Like Clippy, but for snacks, booze, and cigarettes
Lawson, a Japan-based chain of convenience stores with 17,600 outlets – 14,000 of them in the land of the Rising Sun – has opened its first store staffed almost entirely by avatars.
Plenty of retailers around the world have added unstaffed checkouts to save money and shorten queues. Some retailers, such as Amazon Go, have automated their stores so that products don’t even need to be scanned to find a price. Yet even retailers that have added such automation tend to retain a few humans on-site to stack shelves, handle inquiries, or fix the seemingly inevitable errors produced by self-service checkouts.
Lawson has taken a different approach: the Green Lawson store, opened yesterday, will show shoppers an avatar on a screen, backed by a remote worker to answer queries or to process those few transactions – such as purchases of tickets – that can’t be done with self-service tech.
