Exactly. It's become more or less a standard option in the UK, with most larger supermarkets even offering a wall of handheld scanners that clip onto your cart if you don't want to use your phone. Still strikes me as weird, but that's probably just me getting old.
Not sure how they deal with fraud.
When you scan the QR code at the end it will usually tell you just to pay, but sometimes it will ask you to wait for an attendant to check that you have scanned everything correctly.
Assuming everything was accurate, it then updates a ‘confidence’ score in the background for you - and if you always scan everything correctly the checks quickly become less frequent / almost non-existent. If you always scan everything wrong, the attendants will be asked to check it every time.
There is a sample system that every once in a while it ask an employee to check that you enter everything correctly.
I guess that if you repeatedly make conveniently expensive “mistakes” there will be repercussions, but never experienced any issue.
Even though, it happens that I made small mistakes.
In practice not so much because packing the items reasonably well in the bag usually require an ordering that does not match the ordering they came off the shelves. Most items thus still have to be buffered in the cart.
The only savings then is whenever an item happens to come off the shelf at the same time that a good position for it is available in the bag.
The net result then is a small savings in total time but at the cost of the bag packing time taking place in the store meaning more total time in the store
1. Free delivery on grocery orders.
2. "Scan and Go". When shopping in-store you scan items using the Walmart app on your phone. At check out, you scan a QR code on the self checkout terminal, tell it how many bags you are using, hit the pay button, and you are done. It takes under 10 seconds.
With Scan and Go I can do my in-store shopping at a time when the store does not have many customers (such as 9 AM on a weekday) so it is easy to avoid coming anywhere near other shoppers as I grab items, scan them, and dump them in my cart.
Then it is 10 seconds through the self checkout (and the terminals are far enough apart in the self checkout area that I don't have to be close to anyone else) and I'm heading out the door. I don't bag my groceries there--I just keep them loose in the shopping cart until I reach my car. I then transfer them to my cloth bags there.
It's a little slower if you have items sold by weight. When you scan those it tells you you will have to weigh them at checkout. At checkout it prompts you to put them on the scale, weighs them, and adds them to your order.