Major Japanese retailer partners with smart New Zealand technology IMAGR
The PR machine is out in full force on this bit of news, and for good reason.. The way these guys are approaching shopping at the supermarket is super interesting and completely in line with the way I imagine store based supermarket shopping in the future work.
I genuinely hate the checkout process in supermarkets. That is what made Amazon's self-service stores so appealing.. They had eliminated the checkout process, just take what you need and your account gets debited. But, Amazon's approach was to establish a monopoly by setting up their own stores with a mixture of a tonne of CCTV surveillance and tag based solutions. Disappointing because 1) privacy, and 2) by not providing the tech stack to existing supermarkets - there is no one to keep them honestly competitive.
From a technology perspective IMAGR are playing the game like Tesla. They're shunning top-heavy expensive CCTV solutions or wasteful tag based solutions instead opting for ML powered vision systems in the shopping cart itself. They've got a massive head start with their product database and they're taking a very different (and more supportive) approach.
For those who are wondering, all a supermarket has to do is buy a bunch of the Smart Carts, add any speciality items that are not already a part of IMAGR's massive product database and then they're good to go.
As a consumer, you turn up, put your items in the cart and walk out at the end. Behind the scenes, when you put items in the cart, the SmartCart hardware identifies the items and adds them to your running total. If you remove an item physically it removes the item virtually. When you're finished you walk out of the store and it charges your account bypassing the checkout process completely.
Curious to see what other people think about this approach? Does it seem too complex? Or are you like me and can't wait to be able to walk in and walk out of a New World with the items you need in less than 5 minutes. Personally I'm just annoyed that this hasn't had more traction here in NZ - instead supermarkets are opting for annoying self-service checkouts.
I get that the general populace is adverse to change, but this is one of those technologies that I've been following with interest as I see it actually disrupting the self-service checkout orgs.
I personally think the only issue/obstacle is getting people to install the companion app in the first place - just like the initial step required to use Uber.. Once that hurdle is overcome the experience from that point looks to be hugely convenient.