Sam's Club CEO reveals what the company has learned from its cashierless 'beta lab' store
- Sam's Club Now is a "beta lab" store in Dallas, Texas, where Sam's Club does real-world tests of the features that the company's Plano, Texas, emerging-tech center dreams up.
- The store is smaller than the average Sam's Club, and it has zero cashiers. Customers use their smartphones and an app to shop instead.
- In the past few months, Sam's Club Now has tested new features for Scan & Go's cashierless checkout system and digital shelf tags, which are seeing wider tests.
Sam's Club Now isn't just about the future - it's about the present as well.
Opened in November 2018, Now is a functioning Sam's Club warehouse store in Dallas, Texas, where Sam's Club members can shop.
But it's also what CEO John Furner calls a "beta lab," testing features in the real world that engineers and developers in the company's Plano, Texas, emerging-tech center dream up just three miles away.
In the store, "you'll see the engineers physically run back to the office ... and get their keyboard out and put a fix on something," Furner said.
The store is smaller than a typical warehouse store - only around 32,000 square feet versus more than 100,000 square feet in the usual Sam's Club store - and it has zero cashiers.
Instead, shoppers use the Scan & Go functionality of Sam's Club's shopping companion app, adding items to their cart both virtually and physically. After they pick their items, they scan a bar code with the host, Sam's Club's new name for the employees posted at the exits.
Still, Now has as many employees in the store as a regular Sam's Club warehouse store does, when scaled down proportionally.
"They have time to talk to you and to serve you and to help you, where before they were wrapped up" in other tasks, Furner said.
Many of the new technological advancements tested in Now are software-based, according to Furner.
"When you're thinking about technology for people, it can't be intrusive in their life," Furner said.
Every four to five weeks, new functionality designed to be used in Now is put into Sam's Club's shopping app. If successful, it gets rolled out to the rest of Sam's Club's almost-600-store fleet.
Examples of this is Now testing adding all products in the store to the Scan & Go service - even beer and wine - and rolling out computer vision in the app in order to identify items without needing to scan a barcode.
But Now is also a testing ground for physical technology like digital shelf tags, which are also being considered for a larger roll-out. These tags can use Bluetooth to interact with the app and show customers where items are, even if they've been moved.
The app can then plot out the best route to take in the store based on the location of items on a customer's shopping list.
"It's a great concept. It works really well and now ... we're now looking at a single club to experiment and see if it works in the bigger environment," Furner said. "But it's a harder decision because it requires hardware and installation. When it's software, it's scalable right away."
It's much more likely that the tech being tested in Now will end up in local Sam's Club stores than in a version of a Now store.
"It was never designed to be, from our view, a format that we would expand. If we did, we'd make that decision later, but that's not why we did it," Furner said. "It was really just to learn."