Every one of the club's 14 warehouses ran the same exit process: a staff member manually matched each loaded flatbed cart against the member's receipt before letting them leave. It was a task built for careful comparison, done under constant time pressure, at a door that never stopped moving during opening hours.

Weekend traffic exposed the model's limits fastest. Queues at the exit stretched past three minutes as the same manual check ran again and again, and with a line building behind every cart, the check itself became necessarily cursory. Staff were being asked to catch mismatches at a glance while a queue grew behind them.

The two symptoms fed each other. Rushed checks let more discrepancies through, and exit shrinkage kept climbing as a result. At the same time, the slow, imperfect door experience was becoming one of the most common feedback themes members raised about the chain, regardless of which of the 14 warehouses they shopped at.

We replaced the manual check with a computer vision system built around the exit itself. Ceiling-mounted cameras at each exit archway watch every cart as it passes, detecting and classifying the items loaded onto it without asking members to stop or present anything beyond their normal receipt.

A matching service cross-references what the cameras see against the member's digital receipt in real time, before the cart reaches the door. Verified carts get a green light and walk straight through, so most members never break stride on their way out.

Carts that do not match are not turned away outright. They are flagged to a staffed lane where a person runs a quick, targeted check instead of the blanket manual comparison every cart used to get, so staff attention goes where a mismatch is actually likely.