Amazon is ditching its “Just Walk Out” program at its high-tech Fresh grocery stores as it remodels the supermarkets.
Amazon first announced the cashierless system in 2018 when it debuted the first 10,400-square-foot “Amazon Go Grocery” store near its Seattle headquarters.
The concept vowed to offer a new era of grocery shopping where Amazon Prime users scan their member QR code to enter, pick up the items they want and then just stroll out of the store with a cart full of groceries having never checked out or swiped a credit card.
After a futuristic system of cameras and sensors calculated what groceries shoppers left with, they would later be notified via their Amazon account what the bill came to.
Amazon is walking out on the tech, though, telling Bloomberg that it will stop using the program as it remodels existing Fresh grocery stores, and won’t feature it in new locations that will start opening later this year.
Amazon declined to comment on when the tech would return.
There are currently some 40 large-scale Amazon Fresh stores in the US — including in Oceanside, NY, Paramus, NJ, as well as Broomall and Warring in Pennsylvania — though just 27 use the “Just Walk Out” technology.
The “Just Walk Out” technology will still be offered in Amazon Go stores, as well as in smaller-format Fresh shops across in the UK.
The Information first reported on the scrapping of “Just Walk Out” technology.
Tony Hoggett, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide grocery stores and a three-decade veteran of British retail giant Tesco, told The Information that “Just Walk Out” makes sense in smaller shops where customers are purchasing a few items but isn’t ideal for larger grocery stores like Fresh.
Budget-conscious shoppers have expressed uneasiness around the program’s emailing of receipts up to hours after customers leave the stores. They want to see what they’re spending in real time.
As a result, Amazon will rely more on its Dash Cart feature moving forward, where shoppers scan items as they go using a scanner on their shopping cart.
However, Dash Cart’s features will also be scaled back, Bloomberg reported.
Earlier versions of techy carts used a set of cameras to automatically identify what shoppers had grabbed from the shelf and placed in the cart.
Newer versions of the Dash Cart have bid adieu to the cameras in favor of scanners that shoppers must hold items in front of. The scanners then read bar codes, or have touch screens to search non-barcoded items like produce and ready-to-serve hot food.
The smart shopping carts still allow customers to skip the checkout line, including other benefits like viewing the receipt while shopping, Amazon spokesperson Carly Golden told The Post.
“We’ve invested a lot of time redesigning a number of our Amazon Fresh stores over the last year, offering a better overall shopping experience with more value, convenience, and selection — and so far we’ve seen positive results, with higher customer shopping satisfaction scores and increased purchasing,” Golden added.
“Just Walk Out” concept will still be sold to smaller retailers and convenience stores that can be more agile in implementing the tech, which is costly to install and has relied on humans to double-check transactions for accuracy — features that make it difficult for the program to be used in larger-scale supermarkets.
Thus, the effort to sell “Just Walk Out” has been transferred from Hoggett’s team to Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud computing subsidiary, according to The Information.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos originally scoffed at the idea of a cashierless supermarket.
After The Post first reported in February 2017 that Amazon was developing a “supermarket-sized version” of its Amazon Go shops, citing sources that the two-story concept would have robots grabbing and bagging goods on the top floor while shoppers picked up items such as produce, meats and booze on the ground floor, Bezos lashed out.
In a rare Twitter post at the time, he said the paper’s sources had “mixed up their meds!”
News of the forthcoming high-tech grocery stores also worried consumers that Amazon was relying more on technology than human workers — a controversial, job-killing business model.
“It’s both incorrect and misleading to suggest that Amazon destroys jobs — the fact is that no other US-based company has created more jobs than Amazon,” the company said in a statement back in 2020 after The Post reported on the opening of a Fresh store with “Just Walk Out” technology.
