Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) is tweaking its strategy around Just Walk Out, the tech that allows shoppers to scan a payment method upon entering a store, shop and walk out without going through a checkout line.
Amazon announced tech upgrades on July 31 that the company says make Just Walk Out faster, more accurate, cheaper and easier to deploy. The new tech can analyze data from cameras and sensors simultaneously, according to Amazon, rather than sequentially.
In April, Amazon decided to pull Just Walk Out from its Fresh grocery stores, opting instead for Amazon Dash Carts, the smart-shopping cart that scans items as customers put them in the cart.
During a tour of Amazon's Just Walk Out lab with reporters in late July, Jon Jenkins, vice president of Amazon Just Walk Out technology, said the move was a business decision and not due to any issues with the technology in larger grocery stores.
"From a technical perspective, Just Walk Out works as well for grocery stores as it does for the smaller stores, and in fact, the grocery store experience probably helped us," Jenkins said. "The reason we moved out of grocery stores is really the technology of carts is a better fit for the shopper's use case."
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Implemented in large grocery stores, the technology requires many cameras and can become costly. A smart grocery cart offers much of the same experience more efficiently.
Now, Amazon is focusing Just Walk Out on smaller convenience stores, such as its own Amazon Go stores, plus other small spaces with lots of foot traffic, such as concession areas at stadiums. Lumen Field, Climate Pledge Arena and T-Mobile all use Just Walk Out technology in certain areas.
The applications of the technology could touch other retail sectors, as well.
Jenkins pointed to stores or restaurants with short rush periods. If a restaurant has a busy lunch hour, for example, it might add staff for that period, but those employees will have little to do for the rest of their shift outside of the rush. Just Walk Out, Jenkins said, could handle the rush without the overstaffing problem.
Just Walk Out is in more than 170 third-party locations. As part of the shift from an in-house retail tool to a third-party product, Amazon moved Just Walk Out to its Amazon Web Services department in 2022.
Despite the pullback from Fresh stores, Amazon isn't completely abandoning Just Walk Out in large stores. The company is using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to offer Just Walk Out in retail settings, starting with shops at stadiums. The tech relies on RFID tags and only needs cameras at the checkout area, making it a fit for retail stores but not grocery stores, as most grocery items don't have a tag.
The main difference between the RFID tech and the traditional Just Walk Out is the RFID version has consumers swipe their payment at the end. Jenkins said this allows consumers to browse before they've decided to buy anything, which isn't usually a situation at a grocery store.
The RFID tech debuted last year and is in a handful of stadiums now.
As for hurting Amazon's retail business by supplying brick-and-mortar retail competitors with new tech, Jenkins said his team's job is to sell to customers who want the tech. Keeping the team independent from Amazon retail decisions, he added, was a key reason for the move to AWS.
Amazon generated $148 billion in net sales during the second quarter, up from $134.4 billion during the second quarter of 2023. AWS generated $26.3 billion during the quarter, up 19% year over year.
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