Retail Opinion

Walk-in, walk-out, standing still

For a while now we’ve been told that the future means not paying for things. Or, rather more accurately, walking into a shop will involve gaining entry via an app on our phones, choosing what we want and then walking out.

Nothing in life is for free, so in fact we’ll find we have paid for whatever was selected when a receipt appears on our handheld informing us how much money has been spent. Yes, it’s Amazon’s ‘just walk out’ system, which is being used not only in its Amazon Fresh grocery stores, but is also being adopted by other retailers, which are buying the tech for the reason that it is seen as making things better for shoppers.

Well, perhaps. But just recently Amazon made a surprising announcement. It is halting the expansion of its Fresh stores amid rumours that sales have been disappointing and the possibility of some kind of return on investment becomes more remote. This is in spite of the fact that numerous operators from Hudson News in the US to sports stadium stores have chosen ‘just walk out’ as a means of getting the throughput they need to make their stores profitable.

All of which requires a little examination and the phrase ‘horses for courses’ springs to mind. When do you really need to ‘get in, get it and get out’? For Amazon the answer may be not as frequently as might have originally been supposed, and there might actually be those who would prefer to be served or ‘checkout out’ with all of the human interaction that this implies.

Babies and bathwater, however. It is not time to abandon the checkout-free store altogether. There are moments when you really do know what you want and all you need to do is get the desired object and leave. And does this apply to toy shops? On the face of it, probably not, as there are few moments for adults or children in an emporium of this kind that do not involve a little browsing or face-to-face consultation.

But perhaps a hybrid might be useful. All stores have peak trading periods and for toy store proprietors that period is invariably in the run-up to Christmas. This is the moment at which sales will be lost to rivals if you don’t have the capacity to make things straightforward for your customers. There are probably few more frustrating instances than standing in a massive line when you only came in to buy a single item. Ahead of you there are lots of time-consuming customers whose agenda is likely to be somewhat different from yours.

This is when a checkout-free option would clearly be useful. In toy shops there will always be shoppers who have come in for a particular item – this season’s must-have. But they do have other things to do besides ensuring that their loved ones get what they want/need. Why not therefore give them the option of paying at a till or exercising a little ‘just walk out’ freewill?

This has in fact been done, more or less, at the Whole Foods Market supermarket (also owned by Amazon) in Washington DC. Here, shoppers are given the option of checking out with a cashier and all that this implies, or entering the store with the Amazon app and then leaving without the checkout experience.

Interestingly, a lot of shoppers opt to use the checkouts and, given that joining the checkout-free crowd means downloading and using an app, there is a barrier to this form of ‘seamless’ retail. Nonetheless, imagine for a moment that the Amazon tech became sufficiently affordable to install - the price of tech does have a habit of coming down - would you be prepared to follow the hybrid payment route and offer your shoppers a choice?

If you don’t say ‘yes’ to this one you are probably something of a Luddite and history will make a retail victim of you. In truth, the future of retail rarely follows a single path and now that seamless shopping is an option, the chances remain good that it will become another part of the offer as far as paying for something in a shop is concerned.

There is also the little matter of the store itself. You can have as much payment tech piled into a store as you can afford, but if the offer isn’t up to scratch then you might as well chuck it all in the skip.

Here then is a prediction. There will come a point - and it will be in less than five years, cost-of-living crisis or not - when using your phone as a checkout will be perfectly normal. It won’t be something that will be remarked upon and in just the same manner as we adopted the laptop, mobile phone and suchlike, it will just be another part of a store’s panorama. There will be those, of course, who continue to use a checkout (try dining out and using a credit card in Germany - it’s just not part of what is done in many places - yet) and they will continue to behave in this manner for some time to come.

For toy shops and all others there is almost never a ‘big bang’ when it comes to in-store operations, but there is invariably forward movement. The mockers may scoff about Amazon pressing the pause button, but this will only be temporary. Retail change is a constant. Things will not be as you expect.

John Ryan is Stores Editor of business magazine Retail Week. He has worked for the title for more than a decade covering store design, visual merchandising and what makes things sell in-store. In a previous life, he was a buyer.

Amazon presses the tech pause button, but it is back to the future in-store? Our retail columnist John Ryan investigates why Amazon’s experiment is being put on hold and what the future holds for appbased shopping…