Amazon’s no-checkout store threatens death of the cashier
Disruptive change equated to supermarket equivalent of self-driving car
5 HOURS AGO by: Mark Vandevelde and Lindsay Whipp
A few blocks from the Seattle street corner where Amazon is opening a futuristic convenience store that does away with checkout lines and cashiers, a criminal defence lawyer named Court Will wonders what effect the experiment will have on his livelihood.
“We have three or four shoplifting cases at any given time,” said Mr Will. “It’s like asking a defence attorney who specialises in [drink driving cases] what they think about automated vehicles. There’s going to be some mixed feelings.”
Amazon has portrayed its first grocery store, unveiled this week, as the retail equivalent of a self-driving car. Bristling with sensors and equipped with sophisticated software, it tracks customers’ movements as they lift items off the shelves, so there is no need to ring up the bill when they are done.
The New York Post has called it, baldly, “the end of jobs”. About 3.5m people were employed as cashiers in US stores last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — more than in any other occupation aside from sales.
The BLS expects that number to rise just 2 per cent in the next decade, far less than the 7 per cent increase it projects for the entire US economy.
The British Retail Consortium is even gloomier. It reckons one-third of the industry’s jobs will disappear by 2025, as technology takes over more tasks and human labour is priced out of the supermarket by a rising minimum wage.
But those forecasts may be overstated. After all, the number of store clerks in the US is actually slightly higher now than it was in 2005, despite a decade of innovations such as internet retailing, self-scan checkouts and contactless payment cards.
Store staff are needed to keep shoppers honest, but also to keep them loyal. Many customers enjoy a human touch, or are fed up of the robotic chiding they receive when an item in the bagging area weighs more than a database says it should.
Walgreens, the biggest US pharmacy by sales, installed a few self-checkouts six years ago but scrapped them when customers failed to take to the technology. Albertsons, a US supermarket chain, has replaced some of its self-checkouts with additional express lanes, which it says are more efficient.
In Germany, a recent survey by RBR, a strategy group, found just 3,200 self-checkout counters in the entire country. That compares with 48,000 in the UK.
“Germans want to be served; it’s not a lack of technology,” said RBR’s Alan Burt, adding that even those retailers who use the devices tend to redeploy staff elsewhere.
Georges Plassat, chief executive of French retailer Carrefour, agreed. He insisted this year that “the physical network is the essential foundation”. Customers in the food industry are looking for contact, advice and service, he said — things they are most likely to find in a physical store.
Trader Joe’s, the US discount supermarket, eschews automation in favour of hipster staff who exude positivity and go out of their way to engage customers in superfluous chit-chat.
Even Walmart, the utilitarian retailer that has installed self-checkout kiosks in most of its stores, concluded last year that spending more on staff was the best way to halt five consecutive quarters of declining same-store sales, although the company is still evaluating deeper automation.
Retail workers have another role that is even more important than connecting with their customers. The primary function of the store clerk, some executives privately acknowledge, is to prevent those customers from becoming thieves.
For now, self-service technology is multiplying the opportunity for dishonesty, rather than eliminating it. Researchers at the University of Leicester reviewed theft rates at supermarkets in Europe and the US and concluded that they were twice as high where self-checkout machines had been installed.
Malay Kundu, who developed a facial recognition system to spot terrorists in airports now uses similar technology to catch a growing contingent of self-checkout thieves.
His company, StopLift, links supermarket tills to software that analyses images from closed circuit security cameras, to check whether expensive items such as meat or wine are being bagged when only cheaper items such as carrots pass in front of the scanner.
“No one wants to be accused of stealing,” he said. “We alert attendants so they can go and offer some friendly customer service to say excuse me, it looks like you may have . . . these items may not have scanned.”
That problem is likely to deepen if more supermarkets allow customers to bypass a full checkout service by scanning items as they shop. Walmart is introducing the system at its Sam’s Club discount unit, while J Sainsbury is among the supermarkets trying the system in the UK.
“Most of our customers are truthful,” said Alice Bland, who is in charge of the Sainsbury’s trial and says some people even scan the same item several times to avoid making a humiliating error.
All the same, Sainsbury’s — like other supermarkets testing the system — requires customers who use it to queue up at a manned exit before leaving the store.
That is why Amazon’s experiment could pose such a grave threat to millions of livelihoods. The technology aims to make shoplifting not just difficult but conceptually impossible. If customers are no longer obliged to declare what they have taken from the shelves, there is less opportunity for deceit.
“Once you’re scanned in, you basically have free rein,” said Mr Will, who was confident his law practice could fill any gap in its client list by defending alleged criminals of other kinds.
“I guess if someone gets ahold of your phone and goes crazy in there, that would be a crime. Otherwise, you take what you want off the shelf and walk out and if there’s some sort of malfunction that’s on [Amazon] as far as the criminal law is concerned.”
Close surveillance: tracking the customer
Amazon has said little about just how its “Just Walk Out” technology will dispense with checkout queues by keeping a virtual tab of every sandwich or smoothie that shoppers pick off the shelf.
But its patent filing from last year reveals a plan for a retail environment under surveillance so intensive it recalls the Panopticon, a prison designed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham as “a mill for grinding rogues honest”.
To figure out who has bought what, the patent envisages tracking each customer as he or she roams the store. Retailers already use smartphone radio signals to measure the flow of people through their premises. Amazon also suggested using microphones to triangulate a customer’s position by using sounds such as footsteps.
When an item is taken from the shelves, cameras use cues such as skin tone and body heat to identify a customer’s hand and then the product it is holding. Other sensors, such as pressure-sensing pads embedded in the shelves and tiny radio transponders embedded in product packaging, help work out which item has been picked up or put down.
If all else fails, the system can look up a customer’s past purchases and resort to informed guesswork.
In a video that was widely aired on US television during the December shopping rush, Amazon showed a customer picking a cupcake off the shelf, then putting it back — with each move registered by her smartphone. Purchases are automatically billed to customers’ credit cards as they leave the store.
But the reality may be less straightforward.
“It’s a very cool thing they’re trying to do,” said Malay Kundu, chief executive of StopLift and an expert in computer vision. “But it relies on constraining the environment. There are plastic dividers making sure that items don’t move horizontally. What if a customer is reaching across? What if you have kids who randomly take things off the shelves and put them back? Then it becomes tricky.”
In a sign that Amazon may be some way from perfecting its surveillance system, the experimental store is stocked with low-cost items such as meal kits and sandwiches, rather than branded goods that are more valuable as contraband.
For now the outlet is open only to an unspecified number of Amazon employees in the company’s “beta programme”; none of those contacted by the Financial Times had been inside. Members of the public will be barred until “early 2017”.
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