But additional anti-theft measures also lead to more frustrating “unexpected item in the bagging area” errors, requiring store employees to intervene. Stores have tried to limit losses by tightening self-checkout security features, such as adding weight sensors. Common tactics include not scanning an item, swapping a cheaper item (bananas) for a more expensive one (steak), scanning counterfeit barcodes attached to their wrists or properly scanning everything and then walking out without paying. Other customers take advantage of the lax oversight at self checkout aisles and have developed techniques for stealing. “Why should they be? They’re not trained.” “Consumers are not very good at scanning reliably,” Beck said. Other times shoppers won’t hear the “beep” confirming an item has been scanned properly. Customers may type in the wrong code by accident. Produce, including fruit and meat, typically needs to be weighed and manually entered into the system using a code. Some products have multiple barcodes or barcodes that don’t scan properly. “If you had a retail store where 50% of transactions were through self checkout, losses would be 77% higher” than average, according to Adrian Beck, an emeritus professor at the University of Leicester in the UK who studies retail losses.Ĭustomers make honest errors as well as intentionally steal at self-checkout machines. In the biggest headache for store owners, self-checkout leads to more losses due to error or theft than traditional cashiers. Self-checkout, Andrews added, “delivers none of what it promises.” Retailers found that self-checkout stations were not autonomous and required regular maintenance and supervision, said Christopher Andrews, a sociologist at Drew University and author of “The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets and the Do-It-Yourself Economy.”Īlthough self-checkout counters eliminated some of the tasks of traditional cashiers, they still needed to be staffed and created a need for higher wage IT jobs, he said. The move to self-checkout has created unintended consequences for stores as well. ![]() “Self-checkout lines get clogged as the customers needed to wait for store staff to assist with problems with bar codes, coupons, payment problems and other issues that invariably arise with many transactions,” grocery chain Big Y said in 2011 when it removed its machines. The mixed response led some grocery chains, including Costco, Albertsons and others, to pull out the self-checkout machines they had installed in the mid-2000s. “From the get go, customers detested them.”Ī 2003 Nielsen survey found that 52% of shoppers considered self checkout lanes to be “okay,” while 16% said they were “frustrating.” Thirty-two percent of shoppers called them “great.” “The rationale was economics based, and not focused on the customer,” Charlebois said. Only in the early 2000s did the trend pick up more widely at supermarkets, which were looking to cut costs during the 2001 recession and faced stiff competition from emergent superstores and warehouse clubs. It took a decade for Walmart to test self checkout. Many customers balked at having to do more work in exchange for benefits that weren’t entirely clear. The technology was heralded as a “revolution in the supermarket.” Shoppers “turn into their own grocery clerks as automated checkout machines shorten those long lines of carts and reduce markets’ personnel costs,” the Los Angeles Times said in 1987 review.īut self-checkout did not revolutionize the grocery store. Customers then took them to a central cashier area to pay. An employee at the other end of the belt bagged the groceries. The first modern self-checkout system, which was patented by Florida company CheckRobot and installed at several Kroger stores, would be almost unrecognizable to shoppers today.Ĭustomers scanned their items and put them on a conveyor belt. The system reduced cashier costs by as much as 66%, according to a 1988 article in the Miami Herald. Self-checkout, however, was designed primarily to lower stores’ labor expenses. In exchange for doing more work, the model promised lower prices. Instead of clerks behind a counter gathering products for customers, Piggly Wiggly allowed shoppers to roam the aisles, pick items off the shelves and pay at the register. The introduction of self-checkout machines in 1986 was part of a long history of stores transferring work from paid employees to unpaid customers, a practice that dates all the way back to Piggly Wiggly - the first self-service supermarket - in the early 1900s. This raises the question: why is this often problematic, unloved technology taking over retail?
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