Sam's Club
We all love the value we get from shopping at warehouse clubs, but those endless checkout and exit lines are a real pain. Sam’s Club is hoping to eliminate those frustrating lines — not by adding more cashiers, but by getting rid of checkouts all together. It sounds a little crazy, but the AI-assisted tech is already in use in many locations.
Here’s what Sam’s Club is planning to do and how it will affect your shopping trip.
Sam’s Club recently announced that it plans to embrace more technology to make customers’ shopping experiences faster and easier. That involves renovating all 600 existing Sam’s Club locations to remove the checkouts, including manned and self checkouts.
One store, located in Grapevine, Texas, was renovated with the new plan late last year. Apparently the testing period has gone well, because all Sam’s Clubs will eventually be run the same way. Plus, the company plans to open 15 new locations each year for the foreseeable future.
Customers will become their own cashiers in the new Sam’s Club. Scan and Go, part of the store’s mobile app, will replace checkouts. Of course that means you need a smart phone (and be confident in using it) in order to shop at a cashierless location, which some people won’t have or agree to. But Sam’s Club plans to have employees available to help customers use the app.
Scan and Go is already available to use at Sam’s Club, and we’re big fans because it allows us to blaze past the long checkout lines and head straight to the exit. (You can even use Scan and Go to order food at the Sam's Club food court.
You use your phone’s camera to scan an item’s barcode, which puts it in your (mobile) cart. When you’re done shopping and have scanned everything you want, you just pay through the app like you would any other online purchase. Once you’ve paid, it will display a QR code.
Then, when you leave, you walk through large doorways that scan the items in your cart and the QR code on your phone. That eliminates the need for an employee to check your items by hand, so you get out the door faster.
The AI part of the whole process is in the exit, where cameras scan the products in your cart and the QR code that was created when you paid. Instead of an employee doing that, AI is doing it.
Of course, Sam’s Club has also said that it plans to implement AI-drive personalized advertising, which isn’t as helpful for customers as being able to bypass long checkout lines.
Sam’s Club hasn’t announced a timeline for this change yet, but considering how long it takes to renovate a large store, it’ll probably take years for all locations to eliminate checkouts. If you want to use Scan and Go right now and bypass the checkouts yourself, you can. (Honestly, we’re a little dubious that Sam’s Club will completely get rid of all checkouts in the near future, but you never know.)
