While the world is still living in the coronavirus era, Amazon is accelerating its offensive to create a world without cashiers. On Tuesday July 14, the company announced an “express cart”, the Dash Dart, capable of identifying and invoicing items taken by the customer itself. The latter can therefore leave the store without queuing…
The technology used is a mixture of sensors and cameras equipped with computer vision, as in autonomous cars. This system is also installed on the ceilings and shelves of Amazon Go convenience stores. And, since March 11, it has been sold by Jeff Bezos’ company to distributors who also want to set up shops without cashiers. “It is a game-changer”, says Max Hammond, analyst at the Gartner Institute for Studies.
Industry observers are enthusiastic: “The containment and distancing measures linked to Covid-19 have installed in our minds the concept of contactless and frictionless trade”, says Andrew Lipsman, author for eMarketer of a report on these trends, released in May. The analyst also points out that Amazon Go, launched in 2018, is changing scale, with now twenty-seven stores in the United States.
“We have no reason to delay their arrival in France”
Stores without cashiers from Amazon are not yet present on the French market. For the time being… “We have no reason to delay their establishment in France, because they are acclaimed by customers”, assured, on April 28, the director of Amazon France, Frédéric Duval, during a senatorial hearing organized in the middle of a controversy on the sanitary measures against the Covid-19, without however “Be able to give a specific date”.
The arrival of Amazon Go in Europe would be imminent in any case: an English promoter announced, on March 10, on Instagram “Next” in the London Borough of Notting Hill, before hastily deleting his message.
Until recently, Amazon Go was seen as an experiment with an uncertain future. The project was developed in secret in 2012 around the adviser of Jeff Bezos, Dilip Kumar, who became responsible for the “physical shops” branch. But it took years and millions of dollars before the opening, at the end of 2016, of a “fake” test store in Seattle (Washington State), then, at the beginning of 2018, of a “real” store.
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