Walmart unveils tech-enabled Neighborhood Market store
Walmart is offering an ultra-streamlined shopping experience at its new Neighborhood Market location in Coral Way, Fla.
The discount giant’s latest store in the Miami market features a number of technologies designed to save time for both customers and associates. These include the first online grocery pickup offering in this section of Miami, as well as same-day grocery delivery.
The new store is also the first location in Florida to provide an expanded self-checkout option with large-basket self-checkout lanes that enable customers to scan the groceries themselves or have a designated associate assist with the transaction. Walmart is rolling out expanded self-checkout in Florida following successful testing at a prototype store in Arkansas.
In addition, associates can check customers out anywhere in the store using handheld store devices. Non-technological store conveniences include a pharmacy, full-service deli and a newly redesigned fresh produce department. According to Walmart, the store will create about 100 new jobs.
“I know customers will love this store, but I’m even more excited about how our associates will react to it,” Patrick Shanks, regional VP, Neighborhood Market operations, Walmart, said in a blog post announcing the new tech-enabled store. “Associates across the country tell us they want to spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time helping customers. By expanding self-checkout and adding Check Out With Me, associates will be on the sales floor where they can help customers – fast.”
Walmart has already been testing other technologies in live store lab settings. In April 2019, the retailer opened a 50,000-sq.-ft. store it calls the “Intelligent Retail Lab” (IRL) in Levittown, N.Y., that gathers real-time information about what’s happening inside the store through an array of artificial intelligence (AI)-based sensors, cameras and processors.