When the cafeteria in the Quincy office of the grocery retailer, Retail Business Services, closed for renovation, the company leadership wanted to retain easy lunch options for its employees. So in July, a cashierless store opened in an empty corner of the office to solve that very problem.
The 300-sq.-ft. storefront mirrors the format of Amazon Go stores, the brainchild of eCommerce giant Amazon.com. Playing to the needs of customers with an appetite and an app, they are free of cashiers, checkouts and long lines. Twenty-one brick-and-mortar Amazon Go stores have sprung up in the last two years. Right now, there are no Go stores in Massachusetts.
“It’s easy,” said Retail Business Services’ director of IT innovation Ken Bolick. “We launched this as a thing to provide convenient meals and sundry items—the lunch items you might eat as our cafeteria is closed.”
Any of the 1000 employees can scan into “lunchbox” using a company-wide application and pick up food and convenience items: sodas, sandwiches and even whole cartons of milk.
Then, like at Amazon Go stores, customers just walk out. Thanks to artificial intelligence and body tracking, the app automatically charges people and sends them an itemized receipt within thirty seconds, said Bolick.
Lunchbox joins an already cluttered field of cashier-less businesses. Each comes with their own twist. For example, the AI-powered checkout company Standard Cognition eliminated facial recognition in the name of privacy. Another grocery retailer, Trigo Vision, partnered with a European chain to expand the reach of their frictionless technology. And Grabango, a "lineless" grocery service, debuted a minimalist checkout system, rather than getting rid of it completely.
But Bolick said Lunchbox stands out because of its efficiency and implementation.
Retail Business Services knows grocery stores—it runs the behind-the-scenes functions of six East Coast chains. That may be part of the reason the company was able to open the cashier-less store so quickly. The store took six months to implement from start to finish. During that time, Retail Business Services partnered with UST Global and Intel to launch the AI technology and physical infrastructure.
“The main focus was efficiency,” explained Bolick. “How quickly we were able to put it together using the partners we had, the speed of execution—it advanced as fast as we thought.”
Unlike Amazon which is focused on expanding their cashier-less stores, the provider behind Stop & Shop and Peapod hopes to flip the function of these spaces.
Naturally, being responsible for four percent of the country's retail sales, Amazon is zeroing in on growth. The company wants to open larger, more profitable establishments that require fewer people on hand. Last month, Bloomberg reported that the retail giant is looking to open an entire supermarket absent of cashiers.
But Retail Business Services is focusing on the possibility of adding these stores to other small offices that cannot house grocery stores or cafeterias. Bolick said stores like the one in the Quincy office could help employees who would otherwise have to go out for lunch or bring their own from home.
“We don’t envision this technology going in our retail stores,” said Bolick. “We are envisioning a space similar to the way we are functioning in our own office. This is seen as a store in a location where it's not easy to fit a grocery store—somewhere without the scale.”
The current Lunchbox location will close when the cafeteria reopens, but a similar popup is set to open in RBS’s second Pennsylvania office.
Still, Bolick said expansion is "a bit challenging.”
“We are exploring many options, but I think it’s a little spooky for us to speculate on which direction makes the most sense,” he said.
