41–50 of 53 posts
There's more options than just self-checkout and I would argue they work a lot better in FMCG, for instance the grab-and-go tech of AmazonGo, which has come way down in price and difficulty past few years.
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?
As to why it's unpopular, I think that's pretty simple.
The classic checkout system at grocery and home goods stores in the US involved a checkout aisle with a conveyor belt, a cashier scanning items and processing payment, and a bagger bagging up items and placing them back in your cart. Your responsibility was putting all your stuff on the conveyor belt and then paying. Cashiers and baggers were dedicated staff trained for the job, and the result was that you got through checkout quickly.
Now, replace this with a cluster of small kiosks, with one person 'supervising' but the rest of the process the responsibility of the customer. The customer has to do all the work, with less space to do it, and they aren't trained to do it well. At any time, maybe 1/3 of the kiosks are not working for some reason. A variety of scenarios cause working kiosks to stop processing and wait for supervisory input.
It's no wonder people get frustrated by self-checkout. The key is to think about it as a customer, who has seen an optimal process that was easy for them get replaced with one where they have to do a lot of work. Oh, and for a variety of reasons their grocery bill has also gone up, so it's not obvious that they've saved any money due to this change either.
I like self-checkout as a replacement for the old 10-items-or-less express aisles. If I want to buy one or two things, I like not having to wait behind someone with a full cart. But when you replace everything with self-checkout, those full carts end up taking even longer to process; for my weekly grocery run I go to the store that still has cashiers and baggers, so I can get in and out more quickly.
> Some retailers cite theft as a motivator for ditching the unstaffed tills. Customers may be more willing to simply swipe merchandise when using a self-service kiosk than they are when face-to-face with a human cashier. Some data shows retailers utilising self-checkout technology have loss rates more than twice the industry average. This is hardly surprising and stores that sell high-value goods seem to just move ch…
> 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. I wonder how much this rationalization is influenced by the growing public belief that corporations themselves have broken the social contract / have not bound themselves by any kind of social contract…
Having to deal with soaring grocery prices while observing record grocery store profits has about the same effect as pouring gasoline on a fire.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The link I gave to https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-67373472 says "All but two of the 28 stores run by the company, which trades in northern England, will have staffed checkouts." That article is dated 10 November 2023, while the relevant Wikipedia text was changed on 24 February 2021.
I didn't mean to give the impression that I disagreed with your comment - merely pointing out that they are a particularly small supermarket chain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't mean to give the impression that I disagreed with your comment - merely pointing out that they are a particularly small supermarket chain.
I was more pointing out that the article contained that information already, and was more accurate, so didn't think that the Wikipedia link added anything.
And yes, reading the article would do that as well but I usually read the comments first before I decide if I want to waste time on the actual thing.
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?
My local grocery store has had them for a few years. At first they were great, but slowly things got bad. Whatever they did, the machines are now totally unreliable. They didn't monitor the weight of your groceries before, and now they do, and they complain multiple times per trip that the weight isn't right. They also require you to put all your bags in the bagging area first and hit a button to weigh them, but that fails 100% of the time if you put more than three bags in for some reason. It also randomly doesn't have the thing you scanned in its inventory (I don't know where that failure lies in the pipeline). They also just pop up other random errors.
For every single instance of the aforementioned issues, an employee must come over and override it. They seem at their wits' end.
I was told that one reason things changed is because they saw a huge jump in loss/theft.
Note that none of this has seemed to stop stores from actually investing in the things, which may be the source of confusion. But I assume they still use them because of the same reason everything is shit: They'd rather things be shit than pay people more.
I think the error of self-checkout was installing self-checkout terminals as a replacement for traditional checkouts as opposed to a speedy option. Particularly in grocery stores, I really enjoy scan-and-shop style self checkouts, as I am able to pack my bags as I go through the store. I can then present myself at a till, pay, and leave. That actually saves me time. What I don't enjoy are paranoid self-checkout machi…
Costco is so annoying about this, it's not even that it complains about unexpected items, it requires you to put every scanned item on the scale, and if you're shopping at Costco, you probably have some pretty bulky, heavy items that you'd really rather just put back in the cart instead of building the Leaning Tower of Palettes of Toilet Paper and Tuna. I get why they do it that way, but they already check your recei…
There's more options than just self-checkout and I would argue they work a lot better in FMCG, for instance the grab-and-go tech of AmazonGo, which has come way down in price and difficulty past few years.
The problem with something like AmazonGo is that people don't just like being tracked by CCTV. Making it more obvious will drive people away. To say nothing of people not trusting it to accurately ring up their purchases.
Several mitigations for the latter on the software side.