Amazon is scaling back its Just Walk Out technology, removing it from Amazon Fresh stores in the U.S.
Customers appreciated how Just Walk Out gave them the ability to skip checkout lines, but wanted 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,” company spokesperson Carly Golden said in an emailed statement.
Amazon Fresh stores instead will roll out Dash Carts, “smart-shopping carts, which allows customers all these benefits including skipping the checkout line,” Golden said.
The carts differ from Just Walk Out, Amazon said. Shoppers scan an item using a Dash Cart camera, place it in the cart, then exit via a specialized Dash Cart lane to process the payment method affiliated with their Amazon account. With Just Walk Out, “sensors, cameras, and deep learning tools sense what a consumer takes off the shelf,” according to Amazon’s AWS website.
Those tools require people to foster machine learning, another Amazon spokesperson, Nathan Strauss, confirmed by email. The news that Amazon Fresh stores will no longer use Just Walk Out technology was first reported by The Information, which covers technology and the tech industry. The publication also reported that Just Walk Out employs people in India, who work behind the scenes to monitor shopping activity, according to multiple media outlets citing The Information.
Amazon pushed back on that, though Strauss confirmed that humans work alongside the technology.
“The characterization that Just Walk Out technology relies on human reviewers is inaccurate,” Strauss said. “The primary role of our Machine Learning data associates is to annotate video images, which is necessary for continuously improving the underlying machine learning model powering Just Walk Out technology. Associates may also validate a small minority of shopping visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine with complete confidence an individual’s purchases.”
Just Walk Out has continued to scale while the number of human reviews is down year over year, according to Strauss.
Dash Carts use “a combination of computer vision algorithms and sensor fusion to help identify items placed in the cart,” Strauss also said. A receipt is emailed shortly after the customer leaves.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to questions about whether the Dash Cart technology also employs machine learning data associates.
In addition to potentially removing consumer pain points, the Dash Carts could also be a vehicle for paid advertising, according to Bank of America analysts led by Justin Post. They see the switch as “part of the broader push to revamp Fresh locations with more customer-friendly features like brighter colors and coffee shops, as opposed to the possibly ‘Online-first’ design of Amazon's previous locations,” according to a Tuesday client note.
