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Technical executives in retail face a persistent challenge: balancing loss prevention while reducing friction in the customer experience. Recent implementations of computer vision systems at Sam’s Club demonstrate the potential for technology to meet both goals. At Groceryshop 2024, the CEO of Sam’s Club described their new exit verification system and reported a 14% improvement in the Net Promoter Score—a metric that validates the investment in advanced technological solutions.

Computer Vision

My local Sam’s Club has two arches that you push the buggy through after checking out (on the app or at the registers). About 25 feet past the arches is an employee who will wave you through or check your receipt. Most of the time these days, I’m waved through. Combine this with the scan-to-go app, and I can be in and out of Sam’s Club in about 15 minutes. Compare this to the experience at Costco, which is more like a social event, because I will have enough time to make friends in line!

Have you ever ordered milk online only to receive that dreaded out-of-stock notification after placing your order? You’re not alone. After years of ordering groceries online, I’ve learned a secret: ordering through a store’s app right after closing time often yields the best results. Why? I suspect it’s because my order gets fulfilled before in-store shoppers arrive the next morning. But this workaround hints at a deeper problem in retail inventory management—one that affects nearly half of consumers who rate out-of-stock items as their highest shopping frustration according to a survey by Dynata.

Today’s global and distributed applications often need to serve user requests from a single data source across different regions. While providing data scaling and protection against network outages, ensuring low-latency access to data is critical for providing a seamless user experience. YugabyteDB, a distributed SQL database, is designed to handle global data workloads efficiently. In this blog post, I’ll share some techniques to optimize read and write latency in a multi-region YugabyteDB cluster.

I’m writing this the night before we’re going to get some very bad weather. In North Carolina this time of year, that could mean an ice storm. Ice coats all the big and little branches on all the trees, and then they start to shatter onto roofs and overhead cables. I’ve lived all over the lower 48 and in Alaska, and ice storms are by far the worst, especially in a state that doesn’t bury the electrical lines.