Does Amazon’s checkout-free supermarket spell the end of tills?

Yes, I remember going shopping with my Nan in the late 1950’s, being served at the counter (in J. Sainsbury’s!) by assistants that cut and weighed the exact amount of cheese, bacon, ham etc for you – a bit like the modern deli in supermarkets now, except this was the norm then – and the assistant getting your tins of soup, packets of biscuits, tea and sugar etc. You then went to the butcher for your meat, the fishmonger for your fish, and your greengrocer for your vegetables, and the hardware shop for any domestic products. You paid in cash, and Nan could tell what her change would be before the shop assistant produced it.
When the first tiny self-serve supermarket opened in our west London suburb in very early 60’s it caused quite a stir with the new-fangled method, and it took a while for the independent shops to be swamped by the supermarkets that sold everything, as it is now. But in all it only took 50 years for the complete revolution, and I bet Amazons new till-less concept will take less time to overtake the current shopping methods.
Now living in rural Higlands of Scotland, the retail assistants still perpetuate the ‘old-fashioned’ way of chatting pleasantly to customers even at the tills, and promoting a sense of community which is often lacking in the fast-paced hurly burly of the English conurbations I was used to.
Change happens whether we like it or not!

Thanks for that Rowan. The memories are coming back. Most of us hated the way in which the supermarkets put our small shops out of business, but would we relish going back to trailing round lots of shops? As you say, change happens.

For me, an Amazon supermarket will be one more Amazon venture to boycott.

One of the implications of this development is a reduction in the number of supermarkets. The capacity of stores to handle the number of shoppers will no longer be determined by the space required for 20+ checkouts. Even at very busy times, the aisles of supermarkets have ample capacity but the bottleneck is around the checkouts which could be significantly reduced in number if this caught on. Existing stores could probably deal with twice the current numbers of people without enlargement meaning fewer overall would be required. A consequence of that would be a need for more warehousing space on site but Amazon could no doubt develop superdrones to air-drop fresh supplies in by the pallet load [and take away the empties] at more frequent intervals.

As a checkout operator at a supermarket, i would like to say that if this new concept becomes widespread it would mean job losses, abet in the very lowest paid job market. But writing here from experience I personally would welcome it. The indifference and personal abuse metered out to myself and colleagues on a daily basis is appalling. We are expected to smile and greet customers with a friendly hello, no matter how we may be feeling ourselves. Yet in turn are met with silence, grunts or ignored all together in favour of a conversation on a mobile phone. Worse if that service is not delivered, I personally have been sworn at, threatened and subjected to abuse by customers simply because they feel they can take out their frustrations on someone who cannot fight back for fear of losing their job. So in conclusion this checkout-less system will be a opportunity for the general public to abuse one another in new and interesting ways rather then on low paid workers who, in their eyes are less then human and have no rights.

A huge amount of processing power and another increase in electricity consumption just to buy a sandwich?

Yet more waste.