The newest spot to open on Lower Greenville isn’t a trendy bar or a restaurant. It’s a tech-centric grocer.

Sam’s Club Now opens Friday in a former Walmart Neighborhood Market. But the Walmart-owned wholesale membership club stands apart from the company’s other Sam's Club stores, known for their huge floor plans and supersized products.

It will be a one-of-a-kind retail laboratory to test out technologies that could later roll out to stores nationwide.

Step inside Sam’s Club Now and you'll see a grocery store without any cashier lines. Hockey puck-like beacons, which hang from the ceiling, help find your location in the store and guide you with a map to dog food, detergent or any other item on your shopping list.

A "scan and go" app allows you to check out on your own. And an augmented reality app transforms your ordinary metal shopping cart into an animated longhorn or a pirate ship to keep the youngest shoppers entertained.

"We want this to be the store [where] kids demand to be taken," said Eddie Garcia, vice president of end-to-end experience at Sam's Club.

The store is about a quarter the size of a typical Sam’s Club. It has smaller grab-and-go fresh items, such as a two-pack of stuffed peppers and sushi rolls made in front of customers by a chef. Large TV screens can show off the steps of a recipe with store ingredients.

And employees, called associates, play a different role of welcoming customers to the store and orienting them to the technology.

A camera system also helps Sam's Club understand customer traffic flow and shoppers' favorite items, and digital signage makes it quicker to update prices or switch out items on shelves.

Garcia said Lower Greenville is an ideal place to test technology because many of its local customers are tech-savvy and time-pressed 20- and 30-somethings or young families.

"It is co-creating the experience with our members," he said. "It's not enough to sit in an office somewhere and create technology."

The "scan and go" app used at Sam's Club Now is also available at other Sam's Clubs. But at the Lower Greenville location, it's the only way to check out.

Sam's Club is one of numerous retailers experimenting with new ways to boost efficiency and improve the shopping experience. Amazon has debuted its cashierless convenience store concept, Amazon Go, and plans to open as many as 3,000 stores in the next few years. And Irving-based 7-Eleven is testing its "scan and go" mobile-pay app at 14 locations in Dallas, with plans to expand to more of its locations.

From the warehouse to the store floor, technology is transforming the retail industry — and especially retailers of "fast-moving consumer goods," such as grocers, pharmacies and convenience stores, said Gary Hawkins, founder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based Center for Advancing Retail & Technology.

Companies are "trying to keep up with a fire hose of new technologies and new capabilities," he said. They are experimenting with 3-D printing to make clothing and shoes, growing leafy greens steps from the produce shelves and using robots to pack boxes or restock shelves. Kroger teamed up with the self-driving startup Nuro to test same-day delivery of groceries and partnered with the British online grocer Ocado to build futuristic, robot-powered warehouses.

And in Dallas, Sam's Club opened an office in the West End neighborhood of downtown Dallas that's devoted to tech-related innovations for its stores. It has 164 software engineers, data scientists, mobile app developers, product managers, and user-experience designers in the office, Sam's Club spokeswoman Carrie McKnight said. It also has two behavioral scientists on staff.

Although this store looks different, Sam's Club product manager Keith Menezes said its goal is ultimately the same: Finding new ways to surprise and delight customers.

"They enjoy the 'treasure hunt' aspect of shopping in our clubs and this is a great way to experiment with that," he said.