Loop Neighborhood Market: Employee Free, Contactless Retail

Are you ready of a glimpse of what retail c-store just might look line in your neighborhood within the next five years? Will saving time and money be important to you? Do you think Amazon Go is the only solution to contactless fast fresh food and beverage fast?

Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® believes you will begin to see more new retail locations the ilk of Loop Neighborhood Market than Amazon Go or 7-Eleven’s in the next five years.

Consumers are dynamic not static, and the one thing we have learned going though this Covad-19 experience is that we have had way too much non-essential contact with other within the retail experience according to Johnson.  So, a digital transformation is upon us and the convenience channel, an autonomous experience is no longer a nice-to-have, but a need-to-have if retailers want to keep pace with consumers’ changing lifestyles and lessons learned.

Loop Neighborhood Market introduced a totally autonomous convenience store and gas station in one of the technology capitals of the world: Silicon Valley. The San Francisco-based retailer tapped artificial intelligence (AI) technology company AiFi Inc. for its AiFi Autonomous Store Platform.

So, based on AiFi’s modular NanoStore template, the autonomous Loop Neighborhood Market clocks in at just 160 square feet. The store provides customers with an autonomous solution in a fun and engaging small store footprint. The format also enables the location to be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Varish Goyal, president of Loop Neighborhood Market stated “The new autonomous Loop Neighborhood is a wonderful step forward for our store brand. The fast, frictionless process is delightful and helps customers get what they need to move on with their day,”. Regular readers of this blog know we have reported on this company before and were impressed with the template.  

So once again here is how it works is AiFi has a template shopping app that retailers can choose to label as their own. Under the hood, AiFi has an API that links to all payment methods, including a retailer’s own payment apps, the common payment methods of debit card and credit card, and all contactless payment methods including Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.

When one or more customers enter the store, after registering a method of payment, they select their items and leave the store, receiving an immediate receipt for whatever they took out with them. “The entire transaction only takes seconds to complete,” noted Steve Gu, co-founder and CEO of AiFi.

Is your company looking for a platform to edify its relationship with consumers while reducing cost of operating? If so invite Foodservice Solutions® to complete a Grocerant Program Assessment, Grocerant ScoreCard, or for product positioning or placement assistance, or call our Grocerant Guru®.  Since 1991 Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma, WA has been the global leader in the Grocerant niche. Contact: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us or 253-759-7869