GPA SA, a Brazilian food retailer, has in this year plans to open its first store to assess modern technologies like “scan & go” shopping and facial recognition in pursuit of its parent company Casino that, in last November, has opened a store in Paris with no need for customers to checkout.
Using the technology from Microsoft Corp, the Sao Paulo-based store will be making the GPA a latest addition in supermarket chain that are experimenting with the formats similar to that of checkout-free convenience stores adopted by the Amazon.com Inc while rolling out Amazon Go stores in the United States.
The GPA will also be adopting the strategy of rival Carrefour Brasil, who partnered with local startup Zaitt to set up a convenience store that will provide round the clock automated service to the customers.
Britain’s Tesco Plc and J Sainsbury Plc have also confirmed their use of technologies to allow skipping the checkout line to shoppers by scanning products from store’s shelves and made payments of those items using an app on their smartphones.
People, for skipping the lines or for activating the promotions in the apps, are already making use of their smartphones while shopping at company’s stores and now the company is in intentions of developing stronger solutions to be rolled-out in its other stores, plans shared by Antonio Salvador in an interview, who is working as director for digital transformation, at GPA.
GPA started discussions with Microsoft three month ago and the partnership is to give the GPA’s efforts into e-commerce a boost. The planned store is likely to be open in December and it will also have lockers to help shoppers with retrieval of the goods previously scanned from the store’s shelves, Salvador told.
Cost to open the cashier-less store was not disclosed by any of the companies but they confirmed that there will be only one store expected to be open under the current agreement.
