Amazon Go is Amazon’s checkoutless supermarket offering and it looks like it’s coming to the UK if reports are to be believed. Previously we’ve reported that they have been scouting locations and now it looks like they are edging closer.
Apparently the the UK Intellectual Property Office approved the Amazon’s application to trademark the slogans “No Lines. No Checkout. (No, Seriously.)” and “No Queue. No Checkout. (No, Seriously.)” on Friday last.
We’ve reported before about Amazon Go, which has previously only been seen in action in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle. It’s a supermarket where you login when you enter and then, through wizardry such as motion sensors and cameras, means you don’t need to check out. They know what’s in your basket and you pay via Amazon automatically because they know what you’ve taken.
As they say of the stores: “Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning.”
It seems though that early experiments were not successful with the pilot store struggling to keep up with what shoppers were taking when numbers in store exceeded 20.
We’re forgiving. Any emerging technology is always going to have problems. But knowing Amazon they’ll have been working hard to make it work if they truly believe in the concept. Personally, I look forward to getting to grips with the concept in real life and trying to do a shop in an Amazon Go store the moment it opens in London.
