A retail technology consultant says artificial intelligence could eliminate the dreaded "unexpected item in bagging area" error at major retailers, and Sam's Club is already rolling out a system that ditches checkout lanes entirely.
Jackie Swanson, managing partner at Gartner Consulting, told The U.S. Sun that multimodal AI systems combining barcode scanning, product imaging, weight sensors, and shopper movement tracking could wipe out the routine interruptions that have made self-checkout a four-letter word for millions of American shoppers. Sam's Club, Walmart, and Costco were all named as retailers where the technology could apply.
Swanson advises retailers and consumer companies on AI strategy, unified commerce, and customer experience. Her core claim is straightforward: the machines are about to get smart enough to stop accusing you of stealing your own groceries.
Anyone who has stood at a self-checkout kiosk, frozen mid-scan while a red light flashes and a robotic voice demands attention, knows the problem. A piece of fruit shifts. A bag settles. The machine locks up and waits for a store employee who may be handling three other lanes.
Swanson described a near-future system where that cycle ends. She said computer vision can recognize produce and distinguish between visually similar items, telling a lime from a lemon, for instance, and that the system can identify the specific cause of an error before an employee even arrives.
"Multimodal systems can combine the barcode, product image, weight and shopper movement to determine what entered the bagging area."
The result, she argued, is fewer false alarms and faster fixes when real problems do occur. Swanson put it plainly:
"Nobody wants an avocado to trigger a lengthy negotiation with the bagging area."
She also noted that the goal is not to eliminate store employees. Some transactions will still require a human being, age-restricted products like alcohol and tobacco, complicated coupons, payment disputes, and unusual merchandise all fall outside what AI can handle on its own. But the volume of pointless interruptions should drop sharply.
"The future experience should feel like the system understands what happened. Shoppers should not need to explain their entire transaction because one lime rolled into the bagging area with unauthorized confidence."
Swanson's predictions are not purely theoretical. Sam's Club, owned by Walmart, has announced plans to phase out traditional checkout lanes across all 600 of its stores in favor of an AI-powered "Scan & Go" system, the New York Post reported. Customers scan items with a mobile app as they shop and walk out through an AI verification scanner, no receipt check at the door.
A new Sam's Club location in Grapevine, Texas, already operates under the model and is "setting the standard" for future stores, according to the company. Sam's Club President and CEO Chris Nicholas called it "one of the fastest, most scalable transformations happening in retail today."
Nicholas also tied the shift to customer loyalty. When members have a "meaningful, positive interaction with an associate," he said, "they're more likely to renew, and stay loyal." The idea is that freeing employees from checkout duties lets them focus on actual customer service rather than babysitting machines that cannot tell a banana from a bag of chips.
The warehouse club's existing scan-and-go system already has strong adoption numbers. Sam's Club reports that 80 percent of members who try scan-and-go use it again within 90 days, and transactions through the system doubled in the current year, Fox News reported.
Sam's Club is not alone. Kroger has added scan-and-go technology to 400 stores. Walmart has tested it in 120 locations. BJ's Wholesale Club planned to bring it to roughly 100 clubs. Across 40 retailers analyzed by NCR Corp., scan-and-go mobile shopping accounts for 5 to 15 percent of customer transactions, a small but growing share.
The appeal for retailers is partly economic. Mobile scanning apps cost less to deploy and maintain than banks of self-checkout kiosks, which require hardware, floor space, and constant attendant supervision. For customers, the draw is speed and control. One Walmart shopper in Fort Worth, Texas, Kari Malinak, summed it up: "I'm a persnickety shopper. I can't stand it when they bag my produce. It gets all bruised. I like to have control. And I like the quick and easy aspect."
But adoption is not automatic. Jason Goldberg, senior vice president at SapientRazorfish, flagged the core obstacle: "It's a huge barrier for most retailers to get a consumer to download their app." Older shoppers, customers without smartphones, and people who simply prefer a traditional lane all represent segments that scan-and-go technology leaves behind.
Costco, for its part, is maintaining traditional checkout lanes even as competitors push toward automation. That split highlights a real divide in the industry over how fast to move and how much friction customers will tolerate during the transition.
Swanson's claims carry weight given her position at Gartner Consulting, which advises major corporations on technology strategy. But several questions remain open. She did not cite a specific Gartner study or formal report backing her predictions. No projected timeline was offered for when these multimodal AI systems would arrive in stores. And it is unclear whether the computer vision technology she described is already deployed in any retail self-checkout system or remains entirely prospective.
Cost and implementation barriers went unmentioned. Outfitting hundreds or thousands of stores with AI-powered checkout systems is not cheap, and the track record of retail technology rollouts is littered with delays and scaled-back ambitions. Amazon's cashier-less "Just Walk Out" stores, once hailed as the future of grocery shopping, have been quietly scaled back in recent years.
For the millions of Americans who endure self-checkout every week, scanning, re-scanning, waiting for an attendant, and scanning again, the promise of a system that actually works is welcome. Whether it arrives as fast as the consultants predict is another matter.
Shoppers have heard plenty of promises from the retail industry before. What they want is a checkout that does not treat every loose orange like a federal investigation.