Walmart’s Mobile Scan & Go: Who it’s for, I really don’t know

During Amazon’s annual Prime Day (which is two days, to be precise, but I’m being pedantic) sale mid-July last year, Walmart coincidentally (right) ran a half-off promotion for its normally $98/year competing Walmart+ membership service in conjunction with its competing Walmart+ Week (four days—I know, pedantic again) sale. Copy-and-pasted from the help page:

Walmart+ is a membership that helps save you time and money. You’ll need a Walmart.com account and the Walmart app to access the money and time-saving features of membership.

 Benefits include:

Early access to promotions and events
Video Streaming with Paramount+
Free delivery from your store
Free shipping, no order minimum
Savings on fuel
Walmart Rewards
Mobile Scan & Go

Free shipping absent the normal $35 order minimum is nice, as is free delivery from my local store. Unfortunately, for unknown reasons, only three Walmarts in all of Colorado, none of them close to me, offer fuel service. Truth be told, though, my primary signup motivation was that my existing Paramount+ streaming service was nearing its one-year subscription renewal date, at which time the $24.99/year (plus a free Amazon Fire Stick Lite!) promotional discount would end and I’d be back to the normal $49.99/year price. Walmart+ bundles Paramount+ as one of its service offerings, and since the Walmart+ one-year promo price was the same (minus $0.99, to be pedantic) as I’d normally pay for Paramount+ standalone, the decision was easy.

But none of these was the primary motivation for this writeup. Instead, I’ll direct your attention to the last entry in the bullet list, Walmart’s Mobile Scan & Go:

Here’s the summary from Walmart’s website:

Shop & check out fast with your phone in-store. Just scan, pay, & be on your way!

Get Walmart Cash by easily claiming manufacturer offers as you scan
Check out fast at self-checkout without having to rescan each item
See the price of items as you go

 It’s easy in 3 simple steps!

Open your Walmart app: Select Scan & go from the Store Mode landing page. Make sure your location access is enabled.
Scan your items as you shop: Once your items are scanned, click “View cart” to verify that everything is correct.
Tap “Check out”: Tap the blue “Check out” button in the app & head over to self-checkout. Confirm your payment method. Scan QR code at register.

Sounds good, right? I’d agree with you, at least at first glance. And even now, after using the service with some degree of regularity over the past few months, I remain “gee-whiz” impressed with many aspects of the underlying technology. Take this excerpt, for example:

Open your Walmart app: Select Scan & go from the Store Mode landing page. Make sure your location access is enabled.

To elaborate: if you’ve enabled location services for the Walmart app on your Android or iOS device, it’ll know when you’re at a store, automatically switching the user interface to one more amenable to helping you find which aisle (and region in that aisle) a product you’re looking for can be found (to wit, “Store Mode”), versus the more traditional online-inventory search. And if you’re also logged into the app, it knows who you are and will, among other things, auto-bill your in-store purchases to the credit card associated with your account.

Keep in mind, however, that (IMHO) the fundamental point of the app (as well as the broader self-checkout service option) is to reduce the per-store employee headcount by shifting the bulk of the checkout labor burden to you. Which would be at least somewhat OK, putting aside the obvious unemployment rate impact, if it also translated into lower consumer prices versus just higher shareholder profits. Truly enabling you to just “Scan & Go” would also be nice. Reality unfortunately undershoots the hype, at least in the current service implementation form.

Note, for example, the “scan your items” phrase. For one thing, scanning while you’re shopping is only relevant for items with associated UPS or other barcodes. The app won’t auto-identify SpaghettiOs if you just point the smartphone camera at the pasta can, for example:

not that I’m sure you’d even want it to be able to do that, considering the potential privacy concerns in comparison to a conceptually similar but fixed-orientation camera setup at the self-checkout counter. Consider, for example, the confidentiality quagmire of a small child in the background of the image captured by your smartphone and uploaded to Walmart’s servers…

The app also can’t standalone handle, perhaps obviously, variable-priced items such as per-pound produce that must be weighed to determine the total charge, and which therefore must instead be set aside and segregated in your shopping cart for further processing at checkout. And about that self-checkout counter…it unfortunately remains an essential step in the purchase process, pragmatically ensuring that you’re not “gaming the system”. After you first scan a QR code that’s displayed on your smartphone, you then deal with any remaining items (such as the aforementioned produce) and pay. And then, as you exit the self-checkout area, there’s a Walmart employee parked there who may (or may not) double-check your receipt against the contents of your cart, including in your bags, to ensure you haven’t “forgotten” to scan anything or “accidentally” scanned a barcode for a less expensive alternative item instead.

Still, doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Well, now consider these next-level nuances, which I’m conceptually aware of from a comparative standpoint versus the Meijer Shop & Scan alternative offered back in Indiana, the state of my birth.

In upfront fairness, at least some of what follows may be specifically reflective of my relatively tiny local Walmart versus the larger stores “down the hill” in Denver and elsewhere (against which I haven’t yet compared), versus a more general comparative critique:

There’s no way to get a printed receipt at self-checkout; you can only view it online post-transaction completion. This one’s utterly baffling to me, given that conventional self-checkouts offer it. And speaking of which…
At my store, at least, you’re forced to route through the same self-checkout lines as folks who are tediously doing full self-checkouts (thereby neutering the “Go” promise), versus also offering dedicated faster “Mobile Scan & Go” lines as Meijer does with Shop & Scan.
Meijer also offers self-weighing stations right at the produce department, linked to the store’s app and broader service, further speeding up the final checkout step. There aren’t any at Walmart, at least at my local store, where I instead need to weigh and accept the total per-item prices at checkout.
Not to mention the fact that “Mobile Scan & Go” is only available to subscribers of the paid-for-by-consumer Walmart+ service! You’d think that if the company was mostly motivated to reduce headcount costs, it’d at least offer “Mobile Scan & Go” for free, as it does with conventional self-checkout. You’d think…but nope. Pay up, suckers.

First-world “problems”? Sure. Rest assured that I haven’t lost sight of my longstanding big-picture perspective. But nonetheless irritating? Absolutely.

Service “upgrades” that seemingly benefit only the provider, not also the user, are destined for rapid backlash and a speedy demise. Consumers won’t use them and may even take their entire business elsewhere. While this case study is specific to grocery store shopping, I suspect the big-picture issues it raises may also resonate with related situations in your company’s existing and/or under-consideration business plans. Don’t listen solely to the accountants, who focus predominantly-to-completely on short-term cost, revenue and profit targets, folks!

Reader thoughts are as-always welcomed in the comments!

—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.

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