Sainsbury’s checkout-free store in Holborn has been stripped of Amazon’s ‘Just Walk Out’ technology.
Purchases at the store – which since 2021 had enabled shoppers to enter with a QR code generated by the Sainsbury’s app, pick their items, then simply leave – are now made via a customer kiosk with a till and two small self-checkouts.
“SmartShop Pick & Go is no longer available in our Holborn Circus store,” a Sainsbury’s spokeswoman confirmed to The Grocer.
“We continue to work with AWS across a range of projects and we are looking at how we can use technology to make shopping with us even simpler and more convenient in the future.”
Sainsbury’s launched the checkout-free store – located close to the supermarket’s London head office – in November 2021. It came just a month after Tesco opened its first public checkout-free store GetGo, which is also in Holborn.
“We are always looking at new ways to make shopping easy and convenient for our customers,” Clodagh Moriarty, Sainsbury’s chief retail & digital director, said at the time.
Sainsbury’s worked with Amazon to supply the ‘Just Walk Out’ technology behind the store, while Tesco is powering its GetGo store with technology from Israeli startup Trigo, in which it has had an equity investment since 2019. Sainsbury’s was Amazon’s first non-US customer of its Just Walk Out tech, and marked the first time Amazon had enabled a business customer to use its own app to manage store entry, exit, receipts, and payments for shoppers. The Holborn store was also the first Amazon had retrofitted with Just Walk Out technology.
The arrival of Just Walk Out and competitor versions – which enable shoppers to simply take items from shelves and leave a store – seemed to number the days of the checkout. But the technology – involving banks of cameras on the ceiling, computer vision to analyse shopper movements and weighted shelves – hasn’t had quite the impact predicted.
While Tesco now has four GetGo stores, all feature a ‘hybrid’ format, meaning shoppers can still use a checkout if they want to.
Aldi launched its own checkout-free store – with tech partner AiFi – in 2022. The discounter said this month the Aldi Shop & Go concept store in Greenwich high street had sold over 10 million items to date. However, Aldi UK & Ireland CEO Giles Hurley told The Grocer in 2023 that its rollout of self-checkouts, rather than more Shop & Go stores, was seen as the “right next step”.
Morrisons also trialled a similar concept at its headquarters in Bradford, which remains only open to staff. In September, the supermarket launched a trial of scan and go technology, more than 10 years after it was introduced by the likes of Tesco.
Demand for Just Walk Out technology waning
And after initially heralding it as a development that would “push the state of the art forward” to “reimagine the in-store shopping experience” and “redefine retail”, last summer Amazon moved to strip the tech out of its US stores.
As then global grocery stores chief at Amazon, Tony Hoggett, who led the move, said in an interview with The Grocer in 2023: “Not everything you do in grocery needs reinventing.”
The technology remains at Amazon Fresh stores in the UK – which first launched in Ealing in 2021. It offered customers a “new convenience grocery format” Amazon said at the time, and was the first opportunity for Brits to use its Just Walk Out technology. It reportedly planned to open hundreds of Fresh stores in the UK, but the rollout has slowed significantly.
The most recent ‘Just Walk Out’ powered Amazon Fresh store opened in November last year, coming a year since its last store launch in the UK.
The technology’s real promise appears limited to specific situations with bursts of demand, like stadiums, hospitals and conference centres, or much smaller format stores.
A major study of consumer perceptions of self-checkouts commissioned by The Grocer found only 13% of shoppers have used checkout-free technology, compared with 26% having self-scanned using an app and 40% who have self-scanned using an in-store handset.
Over the past couple of years, Sainsbury’s has accelerated its investment into self-checkouts, and its Smart Shopping tool as part of Simon Roberts’ Food First, and now Next Level strategy, and kicked off a major upgrade of its entire network of 25,000 systems in August.
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