A few years ago, St. Joseph’s Hospital was facing challenges staffing its cafeteria, and the facility’s leadership came to the hospital’s innovation team for help. Without enough cashiers, customers at the hospital café in Tampa, Florida, were waiting over 20 minutes in line to check out during busy hours.
We are day-to-day able to focus on the interaction, not the transaction, so we can really focus on developing those relationships with fellow coworkers, visitors that are there for the first time, or visitors that may be back seeking the care of a loved one.
“That really cut into the break times that our team members had,” said Craig Anderson, vice president of innovation for BayCare Health, which operates St. Joseph’s. “We looked at the opportunity to not only streamline and cover those open needs, but to bring a broader experience.”
St. Joseph’s became the first hospital in the country to deploy Just Walk Out technology by Amazon in a hospital-owned cafeteria, providing a frictionless, 24/7 shopping experience. With Just Walk Out technology, shoppers enter the cafeteria with their credit card, mobile wallet, or employee badge. Using advanced AI and computer vision, the technology detects what is taken and creates a virtual shopping cart. When guests are ready to check out, they can leave without waiting in line, and their chosen payment method is charged for the items they took.
The change created prompt, measurable benefits for the hospital and its café customers. Shopping trip times are 75% faster, meaning that busy staff and hospital visitors can get what they need quickly and avoid wasting valuable time in a checkout line.
Previously, the café closed at 9 p.m., forcing some late-night workers to go through their entire shift without eating. With Just Walk Out technology, operating hours increased 60%, and 12% of shopping sessions happened during those extended hours.
“In the beginning, we provided the same service and expanded on that. When you do that, that opens up opportunity for additional shopping, additional revenues, additional customer satisfaction,” Anderson said. “We’ve really seen those tick up—revenues have backed that up.”
Globally, Just Walk Out technology has been implemented at 400 stores and counting. Many of these are busy, round-the-clock environments like St. Joseph’s: healthcare facilities, airports, colleges, and universities. Amazon has developed deep expertise in healthcare settings, including integration with meal plans and hospital management systems. Multiple store formats are available, and solutions can be deployed in new construction or retrofitted into existing spaces.
Introducing Just Walk Out technology helped BayCare add hundreds of items to the cafeteria’s inventory, adding a dry goods market where the cash registers used to be. The hospital can track that inventory with ease, Anderson noted: “The inventory management solution that [Just Walk Out technology powers] has really given us some advantage there about real-time inventory and really knowing when we need to restock.”
The St. Joseph’s café is a large space, and before the transition, cafeteria staff were juggling cashier duty with making coffee and other store service tasks, noted JJ Layton, St. Joseph’s manager of food and nutrition services.
Just Walk Out technology streamlines operations so that staff can focus on customer experience and store maintenance. Whereas interactions with customers before may have been more transactional, the new experience allows room for human conversations in a setting that can be emotionally charged.
"[Now team members] are the liaisons to the customers,” Layton said. “They ask them how their day is going. They ask them if they can help them find anything… We are day-to-day able to focus on the interaction, not the transaction, so we can really focus on developing those relationships with fellow coworkers, visitors that are there for the first time, or visitors that may be back seeking the care of a loved one.”
The hospital also wanted to make it easy for employees to pay for their meals using their hospital badge. This required integrating Just Walk Out technology with Quickcharge, a division of Transact Campus, which offers a variety of cashless payment programs including payroll deduction, prepaid declining balance, meal plans, and loyalty rewards.
Anderson said Layton and other team leaders at the hospital have prioritized listening to customers, understanding that the frictionless checkout experience is new to many, and being ready with guidance. Any retailer looking to implement Just Walk Out technology will benefit from taking the approach of starting with the customer and evaluating their needs from the ground up, from inventory to layout to traffic flow.
“That is really where the rubber meets the road, is at the human experience,” he said. “Technology does become somewhat of the easy part. We do have enough smart folks and all these teams to solve it, but you need to make sure that experience is landing on our customers just right. And it is. That’s really the true ROI in this.”
