Cashierless grocery store is back
It’s been a little over a week since Standard Cognition’s cashierless grocery store on Market Street reopened, and customers are trickling in.
The coronavirus pandemic highlighted how fraught the San Francisco company’s supply chain was. Despite being considered an essential business, Standard Cognition closed its store in midMarch when the city’s shelterinplace orders took effect.
“We’ve had a few pieces of the puzzle to figure out,” said Jordan Fisher, cofounder and CEO. “We have to think about keeping our employees safe in the current environment and going forward as well.”
The store is not Standard Cognition’s bread and butter. Rather, it serves as a showcase for the company’s core offering: its autonomous retail technology. The company wants to equip retailers, including grocery stores, with technology that makes it easy for shoppers to walk in, grab what they want, and leave without waiting in line or stopping to scan and pay.
In other words, Standard Cognition would like to be an answer to Amazon Go (which has temporarily closed all five of its San Francisco locations). But instead of building stores from the ground up, Standard said its technology would help retailers work within a store’s existing layout. The company uses ceilingmounted cameras and A.I. to track purchases and said it does not use or collect facial recognition or other consumer biometrics.
All of that is on display at the company’s single location on 1071 Market St. But no matter how much expertise the company has on its tech — it acquired Italian competitor Checkout Technologies for an undisclosed amount this week — it had to learn how to be a grocer and navigate supply chain issues, which were exacerbated during the pandemic.
“It wasn’t easy for us, and it took us a little longer to figure out the logistics,” Fisher said. “We didn’t have that same infrastructure in place as a major retailer, and it was harder for us to come around.”
Some changes include offering more essential products like paper towels, hand sanitizer and food. It set up more local sources for getting goods, said Chintan Maniar, the head of retail experiences at Standard Cognition. The store now offers around 500 items, compared with about 200 in March, Maniar said.
Heeding local measures added to the challenge, but the company is ready to forge ahead, with gloves and masks for employees. Notices about safe practices are on display for shoppers, as mandated by the city.
“We have a safety plan in place, a strategy for what we’re going to do if one of our workers contracts COVID19,” Maniar said. Standard Cognition employs 100 people, three of whom work at the store.
Even though the store touts convenience with cashless payments, it still has to cater to the city’s rule of allowing for cash transactions. Sixfoot markers show the space in front of its kiosk where customers can buy goods with the help of an employee. San Francisco ordered most businesses to accept cash last year, out of a concern that the trend to cashless payments was shutting out those without access to smartphones and credit cards.
The city said it’s still enforcing the rule and does not plan to lift it temporarily.