E-commerce giant Amazon (Seattle, WA) announced it will discontinue its autonomous “Just Walk Out” cashierless technology from most of its locations.
“We’ve invested a lot of time redesigning a number of our Amazon Fresh stores over the last year, offering a better overall shopping experience with more value, convenience, and selection—and so far we’ve seen positive results, with higher customer shopping satisfaction scores and increased purchasing,” Amazon said in a statement.
According to the company, the technology was deployed in 20 Amazon Go stores, 40 Amazon Fresh stores and two Whole Foods Market stores. It was also available in various third-party outlets including airports, sports stadiums, universities, theme parks, cafés and grocery stores.
Introduced in 2016, the technology was aimed to let customers grab what they wanted from a store and leave, skipping the entire checkout process. Amazon wanted to use artificial intelligence (AI) to surveil purchases and bill customers at a later date via their Amazon accounts, according to Ars Technica.
Amazon cited “technology problems” as one of the main factors for the decision. For example, training the AI software required a team of more than 1,000 workers in India to manually review transactions, labels and images.
“As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales,” Amazon said in a statement.
Just Walk Out will still be available at select locations. However, Amazon is also releasing Dash Carts, smart shopping carts with built-in checkout screens and scanners.
“We’ve also heard from customers that while they enjoyed the benefit of skipping the checkout line with Just Walk Out, they also wanted the ability to easily find nearby products and deals, view their receipt as they shop, and know how much money they saved while shopping throughout the store,” Amazon said in a statement.
