At Sam's Club, a human will no longer check your receipt at the door

Buying things in bulk from wholesalers can take a whole day. Sam's Club, Walmart's store chain, is trying to shorten that time: by using artificial intelligence to scan customers' shopping carts so that they no longer have to show a receipt at the checkout at the exit.

“Eliminating even the few seconds it takes to scan a receipt at the exit door is worth it,” Megan Crozier, executive vice president at Walmart, announced on stage this week at the business presentation for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

At stores that sell bulk items (such as Costco, Sam's Club and BJ's Wholesale Club), it has long been common for store employees to check receipts at the exit. But this also led to it accusations of racial biaswith some customers saying they were subjected to more thorough checks than other customers.

Some retailers, such as Sam's Club and Costco, have long required showing a receipt for anyone leaving the store.

But at other chains, where the practice is less consistently enforced, there have been allegations of racial bias. In 2018, the home improvement chain Lowe's announced that it would suspend its receipt check after a Black customer said he had been asked to show a receipt at two separate locations and that a cashier at one of the locations told him that the employees there did not did. 'don't usually check receipts because the neighborhood was predominantly white.

Costco, on its website, says the practice exists “to verify that the purchased items have been processed correctly by our cashiers.” The explanation continues: “It is our most effective method for maintaining inventory management accuracy.”

This can be a frustrating experience for shoppers, who often have to wait in two lines after shopping: at the checkout and then at the exit. One response to this is the addition of self-checkout lines.

According to a video presented by Walmart executives, Sam's Club will now let customers pass through a gate-like portal instead of having an associate stand at the door and check individual receipts — an innovation that Ms. Crozier described as reimagining the future of retail . The portal is equipped with what Walmart said in a press release: “computer vision and digital technology” to verify purchases.

The technology is currently in 10 locations, but Ms Crozier told the audience the company hoped to roll out the change in all 600 or so locations by the end of the year.

“The interesting thing about it is that eventually we might actually see artificial intelligence at work in our everyday lives,” said James R. Bailey, a professor at the George Washington University School of Business, adding: “And people are saying, ' Well, your phone does this.” And I thought, 'Well, that's just the calculation speed.' You know, it's just this, that and the other. I do not see it. I don't see the progress. What Sam's Club does is actually something tangible and visible.”

The use of artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly common in retail, especially since the height of the pandemic, which changed the way customers interact with physical stores. Walmart already uses artificial intelligence inventory management and as a way to anticipate customer demand. (In an example discussed at the Consumer Electronics ShowWalmart CEO Doug McMillon previewed Walmart's evolved home delivery service, which will use artificial intelligence to predict when deliveries will be needed based on tracked shopping habits.)

In recent years, Amazon has rolled out its 'Just Walk Out' technology, which uses AI to allow customers to leave a store with their purchases and skip the checkout lines entirely as their accounts are automatically charged. This year Amazon closed eight of its Amazon Go storesindicating that the retailer is still trying to gain a foothold in the physical retail space.

Walmart made an oblique reference to the technology when unveiling its own efforts to reduce friction between shopping and going out.

“It's one thing to enable this simple kind of exit technology in a small store for a handful of items,” Ms. Crozier said. “You all saw it. You can have an apple. A cheese stick. Maybe something as big as a box of cereal. But we do it on a large scale.”