A partnership between a Denver-area convenience store chain and a Salt Lake City mobile retail startup will allow customers to skip the line at checkout.
Skip and Russell's Convenience announced this week that the two had partnered to offer Skip's mobile scan and go platform at the chain's 19 convenience store locations across Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu and Detroit.
With Skip's mobile checkout app, customers will be able to scan each item as they place it into their basket, apply coupons digitally and finalize payment on the app as they walk out.
"Offering a frictionless shopping experience to our customers increases the frequency of transactions. By making the shopping experience as fast as possible, we open up more shopping opportunities to our customers that are on break or just short on time. With Skip, we can accommodate any shopper's schedule without disrupting our operations," Tom Bachrodt, Russell's Denver area regional manager, said in a statement.
Russell’s launched in 2004 and has 12 Denver locations, offering a variety of snacks, sandwiches and salads, candy, tobacco products, reading materials and more.
This integration comes nearly three years after Russell's introduced its unmanned Xpress store model, allowing customers in office buildings to use self-checkout in a smaller Russell's store.
Convenience store giant 7-Eleven is eying a similar mobile checkout solution, as it recently announced the rollout of its mobile checkout feature to participating convenience stores in New York City. The company did not provide further details on a potential national rollout.
Outside of its partnership with Russell's, Skip has integrated with over 300 convenience stores across the country to allow for mobile checkout.
"We are working hard at Skip to bring frictionless checkout to new markets as quickly as possible. The goal is to empower every s-store retailer and their shoppers with a supremely convenient experience, that is as sticky as it is enjoyable," Skip founder and CEO Chase Thomason said in a June statement after crossing the 300-store threshold.
