Costco Announces Plans for Scan and Go Checkout

If your Costco trips always begin with excitement as you fill your cart with your favorite snacks, the iconic chicken bake, and some of your go-to premade meals, but then take a frustrating turn when you see a seemingly endless checkout line, then you’ll appreciate the warehouse retailer’s latest innovation to enhance its customer experience.

Following in the footsteps of its rival Sam’s Club, Costco is adopting the convenience of a “scan-and-go” checkout feature, hoping it will provide customers with a smoother, more efficient purchasing experience.

While the specifics may vary slightly from store to store, scan-and-go systems generally enable customers to scan QR codes for each item as they add products to their cart, simultaneously creating a digital shopping cart on their phones, and then pay through an app at the conclusion of their grocery trip. 

During an earnings call, Costco CEO Ron Vachris confirmed that the warehouse retailer is already testing this technology and has had positive results. Vachris explained that “We have also engaged in some ‘scan and go done by Costco Wholesale Corporation' kind of tests that we are doing out there that have been extremely successful [for] moving people through the lines and and expediting the transactions. We have seen some very, very early results have been very positive…”

The big box chain aims to enhance the shopping experience with this feature, as customers have expressed dissatisfaction with excessively long checkout lines at Costco in the past. One Redditor says, “The lines at Costco are, by far, the worst part of shopping there.” 

With the scan-and-go option, shoppers can create their own digital shopping carts on the app, akin to an online shopping experience, instead of waiting in long checkout lines for each item to be scanned individually at the register.

Costco’s largest competitor, fellow warehouse retailer Sam’s Club, first introduced its scan-and-go option in 2016. Although initially designed as a standalone app titled ‘Scan & Go,’ the feature was incorporated into the Sam’s Club app in 2018. According to information released by Sam’s Club’s parent company, Walmart, last year, one in three shoppers now use the Scan & Go payment system.

At Sam’s Club, members scan the items they want to purchase using their phones as they add them to a cart, and then pay for everything through the store’s app once they finish shopping. Finally, the shoppers show an employee the list of scanned items and the payment confirmation for verification before exiting the store.  

Costco has not announced any plans to phase out traditional checkout options, so customers who find downloading a new app and scanning QR codes unappealing can still opt for a standard register. At a minimum, having both in-person and scan-and-go checkout features should still shorten those long lines.

Editor’s note: Costco previously had a page on its website that provided more details on what it labeled as a Scan & Pay system, but the web page is no longer live. We will update this news with more details as they're confirmed.