Smart shopping carts on the rise as retailers adapt to pandemic era
Kroger is the latest retailer to embrace automation at a time when shoppers are more thoughtful about who they come in face-to-face contact with.
Last week, the grocery store chain revealed it has partnered with artificial intelligence firm Caper to deploy computer vision-enabled shopping carts at a supermarket in Cincinnati. If the test run is successful, the retailer will add connected buggies to more of its stores around the country.
Kroger now has 20 branded smart carts built to know what customers place inside. The wireless buggies can tally up your total, make recommendations and allow you to pay for groceries directly on the cart.
The gadgets eliminate the need to stand in line around strangers or pass off items to a salesclerk.
For the past few years, connected shopping carts were billed as a way to cut down on labor costs, get customers to spend more cash and shift patrons out of stores more swiftly. However, according to Caper, the pandemic has pushed more companies to check out the trend to reduce faceto-face interactions.
“In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for autonomous checkout technology is driving grocers and retailers to innovate and adopt new technologies that keep shoppers safe and streamline checkout,” Lindon Gao, CEO and co-founder of Caper, said in a statement.
Smart carts drive customers to spend more cash since the baskets can tally up totals in real-time and expose people to more marketing materials while shopping, the AI company claims. For instance, if you buy cereal, it might recommend that you buy milk as well. The firm says an average shopper’s checkout total increases 18% when using its product.
The new ways to shop don’t come cheap. Smart carts can cost retailers between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, according to Sylvain Charlebois, a professor of food distribution and policy at Canada’s Dalhousie University who has studied smart carts. The devices require a lot more maintenance and upkeep compared to simple shopping carts, which tend to cost retailers under $100 each. Caper says most of its smart cart partners recoup their investment within a year.
Caper, which has raised more than $14 million in funding, claims its tech isn’t meant to replace jobs but free up more frontline grocery store workers to maintain the aisles or offer customer service. The data generated from smart carts enable the tech firm to improve its product recommendations. Its tech can provide dietary suggestions based on what grocery customers have purchased in the past and recipe recommendations based on what shoppers have in their cart. Caper also shares shopper information with the partnering retailer so the store can better manage inventory and gleaning where people are going.
Caper says it doesn’t share shopping data beyond the partnering retailer.