The removal of traditional check-out system does bring convenience but also has brought the problem of theft, age-restricted items and some other issues that requires human beings to tackle (Payne, 2016).

Without any doubt, this will be the ultimate change of convenient retailing but there are still a lot of opposite views on the development of this type of automation, which they consider it will be the threat of current retail industry and even the labor market. The report will also discuss the thoughts on those views as well.

Background

Due to the rapid growth in retail industry, retailers always intend to seize every opportunity on the innovation of the traditional grocery store by implementing emerging technologies, in order to survive in the competitive market. Grewal et al. (2017) indicates that there are five key trends in retailing development. Besides consumption and engagement, which means that purchase decisions still primarily depend on consumer’s need, the other four trends are all related to technology. It explains how technology can suggest better decisions to different consumers by gathering data, and also how it can increase efficiency of the whole shopping experience. Inman and Nikolova (2017) mentions that technology is able to satisfy the needs of both retailers and shoppers. For instance, scan-and-go technology can be utilized as a self-check-outs to reduce the demand of cashiers. Combined with the Que Vision application which could control the waiting time into 30s, on one hand customers can save time on lining out and on the other hand, it enables companies to reduce the labor cost.