A woman uses a dashboard cart while shopping at a Whole Foods store as Amazon launches smart carts at Whole Foods stores in San Mateo, California, the United States, February 25, 2024. The smart cart speeds up Grocery shopping by allowing customers can scan products directly into their cart while they shop, then skip the checkout line.
Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu | Getty Images
Amazon will begin selling its smart grocery carts to other retailers, the company announced Wednesday, marking its latest bid to turn its Dash Cart technology into a service.
A handful of Price Chopper and McKeever’s Market stores in Kansas and Missouri are testing the smart grocery carts, which track and count items as customers shop, Amazon said.
Amazon launched the Dash Cart in 2020 at its Fresh supermarket chain before adding it to select Whole Foods stores. They use a combination of computer vision and sensors to identify items when they are placed in bags inside the cart. As shoppers add and remove items, a display on the cart adjusts the total price in real time.
Amazon is following a similar playbook previously deployed for its “Just Walk Out” checkout-less technology. Just Walk Out was first designed for use in Amazon’s Go convenience stores, until Amazon began selling the system to third-party retailers in airports, stadiums, hospitals and other locations .
Although it has recruited more third-party Just Walk Out users, Amazon has removed the technology from many of its own grocery stores. Earlier this month, Amazon announced it would remove Just Walk Out from some Fresh stores and the two Whole Foods stores where it was installed. The company’s Go convenience stores and smaller Fresh stores in the UK will continue to use the technology, while it expands Dash Carts across its Fresh stores in the US.
Amazon teams working on Just Walk Out, Dash Carts and other brick-and-mortar store technologies were among those hit by layoffs earlier this month.
On Wednesday, Amazon said it has “a firm belief that Just Walk Out technology will be the future in stores offering a curated selection that customers can walk in, pick up the small number of items they need, and simply walk out.”
Just Walk Out relies on an array of cameras and sensors throughout the store that monitor which items shoppers pick up and automatically refill them when they leave. Amazon and other startups that have developed similar checkout systems have been slow to launch them in larger stores, initially launching them in convenience stores, due to the complex and expensive technology involved.
These systems came under scrutiny earlier this month after reports from Gizmodo and others claimed that Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology relied on human moderators who “monitored you while you were shopping. Many reports cite a May 2023 article from The Information that Amazon uses around 1,000 employees in India to review JWO transactions and label images to help train the AI models that make it work.
Amazon said reports that workers monitored customers from afar were “false,” while acknowledging that human staff were responsible for labeling and annotating purchase data.
“Associates do not watch live videos of shoppers to generate receipts – this is automatically taken care of by computer vision algorithms,” the company said. “This is no different from any other AI system that places a high value on accuracy, where human evaluators are common.”
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