Amazon abandons technology in Just Walk Out stores

A while back, Amazon launched something quite ambitious. This is a store where you can just grab the items you need, walk out and get paid accordingly. It refuses to use a traditional till. It looks like Amazon is getting ready to ditch its Just Walk Out technology.

Amazon has been developing this technology for a long time, and has rolled it out to about half of its Amazon Fresh stores located in the states. There are other Amazon Fresh stores with this technology, including in the UK. This means that despite the company’s efforts to spread it, the technology has not been able to pass it on to other entities.

Amazon is abandoning Just Walk Out technology

As cool as this technology sounds, there was a lot of drama going on behind the scenes that basically spelled the demise of this technology.

Data concerns

For starters, such technology does not come without a price. We’re not just talking about money; we’re talking about data. If oil is ‘black gold’, data is ‘digital gold’. Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology uses multiple sensors and cameras to identify people removing products from shelves. This will help the company determine what products are being pulled from the shelves.

These sensors would need to collect biometric information such as faces and body shapes of people. The city of New York didn’t like that, and filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon.

Not really cashiers less

Another thing about this technology is the fact that even though it was “cashierless”, the technology was not without human intervention. A huge amount of data was collected using the cameras and in fact a team of over 1000 employees in India scanned the camera footage. So while there were no cashiers there had to be an army of people looking over the footage. Apparently it costs a lot more than a handful of cashiers.

The operating costs of this technology were generally quite high. With only a handful of stores supporting it, it felt like more money was spent than received on the technology. So Amazon had to abandon this technology. It makes a lot more money from people shopping online than it does from people shopping in the real world. Buying a fruit salad at Amazon Fresh doesn’t make people buy a dress online, so the company doesn’t prioritize its in-store experience as much. The outflow of money is not entirely justified.