Sam’s Club just revealed that 40 percent of its transactions are now digital. One of its locations in Grapevine, Texas already operates with no traditional checkout lanes at all. The entire store runs on Scan & Go. Meanwhile, the global smart cart market is growing from $572 million in 2025 to $3.285 billion by 2030. Instacart tripled the number of grocery stores running Caper Carts in 2025 versus the year before.
Together, these two developments point to the same structural shift. The conventional checkout lane is losing its position as the default transaction point in retail. It is not disappearing. However, its share of transactions is declining every year. The retailers who understand the architecture replacing it are the ones positioning correctly for the next decade.
I have spent over two decades building and deploying self-service hardware across the United States and Latin America: kiosks, POS terminals, electronic shelf labels, and digital signage. The trajectory is clear from where I sit. The checkout lane is becoming one option among several, not the default that everything else supplements. Here is what that transition looks like and what it means for retailers making hardware and software decisions right now.
Two Technologies, One Destination
The conventional checkout lane is going through the same structural shift that the telephone landline went through between 2000 and 2015. It did not disappear overnight. Instead, its share of calls declined every year until it became the exception rather than the default. Retail checkout is on the same curve. The two technologies accelerating that decline are smart cart and scan and go. They take different paths to the same destination: checkout everywhere, not checkout at the lane.
Scan and Go: The Software Path to Distributed Checkout
What Sam’s Club Already Proved
Sam’s Club is the most important case study in retail checkout right now. 40 percent of its transactions are already digital, combining Scan & Go and e-commerce. Half of its members either shop online or use Scan & Go in the club. The Grapevine, Texas location operates at 100 percent Scan & Go participation with no traditional checkout lanes. Sam’s Club plans to expand that format to additional clubs.
The behavioral data behind those numbers is equally significant. Members who use Scan & Go visit three times more often than store-only shoppers. They buy from twice as many categories and renew their memberships at rates ten points higher. That is not a convenience metric. It is a loyalty metric. The checkout experience is driving retention in a way that the conventional lane never did.
Additionally, three in ten U.S. adults have now used scan-and-go technology in the past six months. Notably, among Gen Z, adoption reaches nearly half. The generational shift matters because today’s youngest shoppers will set the expectation for what checkout feels like in 2031 and beyond.
Why the Software Path Works Without Hardware Investment
Scan & Go is a software-first model. The retailer builds or licenses an app. The customer uses their own phone. No dedicated hardware goes on the floor beyond the exit verification system. As a result, the capital requirement is dramatically lower than any hardware-based checkout alternative. A retailer can pilot Scan & Go at one store format, measure adoption and shrink, and scale only where the numbers support it.
The shrink concern is real and worth naming. Wegmans discontinued its scan-and-go app in 2022 due to losses. Hy-Vee discontinued its version in 2023 due to low adoption. Sam’s Club solved both problems through its membership model and chain-wide AI-powered exit verification. The lesson is not that scan-and-go does not work. Rather, scan-and-go works best when the retailer already has a digital relationship with the customer before the first scan. Membership programs, loyalty accounts, and logged-in app experiences provide that relationship. Anonymous scan-and-go does not.
Smart Carts: The Hardware Path to Distributed Checkout
What the Technology Actually Does
The Caper Cart from Instacart runs NVIDIA Jetson edge AI with two camera systems that triangulate item location in the basket in real time. A certified scale handles produce and bulk items. Location tracking delivers promotions based on where the shopper is in the store at that exact moment. Instacart reports a nearly 1 percent lift in average basket size from contextual prompts. The market has tripled in store deployments in one year and is growing toward $3.285 billion by 2030.
As I described in the TIGER 2026 software-defined commerce analysis, the most valuable self-service hardware in 2026 generates compounding intelligence over time. The smart cart qualifies on that dimension. Every item scanned, every aisle traversed, and every substitution the shopper makes is a behavioral signal that no conventional POS captures. That data compounds in commercial value as the fleet grows.
What the Hardware Path Adds That Scan and Go Cannot
Smart carts solve a specific problem that scan-and-go does not. The shopper does not need to download an app, create a loyalty account, or remember to open anything at the entrance. They grab the cart from the stack and start shopping. The hardware handles everything from the moment the first item enters the basket.
Consequently, smart carts reach a broader demographic slice than scan-and-go apps. They work for the occasional shopper, the older shopper, and the shopper who does not want another app on their phone. For grocery formats with diverse demographics and low app penetration, the hardware path captures transaction volume that the software path cannot.
Furthermore, the cart screen is a retail media surface operating at the highest-intent moment in the customer journey: mid-basket, mid-trip, making decisions in real time. That surface value does not exist in a scan-and-go app unless the retailer has built a sophisticated in-app advertising layer. The smart cart delivers it out of the box.
Why Smart Cart and Scan and Go Belong in the Same Strategy
Smart cart and scan and go are not competitors. They serve different segments of the same shopper base. A grocery chain deploying both serves the app-native shopper through Scan & Go and the app-resistant shopper through the smart cart. All shoppers skip the conventional lane, generate behavioral data, and participate in the retail media layer.
In this architecture, the conventional lane does not disappear. It becomes the fallback for the shopper who wants it and the return processing point. It also serves as the staffed touchpoint consumers still need for high-consideration moments. As I described in the AI shopping trust gap analysis, consumers trust distributed checkout for routine transactions and still want a human at specific moments. The architecture that works places human attention exactly where the data says it is needed and automated checkout everywhere else.
What This Means for LatAm Retailers
The Software Path First
For most LatAm grocery and general merchandise formats, the right starting point is the software path. Scan & Go via a loyalty app or QR-initiated payment requires no hardware investment beyond exit verification. It builds the digital customer relationship that makes everything else more valuable. Moreover, WhatsApp-based commerce and QR payment behavior already exist in consumer habits across the region. That existing behavior is the foundation for scan-and-go adoption without needing to build it from scratch.
The Hardware Path When the Infrastructure Is Ready
Smart carts require reliable WiFi throughout the store floor and a data infrastructure connecting the cart to POS, loyalty, and inventory systems. In many LatAm store environments, that infrastructure is still maturing. Specifically, the smart cart is the right second step, not the right first step. LatAm retailers who build the digital customer relationship through scan-and-go now will have the data foundation and infrastructure readiness to deploy smart carts effectively when the hardware economics align.
The Architecture That Defines the Next Decade
The Four Checkout Options That Coexist
The conventional checkout lane will still exist in 2031. It will handle returns, complex transactions, and the customers who prefer it. However, winning retailers in 2031 will have built a checkout architecture where the lane is one option among four, not the default that everything else supplements.
The smart cart for the shopper who wants hardware-assisted checkout. The scan-and-go app for the shopper already in the app ecosystem. The SoftPOS-enabled associate for the transaction that happens in the aisle or at the fitting room. The conventional lane for the customer who wants a human and a belt.
Why the Decision Has to Come Before the Competition
The difference between winning and losing retailers will not be which of those four options they chose. It will be whether they designed those four options to work together before competitive pressure forced the decision. Sam’s Club designed toward 40 percent digital transactions deliberately. It built the membership infrastructure that made scan-and-go trustworthy and the exit verification that made it operationally viable. Now it is expanding a checkout-free format that most retailers are still treating as a concept.
The checkout lane as the default transaction point is ending. The retailers who design the architecture that replaces it now, on their own terms, will define the customer experience for the next generation of shoppers. The ones who wait will find that their competitors already made the decision for them.
If you are evaluating your checkout architecture or building the technology roadmap for distributed checkout in your retail network, connect with me here or reach me on LinkedIn. I am happy to walk through the deployment framework we use across the U.S. and Latin America.
Adriana Rivas is a retail technology executive and AI strategist, and the founder of a U.S.-based hardware company specializing in self-service kiosks, POS systems, electronic shelf labels, and digital signage deployed across the United States and Latin America. She is the award-winning author of How to Implement Self-Service Without Failing (Amazon #1 Hot New Release, Silver Nonfiction Book Award 2025) and recipient of the Gold Stevie® Award, Thought Leader of the Year 2026. She is also recognized by Thinkers360 as the #7 Global Thought Leader in Retail and a Certified Master Expert in Retail.