Digitisation and Automation of Public Services: Vulnerability Analysis of Self-Check-Out-Stores

“Europeans spend between 17 and 35 minutes per day on shopping and personal services”. According to Eurostat, the time Europeans spend on shopping and personal services (like visiting a doctor or a hairdresser) ranges from 17 minutes per day in Romania to 35 minutes in Germany, according to a survey carried out in 15 EU countries between 2008 and 2015. As urban lives become hectic and population concentration in cities has been at the highest levels in history, there is an obvious inclination towards solving associated problems for consumers and improving the shopping experience. One of the ways companies claim to achieve this is by automating the shopping process, for example, Amazon Go is an unmanned, self-checkout store which promises a really fast and convenient shopping experience for the urban shopper who has an established digital presence on their mobile phone application with a payment method already set up. The foundation of such shopping experience is the complete digitization and automation of every stage a consumer goes through when shopping starting from entering the store to exiting without human intervention. Contemporarily, the fabric of this automated shopping experience is primarily reliant on an automated store access through the mobile application with a QR code to scan at the entry checkpoint at the store, and tracking the mobile application owner with cameras and proximity sensors, utilizing weight of the products/produce off the shelves to add it to cart on the mobile application remotely and allow the consumer to exit the store without having to interact with a human cashier by automatically debiting the payment method in-app at the exit checkpoint for the items in the cart. The after-sales support are still under development, as is the concept, which is fairly recent with the first such store opened in the US in 2018.