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Unstaffed tills were supposed to revolutionise shopping. Now, both retailers and customers are bagging many self-checkout kiosks.
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It’s a common sight at many retail stores: a queue of people, waiting to use a self-checkout kiosk, doing their best to remain patient as a lone store worker attends to multiple malfunctioning machines. The frustration mounts while a dozen darkened, roped-off and cashier-less tills sit in the background.

For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free?

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn’t living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it’s worth.

“It hasn’t delivered anything that it promises,” says Christopher Andrews, associate professor and chair of sociology at Drew University, US, and author of The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy. “Stores saw this as the next frontier… If they could get the consumer to think that [self-checkout] was a preferable way to shop, then they could cut labour costs. But they’re finding that people need help doing it, or that they’ll steal stuff. They ended up realising that they’re not saving money, they’re losing money.”
One of the frustrations of self-checkout can be the extra work of having to find a specific PLU code to ring up a purchase (Credit: Alamy)

Unexpected problems in the bagging area

Many retail companies have invested millions – if not billions – of dollars in self-checkout technology, which Andrews says was first developed during the 1980s, and started appearing in stores in the 1990s. They’re not exactly cheap to get into stores: some experts estimate a four-kiosk system can run six figures.

Despite the cost to install them, many retailers are reversing course on the tech. Target, for instance, is restricting the number of items self-checkout customers can purchase at one time. Walmart has removed some self-checkout kiosks in certain stores to deter theft. 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.

Dollar General, one of the fastest-growing retailers in the US, is also re-thinking its strategy. In 2022, the discount chain leaned heavily into self-checkout technology – it’s not uncommon to see only one or two employees staffing an entire Dollar General store in some areas. Despite the investment, they are now planning to increase the number of employees in stores “and in particular, the checkout area”, according to the company’s CEO, Todd Vasos.

“We had relied and started to rely too much this year on self-checkout in our stores,” he said during the company’s Q3 2023 earnings call on 7 December 2023. “We should be using self-checkout as a secondary checkout vehicle, not a primary.” (Dollar General did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment).
Some data shows retailers utilising self-checkout technology have loss rates more than twice the industry average
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.

In addition to shrink concerns, experts say another failure of self-checkout technology is that, in many cases, it simply doesn’t lead to the cost savings businesses hoped for. Just as Dollar General appears poised to add more employees to its check-out areas, presumably increasing staffing costs, other companies have done the same. Despite self-checkout kiosks becoming ubiquitous throughout the past decade or so, the US still has more than 3.3 million cashiers working around the nation, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Humans or machines?

Consumers want this technology to work, and welcomed it with open arms. However, years later, they’re still queueing for tills; waiting for store-staff assistance with errors or age checks; and searching high and low for the PLU code of the Walla Walla Sweet Onions they’re trying to purchase.

In a 2021 survey of 1,000 American shoppers, 60% of consumers said they prefer to use self-checkout over a staffed checkout aisle when given the choice, yet 67% of consumers have had the technology fail while trying to use it.

Experts say some self-checkout kiosks may stand abandoned as some shoppers transition backed to staffed tills (Credit: Alamy)
The bottom line is businesses want to cut costs, and shoppers want to get in and out of a store. If self-checkout isn’t the answer, they’ll find another avenue.

“It’s not that self-checkout technology is good or bad, per se… [but] if we try self-checkout and realise we’re not benefitting from it, we might switch back to not using it,” says Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas, who studies consumer behaviour and decision-making.

That appears to be happening in many cases, as customers’ frustrations with the technology persist. But Andrews says that while stores may change up their strategies – as seen with Dollar General and others – many large retail chains are likely to keep kiosks in stores due to sunk costs. “They spent billions putting it in stores, and are hoping they can still get the public to buy into it,” he says.

Retailers may continue to rely on the technology, but many aren’t putting all their farm-fresh eggs in the self-checkout basket. Instead, they’re increasingly giving customers the option to choose between human and machine.

For the customers that do choose to do the labour themselves, there’s one thing Andrews believes won’t change. However ubiquitous the technology is, and however much consumers get used to using the kiosks, shoppers are likely to find themselves disappointed and frustrated most of the time.

“It was part of a larger experiment in retail in trying to socialise people into using it,” he says. Simply, “customers hate it”.

#caisses_automatiques #grande_distribution #commerce #commerce_alimentaire #vol #solutionnsme_technologique

#supermarchés #flop #automatisation #efficacité #inefficacité #technologie

C’est une question qui m’a taraudée. Jusqu’où sommes nous prêt à aller dans la domestication des animaux pour notre confort égoïste ? Comment mon chat a-t-il réussi à devenir si humain pour savoir me donner autant de satisfaction jusqu’à me réjouir de sa simple vue et me bloquer un mois complet pour le veiller avant sa mort. Pourquoi les vétérinaires te parlent avec une bienveillance qui n’existe pas chez les médecins. Je m’exerce aujourd’hui à être capable de transférer cette capacité relationnelle sur des insectes ou des escargots, ça me parait plus sain, et c’est réjouissant d’admirer des êtres vivants libres.
#domestication

#makingkin #especes_compagnes

Je ne suis pas sure que ça soit du confort égoïste... ou si c’en est, c’est un premier pas vers une meilleure relation avec les autres espèces non ?

Manifeste des espèces compagnes
▻https://editions.flammarion.com/Catalogue/climats/essais/manifeste-des-especes-compagnes
ou
▻http://www.lyber-eclat.net/livres/manifeste-des-especes-de-compagnie

Et
Vous avez un chien... et c’est lui qui vous a choisit, de Yona Friedman
▻http://www.lyber-eclat.net/livres/vous-avez-un-chien

http://img.over-blog-kiwi.com/1/03/85/37/20161129/ob_d18e8f_yona-friedman-plan-4.png

@touti : ton post me fait penser à un autre, qui était peut-être aussi de toi mais qui semble avoir disparu, où tu parlais de la gentrification des humains sur les #insectes et que j’avais trouvé à la fois drôle et inspirant...

@sinehebdo je ne me souviens pas d’avoir écrit un truc drôle sur les insectes :)
@supergeante merci pour les références. Je pense que c’est égoïste dans la mesure où nous avons modifié des animaux sauvages jusque dans leurs caractéristiques physiques et les avons rendu dépendants pour qu’ils tiennent compagnie aux humains. Castrer les animaux est le signe que nous décidons en maîtres de leurs vies et nous les dressons aussi pour qu’ils conviennent à notre désir de domination et à cette représentation du monde dit civilisé.

Un peu HS, mais J’ai entendu dernièrement que les recherches initiées par Dmitri Beliaïev sur la domestication de renards sur 50 ans tendent à montrer la modification physique et génétique opérée. Modifications que l’humain aurait également mis à profit pour s’auto-domestiquer (changement des traits du visage) et mettre plus facilement en place l’entraide.

#proxémie ▻https://blog.monolecte.fr/2007/06/25/creatures-celestes