Amazon's Just Walk Out Tech Debuts at Lake Washington Institute

The store, located within the campus cafeteria, marks a shift from standard vending options to a walkable retail environment. Customers access the space by scanning a credit card, mobile wallet, or the 365Pay app at an entry gate. As shoppers browse, sensors detect items removed from shelves, automatically building a virtual cart. Once finished, they simply walk out, and their payment method is charged for the selected goods.

For Evergreen Refreshments, the implementation is designed to mitigate the inefficiency of lunch hour bottlenecks, where long queues often lead to abandoned sales. By automating the transaction process, the provider aims to maintain a consistent retail presence during late-night or early-morning hours when staffing a traditional cafeteria is not feasible. Jeff Dumbrell, Chief Revenue Officer at 365 Retail Markets, noted that the autonomous model is specifically engineered to handle the high-volume, unpredictable rhythms of campus life.

365 Retail Markets managed the entire deployment, from camera calibration to gate integration, ensuring the new store communicates directly with the existing software Evergreen Refreshments uses for catalog management and reporting. This operational continuity allows the provider to leverage its current field teams for primary support, with Amazon providing back-end hardware maintenance. The project serves as an expansion of the 365 Retail Markets portfolio, which now supports nearly 40,000 operators following their acquisition of Cantaloupe, Inc. earlier this year.