French multinational food retailer Carrefour has partnered with autonomous shopping firm AiFi to open a concept convenience store.
Carrefour Flash 10/10, located at 11 avenue Parmentier, in Paris’ eleventh arrondissement, leverages various technologies to improve the customer experience.
The store relies on 60 cameras, with 2000 sensors built into shelves. Alongside that is an algorithm for interpreting visual data, tracking customers as virtual avatars and assigning the products they pick up to a virtual basket. Baskets are validated at a kiosk with contactless and cash payments available.
“We are proud to partner with Carrefour to build this delightful shopping experience for shoppers. Following our initial testing in Massy, we are excited to be launching this store in Paris,” said Ying Zheng, Co-founder and President of AiFi, which also provides autonomous shopping and computer vision technology for retailers such as Morrisons and Zabka.
“Speed and Accessibility”
Flash 10/10’s name refers to the concept of “10 seconds to shop and 10 seconds to pay”, enabled by not requiring customers to scan products or take their items out of their bag to pay. Customers can freely enter and exit the store through a gateway, without needing to install an app – with the shop being maintained by just four employees.
“The Flash concept checks our customers’ expectations. They want to be able enter the store easily, know what they are buying, pay quickly and then leave. Compared with other existing concepts, with Carrefour Flash, customers get speed and accessibility in a unique way,” said Elodie Perthuisot, the Carrefour Group’s Executive Director of E-Commerce, Data and Digital Transformation.
The development comes after Carrefour’s Brazilian subsidiary launched a smartphone shopping store earlier this year, with six such stores now open in the country. Heavy hitter Amazon has also been making moves in the autonomous shopping space, opening a till-less store in the UK earlier in the year.
