Coles executive claims Australian supermarkets will all be ‘checkout-free’ stores within 10 years

All Australian supermarkets will be ‘checkout-free’ within 10 years, according to a Coles executive. 

Coles head of commercial and express Greg Davis said artificial intelligence, sensors and data would be used to detect what customers pick up and put in their bags.

The innovative technology has already been trialled in the US by Amazon, which runs several checkout-free ‘Go’ stores.

Customers are charged to their Amazon account after they leave the store.  

‘I have no doubt in the next 10 years, customers will be able to take the product off the shelf, put it in their basket, walk out and have it all paid for,’ Mr Davis told the Sydney Morning Herald.  

Mr Davis described the new shopping system as ‘almost seamless’ and said he expected Coles would follow suit with Amazon over the next decade. 

He said this was a result of how fast new technologies change the landscape of grocery shopping, and noted that in 2009 just 60 of Coles’ 800 stores had self-serve checkouts.

‘Now almost all of our stores have them and 50 per cent of our customers use them when checking out. It’s the biggest visible change at Coles in the last decade,’ he said.

Woolworths has started testing a system called Scan&Go that allows customers to scan each item on their phone and pay digitally before they leave.   

Coles has already gotten the ball rolling on their checkout-free stores, and is now working alongside Witron and Ocado to build robotic warehouses.

The supermarket giant also has plans to combine analytics and artificial intelligence to make each store’s products ‘tailor-made’. 

‘This will significantly improve our forecasting and therefore improve our availability so we can have exactly the right range in the right stores,’ Mr Davis said. 

Coles also has plans to combine analytics and artificial intelligence to make each store’s products ‘tailor-made’