11–20 of 53 posts
People like speaking and projecting in absolutes, but the truth is mixed.
This is hardly surprising and stores that sell high-value goods seem to just move checkout employees from the traditional checkout to a monitoring role at the self-checkout area. Home Depot now has self-checkouts where I live (usually a block of 4 per store), but there's always a few employees milling around the self-checkout area helping customers and probably keeping an eye out for theft.
There's just no sense of "social contract" when interacting with a self-checkout. It's much easier to rationalize theft as merely striking back at a large, faceless corporation when you're interacting with a machine.
been using the self checkout at Uniqlo recently. works beautifully
There is a technology where the shopping cart itself is the self checkout.
Amazon has similar, but staffed, stores like this in the US.
So it is possible to do seamlessly-ish, we just aren't there yet in terms of adoption.
What I don't enjoy are paranoid self-checkout machines with scales that are constantly complaining about unexpected items, or self-checkout machines in locations where pretty much every customer is making an age-restricted purchase or a large portion of the items have security tags. There needs to be a sensible attempt to understand the purchase habits of the people using a particular store and tailor the checkout experience accordingly.
On a related note: I was in a Boots (similar to Walgreens) earlier today and I witnessed a truly crazy amount of shoplifting: 3 times whilst I was there. Partially that was down to the layout of this particular store, which had a number of different exits and an insufficient amount of staff. The self checkouts don't help at all, because they cause far more false positives with the exit alarm, where a security tag doesn't get removed.
It would be straightforward for an inventory system to hook up directly to the security tags, rather than having them be totally separate from the SKUs which are actually scanned into the POS. You'd then have item-level tracking of stock, which I'm sure would help from more than just a shrinkage perspective.
This article didn't ring true at all given all the supermarkets near me have been expanding their self-service offerings while reducing their staffed tills. Even my local Waitrose now only has 1 or 2 staffed tills. Then when I got to the examples I realised the article is entirely US focussed. Is there a cultural difference to explain why self-service would be more of a failure in the US?
This article didn't ring true at all given all the supermarkets near me have been expanding their self-service offerings while reducing their staffed tills. Even my local Waitrose now only has 1 or 2 staffed tills. Then when I got to the examples I realised the article is entirely US focussed. Is there a cultural difference to explain why self-service would be more of a failure in the US?
Almost entirely US focused. There's one UK mention: "In the UK, supermarket chain Booths has also cut down on the number of self-service kiosks in its stores, as customers say they're slow and unreliable." linking to https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-67373472 That says "Booths is believed to be the first UK supermarket to move away from using self-service tills, which have become increasingly common in r…
This article didn't ring true at all given all the supermarkets near me have been expanding their self-service offerings while reducing their staffed tills. Even my local Waitrose now only has 1 or 2 staffed tills. Then when I got to the examples I realised the article is entirely US focussed. Is there a cultural difference to explain why self-service would be more of a failure in the US?
Almost entirely US focused. There's one UK mention: "In the UK, supermarket chain Booths has also cut down on the number of self-service kiosks in its stores, as customers say they're slow and unreliable." linking to https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-67373472 That says "Booths is believed to be the first UK supermarket to move away from using self-service tills, which have become increasingly common in r…