Walmart is testing cashier
As Amazon's plan for world domination has swallowed Whole Foods, competing supermegachain Walmart is rolling out more plans to fight back in an ongoing battle of DavidGoliath versus Goliath.
The latest examples of Walmart's plan to keep up with Amazon? Personal shoppers and a cashier-less store, according to Recode.
The personal shopping project is part of Walmart's Code Eight subsidiary, which seems to be focusing on higher-end city shoppers, not necessarily Walmart's core demographic. The cashier-less store move is being spearheaded by Walmart's incubator Store No. 8, which is aiming for a business without no checkout lines.
Hope you know how to bag your own groceries.
Recodealso reports that while the cashier-less stores are currently free for testers, Walmart plans to charge a membership fee down the line (is Walmart Prime too on-the-nose?).
With this, Walmart is certainly positioning itself to take on Amazon Go, the online retail behemoth's planned grocery store plan that was announced a year ago but hasn't made its way to the real world yet.
Since the announcement of Amazon Go and Jeff Bezos' Whole Foods buy, Walmart (and other similar stores) have been playing catch up, trying to position themselves to maintain a share in the market.
Here are a few of the other ways The House That Sam Walton Built has been trying to keep pace.
In October, Walmart inked a deal with Google to allow users to pair their online Walmart shopping accounts with Google Express in an effort to grow its online shopping base.
Walmart has been buying up other properties in an effort to match Amazon's offerings, purchasing sites like Jet.com and Modcloth, and also snatching up Parcel so they can keep up with Amazon's same-day delivery.
There's been work by Walmart to up their online ad game, using a deep trove of online shopper data to bulk up their efforts.
There are the giant vending machines to help shoppers avoid human contact.
Walmart is spending money on robots for inventory scanning and expanding its use of robots in other departments.
Walmart tested 30-second returns to entice shoppers (and undercut Amazon).
And, of course, there's home delivery, with Walmart testing the practice by having employees drop off packages ordered from stores on their way home from work.
All in all, there's a lot going on here, which proves Walmart is not just nervous about Amazon's world domination efforts — but also about being left behind in the growing world of e-commerce and convenience.
Whether Walmart is successful not remains to be seen but this will, inevitably, lead to something even bigger and more absurd, like one of the companies buying Sears and then the other buying Target and then one buying the other and it all ends with Disney owning everything.
I, for one, will welcome our new mouse-eared grocery overlords.
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