Björn Weber

Otto Group is offering other retail companies the opportunity to use the Virtual Content Creator (VCC), which its subsidiary One.O has developed as part of the Movex live shopping suite.

The highly acclaimed mini-stores, which Tegut operated largely unmanned under the name Teo, will be transferred to Edeka headquarters along with their operating company Smart Retail Solutions. It is very likely that Edeka Group will further optimise and expand this format in order to be able to offer food in structurally weak areas throughout Germany and to operate 24-hour convenience…

Colruyt has attracted a lot of attention in the retail industry with its innovative Easy Checkout system. Now, the market leader in Belgian retail is allowing its hardware supplier Partner Tech Europe to market the system to other retailers. This includes the vision recognition software developed by the Colruyt team itself, which reads a barcode as soon as the item…

Carrefour will introduce Vusion's platform in all of its hypermarkets and supermarkets in France. The French retail giant will be the third major retailer after Walmart in the United States and dm Drogeriemarkt in Germany to use Vusion's EdgeSense technology.

Bartels-Langness intends to enable payment directly at the Snapcart system, which Bela IT developed in collaboration with Shopreme and Hanshow. A development by Shopreme will also soon enable customers to upload handwritten shopping lists onto the smartcarts.

As CEO of GK, Michael Scheibner regularly talks to the top executives of the world's largest retail companies and is familiar with many of their strategies. In the run-up to EuroShop in Düsseldorf, he shared his thoughts with Björn Weber, whom he has known well for 16 years.

This week, the retail company Georg Jos. Kaes began its announced trial of various checkout methods with Wanzl, Shopreme, DRS, and Zebra at its V-Mart in the Euro-Industriepark in Munich. The Retail Optimiser was there for the premiere.

Kesko Senukai will equip all 94 of its Senukai-DIY stores with electronic shelf labels from Vusion. The leading DIY retailer in the three Baltic states, which is operated as a joint venture between Finnish retail giant Kesko and the Rakauskas family, is also testing Vusion's Captana solution for automatic inventory control using shelf cameras and computer vision.

Amazon is closing all of its physical Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh retail outlets. Other retailers are also backing away from scanless stores. The technologies had fallen into disrepute after it became apparent that they did not always work automatically.

Drugstore operator dm is planning an additional small item distribution centre at its logistics site in Wustermark near Berlin, which will use robotics from Austrian specialist TGW Logistics for picking. With the Pickcenter Rovoflex, TGW offers a new type of automatic picking system with six-axis robots that continuously improves its own work through AI.