Amazon is expanding its presence in the real world, this time with a shopping cart. Although it looks just like a standard stretched upgrade from the cart, the Dash Cart is a smart version of the tried and true means of transporting food. The new Dash Cart is arriving first at the Amazon supermarket in Lojas Angeles, and may expand to its remaining stores in the United States.
The shopping cart is equipped with a touch screen and other hardware components. The goal is to automatically detect which items you are putting in the cart and the number of products. When you finish shopping, you can take the cart along a "special path" that allows you to pay without having to attend to an employee. To do this, you need to use the Amazon account via mobile phone and make the call to the touchscreen.
To The Verge, Dilip Kumar, vice president of physical retail and technology at Amazon, explains that the cart integrates "cameras, a scale and vision and weight sensors". If you buy, for example, an apple, you can insert the item code on the touchscreen to be weighed before adding it to the cart.
The store in Los Angeles is not on Amazon Go, which means that it does not include cameras, sensors and other equipment for the automatic detection of the items it removes from the shelves. Instead, it is a normal supermarket, but has "smart" supermarket carts. The store is taking orders for online purchases, but the physical space is not yet open to the public. Still, Amazon says it plans to open the store later this year.
The idea is based on Amazon's approach to try to take advantage of the convenience of the digital world and bring it to the physical world. For some years now, the company has tried to apply all the learning acquired with the development of products that integrate Alexa.
In 2017, Amazon acquired, for example, the North American supermarket chain Whole Foods. Two years later, in 2019, the company began testing a system that would make the payment process take 300 milliseconds. Scanners can identify an individual human hand as a form of payment.
