New Checkout Experience Seeks to Eliminate the Wait and Add Options at the Register
Walmart Company News | June 30, 2020
Retail checkouts have been evolving for years. Inside its stores, Walmart has introduced convenient check out options, including self-checkouts, pickup and delivery, giving customers more choice and changing the way they shop.
But there’s one checkout area that hasn’t changed in a long time. Cashiers stationed at conveyor-belted lanes have been a retail staple for decades. An experimental checkout experience at a Supercenter in Fayetteville, Arkansas, seeks to challenge the old ways.
The design is pretty simple. All the lanes are gone. There are 34 registers lining the edges of a wide-open area. Each register is equipped with a green light alerting associates and customers to available checkout bays. There's no such thing as closing a lane, all registers are open, all the time.
All the cashiers in the store transitioned to a new type of job called ‘Host.’ If a customer wants to check themselves out, a host is there to show them to an open register. If a customer wants to be checked out by an associate, a host rings them up and bags all of their items just like they would have in the old lane-driven layout.
Reducing the amount of time to train employees and encouraging personal interactions are changing the whole experience for associates as well. “There’s no barriers of conversation on the frontend. It creates a whole lot better atmosphere coming to work.” Carl Morris, Store Manager