【1999 Archives】

Amazon's splashy video for Amazon Go — an all-seeing999 Archives all-knowing store where customers can grab items, toss 'em in a bag or pocket and just walk out without ever waiting in line — has obvious appeal. So obvious, in fact, that another tech company proposed the exact same concept more than 10 years ago.

An IBM ad showcasing a smart store got major circulation on the airwaves in 2006 (when YouTube was nascent). It features a nefarious-looking character in a trench coat wandering the aisles of a supermarket, stuffing his pockets with items as other patrons and security guards shoot him looks of suspicion. As he exits the store through what looks like a security gate that "flashes" him, the guard calls out, "Excuse me, sir!"

The man stops and turns. The guard grabs a piece of paper dispensed from the gate: "You forgot your receipt."

The ad, created by the agency BBCD, is more than a decade old, so it likely wasn't predicting the same technologies that make Amazon Go possible, those being machine learning, computer vision and advanced sensors. Instead IBM was showing "future store" vision powered by RFID, a tech in widespread use today. An IBM white paper from March 2009 discusses, among other things, how RFID readers positioned throughout a store could detect movements of products within it.

RFID is used in retail, but its presence is all but invisible to the customer, and most stores today still have a traditional checkout. We'll see in 2017 if the new technologies that power Amazon Go can finally bring IBM's vision of a "smart store" to reality.

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