Cashless cashierless and creepy a visit to the future of grocery shopping

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Washington: As I walk into the grocery store a woman in her twenties is coming the other way clutching a shopping bag. “It’s like bizarro world in there,” she says, wide-eyed, as if she’d just hopped off a theme park ride.

From the outside, the Amazon Fresh store in Washington DC’s Logan Circle neighbourhood looks pretty much like any other supermarket. But once you walk through the front door you realise that this is not going to be a regular shopping experience.

A shopper takes a product off a shelf at an Amazon Fresh cashierless convenience store.Credit:Bloomberg

To get inside, you scan a QR code on Amazon’s smartphone app and walk through a turnstile - like you would before boarding a train or an airplane. The most unusual thing, though, is what isn’t there: there are no checkouts, no cashiers and no queues.

Once customers have finished shopping, they simply walk out the door without ever removing their wallet from their pocket. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were shoplifting.

Amazon, the retail behemoth founded by billionaire space fanatic Jeff Bezos, describes the experience as “just walk out shopping”. Alarmed civil liberties groups use more derogatory terminology: “total-surveillance shopping”.

Amazon Fresh’s Washington store is the first of its kind in the US capital and just the 15th in the United States. The first store of its kind was launched in Los Angeles last September.

The recently-opened, checkout-free Amazon Fresh store in Washington DC offers a glimpse into the future of retail shopping. Credit:Matthew Knott

When the Washington store opened for business last week, it was a major local news event. It was the same story in March when London’s first Amazon Fresh store launched: the Daily Mirror pessimistically described it as a “dystopian” development.

Shopping around the globe is becoming increasingly automated: Woolworths now offers contactless, “scan-and-go” shopping at 33 stores in Australia. Amazon Fresh takes that concept to the next level by entirely removing the need to scan any barcodes.

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To shop in an Amazon Fresh store is to enter a commercial equivalent of the Panopticon, an all-seeing system of prison surveillance designed by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century.

The company, somewhat creepily, knows exactly what you have selected during your trip through what it vaguely describes as a combination of “computer vision, algorithms and sensor fusion”. There are no obvious cameras following you as you shop, but customers are most definitely being tracked.

Just walk out: a customer carries a reusable bag after shopping at a cashierless store.Credit:Bloomberg

“Anything they take off the shelf is automatically added to their virtual cart, and anything they put back on the shelf comes out of their virtual cart,” Amazon explained in a statement.

After you leave the supermarket, the credit card linked to your Amazon account is automatically billed for your purchases.

The experience takes a bit of getting used to. At the end of my shop I realised that I had, operating on the basis of habit, unnecessarily put all my items into a basket. I could simply have put them straight into my reusable bag and walked out the door.

I also had no idea how much money I had spent during the visit.

But the technology is undeniably impressive. After returning home I checked my Amazon account and saw that my credit card had been accurately charged - right down to the single plum I picked up.

Privacy rights groups are concerned about Amazon’s intense tracking of customers, and what the company will do with all the data it is amassing.

Meanwhile, unions are worried about a loss of jobs. Employees are still needed to stack the shelves and assist customers, but Amazon Fresh’s lack of check-outs means that fewer staff members are required than a regular supermarket.

But the concept is proving popular with shoppers. Amazon plans to open more than two dozen Amazon Fresh stores across the US in coming months, according to Bloomberg.

The company has not announced any plans to launch in Australia. But what feels like a “bizarro world” experience right now may well be just a regular trip to the shops in the not-too-distant future.

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Matthew Knott is North America correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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