This is happening before our eyes, the stores of the future are not only fantasies and plans anymore, but specific implementations. The opening of the first fully autonomous store called Take & GO will take place at the end of June in Poznań.
There are a few shops already providing self-service but after selecting all products, you go to the self-service checkout and make payments with a card – Visa, MasterCard, Apple Pay or Google Pay – in the payment terminal.
In Take & GO there will be no cash registers, only a sensor system on the shelves with goods and a system of cameras located around the store.
The customer at the entrance will be verified using the mobile application, after which he will be able to select the goods of interest, and the intelligent shelves and cameras will identify the product, and when leaving the store, they will automatically charge our account for them. Completely the same as in the Amazon GO stores already operating in the USA.
Well, the key (also literally) to the whole process will be the customer’s smartphone with the Take & GO application installed. After entering the store and identifying the customer, you will be able to start the purchase. RFID tags placed on shelves and products will assign and bind them to a specific customer. The moment of downloading them from the shelf will not be finalized yet, so when the customer thinks about it, he can safely put it on the shelf and continue shopping.
Finalization of shopping takes place at the end of the store outlet in which the client will display a list of all purchases that he put in the bag and after they are confirmed, the payment is taken from the customer’s account using a plugged in for the payment card application. At this point, there is no need to remove products from the bag and scan them, as in other similar projects of the Bio Family unmanned stores.
What products can we expect?
At the start, it is planned to equip the store with an assortment of 900 products. Mainly they will be food products and ready meals, without cigarettes or alcohol. There will be a lot of sliced fruit, juice or coffee, and a wider range of products will be dependent on the demand reported by customers. The network’s founders also promise to launch a system of special discounts for regular customers. In the next 12 months, 21 such stores will be launched in 3 cities in Poland. At the beginning it is Poznań, the next one in Warsaw.
This all sounds very nice but is it necessary? We understand its all about reducing costs for these companies. Theoretically, that should mean cheaper products for the consumer but we doubt it. It seems like stores are getting greedy but let’s hope we are wrong. If by reducing costs we get cheaper products then great but we are not so sure that will happen. We will see…
More articles click here or go to homepage
