DUBAI, UAE – The Middle East on Monday secured its first fully automated store without ATMs as retail giant Carrefour unfolded its vision for the future of the industry in a cavernous Dubai shopping mall.
Like Amazon’s innovative unmanned grocery stores that opened in 2018, the Carrefour supermarket looks like any ordinary convenience store, full of soft drinks and snacks, spread out among the city-state storefronts.
But hidden among the family rate is a sophisticated system that tracks shoppers ’movements, eliminating the cash line and allowing people to grab the products they’ll be coming out with. Only those who have the smartphone app in the store can enter. Nearly a hundred small surveillance cameras cover the ceiling. Countless sensors run through the shelves. Five minutes after shoppers leave, their phones ping with receipts for everything they put in their suitcase.
“So will the future,” Hani Weiss, CEO of retail at Majid Al Futtaim, the franchise that operates Carrefour in the Middle East, told The Associated Press. “We believe in physical stores in the future. However, we believe that the experience will change. ”
The experimental store, called Carrefour City +, is the latest addition to the growing field of retail automation. Leading retailers around the world combine machine learning software and artificial intelligence to reduce labor costs, eliminate long-line irritation, and gather critical data on shopping behavior.
“We use (the data) to provide a better experience in the future … in which customers don’t have to think about the next products they want,” Weiss said. “All statistics are used internally to provide a better shopping experience.”
Customers must give Carrefour permission to collect their information, Weiss said, which the company promises not to share. But the idea of a large retailer collecting data on shoppers ’habits has already raised privacy issues in the United States, where Amazon now operates several such futuristic stores, known as Amazon Go. It is less likely to become a public debate in the autocratic UAE, where one of the highest concentrations of per capita surveillance cameras in the world is located.
With the pandemic forcing major retailers to reevaluate the future, many are increasingly investing in automation, a vision that threatens the loss of jobs across the industry. But Carrefour stressed that human workers, at least in the short term, would still be needed to “support customers” and help the machines.
“There is no future without humans,” Weiss said.