Amazon’s cashierless store finally ready to go after yearlong delay

Published on: Jan 22, 2018
Author: Amy Liu

Nearly a year after it was promised, Amazon.com Inc.’s cashierless convenience store is slated to open to the public on Monday.

The new Amazon Go store, located in the base of Amazon’s main headquarters in Seattle, uses computer vision and machine-learning algorithms to track shoppers and charge them for what they select, thereby eliminating checkout counters.

In an interview last week, Dilip Kumar, vice president of technology for Amazon Go and Amazon Books, said testing with employees has trained the technology to work in the store, an experiment that is part of the company’s broader effort to reinvent how consumers shop. Kumar declined to say whether Amazon AMZN, +2.53%   will expand the Go concept, although he said the company has developed the technology to scale.

Amazon announced the new Go store with fanfare in December 2016, and said it would open to the public in early 2017. The opening was delayed, however, as the technology proved more difficult to master than expected, with glitches occurring when too many people were in the store or were moving too quickly, The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2017.

Source: Market Watch

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