Walmart quietly updates self-checkout tech to fight back against theft

The news: Walmart updated its self-checkout technology, per The Street.

• Customers can now scan Walmart’s Great Value-branded items anywhere on the packaging without needing to find the barcode.
• This checkout tech is from Digimarc, which Walmart partnered with in 2022. Digimarc’s tech embeds codes “invisible to the human eye” on product packaging to make it easier for self-checkout machines to detect them.

Why this matters: This tech can speed up the self-checkout process for customers, improving the in-store experience. It can also help Walmart protect against theft by making it harder for customers to get a product through checkout without properly scanning it.

This is especially important as self-checkout theft—both purposeful and accidental—is rampant.