Retailers check out life without tills and cashiers

Tesco and other supermarkets are testing ways to let shoppers skip the queues and just pay for their goods as they walk out

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Linda Higgins is ready to embrace checkout-free supermarkets – on one condition.

“I don’t have any issues with it as long as there’s still somebody in the store who’s there to help if you’ve got a problem,” says the 61-year-old accountant outside a Tesco Express in central London.

Fellow shopper Michael Kung, 36, concurs: “I hope there will still be someone around. I don’t know if I would be comfortable without that.”

Their feedback may prove valuable as the big supermarkets inch closer to a future without traditional checkouts and cashiers.

Tesco, Morrisons and Aldi have all said in recent months they are thinking of bringing the technology into the wild after testing it among staff.

The system typically uses ceiling cameras and shelf sensors to track the products customers pick up and put in their baskets. Shoppers get charged through a smartphone app linked to a bank card.

The major chains have all followed in the footsteps of Amazon after the e-commerce powerhouse opened its first shop without tills in the UK in March. It now has five in the capital.

Amazon Fresh store
Amazon Fresh store Credit: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg

“We all hate queuing, it’s well-known,” says Miya Knights, a retail analyst and co-author of a book on the tech behemoth. “Amazon completely disrupted the industry by being the first to come to market with an actual working system that totally eliminated that.”

Brian Kalms, a managing director at AlixPartners, believes that it is only a matter of time until more rivals follow suit.

“One of the barriers to entry has been ‘oh my gosh, how do we copy this’,” he says. “You just license it, which is not that dissimilar from Ocado and their platform model.

“Amazon has already said that they will license their technology, at least in the US. If it becomes easier to do, it will become attractive.”

The trend has given rise to a handful of companies including Standard Cognition, Zippin and Trigo, which build similar “Just Walk Out” systems.

Israel-based Trigo has been picked by both Tesco and Aldi to help with their AI-powered infrastructure for physical stores.

Amazon Fresh store
Amazon Fresh store Credit: Amazon

Co-founder and chief executive Michael Gabay won’t elaborate on future deals, but he boasts that his company is “already working with five of the 10 largest grocery retailers in the world”.

He set up Trigo with his brother three and a half years ago and it has raised $104m (£76m) to date. The firm has 150 employees and offices in the UK, Germany, US and Netherlands.

“When Amazon came out with their idea at first we were in shock,” Gabay says. “But actually there is a huge need among grocery retailers... They were looking for companies like us to develop this kind of solution for themselves.”

Sainsbury’s was forced to reinstall tills in 2019 at a checkout-free shop after it realised that “not all customers were ready” for the move. Some say the experiment was doomed to fail as the tech was rudimentary at the time.

Gabay estimates that next year there will be dozens of checkout-free stores in Europe, “hundreds” in 2023, and “in 2024 you will see, I believe, 700-800 stores of this concept”.

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The pandemic has seen shoppers buy more on their mobile phones and use self-service checkouts, so the time seems ripe for so-called “no-touch environments” to catch on.

Some industry observers believe that while having no tills may be optional for certain retailers, others will be keen to embrace it to keep a lid on costs and stay lean.

The likes of Tesco and Sainsbury’s have set ambitious cost-saving targets and have already waved goodbye to in-store counters and thousands of staff.  

“Retailers are very good at seeing what customers like and not just saying, ‘this thing is going to be cheaper for us to operate and we’re going to try to force it on the customers’,” adds AlixPartners’s Kalms. 

The Office for National Statistics estimates that around two-thirds of cashier jobs in the UK are at high risk of being replaced by technology.

Knights, the analyst, says: “Retailers are also finding it harder to find labour - labour that isn’t seasonal. Keeping those employees happy and well-trained is becoming more and more difficult.”

Both Kalms and Knights, however, agree that while some roles will disappear, supermarkets are far from becoming entirely devoid of staff.

The Amazon Fresh grocery store has employees that replenish the shelves, while others man the alcohol, medicine and click-and-collect counters, or guard the door to prevent shoplifting.

“Where I live most of the people on the checkouts are older people, and kids need supermarket jobs too, so that could cause problems if more of these shops open,” says Tesco shopper Higgins.

The cost of rolling out the technology could also prove prohibitive, although with scale comes economy, so the more stores they roll it out to, the cheaper it becomes.

Trigo’s boss claims it typically takes about a year and a half for grocers to “make a profit from this solution”.

The systems lend themselves to smaller and medium-sized shops – however, vast warehouse-style stores with tens of thousands of products are difficult to monitor.

Evidence for this was Amazon’s departure from its Just Walk Out technology last year in one of its larger stores. It introduced its so-called Dash Cart, which uses “smart” baskets.

“They knew that the technology becomes too expensive to scale to a full-size store, and the practicality of just walking out with a week’s worth of shopping was low,” says Knights.

Historically, UK grocers have been lagards when it comes to high tech, especially compared to their counterparts in Asia, but recently there has been a willingness to be seen to be a faster follower.

Knights adds, however, that any decision to use the tech in more stores won’t happen overnight: “Supermarkets are like supertankers, turning them around takes forever.”  

Additional reporting by Sam Hall

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