, and, as a result, it may be on the precipice of inventing the best darn innovation sandwich of recent retail innovation history.
For those unfamiliar, Sam’s Club Now is retail without a safety net: Sam’s Club created a 32,000-square-foot store in Texas predicated upon scan-and-go shopping technology. Within the store, consumers’ mobile phones are their remote controls for the entire shopping experience. They scan and pay for anything they want with their phones and then walk out through a controlled exit. No fuss. No muss.
When Lore raised money for Jet.com, he did so on the premise that Jet.com would offer in-basket discounts on pricing, meaning Jet.com would see what customers wanted to buy and then offer customers incentives to add other items to their baskets based on shipping locations and costs. Sam's Club would have the ability to control pricing real-time against both consumer demand and its inventory dispositions across both its stores and its warehouses. Such a capability would be unprecedented. It is the same business idea that was posited. Only it isn’t a new startup coming up with the idea. It is Sam’s Club, a company operating inside the gauntlet of the most legacy of all legacy retail operations.