Ali's unmanned retail "Amoy Coffee" seems to save only a cashier?

Follow the caf é (Wechat official account vdailycom) and found that Beautiful Cafe opened a small shop of its own.

Four days ago, at the Taobao creation Festival, Ali's unmanned retail "Amoy Coffee" version 2.0 was officially unveiled. As the "model" of the first unmanned retail in Hangzhou, "Amoy Coffee" quickly attracted the attention of many customers.

Since Amazon launched the offline brick-and-mortar supermarket Amazon GO on December 5, 2016, the concept of "unmanned retail" has been popular. Then, Rosen, 7-11, the whole family and other five convenience stores have introduced unmanned cashiers and electronic tags to join the army of unmanned retail.

In early June, an unmanned convenience store called Bingo Box launched in Shanghai, claiming to be the world's first truly large-scale replicable 24-hour unattended convenience store. On July 8, an unmanned intelligent store called Take Go announced that it had officially unveiled in Shanghai after a trial opening.

With the addition of giants such as Ali and Wa, the concept of unmanned retail soon became a hot topic, and even from the media, "if you don't work hard, you won't even be a salesperson in the future."... " With emotion. What is worth thinking about is, what is the current intelligence of unmanned retail? Can it really become the Terminator of traditional retail?

Unmanned retail experience: convenient, but not labor-saving

Yesterday afternoon, the reporter came to the Hangzhou International Expo Center's "TAO CAFE Taobao member store", here is full of customers who come to experience "Amoy Coffee", while the area of "Amoy Coffee" is only more than 200m2.

The whole self-help shopping process of "Amoy Coffee" is as follows: when entering the store for the first time, consumers need to open "Mobile Taobao", scan the code to get the electronic admission code, sign the terms such as data use, privacy protection statement, Alipay withholding agreement, and then go through the gate. Start shopping (you don't have to take out your phone later) Then pick up the goods, and the user can pick up any item at will in the store, or order in the dining area, which is no different from daily shopping. Finally, before leaving the store, the user must go through a "settlement door", which is composed of two doors. When the first door senses the user's demand for leaving the store, it will automatically open. A few seconds later, the second door will open. At this time, the "settlement door" has completed the deduction, and then, the prompt next to it will send out a voice prompt: Alipay deducts a total of XX yuan.

Entering "Amoy Coffee", what comes into view is the shelves, catering area and leisure area. as the catering area and leisure area account for a relatively large proportion, the retail area is only half of the storefront, and there are few goods on the shelves. Taobao internal dolls, dolls and cultural products are mainly. The reporter randomly interviewed several consumers who were shopping in the store and found that they all entered the store in order to experience the new mode of unmanned retail, and their comments on it were mixed.

"it's so convenient. I feel like I don't have to wait in line for cashiers anymore." Ms. Fu bought a doll in "Amoy Coffee". She thinks this new shopping model is very suitable for young people. "every weekend when I go shopping in the supermarket, I have to wait a long time when I check out, but I only waited for about six or seven seconds. And for us, we are used to using mobile phones at ordinary times, so this way is not complicated. "

Apart from the fresh mentality, some people think that this shopping model is not as convenient as it seems. "it feels good to go shopping as a whole, but it's not as convenient as I imagined. There will be a lot of staff at the scene who agreed with you about the rules. For example, there was a person who could test and pick up a meal while buying coffee just now, and the staff told me that it would take me a few seconds to look over there. I don't know if she doesn't say." Mr. Wu, a white-collar worker who works in an e-commerce company, thinks that this unmanned retail shopping mode seems convenient, but in fact it is not random. "I think shopping is a very casual thing." but this kind of unmanned convenience store gives me a sense of'I'm going to follow your rules', such as what to do in there and what to do out. Normal shopping won't set such rules for you. It will be more convenient for the consumer environment where large supermarkets need long queues, but if I just want to buy one or a small number of goods, the process will be a bit cumbersome, so I might as well take it out and scan it. "

Save labor costs, unmanned retail costs are not low

In previous public videos, Coffee Amoy's technical engineers dressed up as customers, shopping in unmanned convenience stores in a variety of bizarre ways, trying to put goods into schoolbags and trouser pockets. Many people crowded in front of a container to snap up popular styles, wearing sunglasses, wearing sunglasses and hats, the main purpose of which is to test the recognition rate of the unmanned payment system in extreme situations.

It is worth noting that unmanned convenience stores have high requirements for technology. Take "Amoy Coffee" as an example, its application technology is a set of unmanned solutions, which is mainly divided into three systems: biometric autonomous perception and learning system, which mainly solves the problem of consumer identification in open space; the second is settlement intention identification and trading system, which is completed between two "settlement gates". It is not known whether RFID or machine vision technology is used. The third is the target detection and tracking system. In the continuous tracking of consumers, posture recognition is more feasible than face recognition, and it is not easy to lose, which mainly depends on multi-channel cameras.

At present, unmanned convenience stores are based on three technological forms, the first is high-end video recognition and biosensors, the second is the Take Go; of Amazon GO and Shenlan Technology, the second is the RFID retail application, corresponding to the colorful fruit box; the last is the traditional QR code scanning, the target is the convenience bee.

According to round-the-clock technology reports, Amazon Go currently has two unsolved problems: first, when the number of people to be tracked in the store exceeds 20:00, the system will malfunction; second, because Amazon is limited by RFID and sensitive laminates, when customers put the items back on the shelf, if the position moves too large, it will also affect the accuracy of tracking.

Chen Weilong, CEO of Tianruo Technology, has also said that the image recognition system used in unmanned convenience stores is acceptable in small scenarios such as 10 square meters, 100 commodity categories, 2 users, and high capital and technology investment. However, if it is to be further expanded, it will face very great challenges.

Chen Haibo, founder of Shenlan Technology, a technology start-up company founded in 2014 as a "global provider of traditional retail intelligence upgrading solutions", said that Shenlan Technology is already ahead of giants such as Amazon in some technology. but any kind of artificial intelligence system needs a lot of data training, needs time to complete training and self-learning, at first, due to a short time, lack of training There may be loopholes and mistakes.

Chen Haibo believes that the new retail is to solve the fundamental pain point of "two highs and one decline" in the retail industry, and according to the 2016 China convenience Store Development report and China Merchants Securities, rent is part of the highest rate of increase in convenience store costs. but unmanned convenience stores did not solve the problem. According to the data provided by Chen Haibo to all-weather technology, the cost of renovating a store similar to that of the whole family is less than 100000 yuan, coupled with frequent BUG (loopholes), upgrades, and replacements, and the technical cost is quite a lot. Based on a monthly salary of 5000 yuan, the salary of two shop assistants is only about 100000 a year. It can be seen that although the unmanned convenience store saves the labor cost, it increases the technology cost which does not exist in the ordinary convenience store.

A survey shows that there are about 3.5 million online retail stores in China, including about 2700 KA stores (Carrefour, Wal-Mart, RT-Mart, etc.), 20, 000 hyper market (supermarkets such as Century Lianhua, China Resources Suguo, Hongqi, etc.), and 150000 supermarket, minisupermarket, CVS and other supermarkets. In the remaining, large physical retail outlets, "mom-and-pop stores" account for about 60% of the entire retail format, and these stores basically exist in the 3-6 line market. For mom-and-pop stores, which account for half of the retail industry, such high-cost technical support is not as practical as relatively low labor costs.

The intelligence and credit of unmanned retail still have a long way to go.

The existing unmanned convenience stores only lack a cashier and do not realize the real "unmanned". Traditional convenience stores can not get rid of manual work, such as goods transfer, large and small warehousing, local dealer supply, single store services (tally, shelves, inventory, input, cleaning). Logistics, warehousing and store management have been in parallel for a long time.

And in the case of no one watching the store, will the loss rate and theft rate of goods rise accordingly? It can be seen from the experience of sharing bikes some time ago. Compared with traditional convenience stores, an important feature of the existing unmanned retail attempt is that the products sold do not need additional manpower to serve, mainly concentrated in beverages, food, common daily necessities and other fast consumer goods categories. As for goods that emphasize experience, or goods with a more complex shopping process, it is undoubtedly difficult to achieve unmanned retail, such as fresh food products that account for a large proportion of chain convenience stores and products recommended by cashiers on a daily basis. And precisely, these projects and services that need people are a very important part of its profit composition.

Chen Haibo once said, "to really move towards a new retail, we must not rely on the current code scanning scheme of the Internet of things and the Internet, or the scheme of 'online and offline integration + logistics'. In the end, we should really use artificial intelligence technology." to realize the unmanned, intelligent and credit of retail, Shenlan Technology is to redefine the new retail with artificial intelligence. " There is still a long way to go for unmanned convenience stores to achieve what they call "unmanned, intelligent and credit".