That’s trolley clever!

Amazon’s latest delivery: Smart cart that scans groceries itself

Sick of endless supermarket queues and unexpected items in the bagging area? Amazon’s got a gadget for that.

instead of lining up for a cashier to scan your groceries, or fumbling about at the self-service checkout, the tech giant has ditched the middleman – by inventing a trolley that’ll do it for you.

The smart trolley, known as a Dash cart, scans and weighs each item that is placed in it – before totting up the bill and chargphone ing shoppers’ online accounts automatically.

it’s the latest advance in Amazon’s effort to rival traditional supermarkets after it opened 20 convenience stores in the US, employing no cashiers.

in these outlets, shoppers will place items directly in bags inside the smart trolley where they are detected by inbuilt scanners, cameras and scales. For fresh produce, shoppers punch an item’s fourdigit code and the quantity into a screen on the trolley, before dropping it in to be weighed and priced.

Shoppers then leave the store via a special lane which completes the purchase – meaning the trolley can charge their Amazon account automatically via a smartapp. The Dash cart, which is set to be trialled at a new store in Los Angeles, also knows when items are removed – and customers can still use discount coupons by using an inbuilt scanner.

The smart trolley is part of Amazon’s plan to open larger grocery stores, which are around ten times the size of its Amazon Go convenience stores. Dilip kumar, vice president of physical retail and technology, said: ‘While the technology is complicated, we try to keep a lot of that behind the scenes so that from a customer standpoint this technology takes a backseat.’

Amazon Go has been trademarked in the Uk since 2018 – when the company was reported to be looking for retail spaces. it planned to open the first British Amazon Go store in Notting Hill, west London, later this year – but it is not known if this will still go ahead. Amazon also owns the upmarket Whole Foods supermarket chain, which has seven stores in the capital.