After the Amazon Go cashless store fiasco, one would have thought that the sector would stay away from this technology. And yet, Aldi seems to want to take up the torch. This week, the hard-discount giant announced it was launching – in partnership with Grabango – a cashier-free shopping system in one of its supermarkets in Aurora, on the outskirts of Chicago.
For Will Glaser, founder and CEO of Grabango“the launch of ALDIgo is a pivotal moment for the retail sector”. The particularity of this “test” launch lies in the choice of a typical, normal-sized store, as the head of the start-up attests: “Although more difficult, it was important for us to launch this technology in a typical store and not in a store designed specifically for us”.
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Computer vision follows consumers
Concretely, this supermarket will be equipped with computer vision technology which speeds up the checkout process. The Grabango system was added to an existing Aldi store without the need to change the display of products on the shelves. It allows Aldi to identify and track every item in the store, and allows customers to exit without having to queue or scan their items.
To use ALDIgo, customers do their weekly Aldi shopping as they usually do. There are no carts or special barriers at the entrance. Once the shopping is finished, they can pay with their credit card or with the Grabango app at the payment terminal located near the exit. In addition, customers always have the option of switching to traditional checkout.
first tests in london
Aldi is not its first attempt at “autonomous” supermarkets. Already in 2022, the German giant was working on the subject, leading it to open a concept store called Aldi Shop&Go in the heart of London, in the Greenwich district. It was opened to the public after being tested by Aldi employees for several months. Inside, customers can make their purchases without scanning a single product or having to go through a checkout. They simply download the Aldi Shop&Go app, which allows them to enter the store, collect their items, and then simply exit once they are finished shopping.
After leaving the supermarket, purchases are automatically charged via the selected payment method and a receipt appears in the app. The system, provided by self-shopping platform provider AiFi, uses specially positioned cameras to detect which products customers have collected, before charging them to their account once they have completed their shopping.
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“Cashless” technology still struggles to do without humans
Grabango launched into this cashierless payment market in 2016. Its platform could process “millions of simultaneous transactions”, with no limits on access to the store, what can be sold there or the configuration of the shelves . The Californian start-up is already present in stores of the Giant Eagle, 7-Eleven and Mapco Store chains.
Coincidentally (or not), Amazon launched its Just Walk Out technology the same year. The system has long been presented as a major innovation, first coming from dedicated stores (Amazon Go), then rolled out over larger areas. However, at the beginning of the month, the firm announced the disappearance of its system from all stores in UNITED STATES, with only the United Kingdom planning to keep it. The reason ? The cost – far too high – of its system which includes sensors, cameras… and humans!
Too high operational costs singled out
Amazon has, in fact, been careful to specify throughout all these years that the majority of sales required the intervention of human evaluators. 700 purchases out of 1000 would have involved a manual verification in 2022. A figure which far exceeds Amazon's internal objectives, which wanted to achieve less than 50 evaluations per 1000 sales.
Coming back to Amazon's collapse, Grabango did not hesitate to drive the point home just after the announcement of his withdrawal. “The reliance on IoT sensors on shelves, the cornerstone of Amazon's JWO technology, has proven to be its Achilles heel. These sensors, while innovative, require a fixed store layout that goes against the dynamic nature of retail”, says Will Glaser, CEO of the start-up. According to him, “This inflexibility translates into high operational costs on top of considerable hardware investments. The ongoing maintenance of thousands of single points of failure has only made the situation worse.”
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