Smarter shopping carts are coming but usability and privacy concerns loom

UPDATED 11:45 EDT / JULY 31 2023

ANALYSIS by David Strom

A new version of the smarter shopping cart will be coming to a nearby market this fall.

Thanks to various partnerships and technological innovations of Instacart Inc., the latest embodiment of what the company calls Caper Carts will be able to track purchases while shoppers navigate through the aisles. The goal is to make it easier for shoppers to skip the checkout lines.

But it’s a tough reach, given the complexities of the retail channel and how the items will be scanned and tracked. If it works, it could be a major time saver. If it stumbles, it could be another example of bad user interface technology that is presently in most grocery and other retail chains: automated checkout scanning lanes.

Smarter checkout is predicted to process more than $387 billion in worldwide transactions by 2025, according to a 2020 study by U.K.-based Juniper Research. The segment has benefited with advances in computer vision, machine learning and AI modeling, and somewhat better consumer acceptance. But there is still a great deal of technology to put in place to make the shopping experience as friction-free as possible.

Amazon Inc. has been using a variety of technologies in its various retail storefronts for several years, in about 20 of its Go stores in the U.S., and about 40 Fresh grocery stores (according to one source) and eventually in all of its Whole Foods stores by the end of the year. The photo shows how it works at Whole Foods, where shoppers read their palms at checkout time. The Go and Fresh numbers are less than they were a few years ago, since the company closed eight Go stores earlier this year and put a halt on adding any new Fresh outlets.

Amazon has two different relevant tech stacks, Go and One. Go is first a smartphone app, which works just like other retail point-of-sale systems such as Toast, Clover and Block’s Square. This is where a shopper scans a QR code that associates the person’s smartphone with the purchase stream at a checkout lane. One is the palm-reading app.

These “contactless” apps got a big boost during the pandemic. The challenge for Amazon is: Why should a consumer download yet another one of them?

But Amazon also brands its Go physical storefronts, where a shopper “just walks out” of the store: There are no checkout lanes because the store is outfitted with numerous cameras watching their movements. Think your average Vegas casino, only more obvious.

I had an opportunity to try this out in a convenience CIBO Express at Newark Airport in 2021 (here is a review of the experience at that location written by Business Insider). It took me a few moments to figure out how to navigate the shop and where to key in my email address. And though I felt somewhat odd about walking out of the place and into the airport terminal, within a few minutes I received my emailed receipt for my purchases.

Amazon has put this technology in a number of its retail properties around the country as well as licensing it to other retailers such as Hudsons, Panera Bread Co. and specialty shops inside a few major sporting arenas. It makes sense for it, given all the other e-commerce technology the company provides for online sellers.

Amazon’s One technology also has a turnstile-like device (pictured adjacent) that initially associates shoppers’ credit cards and mobile phone numbers with their unique palm biometrics. Speaking of airports, it does look a bit like the scanners at departure gates where passengers present their boarding pass or QR code on their phones.

Each retailer can opt in to what data it will use to authenticate its shoppers. In CIBO’s case, it doesn’t use the biometrics, but every time shoppers visit an Amazon One-enabled store, it scans their palm when on entry and departure.

Instacart is doing something in between Go and One, placing the tech inside the actual shopping cart to do the item scanning, rather than going full Vegas with cameras on the ceiling. Its Caper Carts division equips the carts with proprietary technology that doesn’t require shoppers to scan or weigh each item manually, but just deposit them in their carts. Each cart has an attached tablet with a touchscreen that monitors the progress in the prototype below.

There’s a lot of technology underlying this system, in terms of recognizing the items in a cart, communicating back to the cloud, working with other Instacart technology that’s used to support online shoppers, and keeping the batteries charged as well. According to the company, Caper Cart is the only smart cart on the market to offer stacked charging, meaning that stores don’t have to charge carts individually or swap out batteries as often. The carts won’t be deployed for Instacart’s in-store professional shoppers.

Conversely, when customers remove an item from the cart, it recognizes that the item has been taken out of the cart and asks them to confirm that the item has been removed. Once customers have completed their shopping, they pay for their purchases directly using the cart’s touchscreen and leave the store. Like Amazon Go, receipts are sent via email within minutes of leaving the store.

The on-cart screens have a similar user interface to the web or mobile Instacart shopping from home application. In addition, “the software gives customers in-aisle personalized recommendations and item discoverability by integrating directly with the Instacart App,” according to the company announcements.

Schnucks Markets Inc., a Midwest grocery chain, will be conducting a three-store pilot of the Caper Carts this fall. Each store will have 10 of them for the initial rollout. If the pilot is successful, it plans a broader rollout planned for early 2024, the company told SiliconANGLE.

Instacart is piloting its smarter carts in several other chains as well, including a ShopRite in New Jersey and at the Fairway Market in Kips Bay in New York City. “We have an incredible opportunity to bridge the gap between the in-store and online experiences,” a company representative told SiliconANGLE.

Amazon and Instacart aren’t the only vendors vying for the smarter shopping experience. There are numerous others, including Trigo (which uses AI-powered computer vision in its EasyOut application) and Trax and Placer.ai (both of which use in-store analytics) that track your purchases. (Note: My daughter works for Placer.)

Trigo is active in Europe and can be found in several Auchan grocery stores in Poland and France, for example. “We are focused on providing frictionless checkout technology to the worlds leading retailers,” Trigo Vice President of Marketing Shay Ziv told SiliconANGLE. “We are focused on providing frictionless checkout technology to the worlds leading retailers. However, unlike Amazon Go, Trigo’s technology enables grocers to retrofit an existing store, instead of making significant modifications, whereas Amazon’s Go stores are purpose built for Amazon’s technology.”

Mixing online and in-store experiences can be either a blessing or a curse. It could make it easier for shoppers to locate items and save time by forgoing checkout lines.

However, that’s what was predicted for the in-store self-checkout scanners decades ago and it hasn’t been met with universal love. Part of the problem is that people shop differently: Some, like my wife, just go up and down every aisle and use that to jog their memory of what to buy. Others come with lists and know their store layouts. Having a digital system that can meet everyone’s shopping style is a challenge, let alone insuring that the equipment will function properly.

That brings us to the privacy challenge: These new shopping methods certainly come with a creepiness factor. One plus for Instacart is removing the “watching over the shoulder” experience found with Amazon One technology-enabled stores.

But as with any online shopping experience, all purchases are recorded and end up in someone’s cloud database. Most online shoppers probably don’t pay much attention to this fact. And though it’s great that the shopping cart can now make in-store recommendations — you appear to be shopping for a Keto diet? Go to aisle 17! – that just adds further creepiness. It’s a tough balance to be useful without turning off shoppers.

Then there is the biometric issue. One analyst is already keeping score of which retail store chains use facial recognition. It’s the work of the privacy group Fight for the Future, and its Deputy Director Evan Greer has said that people should have a right to pay for things without subjecting themselves to surveillance. That conflicts with what Amazon is doing.

Mark Hurst, who consults on usability and product design, told me he no longer shops at Whole Foods since it was purchased by Amazon and has cut down on his overall Amazon usage. He’s steering clear of Amazon One, saying, “Smarter shopping carts are not about improving checkout, they’re for tech companies harvesting data on shoppers that they can fuse with other data on behavior and location for their surveillance-capitalist business model. So-called ‘smart’ tech is really surveillance tech, and it’s destroying Americans’ privacy for profit.”

But the walk-out technologies have another drawback because they can be used to record what a shopper almost selected but didn’t. This means vendors have access to real-time decision-making of shoppers, which adds to the creepiness factor.

Finally, though palm reading on Amazon One isn’t as bad as recording a face, it is still sending this data to Amazon’s cloud. To provide some perspective, the FBI’s National Palm Print System already contains more than 29 million palm prints. What happens when a hacker can gain access to this data? Hurst asks, “How will you get yourself a new palm?”

Of course, there is always the ultimate privacy-enhancing technology available: paying in cash. Whether shoppers will walk out from smart cart-enabled stores with a positive experience, or steer clear of these stores altogether, remains to be seen.

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