A woman uses a dash cart as she shops for groceries at a Whole Foods store as Amazon launches smart shopping carts at Whole Foods stores in San Mateo, California, US on February 25, 2024. The smart shopping cart makes grocery shopping faster by letting customers scan products directly In their shopping cart while shopping and then skip the checkout line.
Taifun Coskun | Anatolia | Getty Images
Amazon The company said Wednesday that it will begin selling its smart grocery carts to other retailers, marking its latest bid to turn Dash Cart technology into a service.
Amazon said a group of Price Chopper and McKeever's Market stores in Kansas and Missouri are testing smart grocery carts, which track and count items as customers shop.
Amazon launched the Dash Cart in 2020 in its Fresh supermarket chain before adding it to select Whole Foods stores. They use a combination of computer vision and sensors to identify items as they are placed in bags inside the cart. As shoppers add and remove items, the display on the shopping cart adjusts the total price in real time.
Amazon follows a similar previously published playbook for its cashier-less “Just Walk Out” technology. Just Walk Out was first designed for use in Amazon Go convenience stores, until Amazon began selling the system to third-party retailers in airports, stadiums, hospitals and other locations.
Although more third-party Just Walk Out users have signed up, Amazon has pulled the technology from many of its grocery stores. Earlier this month, Amazon said it would eliminate Just Walk Out in some Fresh stores, and at the two Whole Foods locations where it was installed. The company's Go convenience stores and smaller Fresh stores in the UK will continue to use the technology, while it will expand Dash Carts into US Fresh stores.
Amazon teams working on Just Walk Out, Dash Carts and other physical store technology were among those hit by layoffs earlier this month.
Amazon said Wednesday that it has a “strong belief that Just Walk Out technology will be the future in stores that have a selection where customers can walk in, grab a small number of items they need, and simply walk out.”
Just Walk Out relies on an array of cameras and sensors throughout the store that monitor the items shoppers pick up and automatically charge them as they leave. Amazon and other startups that have developed similar cashierless payment systems have been slow to launch them in large-format stores, having originally launched the systems in smaller markets, because of the complex and expensive technology involved.
These systems came under scrutiny earlier this month after reports from Gizmodo and others claimed that Amazon's Just Walk Out technology relies on human moderators who “monitor you while you shop.” Several reports cited a May 2023 story from The Information that said Amazon is using nearly 1,000 employees in India to review JWO transactions and call the shots to help train the AI models that make them work.
Amazon said reports that workers monitor customers from afar are “incorrect,” though it acknowledged that human employees are responsible for labeling and annotating shopping data.
“Partners don't watch live videos of shoppers to create receipts — that's taken care of automatically by computer vision algorithms,” the company said. “This is no different from any other AI system that places a high value on accuracy, where human reviewers are common.”
