After watching customers fly in and out on a tour of the Amazon Go store in Seattle, I was amazed at the ease and satisfied expressions on the customers’ faces. Could this be a huge snapshot of what is to come? I think so.

As you stated, the checkout has always been where the friction lies. The customers spending the most money are the ones waiting the longest (e.g. the 10 items or less folks are out the door pretty quickly). For most grocers adding the ability to “scan and go” or other quick checkout technology will be a must. However, I don’t seeing it completely replacing the checkout aisle. There will always be a contingent of consumers who don’t want the onus of scanning or being 100 percent responsible for the final transaction.

Certainly these technologies create a far better experience for consumers than exists today and they will continue to develop and deploy.

One point I’ll make that is never talked about is shrinkage. These systems are far from perfect and through their own errors can increase shrinkage measurably. That cost and the cost of deployment will be paid for by consumers. So grab and go technologies are a great convenience, but not really a free benefit for users.

Scan and go will likely be a pervasive way for shoppers to check out in the near future. I am still skeptical of Amazon’s ambitions to open 3,000 Amazon Go stores within two years. It is hard to believe that the stores can be profitable with the level of technology investments. Leveraging consumers’ devices as the new POS seems like the best solution and I think consumers will like the independence and convenience it offers.

Regional grocers are trying to keep pace with a potential competitor like Amazon. They are also looking at reducing their labor costs and hassles. The pilots are sensible and necessary for the grocers to learn how well the technology works, modifications that need to be paid, and implementation lessons. The role played by cashiers in traditional stores is mostly to check out the shopper, and eliminating the need for this labor will lower the store’s costs.

The greatest point of friction in the grocery shopping experience remains the checkout process. In some stores, a bad checkout experience could lead to customers shopping elsewhere. The pace of innovation is relentless, especially with what Amazon has accomplished with their Amazon Go pilot.

However traditional grocery stores such as Kroger should take a far more conservative approach to test, pilot, and measure how the cashless experience resonates with their core customers. Certainly the Amazon Go convenience model works quite seamlessly in a smaller scale store. However the challenge is to scale up that operation, and if a Kroger chooses to take this route, what are the downstream implications and impacts to their cashiers and other members of their team?

It’s very much an organizational change management play, as it is an innovation strategy.

The technology has been there; the will to experiment has been lacking. What Amazon did was to take chances. I still question the financial performance of the stores and whether they would scale. Amazon Go is really a convenience store/corner store model and they haven’t opened as many stores as planned. I think grocers need to have a holistic model for multi-model checkout experience based on the consumer, store location/layout, basket analysis, etc. There is no one-size-one-tech-fit all option anymore.

Eliminating the checkout bugaboo will create a huge win/win for grocer and customer. Self checkout is a variation on the current process, checkout-free technology completely reinvents the process and challenges your the underlying business assumptions.

To compete and thrive, regional grocers must invest in their stores, update their assortments, and stay in tune with tech advances. Of course it’s sensible and necessary for regional grocers to pilot check-out experiences. The alternative is to watch their market share sink with negative sales comps, stubborn fixed costs, and even lower net margins. Applying technology to the customer experience race, you can never out run the competition unless you redefine the game.

Building on Kenneth Leung’s great observation here today about “multi-modal checkout” in grocery, I think we must also ask the question, “in what retail formats and trips?”

By that I mean Amazon Go is a convenience store, not a supermarket. It caters to a certain kind of transaction that fits the “grab and go” concept well. Eliminating checkout friction during the lunch rush adds significant value.

Shifting the scanning task to the shopper for a full-basket grocery order is not eliminating friction — it is transferring it from the front end to the aisle. Price-lookup items like produce are going to especially clumsy in this regard. Has anyone carefully studied whether any time is actually saved? Maybe it’s all about perception.

I would counsel grocers to study this proposition hard. True, there is great pressure to offer services that match best experiences anywhere. Perhaps a grab-and-go option should be on the “multi-modal” table for supermarkets, but the benefits may be elusive.

The ease and convenience of being able to choose an item, put it in your cart, and basically walk out of the store without the need to empty your cart on the conveyor belt and wait in line to check out, is huge. In today’s hectic environment, consumers don’t have the time or patience for hassles. Whether the technology is as cutting-edge as Amazon’s Go stores, or a little more simple like Sam’s Club’s Scan & Go, the customer benefits from a faster and easier process and the retailer benefits from a less congested checkout area and happier customer.

I wonder if the days of DPP (direct product profitability) will make a comeback. Can you imagine … you can buy that item for $2.99 and wait a bit for a cashier, or if you want to go to a scan and go outlet you can pay $3.50 until the equipment is paid off….

This is a solution looking for a problem. Regional grocers aren’t going to lose market share to Amazon because it has discovered a way to do this (it has but at a tremendous cost). There are so many other issues which need to be addressed rather than using AI to empower checkout-free technologies in a grocery store. Pricing, out-of-stocks, broader availability, non-gmo alternatives, etc. Amazon’s boast about building hundreds of stores like this over the next two years is nonsensical and unbelievable.