That equates to one place for every 3.3 million residents.
On Wednesday, Amazon released a blog post in which it provided an update regarding its Just Walk Out technology. This technology was purportedly removed from its Fresh grocery stores earlier this month. While the article is praising the benefits of Just Walk Out as a sales pitch to potential retail partners, it also provides a startlingly small number of locations that are implementing the technology that are not affiliated with Amazon. In the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, there are currently “more than 140 third-party locations with Just Walk Out technology.”
It is important to note that this is not the number of businesses or retail chains that have licensed the technology; rather, it is the total number of sites. In addition, that is not the total in a single state or even a single nation. Just Walk Out is being utilized in “more than 140 third-party locations” across four countries, which together have a total population of over 465 million people.
Based on the average, this indicates that there is one Just Walk Out store owned by a third party for every 3.3 million individuals in those four individual countries. (I can only imagine how busy they must be!) Starbucks, on the other hand, had 241 stores in New York City alone as of 2019, and there are over one million retail locations in the United States. In comparison, there are over one million retail locations in the United States.
According to reports, Amazon had already intended to withdraw the Just Walk Out technology from its Fresh grocery stores for around one year. This was due to the fact that the technology was too expensive and sophisticated for larger retail spaces to efficiently operate and maintain. The firm now markets its technology as particularly well-suited for smaller convenience stores that have a lower number of customers and merchandise. This includes the company’s own Amazon Go locations, which it has been working hard to close down over the past few years.
At the beginning of this month, the corporation apparently disbanded the group of developers that were working on the Just Walk Out technology. It is up to you to speculate as to how the employees who were terminated were given the instruction to depart the workplace. It has been reported that Amazon has only left “a skeleton crew” to work on the technology moving forward as a result of recent layoffs that occurred within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) segment and the Physical Stores Team. A team consisting of skeletons to maintain a skeleton seems like a reasonable idea.
Fair enough, some of those businesses are situated in areas that get a lot of foot traffic. Near the offices of Amazon, there are nine merchandise outlets located at Lumen Field in Seattle, which is the home of both the Seattle Seahawks and the Seattle Sounders. A multinational hospitality and entertainment corporation known as Delaware North has opened “more than a dozen” shops that make use of the technology. According to Amazon, retailers who have implemented Just Walk Out have reported higher levels of consumer satisfaction, as well as greater sales and transactions.
Amazon has stated that it “continues to invent the next generation of this technology to improve the checkout experience for large-format stores,” despite the fact that the development team for Just Walk Out has reportedly been eliminated. Its further activities include enhancing latency in order to provide “faster and more reliable receipts,” developing new algorithms in order to recognize client behaviors, and enhancing the performance of new sensors.
In the event that the stories regarding layoffs are genuine, the few developers who are still working on Just Walk Out will have a lot of work ahead of them.