WASHINGTON — Sam's Club is planning to stop having employees check receipts at the door, instead turning to artificial intelligence and computer vision technology.
The announcement was made during Walmart's keynote address this week at CES 2024. Sam's Club is owned by Walmart.
The technology is currently being run as part of a pilot program across 10 Sam's Club warehouse locations, nine of which are in the Dallas metro area and one in Joplin, Missouri.
Customers would shop as normal but instead of stopping at the door to show a receipt to an employee, cameras at the stores’ exits take a picture of what’s in shoppers’ carts to confirm purchases.
"We care about every second a member spends with us. So eliminating even the few seconds it takes to scan a receipt at the exit door, it's well worth it," Megan Crozier, the Chief Merchant of Sam’s Club U.S., said during the announcement.
A video demonstration of the technology in action showed customers walking through the exit that has cameras on the side and overhead.
Sam's Club plans to roll the exit technology out nationwide to its nearly 600 warehouse clubs by the end of the year. The company says it's the first retailer to deploy this technology at exit and at scale.
Sam's Club and its warehouse club rival Costco both require memberships and make customers wait in line for receipt verification to exit. Last year, Costco started getting stricter about enforcing its membership rules after seeing more non-members using cards that don't belong to them at self-checkouts.
