Recently, a new start-up company has put its product in testing and in collaboration with many grocery stores. Their product is a grocery cart packed with technology and a sensor that allows you to use it as a guest or log in with your grocery store membership because they partner with different retail brands. In addition, the cart has a small scaler that allows you to scale the item like fruits and vegetables. It also has an embedded payment system and bags to make your experience as a customer even better. The grocery cart is almost like a portable self-checkout system. While this technology might eventually eliminate cashier jobs, the co-founder of the startup said he don’t see the cashier’s job be gone in a short time. In fact, each newly developed technology will create a new job. For this grocery cart, when nothing goes wrong during your purchase, it shows a green light, however, if something does go wrong, you will need store employees to solve the problem manually.
This technology can challenge Amazon Go store because it is more flexible, you don’t have to bring your own shopping bag, and with technology embedded in a cart allows more capacity. Also, it can be invested at a relatively low cost because retailers only need to sign a contract with the company rather than updating the entire store which cost a lot of money.
Source:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/23/tech/smart-shopping-cart/index.html
I think the Al grocery cart is interesting, but there are pros and cons to everything. Amazon Go is more for the consumer who needs something convenient to grab and go. The Al grocery cart is for the shopper who is food shopping for large quantities of items. I do not think these two are necessarily competitors, but in fact, I believe they will both be successful in their own way. I can see normal grocery stores such as Wegmans and Giant using the Al Grocery cart to help their customer move more efficiently in the shopping experience. I see Amazon Go as a convenient store located in high foot traffic areas. They are both the technology of the future, but serve different purposes. The on thing people need to be-aware of is that with this technology companies will be tracking your information and what foods you tend to buy and even what foods you pick up and then later put back. People have to be open to receiving targeted ads for the things that the frequently purchase. Amazon Go is successful because of the thousand of camera located inside the store. They have to be okay with being filmed/tracked by sensors. I am a huge fan of this technology because it will definitely decrease theft in stores.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/03/tech/amazon-go/index.html
In my opinion, the AI grocery cart can be competing against Amazon Go, but it might not be entirely smarter than it. Amazon Go is a system where the customer doesn’t always need to grab a cart and put things into it. For customers who only wanted to quickly purchase only 1 or 2 items, the AI cart doesn’t help to be more convenient. However, it says that the AI grocery cart definitely has a lower cost. Amazon Go store must have hundreds of cameras. Although they both replaced the cashier’s job, the AI grocery cart did appear to have higher cost performance.
Source for my previous comment: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanabandoim/2019/05/28/can-grocery-stores-embrace-change-and-technology/#380c1f173a0f
I found this post very interesting, and think that while this technology would be really cool to implement into shopping carts, it would also be kind of useless. Improving the experience of shoppers is important to grocery stores, but how far are they willing to go to actually do so? Doing this will improve the experience for some, but complicate it for a variety of other customers who may be older or aren’t accustomed to this technology. Along with this, people would lose their jobs and have to find other work somewhere else. Overall, I think that this technology could be useful, but might work better if it was used for something that is a bigger problem in grocery stores like finding products off the shelves and getting the best deals and prices. Therefore, I think this technology is useful, but could be used for a wider variety of things rather than just shopping carts.
I saw many commercials and heard information about Amazon go, but I didn’t heard about AI grocery cart before. I think AI grocery cart is interesting and useful, but I feel like Amazon go is much more simple and developed version of AI grocery cart. Because ,in the article above, it says that AI shopping cart is like a portable self-check out system, but when we use amazon go, we don’t even need a shopping cart (just pick up the items and go). I think the reason people invent technology such as AI grocery cart and Amazon go because we pursue more simplicity and comfortable life. Following these reasons, I think Amazon go is more useful for people. Also, according to the article I found, it says that Amazon describes itself “you enter Amazon Go, take the products you want and, thanks to the app, just leave again”. Likewise, Amazon Go is much more simple (we don’t need a cart).
https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/news/amazon/139650-what-is-amazon-go-where-is-it-and-how-does-it-work
I’ve read some articles on the AI grocery cart too. I wasn’t a big fan of it. I noticed in your post, you mentioned that the co founder believes this technology will create more jobs because cashiers will have to help when the technology doesn’t work properly. In my opinion, if I was an employee and I had to constantly fix problems with a grocery cart, I would just ring up the customers myself. I wouldn’t want that extra hassle of figuring out what was wrong. There is no incentive for employees to solve problems with this cart. With that being said, I believe Caper is still in its early stages and it can still improve a lot. I think with more improvements, Casper can be the future of shopping. Casper can definitely compete with Amazon Go and I’m interested to see how both advance in the future.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/10/caper-shopping-cart/
This is an interesting concept. In my opinion, I feel that the Amazon Go store seems much easier. This is because you don’t have to bring a shopping cart and they can sometimes be a nuisance. In addition, what if they were to malfunction or break? Another point also is that shopping carts are gross. I believe that eliminating grocery carts would be beneficial. In the article attached to my comment, it mentioned about Walmart’s self-driving vans for food drop-offs. This would also be beneficial and less time consuming as well. I am amazed how AI is being used to help make our lives easier. However, with technology they can and will malfunction. All three of the ways that AI is contributing to making grocery shopping easier will eventually come across a bug. This will cause massive problems for customers who are in a hurry doing last minute errands. This all seems great but there are many downsides to it. I prefer shopping the old way but now will ordering items from a grocery store online to pick it up also it nice too.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/11/caper-smart-shopping-cart/