Tag: cashierless checkout

OM in the News: The Short Life Cycle of Amazon Go

It doesn’t seem that long ago that we posted the news that Amazon was opening 57 Amazon Go cashierless bricks and mortar store grocery sores.

We even highlighted this exciting digital-driven advancement in an OM in Action box in Chapter 5 (see page 175). But as we also point out in in our discussion of product life cycles in that chapter (Design of Goods and Services): “Products are born. They live and they die.”

The e-commerce giant just announced that “its branded stores failed to deliver a distinctive customer experience with an economic model that could be scaled up successfully.” This marks the latest pivot in Amazon’s more than decadelong effort to break into physical retail, reports The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 28, 2026).

Amazon Go’s convenience stores, which let customers check out electronically without waiting in line, also never resonated with shoppers on a large scale, and the company has trimmed its fleet by more than half since 2023. The company does, however, license its Just Walk Out technology to retailers at more than 360 locations in five countries, including colleges and universities, sports arenas, hospitals and airports.

Amazon plans to continue experimenting with bricks-and-mortar retail. The company just won approval to open its largest-ever store in Orland Park, Ill., where it will sell groceries, general merchandise and prepared foods. The megastore, which at 230,000 square feet will be big enough to fit nearly two Target stores, will incorporate in-person and digital shopping.

Product life cycle can span a few days (a concert t-shirt), months (seasonal fashions) years (NFL Madden football), or decades (Boeing 737). Amazon Go lasted eight years.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why did Amazon Go fail?
  2. Name a few other products that also exhibited short life cycles.

OM in the News: Retailers , Artificial Intelligence, and No Cashiers

Sam’s Club’s AI-powered cashierless shopping.

U.S. retailers large and small are pressing ahead with testing the use of AI to track what products shoppers pick up and to automatically bill their accounts when they walk out the door, eliminating the need for checkout lines. The concept got a push from Amazon Go stores, which Amazon launched in early 2018; there are now 15 stores, A new study found that 28% of retailers are testing cashierless systems

Sam’s Club is offering AI-powered cashierless shopping this month at a 32,000-square-foot store in Dallas, reports The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 13, 2019). Currently, customers shop at the store by scanning barcodes on the products, an older cashierless-checkout technology. With the AI system is in place, customers use their smartphone cameras to scan the product itself. The cloud-based system, which uses computer vision and machine learning, recognizes products by matching them to a database of stored images. This is different from Amazon Go, where cameras installed in the stores do the work of scanning the products.

Not every type of store is suited for cashierless technology. Walmart tried out a cashierless system based on scanning barcodes for about six months in more than 100 stores but discontinued it in 2018. The technology proved impractical for pricing produce and other items that had to be taken to a cashier to be weighed, causing delays.  Theft is also a concern. Manual scanning operates on an honor system and some customers don’t scan every item, often requiring stores to validate purchases.

Still, the potential benefits include speed and convenience. Even small companies are testing the waters.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why is this an important OM issue?
  2. How does this AI approach differ from self-checkout?