It’s no secret that Walmart Inc. (WMT) is giving tough competition to Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN). Now Walmart’s retail warehouse chain Sam’s Club is planning to open a new store in Dallas, Texas that will have no cashiers or checkout lines.
The new store will be much smaller than the usual warehouse club and will mainly contain food products. Customers will have to use a new app called Sam’s Club Now to scan and pay for their purchases.
Upon entering the store, shoppers will open the app, which they can use to find items and add them to their cart by scanning them. After completing their shopping, customers can pay by scanning a code with an employee at the exit, thereby eliminating checkout lines.
The app can offer suggestions based on customers’ purchase history and there are also options for placing orders online and then picking them up at the location later. The new concept will be first tested on a small group of people and then rolled out on a wider scale in future.
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The company plans to use various technologies that it has at hand to improve the customer experience at its stores. As the competition in grocery intensifies, several retailers are resorting to various strategies to drive sales by increasing the convenience of customers while at the same time keeping costs in check.
This new Sam’s Club store will compete directly against Amazon’s cashierless Amazon Go stores. Amazon currently has four Go stores with plans to open more by the end of this year. Last month it was reported by Bloomberg that Amazon plans to open around 3,000 Go stores by 2021, although the online retailer has not confirmed this news yet.