Jan. 22 (UPI) — Amazon Go, a grocery store that utilizes an app to provide customers with no checkout counter or checkout lines, opened in Seattle on Monday.
Shoppers can download the Amazon Go app and enter the store, utilizing the company’s “Just Walk Out” shopping experience so customers can buy what they want without waiting in line. Customers will receive a receipt shortly after they leave the store.
“The just-walk-out technology is tracking that these items are leaving the shelf, and it’s putting them in my virtual cart,” Amazon Go Vice-President Gianna Puerini told NBC News. “And if I put them back on the shelf, they come out of my virtual cart.”
According to Amazon, the technology used to run the store is similar to that of a self-driving car — using special cameras, “computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning.”
“Those cameras are primarily looking at all of these products and figuring out what has left the shelf and what is going back to the shelf.” Puerini said. “The system is highly accurate. On the rare occasion, if you were to find an error, we make it super easy to do a self-service return.”
The stores will sell ready-to-eat breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack options as well as staples like bread, cheese, milk and special meal kits.
Although the store doesn’t have checkout lines, associates do work both in the store and in the kitchens to help prepare ingredients and help customers.
“There’s a kitchen full of chefs and cooks making the things that are on the shelf right now, and as you look around the store, all these folks in orange are all here to help make customers’ experience better. So we’re just shifting the kind of work that folks do,” Puerini said.
The roughly 1,800-square-foot store is located at 2131 7th Ave in Seattle, Washington, near the corner of 7th and Blanchard.
