Amazon hopped the pond and opened up a new cashierless checkout Fresh market in London today.
The new Fresh location is in Ealing, West London, is 2,500 sq. ft. and will carry 10,000 items. The market will also feature Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, which uses cameras, shelf sensors and artificial intelligence to automatically keep track of what people pick up and charge them upon exiting the store.
This Fresh location also marks Amazon’s first brick-and-mortar retail operation outside of the U.S. The company has opened up 10 Fresh markets here in the U.S. as well as 26 of the smaller-format Amazon Go stores in Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Chicago. Amazon also has two of the mid-sized Go Grocery stores in the Seattle area.
It’s been a busy week for Amazon’s cashierless checkout team. On Tuesday, airport store chain Hudson opened up its first unattended retail store using Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology at an airport in Dallas, TX. That store (called Nonstop) is smaller, and the first of many Hudson plans to open.
As we’ve noted before, it’s been an eventful year for the cashierless checkout space around the world. AiFi partnered with Dutch chain, Wundermart, to open a thousand cashierless convenience store. Standard Cognition raised $150 million to scale up its cashierless checkout tech. And new startups like Nomitri and IMAGR are starting to go live.
Amazon is 800-pounds gorilla in the cashierless checkout line, however, so it’s worth watching where the company opens up new locations and who adopts its technology.
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