Unstaffed, digital supermarkets transform rural Sweden

The Lifvs start-up has opened 19 stores across the country, choosing remote places that have lost their local shops

Emma Nilsson's husband is harvesting hay in the hot summer sun and she has popped into the village shop to get him a bottle of water. But there's no friendly face at the checkout, or opportunity to swap local gossip. Instead, she pulls out her phone, logs in with BankID, the national identification app operated by Sweden's banks, and opens the locked glass door with a tap on her screen.

With only a small camera in one corner to supervise her, she studies fridges stocked by someone she's never seen, selects the bottle she wants, calls up a barcode reader on the app, then scans and pays with another tap. This new unstaffed supermarket - a wall of fridges and another of shelves packed into a 22sq metre container - has made it a lot more convenient to live in Eket, a village of 400 people in the far-north of Sweden's Skane region.