A Fresh start

Check-out-free shopping at the new Amazon Fresh store, among the financial powerhouses in London’s Canary Wharf, is quick and slick... but leaves Sue Scott craving something more

I’ve always found the area around Canary

Wharf – rival to London’s first financial district – a somewhat soulless place, more so now, since only an estimated 10 per cent of workers have returned to the cluster of dizzying skyscrapers that were emptied of their 100,000-plus staff at the start of the pandemic.

In offices high above the monotone streets, staring blankly down at any homeless person foolish enough to think that, in this money-making district, anyone has real cash in their pocket, the world’s financial heart pumps to a digital beat.

The best-known occupants of some of the most expensive real-estate in the world – Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, HSBC, Infosys, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank – are all busily engaged in the act of making money disappear. That is, making services so frictionless, so intuitive that, eventually, no one will ever remember the dirty tokens of wealth that changed hands among the fruit merchants and importers that once made this area one of the brightest, loudest, smelliest in the city, as boats from the Canary islands disgorged their exotic cargo.

It is, then, an obvious place to open a grocery store where you can buy from the world’s table without any discernible payment taking place. Embedded finance has come home.

The Amazon Fresh ‘Just Walk Out’ store on Wood Wharf is one of five that opened in London in quick succession after the Big Tech unveiled its first ‘checkout-free’ format in the UK in March.

Copying the successful Amazon Go model in the States, the bright-green branded outlets employ proprietary AI and camera technology to track shoppers as they move up and down the aisles. And when they leave, the goods they carry out are automatically charged to their Amazon account, an email arriving some time later, confirming money has been debited from their linked payment method.

Shopping is sometimes referred to as a guilty pleasure – you certainly feel guilty leaving without paying but the pleasure is somewhat limited. What seems like an unconscionable number of staff for the floorspace are personably engaging with customers, filling up lines, and guarding the alcohol shelves. Curious shoppers are taking snaps of displays on their phone and shiftily putting goods straight into their bags, still unused to the freedom that embedded finance brings.

Mostly, my fellow weekday evening browsers were tourists and young couples. The only thing that bound us together was a tacit acknowledgement that we were all signed up to Amazon – without an account, you can’t get entry to what is basically a corner store that selects its customers.

According to Michael Pierce, director of partnership commercialisation at software-as-a-service Cloud banking platform Mambu: “What Amazon has done is looked at the customer journey and identified that the biggest pain point in that is the checkout process. And if they can eradicate that checkout process entirely, they can likely increase conversion rates and encourage more spending, which results in more revenues.”

I certainly spent more on beer than I’d intended.

Amazon isn’t the only retailer exploring checkout-free technology, although it’s garnered the most publicity so far.

In June, European technology firm Sensei partnered with Continente to open its first autonomous store in Lisbon, Portugal. As with Amazon Fresh, you first have to sign up to a shopping app that generates a one-time QR code, allowing you to sweep through the entrance. But Sensei itself says it doesn’t retain any data or ID of the users as they progress around the store.

It claims its technology will help retailers retain customers and increase revenue, while the data that such stores create will drive waste out of the supply chain by optimising stock levels. It’s reported to be in talks with other retailers in Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and the UK, following £6.5million of fundraising.

Despite consumers’ willingness to embrace online shopping over the past 18 months, they still prefer a tactile experience when it comes to groceries. In the UK, the channel’s overall share of the grocery market dropped back to 14.5 per cent in March 2021. Amazon, being hyper-sensitive to customer behaviour, won’t have missed that message.

Then again, perhaps the ‘Just Walk Out’ stores are more to do with having a shop window for its technology, should the Big Tech wish to license it to other retailers.

Whatever the strategy, to be honest, if I want guilt and pleasure in equal measure, I’ll take my debit card to Waitrose.