Inside the Walmart, Target and CVS reusable bag pilots
It’s easy to design aspirationally," IDEO Director Chris Krohn told me under the fluorescent lights of a Walmart store in Mountain View, California. We hovered over a teal and black kiosk about the size of a trash can, positioned proudly in "action alley," the thoroughfare that runs along the front of the store, separating the ends of aisles and beginnings of checkout lanes.
In the pilot phase of the Beyond the Bag program, Krohn, his team and other members of Consortium to Reinvent the Retail Bag — including the startups, retail partners and Closed Loop Partners — have spent the past 4.5 weeks observing, interviewing, testing and adjusting every aspect of where, when and how a customer could interact with this kiosk — a GOATOTE reusable bag rental station — in an effort to encourage shoppers to opt for reuse over defaulting to single-use.
Focused on addressing the plastic waste problem in retail, the Beyond the Bag initiative aims to identify, test and implement innovative single-use alternatives that make sense for stores, customers and the environment. Led by Closed Loop Partners, the project is a multi-year collaboration between founding retail partners Walmart, Target and CVS Health, design firm IDEO and a growing list of additional supporters.
"It’s easy to design for the most ideal experience we could possibly think of that aligns with circular economy or reusability theory," Krohn said as he motioned to the steady stream of customers flowing around us like water circumventing a protruding river rock. "But ultimately, if we’re not factoring in the operational constraints — the reality of the conditions that we’ll be bringing our solutions into — we’re going to fail."
Understanding and designing around these "operational constraints" are exactly why the team of experts in design, retail and reuse as well as behavior and systems change have been interviewing shoppers and tweaking the approach at every step of the customer journey, iterating in real time throughout the pilot, set to conclude after six weeks. The aim is to align the technical feasibility of a new model with the customer experience and existing store operations.