In many industry perspectives, the main characteristic of unmanned convenience stores and vending machines is "unmanned", which means reducing labor costs through unmanned retail while still meeting the demand for 24-hour store opening. In fact, the rapid spread of the concept of "unmanned retail" is closely related to the difficulties that physical stores have encountered in retail in recent years. With the rise of e-commerce, the penetration of the physical retail market is gradually deepening, and news such as physical stores closing and layoffs is not uncommon. In addition, the rental, water, electricity, and labor costs of offline stores continue to rise, making it more difficult for physical retail to compete with e-commerce in terms of price. Therefore, if physical retail wants to reduce operating costs, "unmanned" is clearly a good choice.
Coincidentally, the emergence of "unmanned convenience stores" can actually be said to be a product of the advancement of high-tech technologies such as online payment, the Internet of Things, and image recognition at a single node. Previously, the Internet emphasized "meeting the 80% needs of 80% of users". In the future, the addition of artificial intelligence will further improve the transaction efficiency of the entire system, and convenience stores can fully meet the 99% daily needs of one user.
In fact, all forms of unmanned retail in the current market can be divided into two types. One type is high-tech stores that require cutting-edge technologies such as computer vision, sensor fusion, deep learning, and biome