Sam’s Club, Walmart Canada, 7-Eleven and many other retailers are now piloting these types of systems. Mobile scan-and-go is one option, for instance. Amazon Go cameras, in contrast, stay nicely positioned in the ceilings of stores, while carts get slammed into each other, run into cars, rained on, snowed on, and lord knows what else little Johnny might do to them.įourth and finally, there are just better ideas out there. And, don’t even go down the rabbit hole of maintenance and repairs either. The idea is likely to run into a whole host of issues at scale. Now imagine operating a touch screen in 120 degree Phoenix heat in the summer or negative 32 degree temperatures in Minneapolis in the winter. They get taken out to parking lots, removed from stores for a variety of purposes, and weather can also wreak havoc on how well they work in general, say nothing of how it might impact reliability and functionality when they are also suped up with tech.Įver have one with a bum wheel, for example? Third, shopping carts are not always reliable tools in all settings. The Amazon Dash cart, on the other hand, is like asking customers to play a game of Simon from the early 1980s as they shop. Customers simply place items in their carts and then walk through checklanes to have cashiers scan, weigh, and bag all their items. Current grocery stores don’t require customers to do any of these dorky color coded things. It all seems downright confusing and a far cry from the modern grocery store operation that has been well-emblazoned in everyone’s minds since Piggly Wiggly first invented the darn thing way back in 1916.

One has to pair it with his or her phone, wait for beeps, discern between various colors signals, enter PLU items, check for barcodes, etc. One can only “just walk out” if his or her trip is confined to two bags and he or she also chooses to learn what is, at its core and as described above, not a very intuitive technology. At Woodland Hills, however, the situation is different. You just walk in and walk out, just as its much ballyhooed “Just Walk Out” technology platform says it should operate. The beauty of Amazon Go is that it is easy. Second, the experience design of the cart itself, wrapped up in the store’s overall shopping experience, is also not user friendly.

Amazon cart