Amazon Expands Sales of Its Cashierless Tech, While Scaling Back Itself

Almost a decade ago, Amazon.com Inc. leased a space at the base of a luxury apartment building in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood to build what was supposed to be its first retail store. The company outfitted it with technology that, it said, would allow people to purchase items by plucking them from the shelves and leaving without stopping at a cashier. Amazon called the system “Just Walk Out.”

When the store opened on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic, it was a 10,437-square-foot demonstration of the retailer’s technological prowess and its ambition to reshape how people shop in the physical world. But Amazon quietly shut it down in April. The company also plans to strip the cameras and shelf sensors from the two dozen Amazon Fresh grocery shops in the US that use Just Walk Out, replacing them with so-called smart shopping carts, which operate as wheeled self-checkout machines.