A post yesterday concerned a gargantuan French grocery using Li-Fi to observe shopper behavior, a technology that could potentially allow stores to instantaneously update pricing to spark sales or employ surge pricing in aisle six.

Another way to sell citizens on surrendering privacy is to offer them convenience, as Amazon plans to do with its pay-and-go supermarkets in which an app tallies the bill and charges customers, no checkout required. As sensors fall in cost, such options become possible.

It’s a disappearance of millions of jobs, of course, eliminating cashiers, but more than that a way for Amazon to track you as much as possible, to know what you want so it can figure out more ways to sell it to you. The company’s goal is to reverse the normal order of things, putting you in its pocket rather than the other way around. 

From Leslie Hook at Financial Times:

Online retailer Amazon is looking to eliminate the checkout in real-world supermarkets with the opening of its first physical grocery store early next year.

Its initial Amazon Go store will feature “Just Walk Out” technology that allows customers to take items from the shelves and walk out, without ever standing in a queue for a till.

The company said the store would use the same technology as driverless cars, employing sensors, computer vision and deep learning to determine which products a shopper had placed in their bag.

For Amazon Go, shoppers download an app on their smartphones and show the barcode it produces to a scanner as they enter the store. They can then shop freely from the shelves, where sensors will detect which items they have selected. When shoppers walk out, their bills will be automatically tallied and receipts will appear on their phones.•