LABELS & PACKAGING ─ Smart Retail
SMART
RETAIL AI in the produce section By David Zwang
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t one point in time, shopping was fairly straight forward. You went into your local brick-andmortar store, made a selection, go to the cashier, paid for it with the local currency or more recently credit cards. Things started to change with the advent of online shopping. In this case, we go to a website, make a selection and pay for it with some form of electronic payment through an electronic cashier application, and the items are either sent to us directly or we can pick them up at the local brick-and-mortar store. And now we are entering a very different shopping model utilizing a brick-and-mortar store with a checkout-free virtual cashier.
Just Walk Out
Photo: Ting Shen for the New York Times
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Amazon opened their first checkout-free “Go” store in 2018 in Seattle. The Go stores’ checkout-free concept was executed in bookstores and general merchandise stores, some of which could be found in malls. While this initial foray into technology-enhanced shopping was a great experiment, this year they announced that they will close more than 50 of their Go concept stores and focus the technology on their mainstream food markets, like Whole Foods, which they purchased in 2017, and a new line of “Fresh” branded stores. The first “Fresh” concept store
WhatTheyThink - Printing News | July/August 2022
7/6/22 8:57 AM