Question

OM in the News: No More Lines in the Supermarket? JULY 9, 2019 by Barry Render fags: scanning supermarkets, Tesco, waiting lines A man recently strolled down the candy aisle of a grocery store in England, picked up a bar of chocolate and stashed it in his back pocket. He wasn't stealing. Specially equipped surveillance cameras were tracking both his body and the products he was taking off the shelves, to help him pay for them. The giant supermarket chain Tesco wants to make shopping at its stores more convenient. Tesco is one of several A woman scans the bar code of an item she is buying grocers testing cashierless stores with cameras at a Tesco store that track what shoppers pick, so they pay by simply walking out the door. The retailers hope the technology will allow them to cut costs and alleviate lines as they face an evolving threat from e-commerce giant Amazon, reports The Wall Street Journal (July 8, 2019). European efforts to scale up the technology in traditional stores-economically and without privacy issues will likely be closely watched in the U.S. Grocers in the U.K. often pioneer new technology like online delivery and self-payment kiosks that their American peers eventually adopt. Tesco plans to open its self-styled "pick and go or frictionless shopping store to the public next year after testing with employees. It then wants to use the technology, developed by Israel's Trigo Vision, in more stores. The test store uses 150 ceiling-mounted cameras to generate a 3-dimensional view of products as they are taken off shelves. Israel's biggest supermarket chain, Shufersal, plans to deploy similar technology across all its stores. "The whole notion of waiting in line will vanish," the company said. U.S. retailers face concerns about excluding low-income shoppers who tend to pay with cash. Lawmakers in several cities, including San Francisco, have been considering bans on cashless stores. U.S. retailers also operate many large stores, where tracking thousands of products all day long would be expensive. Classroom discussion questions: 1. How does this compare to Amazon Go stores? (See our Jan. 28, 2018 blog) 2. What are the difficulties in implementing the technology in huge supermarkets?

Answer 1

(1) Tesco uses a technology that will allow customers to walk around its stores, load up their shopping bags and walk out without putting them through a till. It has invested an undisclosed sum of money into" Trigo Vision", an Israeli start-up that uses Artificial Intelligence to create checkout-free operations for large grocers whereby customers can enter a shop, pick up what they want to purchase and walk out again without any physical transaction taking place.

While Amazon Go is the first store of its kind where no checkout is required. Customers simply enter the store using the Amazon Go app to browse and take the products they want and then leave. The store is partially-automated, with customers being able to purchase products without using a cashier or checkout station.Amazon, the store concept uses several technologies, including computer vision, deep learning algorithms, and sensor fusion to automate much of the purchase, checkout, and payment steps associated with a retail transaction.

(2) The difficulties in implementing the technology in huge supermarkets are:

• The customers might be uncomfortable when exiting, as they might not be sure they had paid properly.
• To track customers at busy time.
• It is difficult to get a cashier less system to work with items where the size, shape and weight varies.
• Privacy is a major concern.
• Anti theft measure remains the biggest concern.
• Cost associated with each technology .
• Limited in scope because the efficiency of these technologies depends on their ability to capture data about the consumer’s whereabouts in the store, as well as identify the items that they pick up and take with them.