Amazon Go store is checkout free

Using just a smartphone and Amazon‘s Go app, you can scan a barcode at the entrance of a store and virtually pay for any item you picked up while shopping.

That technology detects when items are taken off shelves, presumably using your phone to work some geolocation magic and figure out which virtual cart the item belongs in.

For Amazon, just opening a brick-and-mortar store is big news.

When they leave the receipt is displayed on the app and the payment is automatically processed via the customer’s Amazon account. This 1,800 square feet store is real and no science fiction. It’s called Amazon Go, and it looks like the future. The first location in Seattle is now in Beta and open only to Amazon employees, but doors are expected to open to the public in early 2017.

Calling it “Just Walk In Technology”, Amazon described the innovation as a mix of “computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion much like a self-driving vehicle”.

It was not immediately clear whether Amazon will expand this model with more physical stores or offer the technology to other retailers.

Amazon Go, along with automation from companies such as McDonalds, shows how AI technologies will affect minimum wage jobs in the service industry and beyond. As reported by ZDNet’s Natalie Gagliordi, Amazon Go has been in the works for four years. Past year the company opened Amazon Books, a then one-off bookstore also based in Seattle.

Trying to eliminate checkout lines isn’t a novel concept, though most solutions so far still involve an extra step for customers at the end: actually checking out in some way.

According to Amazon, it’s as simple as that.

What do you think about Amazon’s Go store? Amazon claims it can track the items automatically through a combination of computer vision and deep learning technologies.