Cashierless Checkout Is Coming To Convenience Stores

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Grab your items and leave the store without going to the cashier. That’s the idea behind Standard Cognition, a startup using artificial intelligence to create an autonomous checkout experience. Now, it’s taken the next step in getting that technology into the stores where people shop.

On Tuesday, The San Francisco startup announced a new partnership with Alimentation Couche-Tard, the parent of Circle K among other retail chains, to install its checkout system in convenience stores, beginning with a pilot in Phoenix. The stores will be retrofitted with the technology, meaning that no redesign of the store is necessary, one way Standard Cognition is attempting to differentiate itself from deep-pocketed competitor Amazon Go. The partnership will start at “a number of stores in the Phoenix area,” says Magnus Tagtstrom, head of digital innovation at Couche-Tard, with the first autonomous checkout-equipped Circle K going live early next year.

If the pilot goes well, more retail stores could be encouraged to adopt the AI-powered technology, starting with convenience stores like Circle K. Laval, Canada-headquartered Couche-Tard is the fifth largest convenience store operator globally, according to a Deloitte report. “This is testing with shoppers: What if this was the New Circle K experience?” Tagtstrom says.

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Customers will be able to try out autonomous checkout by checking into the store on a phone app (they can use either the Circle K app or Standard Cognition’s own app, Fisher says). When the customer walks out of the store, the app will process the transaction. Shoppers who don’t want to pay through the app can still save time. The artificial intelligence tracks everything picked up by a customer, regardless of whether they use the app, and feeds the data to the cashier, eliminating the time needed to scan each item.

During the coronavirus pandemic, an autonomous checkout solution provides the obvious added value of avoiding the transmission vectors that come from interacting with the cashier or standing in line. That comes on top of the technology’s baseline potential—to make convenience stores more convenient. “Let’s have our cake and eat it too: get the Snickers bar immediately, and don’t have to wait five minutes in line to pay for it,” Fisher says. “It’s kind of the best of both worlds.”

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