Starting fresh with autonomous checkout makes so much more sense, for both the retailer and the customer. We tell them they may be headed backwards. If Walmart, with its deep pockets and hundreds of dedicated staff, couldn’t make Scan & Go work, what makes other retailers think they can? Yet we still speak with retailers, including very large, well-known companies, who have not given up on this old-fashioned concept. As Thad Peterson of Aite Group put it in an interview with PaymentsSource, “Having the consumer scan their own products and then walking out without going to the point of sale is great, but I’m not sure that consumers would find scanning an entire cart of groceries more convenient than letting a store associate handle that job at the point of sale.” The fact is, scan & go is not autonomous checkout – it is glorified self-checkout, asking customers to take on the labor of checkout themselves.
