10 January 2023 – 08:12
The cashless Aldi that was opened in the center of Utrecht in July is not a success six months after its launch. On weekdays, there is hardly ever anyone in the store, except for a handful of employees, RTV Utrecht reports.
The Aldi Shop & Go in the center of Utrecht was to become the first cashierless supermarket in the Netherlands. So without a cashier or self-scan.
The store is similar in many ways to the cashless Amazon Go stores in the US. No fewer than 475 cameras and 450 scales then register the purchases. Payment follows automatically when you leave the store.
Aldi already announced plans for a cashier-free store in Utrecht in October 2021. The store was initially supposed to open its doors in early 2022, but testing had to take longer.
In the United Kingdom, Aldi Süd already had a similar cashless Shop&Go store. It went to the general public in January 2022 in Greenwich (London).
The technology comes from Trigo Vision. That Israeli company also supplied the technology for REWE, Germany’s second largest supermarket. In a brand new REWE store on Schönhauser Allee in the popular Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg (pictured), customers will soon be able to walk into the store with a REWE shopping card, select their items and simply walk out – without having to queue at the checkout or scan items.
There seems to be an explanation for the lack of success: you can only shop there by linking the Aldi app to a credit card.
Aldi itself does not like to answer questions about how the test of their ‘special innovation project’ is going. “We are not making any statements about that in the meantime.”
