Amazon’s planning to open the first physical shop with no checkout required and Coop opens in Milan the supermarket of the future, a shop equipped with interactive monitors and Electronic Shelf Label. The future has arrived: how will our shopping experience change in the next years?
Over the last years, the technological revolution has meaningfully changed our life style: thanks to the smart phones we can literally do a lot of things that few years ago seemed impossible.
Make payments and withdraw money from our on line bank account without going to the bank, book a train ticket through an App and buy everything we need on line, just to receive it the next day.
Technology has also changed the way we interact with shops and retail stores, how we choose products and check out. Our shopping experience is evolving more and more into an interactive and multimedia experience, where buying becomes increasingly easier, faster and more practical.
That’s what Amazon is aiming at with Amazon Go, the very first physical shop of the leading company in the field of on line shopping. Amazon wants to build a completely automated shop, getting rid of the checkout and, thus, eliminating the long queues of a typical shop.
How will it work? It’s easy and intuitive. Before entering the shop, the customer scans the QR code appearing in the Amazon Go App and proceed to buy what he needs. Once he finishes doing shopping, he just go outside and that’s all. No checkout or lines, but only a special gate at the entrance of the shop that will charge the needed amount from our Amazon personal account.
The shop, located in Seattle, is currently being tested and only Amazon employees are allowed to use it. But the managers claim that it will open at the end of the current year.
Anyway, we don’t have to go this far to experience going shopping in a supermarket of the future. We just have to go to Milan, at the Bicocca Village, and go shopping in the new supermarket of the future built by Coop in collaboration with Accenture, which has already been presented during EXPO Milan 2015.
Coop’s supermarket of the future represents how the technological innovations can turn a shop in an elegant and practical environment for the customers.
It’s equipped with 100 interactive monitors that shows relevant informations about the product, like the origin, nutritional values and the presence of allergens.
The monitors, thank to the special Kinect sensors produced by Microsoft, recognise the gestures of the customers and identify the products they’re going to choose.
Furthermore, Coop’s supermarket of the future is also equipped with the new Electronic Shelf Labels, produced by Hanshow and installed in the shop by Nicolis Project. Thank to this innovative system, prices can dynamically be changed in few seconds and the special display grants an excellent level of readability from every angle.
The shop presents also a number of vertical touch screen monitors, located between the traditional shelves, and equipped with bar code readers to help customers choosing the products they need.
They also give you the possibility to create customised filters, in order to exclude products containing specific allergens. In this way, the customers don’t need to check every single label.
Coop and Amazon are just the initiators of the upcoming digital revolutions that’s taking shape inside the shop and retail store. Within the next years, many more innovations will revolutionize our world and our way of shopping.