It is now an interesting phenomenon that people are investing a lot of energy and money on the various of fully automated products or services, such as unmanned vehicles, unmanned warehouse and even the trending topics of unmanned retailer store.
Recently, Jack ma’s first unmanned supermarket, Tao Café, just opened. The overall floor space is not particularly large, but enough to show a series of ideas and technology behind the concept of the unmanned stores.
To be qualified of the cashier-free store’s membership, customers must have Alibaba’s app downloaded on their phone and bind their payment account. At the entrance of the unmanned store, a tablet is set up to recognize customers’ faces and collect user identity information. The entire information collection process takes about 2-3 minutes, once the entry is completed, the store will be able to identify the corresponding information through face recognition and smart sensor (Abrams, 2017).
(Graph 1: Outside of Tao Cafe)
Once customers enter the supermarket, the in-store sensor and multi-angle camera will sense and record the routes they walk through the store, the goods they viewed and which items are picked up and seen for seconds. After analyzing these big data, the manager of the supermarket will be able to carry out accurate advertising & promotion and replenishment based on the customers’ purchasing preference and personal attributes. Moreover, customers can shop whatever they want in the store and put in their handbags and pockets, and “swag” out of the store without actual paying action, where the payment has already deducted from their Taobao account with the help of face recognition, multi-angle camera and smart price tag technology.
(Graph 2: Customers waiting in queues to get through the identity check at the entrance)
Nevertheless, the so call “unmanned supermarket” still need the cooperation from workers in distribution center, delivery drivers and other types of workers in the supply chain, but the job of cashier is likely to be replaced by technology in the future.
Would you like to shop at such unmanned supermarket?
Reference:
Abrams E. (2017). Did Alibaba just rip off Amazon’s unmanned supermarket?. Available: http://shanghaiist.com/2017/07/12/alibaba-tao-cafe.php. Last accessed 20th Oct 2017.
Liang, Y. (2017). China Focus: Alibaba’s self-service Tao Cafe takes e-shopping offline. Available: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-07/11/c_136434967.htm. Last accessed 20th Oct 20
