I assume you mean being able to walk out the front door with the goods and have them charged to you automatically. But how does this address the current US epidemic of people stealing goods by just walking in and out because there’s no criminal charges under a certain amount in some jurisdictions? Seems like this problem will just amplified, leaving to more shuttered stores.
I'm sure at some point a company will identify people on entry and then simply sell the value of the stolen items as debt to a debt collection agency...
Auto-payment stuff has been tried before in some places, but it's largely a failure. It's too prone to generate false positives in both directions (not detecting purchased goods and the usual rigmarole of failing to properly identify a customer because facial recognition tech isn't that good).
Self-checkout seems to be the happy middle ground where the lost turnover/angry number of customers is reasonable enough for it to be possible.
People really don't like "computer says no" when their money is involved and that's the barrier you need to clear before auto-checkout is a thing.
The general idea is to use something like UHF RFID to scan the whole shopping cart at once (there are even UHF RFID tags that can interoperate with EAS systems). The technology exists and is suprisingly cheap and is used by some some clothing retailers. And that points to the main issue: you have to somehow apply the tags to the items, that is easy to do if you work closely with the manufacturers and only sell your own brands, but somehow non-trivial for something like grocery store.
In theory there is an standardized mapping of the whole GS1 labeling system onto UHF RFID and the only thing that prevents universal deployment is some kind of critical mass. Somewhat surprisingly the standards even take into account the privacy issues inherent in that and the tags do not have fixed physical address (unlike HF RFID/NFC with 1wire-style deconflicting UIDs) and the contents can be progressively masked out, with command to completely disable the tag being mandatory.
On the other hand, first demonstration of that I can remember was by Siemens in 1991, so there is probably another 30 years to go for that to become widespread :)
I was really surprised how futuristic the shopping experience in Decathlon is. Every item has a unique rfid (or something) tag, and all you have to do is put them in a box at checkout, and it scans them automatically.
Most of their items has this tag inside the regular tags, I guess this would be much harder to implement in a regular store.
> I guess this would be much harder to implement in a regular store.
Also very uneconomical. RFID tags have a cost, while printing a barcode on a package that is anyway printed is totally free. Unless there's a clear economical advantage that compensates for the lost revenue, this is a no-go for less expensive items like what you find in a grocery store.
Doesn’t really matter though. The next gen tech is coming soon. You won’t have to scan anymore and theft will be next to impossible.