Time to Pay? Meet Me in the Middle

THERE WAS A TIME, not long ago, when all the pundits were putting out multichoice polls on Twitter, LinkedIn and similar, asking how long it would be before all stores were autonomous and filled with “just walk out technology.” Two years? Three years? Five years? The timeframes involved were short, even at the longer end of the polls’ suggestions.

That has not come to pass. Instead, quite irrespective of the retail sector involved, shoppers are now frequently given a choice. Pay using an app, self-checkout or – and it feels a bit like a last resort – head for the manned checkout. This has altered the look and feel of many stores, including Amazon’s “Go” stores: Where there were barriers at entry and exit for those choosing to shop without visiting a checkout, these are now something of a relic and in their place are now a range of payment options.

The handful of Amazon Fresh grocery stores in London that continue to trade now have self-checkout as part of the proposition. Meanwhile, Tesco, the U.K.’s largest food retailer, has abandoned trying to get shoppers to pay solely using an app in its High Holborn pilot in central London and now offers a hybrid approach, meaning that self-checkout is also available.

So here’s the thing. Visit a hybrid self-checkout convenience store that is coupled with checkout-free app-based shopping, and many shoppers will use the self-checkout. The brakes have been put on what looked like a brave new shopping world, and in its place, the hybrid format has emerged, which looks suspiciously like a compromise. Amazon has come from one end of the payment spectrum and met Tesco coming from the other, with both ending up in, more or less, the same place in a very limited number of locations.

It seems probable that that’s about as far as it will go. The customer has called the shots, and the retailers have responded.