One Big Roadblock: Consumer Theft
In May 2018, Walmart shelved Scan & Go—its cashierless checkout technology. The reason it gave back then? Low adoption rates. But a recent report from Business Insider paints a very different picture.
"You think that the theft is bad on self-checkouts? Wait until you try Scan & Go, where nobody is watching the customers out in the aisles," former Walmart employee Joel Larson, who spearheaded that initiative, told Business Insider.
The Future of Checkout
The future of frictionless checkout probably looks like Amazon Go, and it will rely heavily on computer vision to identify the buyer and what they’re grabbing from the shelves.
“But even Amazon hasn’t perfected the technology for large store formats,” said eMarketer principal analyst Andrew Lipsman. “Until then, it looks like self-scan at checkout will be the winning technology over scan-and-go on your smartphone.”