

The seven of us jumped in to quickly make the right fixes so by day two it was working, and from there it was smooth sailing.” “On the first day of the tournament, the app didn’t work, so we had to go in and program the first round of team updates manually.

That seemed straightforward, but it took a few tries to get right. Each time a basketball team was knocked out, they could put its hometown’s store screens back to normal by opening time the next morning. Then came an important step: Developing a web app that allowed them to turn the themed screens off in tiers. “We bought a bright orange basketball and took a photo of it to use as the background on the screen, and added the words ‘Shop, Scan, Slam!’” she says. To create the look and feel, they had to get scrappy. They placed themed screens at about 200 stores near the colleges with teams in the tournament. Rilee’s teammate at the time, Matt Howard, was a huge fan, so they decided to explore what a basketball-themed screen experience could look like.
TARGET SELF CHECKOUT SOFTWARE
One of the first chances to test the software came earlier this spring in the weeks leading up to the national college championship basketball tournament. The team, which consists of four engineers, a scrum master, a product owner and a trainee from Target’s Technology Leadership Program, has four self-checkout stations to experiment on in their workspace. Since then, Rilee and her team have been exploring the new program’s capabilities. More than 4,000 engineers participate-and part of the fun is teaming up to learn together through innovation sprints, hackathons, demo days, Target-run conferences and more. The hackathon was part of a Target technology team commitment called 50 Days of Learning, which encourages team members to spend 50 days of their work year building skills and exploring new ideas to create the next innovation for Target. Rilee hatched the idea for it during a hackathon with her team at Target’s Minneapolis headquarters. The self-checkout machines got their festive look thanks to new software that allows our engineers to personalize the screen displays with different colors, background imagery, emojis and more. “That’s the great thing about working at Target-we challenge ourselves to add an element of joy into everything we do and make.” “The best part of my job is going into stores and seeing guests using technology that we created first-hand,” she says.

But this is the first time I had ever seen them at a store in Northern California. Now after doing a little digging online, I found out that "self checkouts" at Target aren't anything new they actually debuted them a while ago in some areas (close to their Minneapolis headquarters) and then launched a "new and improved" self checkout system last August. Yesterday I noticed in horror (as I'm not a fan of the concept) 4 new "self checkout" lanes being installed at my local Target.
