Back in grad school I had a research project where I prototyped an easier way to shop inside a grocery store. 

While there have been plenty of improvements in e-commerce and online shopping over the years, going into a physical market to shop for items that go into our refrigerators is still arduous. 

For my research, I spent an uncomfortable amount of time in local grocery stores to document some of the pain points. My findings reinforced a simple truth – shopping in large supermarkets was unnecessarily inefficient.

For example, once customers add all necessary items to a shopping cart, they must endure long lines to checkout. This checkout process then requires emptying out all of the items in the shopping cart onto a conveyor belt, where a store clerk scans each item individually by hand. Typically an additional store clerk is required to refill the shopping cart once again. 

This process is not only slow, but physically grueling.

Clearly, there was a huge opportunity to make this process faster and less analog. It became apparent to me that a self-scanning system could reduce the repetitive lifting that customers would typically have to perform, not to mention the filling, emptying, and re-filling of a shopping cart.

Years before the first Amazon Go stores opened, my design for cashierless checkout was inspired by a single piece of technology that is abundant in many retail stores, but is almost never present in supermarkets: RFID tags.

The prototype I made would require supermarkets to outfit shopping carts with RFID readers, as well as digital displays to provide users with feedback on what they were adding to their physical carts. It was aimed at helping customers get in and out of the store in less time, while also limiting friction in the process and reducing customer frustration.

It’s incredibly rewarding to see that Amazon continued to build on this same concept to make the physical shopping experience smoother. 

More recently, Amazon has even announced that it’s expanding this experience, along with its own smart shopping carts, to Whole Foods locations next year. 

What was exciting about my concept, as well as Amazon’s iterations, is that cashierless shopping isn’t as revolutionary as it may seem. 

RFID and even QR codes are not new technologies. RFID tags are less than 1 mm thick and can be attached to all items. While bar codes require manual operation, RFID tags can wirelessly transmit data, so that collecting product information can happen within seconds.

Over the past year, fast fashion retailer Uniqlo has also released self-checkout machines using this same concept, which quickly reduced queue times in-store.

It just goes to show how a fresh perspective, and a new application for something already available, can dramatically reshape the most basic experiences.