By Staff
December 6th, 2016
BURLINGTON, ON
Wow!
Cannot wait for this one to come to my local supermarket.
Amazon GO has opened their first supermarket in Seattle. They seem to be into everything but listen to what they have added as a service – convenience feature.
When you take something off a shelf and put it in the cart – the cost of that item is automatically deducted from your Amazon account.
Imagine – no more standing in a checkout line at a supermarket.
Amazon GO lets customers walk in, grab food from the shelves and walk out again, without ever having to stand in a checkout line.
Customers tap their cellphones on a turnstile as they walk into the store, which logs them into the store’s network and connects to their Amazon account through an app.
The service is called Amazon Go. It uses machine learning, sensors and artificial intelligence to track items customers pick up. These are then added to the virtual cart on their app. If they pick up an item they later decide they don’t want, putting it back on the shelf removes it from their cart.
Do you know what that means?
No more standing in a checkout line.
No more standing behind someone who fishes through their change purse for the exact amount of change.
This is close to Nirvana.
Making life more convenient is certainly appealing until one realizes that the price we pay for these conveniences is the loss of jobs. The cost of saving 5-15 minutes at the check-out will result in higher rates of unemployment and poverty. Resulting in higher costs for, but not limited to, health, income and justice budgets.
By saving ourselves a mere few minutes of a day we have higher taxes and tough budget cuts to look forward to.