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Curious. Obviously this is just just anecdote, but all the shops I use regularly (in the UK) have been increasing the number of self-checkouts and upgrading the systems. My local Waitrose has stripped out a whole load of basket tills and replaced them with a larger self-checkout area with upgraded hardware that is noticably better/more reliable. Perhaps this is a location or shop specific effect?
Curious. Obviously this is just just anecdote, but all the shops I use regularly (in the UK) have been increasing the number of self-checkouts and upgrading the systems. My local Waitrose has stripped out a whole load of basket tills and replaced them with a larger self-checkout area with upgraded hardware that is noticably better/more reliable. Perhaps this is a location or shop specific effect?
It works fine in most stores, and the queue is not infrequently longer than in manned tills because many people seem to prefer the convenience of self-checkout, that's my case too. The few stores I knew which had painful self-checkout machines (usually related to weighing items, and needing precise timing between putting the scanned item on the right-hand platform and scanning the next item) seem to have fixed their problems in the last few years.
Many stores are moving to scan-as-you-go, you scan your customer card when entering, get a handheld scanner, and just hang it down and pay when leaving. With a random but infrequent check by personnel. This is by far the most convenient method and I see it in almost all supermarkets now (well, the French and Dutch chains that operate in Belgium at least, but now that I think of it, it seems the Belgian ones don't do it). There's also the Decathlon system where every item has an RFID tag and you just put everything down and it detects things without scanning, but I think it works because people generally don't buy lots of things at once at Decathlon (a large sports apparel and equipment store). I don't think this is viable for supermarkets.
Also, being "caught" not having scanned something (just forgetting to scan before putting something in the cart must be rather common, it's human) never seems to be a problem, it triggers a full rescan and probably increases the chance of getting checked later one, but even that doesn't always seem the case.
So from my point of view, it's clearly not a "spectacular failure", customers certainly don't hate it, and it's not going to be abandoned anytime soon.
This is probably not an issue in many countries but for example in Switzerland where space is limited in many stores this makes a huge difference. You can have double or triple the checkout points than if you had regular checkouts.
I have seen optimized regular checkouts (no conveyor belts) in super markets now as well but they still require double the space than a self checkout.
Generally I also only see 1 attendant for 10 or so self-checkout machines. They carry a special phone which lets them deal with age checks or random inspections. In some places the random inspection can even be done without the attendant (the attendant can release the register to allow you to follow the steps yourself.).
It's interesting that despite being a BBC article, the customers supposedly ditching them are nearly all US retailers, with only one very minor UK retailer mentioned. From my experience (in the UK) they tend to work well if staffed appropriately, and are easy and quick to deal with the vast majority of the time.
Self-Checkouts have been really problematic in Germany with stores rushing to put them to use and namely:
1) they have very bad interfaces
2) they don’t trust customers at all
3) it’s easy to report cases to the police and
4) stores have people hired to catch thieves and their incentive is that they are paid 50 to 100 euros per report (paid by the person caught)
Now a combination of all of the above leads to a not insignificant number of people having police files for missing an item while scanning. I read about cases about once a week on Reddit.
Aaand I am one of them, luckily without the police report because they saw that it was an error, but with a permanent ban from the store. My mistake? Went to pay, scanned my customer code in the store’s app so I get the e-receipt and the payment failed without me seeing that it failed and I went out the door. Their reasoning for banning me? Should have asked for the physical receipt. I say me having to operate two devices that I’ve never seen in my life and some really bad UI/UX were at fault but at least I’m glad they didn’t call the police.
I don’t use self-checkouts anymore.
I'm surprised RFID hasn't taken over. Scanning the whole basket in one go is way more convenient and faster than fiddly labour intensive Barcode scanning of individual items. RFID is now very cheap and the benefits of saved: labour, time, theft prevention etc are huge. Decathlon is the only retailer I have seen use this.
As I said in another comment, I think it works for Decathlon because you usually only buy a few items, but it probably wouldn't work for a supermarket where people have a dozen identical things in their cart, and often 50 or 100 total items.
1. Human is nicer than cold robot 2. Liability to scan items is the stores responsibility
Curious. Obviously this is just just anecdote, but all the shops I use regularly (in the UK) have been increasing the number of self-checkouts and upgrading the systems. My local Waitrose has stripped out a whole load of basket tills and replaced them with a larger self-checkout area with upgraded hardware that is noticably better/more reliable. Perhaps this is a location or shop specific effect?