Paying at the register may become a thing of the past.
Six Flags, Coca-Cola, and Amazon have teamed up to usher in a new age of no checkout lines at select in-park stores. On June 1, 2023, Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson Township, New Jersey, opened the first Quick 6 store in a theme park featuring Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology.
Customers are empowered to pick up merchandise and leave the store without having to wait in line at checkout. Six Flags continued the rollout in 2023 with a second Quick 6 location at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California, on Sept. 28.
How it Works
When park guests remove what they want from shelves, the items are placed in their virtual cart. When they leave, their selections are charged automatically to the payment method they used to enter the store. The 400-square-foot shops feature a selection of Coca-Cola products, snacks, ponchos, sunscreen, and other retail items.
“This allows us to innovate in the theme park space by providing our guests access to unique products at speed,” says Six Flags Vice President of Corporate Partnerships Stephanie Borges.
She adds that all of the transactions are safeguarded, so there is no concern from guests about the payment data being treated any differently than at standard checkouts. At press time, credit cards are the only form of payment accepted at Quick 6. “We have had great success of people coming in and buying drinks and snacks.”
The revolutionary new way to generate revenue shatters the need to wait in line to pay. “We hope to see adoption of people coming in to avoid lines and get a quick snack and drink,” says Rachel Chahal, director of amusement/eatertainment partnerships for The Coca Cola Company.
The Science Behind the Sale
Visitors gain access to the store by tapping or inserting their credit cards at the entry gate. At that time, the technology assigns them a temporary numeric code, which serves as their unique digital signature for the shopping trip. The system maintains the code throughout a shopper’s time in Quick 6. As they exit, the code disappears, and if they come back, they get a new code. Amazon says customer trust and privacy are paramount to the experience.
According to Jon Jenkins, vice president of Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, while guests are in the store, several specialized mounted cameras that monitor the entire store employ a combination of computer vision and machine learning to determine who takes what from the shelves, and when they leave, charges them the correct amount.
The technology utilizes object recognition to accurately identify merchandise, and the system is programed to know what it is looking at. Impressively, when a customer mistakenly returns an item to the wrong place, the system adjusts accordingly. It also alerts a store staff member to put the misplaced item back in the correct spot. For smaller, hard-to-see items like chewing gum or lip balm, weight sensors on the shelves detect when customers pick something up.
“Very small items are an interesting challenge for a computer vision system, because the cameras—the primary sensors—can only see so much,” Jenkins says. “Having additional sensors enables us to do some really cool things in terms of solving problems that would be otherwise very difficult to solve with cameras only.”
The tech is so attentive, if a guest picks up a can of Coca-Cola in the Quick 6 store,
the Just Walk Out technology adds it to their virtual cart. If they return it to the shelf, the
system automatically removes it from the cart. He says the technology can distinguish shoppers from one another without collecting or using any of their biometric information.
The technology’s accuracy allows it to even track groups of Quick 6 shoppers. More than one person can enter a Just Walk Out-equipped store on a single credit card. The system tracks each shopper, but associates all of them in that group with the same payment instrument. When the group leaves the store, the system knows which shoppers were using that same card and generates one receipt for their collective transaction.
“Without knowing the technology, it feels like magic,” says Gérard Medioni, a vice president and distinguished scientist at Amazon. “But creating that magic—determining who took what—is harder than you think.”
In an effort that started eight years ago, Medioni headed a unit of research scientists who designed the Just Walk Out technology. It’s now available in more than 70 stores owned by Amazon in locations in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, in places like airports and sports stadiums where visitors don’t want to spend time waiting in line.
In amusement parks, the system provides the benefit of giving guests additional time to enjoy more attractions the parks have to offer, rather than waiting in store checkout lines.
Economic Impact
Beyond the benefits listed above, owners and operators will be interested in the sales impact at Just Walk Out locations. In September 2023, Amazon revealed that Lumen Field—the stadium of the Seattle Seahawks NFL franchise—opened a convenience store in 2022 named District Market featuring Just Walk Out technology.
Once online, sales more than doubled those of the previous store in the same location. Plus, satisfaction survey scores of fans reached an all-time high. Lumen Field has since added Just Walk Out technology to eight stadium concession locations. The Coca-Cola Company is pleased with the early results at the Quick 6 stores.
“We feel this type of technology is the next generation of moving people quickly through lines and being able to get back to the thrills. Having the Quick 6 markets allows guests to have more choices available at their fingertips,” adds Chahal.
As for the future, Borges says Six Flags hopes to expand the Quick 6 technology across more stores in the coming years.
