The last year or so have seen no end of stories about jobs becoming automated out of existence.  Indeed, a well publicized study from researchers at Oxford University last year predicted that roughly half of all jobs will be automated in America in the next 20 years.

The paper provided the intellectual grunt behind a tool offered on the BBC website that allowed users to check the likelihood that their job would be automated in the not too distant future.

Put in shop assistant/retail cashier and you would be told that there was a 90% probability that a robot would be doing your job in no time.

A fully automated store

A Swedish store are looking to bring this into fruition by offering a completely automated experience.  The store, called Naraffar, is located in the small town of Viken and offers a 24 hour shopping experience without a single human in sight.

It offers all of the usual goods that you would expect in a convenience store, with users ordering their products via the app.  The shopper uses this app to scan each item, with a monthly bill sent to the customer for the products they’ve bought.

Whilst the concept does rely to a large extent on customers being honest, there are a number of surveillance cameras installed, although I suspect they aren’t quite as intelligent as those offered by British startup Third Eye, who I wrote about recently.

They also check the credit rating of each new customer before approving them, and the door is setup to trigger an alert if it’s open for too long.

“My ambition is to spread this idea to other villages and small towns,” the founders say. “It is incredible that no one has thought of this before.” 

I’ve written previously about a Japanese project that is automating stock control in stores, but this is probably the first example of a fully automated shop.

Is it a trend that will take off?  Time will tell.