I don’t think it is a pullout, it is saturation. You can only have so many self-checkout stations before the effectiveness of adding more diminishes.
The problem with self checkout is when things gone wrong, either the customer will cancel their transaction, ignore the problem and deny accountability , brute forcing which breaking the rules , or search for the staff for solution. It just make the failure more prominent thus defeating the very solution that self checkout offer.
in our area, people are just smashing in grab at a grocery store, because they arent even allowed to give them “customer” service anymore. these people are not hurting for money, but to fuel thier addiction(very high area of people doing various drugs. not even allowed to lock up the expensive stuff, because idiot regionals think the store needs to have all items available for customers.
Ah so the genius executives behind these will be held accountable by shareholders and fired right? Right?
I’m waiting for them to close the stores to customers entirely and go to pick up or delivery only.
I know that would kill impulse buying, but I think they might make it up by not needing to police the isles, and no theft.
Service Merchandise did tag pulls and pick up at the register for everything back in the 70s and 80s. That might come back.
that would kill impulse buying
Clearly you don’t work in digital advertising
Holy shit, Service Merchandise, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time. You just reminded me of taking the tag to the counter. Didn’t circuit city also do tag pulls?
Toys R Us for video games as well.
Go back to the old General Store model where you’d bring your list and have them pick it out?
I would pick up 60 2-liter sodas at a time from my Wal-Mart, if they would let me place an order and let me pick it up. Sadly, only delivery is allowed to have the variety of drinks that I want.
Canadian Tire isn’t far off from this. They’ve put so much effort into making their stores as unpleasant and time wasting of an experience as they can. I pretty much only go there when I need something I can only get there, now.
self checkouts facilitate logging your purchase data, imcluding your biometrics and facial data.
The shop is not paying me enough to do their job. Plus I never agreed to do any of it.
I use cash, go to cashier or kiosk every time or leave shopping items behind if closed as matter of principle…
Vote everyday with:
. your choice
. your feet
. your wallet
As if the same cameras aren’t pointed at everyone standing in a checkout line, let’s be honest, it makes no difference. You still swipe your card at the end, walk around with your phone radio, the face is just a cherry on top.
They aren’t bringing back cashiers, they’ll have one cashier with a massive line as a deterrent to get you to download the scan as you go app on your phone so you supply the bar code scanner at your expense and they track your phone and change the digital price tags based on your Palantir profile as you walk up.
Or the other option is Walmart has started remodeling their stores into primarily warehouses. The main entrance is badged only for picker workers to hand orders to Doordash or put app orders in people’s cars. The legacy experience entrance will be a temporary secondary option until they get enough robots to make the building fully lights out and automated. Shambling automatons will emerge from the black hell portal in the surface of The Edifice with your tampons and then run facial recognition on you and sniff your car for drug and explosive residue.
You’re just silly.
Your car itself will sniff you for drugs and explosives every time you start it and every 30 seconds thereafter, not the Walmart robot.
I’ll do a big shop, look shocked at the line up and just walk out. Have fun dealing with my cart.
There’s no way I’ll get an app. I get they’ll have methods to entice people but I held off getting Facebook when it was the big thing, I’ll be ready for when corpos want to fuck around.
In fact I welcome it to see how I do.
I’m pretty good at not buying from Safeway when they have an item I want on app-coupon sale.
But since tje new Trump order I’ve gone completely anti-consumerist, only getting stuff I immediately need.
I like self check because there’s never a line when I go. With cashiers, the policy was to only open a new register if the lines got over three deep. So, there was always at least three people in line, no matter what time of day, on average.
I’ve never waited in line since I started using the self check lanes.
There are actual GOOD ways to implement self checkout though…
BAD: Me scanning individual items at a grocery store, LARP’ing as a cashier… terrible experience for all… i’m literally doing someone else’s job for free…
GOOD: me throwing my entire basket of purchases into some kind of RFID scanning bin (not sure the exact technology behind it), the screen instantly shows me the list of items and total, and i tap and pay and leave. Actual time saver, and i dont feel like i’m doing a cashier job.
In both cases, it results in a loss of jobs, which sucks… but at least #2 isnt infuriating from a customer POV
Muji And Uniqlo shops has #2, very convenient
I only ever seen #2 once in my life, and that’s in Decathlon. Just have to put stuff in the bin and they will show all the item and ready to pay, you just have to make sure all the item are accurate. It’s great shopping experience, but very expensive to implement for item that is very low value.
You missed a third option that already exists. At the supermarket I go to, I pick up a scanning gun with a screen on it when I walk in. As I shop, I scan things and place them in my bags. At the end, I press a checkout button on the scan gun, and it makes a little bar code on the screen. I head to tge self checkout, scan my barcode, pay, and walkout. It’s fucking seamless and amazing and should be the standard in every supermarket.
The only thing that sometimes ruins it is when there is a line of idiots at the self checkouts with full carts of groceries and I have to wait for them. There needs to be a dedicated lane for scan gun only people. Self checkout is for people with like 10 or less items, not a week’s worth of groceries.
Except that allows shoplifting. Like, what, you expect people full authority to use the “honor system” with a scanning gun.
Except for if you buy multiples of one item, e.g. a box full of 12 milk kartons, and then have to manually input the amount by pressing the plus icon on screen 12 times…
And except for when the hand scanner shows you the correct item number and amount to be paid when you press “Pay now”, but then the self-checkout inexplicably “loses” some items, shows you a different amount, asks an employee to check your cart, and you get accused of trying to steal…
I saw one of those with I visited my wife’s family in the south of England in 2014 and I thought “oh cool, what a great idea!”
12 years later (sorry) and I’ve never seen that in Canada or any place I’ve traveled to. But it seemed like the future at the time, and probably still would!
I like it because I don’t have to talk to people. It is otherwise an inferior experience.
I don’t get why people think they will be more efficient and faster than someone who’s used to pass products all day. Cashiers already know where to look for the barcodes and remember the codes for vegetables without having to look anywhere. Self-checkout is only faster in the beginning because few people use it. When it becomes the only option, prepare for even longer queues with people passing the products in such calmness as if they’re doing it in purpose
It wasn’t about speed, it was about reducing spending on wages
That’s right. 4-6 registers with one employee.
The idea of the self-checkout was that you literally just pass by some scanner with a full cart and it instantly displays the list of items with prices and sum. You just need to tap your card or phone on the reader and are done with it.
The implemented reality was very far away from that idea though. That’s why it failed.
Customers are pissed because they have to do the cashier’s job. And they do compensate themselves with some extra price reduction as a system requiring cooperation obviously can’t reliably detect theft. And if you had a detective watching the cams, you could as well just go back to cashiers - which they seem to now do.In the end this is yet another failed “fake it till you make it” bet on future tech which just didn’t materialize in time. Shops can tank some customer dissatisfaction for a time and then profit a lot from being the first to do the new thing when it becomes actually possible a few months later. But pissing off the shoppers isn’t a good long-term strategy.
For most people that is definitely true. I however was a cashier for six years before graduating college and am at the very least just as fast. My problem is usually the scanner won’t keep up with me since there always seems to be a delay for the system to verify I have put the item in the bag before it lets me scan another.
Same. I worked in retail for years, I can use a cash register just fine. These things are infuriating though no matter what you do. Terrible cashier-user experience compared to just like a regular grocery store checkout line
You aren’t faster at checking it out per item. The supermarkets are just keeping it understaffed all the time so the human checkout has a long wait while self checkout does not, so it’s faster to not wait. I try to not use self checkout, but if I have a few items it just makes me feel guilty about making other people wait behind me.
As they keep having understaffed situations, sometimes there’s no other option except self checkout. Which honestly should be illegal.
At the very least, I am definitely faster at scanning and bagging my items in the order I want, though. I’m also WAY better at catching when the price doesn’t match what I saw on the shelf tag.
Yeah, but while you are queued they can feed you ads.
In many cases, I am faster than the available cashiers at my local grocery store, because they’re old. Also depending on what I’m buying, idc how my stuff is bagged so I can just throw it in a single bag and go vs them taking 3 bags to do the same thing.
But to me, the main reason to use self checkout is that I don’t have to interact with anyone. No conversation, no upsells, just me and a machine. The only reason I’ll go to a cashier is if I have a lot of stuff or if I’m buying alcohol.
You don’t think machines can up sell you? Ok.
When has a self check out given you purchase suggestions? I mean I can see them doing it, but I haven’t seen it
McDonald’s kiosk? Wouldn’t you like hash browns with your order?
Would you like to round up for the Boys and Girls club?
What upsell is the grocery store cashier doing? Stamps and ice?
To suggest a machine is incapable of up selling even more obtrusively than a cashier is dishonest.
It has literally never happened to me over the past decade short of rounding up for charity. Can they? Yes, it could be programmed in, but I’ve never experienced it.
It’s only more efficient when I use it, which sounds like a joke about “it’s only wrong when someone else does it.” But if I am only buying a quart of ice cream and some toilet paper, I actually can scan those faster because I don’t have to pass them to a person to scan them for me. My typical use case is roughly the same speed as a cashier. I also know how to use the machines fairly well.
However, your last sentence is exactly right. Once one idiot gets to self-checkout, the whole thing goes to shit for everyone. Or if something doesn’t scan, or it is a bottle of Nyquil that some stores require ID to buy, then it is so much longer to get a person over to help you.
I only use self checkout if I can carry what I’m buying in my hands. Anymore than that and I’ll go through a lane. Seems like half the time I get flagged for the dude to come check anyway though so WTF is the point?
I refuse to use them because of liability. Too many cases of people being falsely accused of stealing.
When the employees try to shoo me to the self checkout I just stare at them awkwardly.
But I am more effecient than the cashier. Dunno how it is like where you’re from, but a cashier job is either for people who are nearly retired, or a teenager’s first job.
So, in the same footprint of three cashiers that will have 3 queues waiting around, there can be 12 self checkouts with no queues at all.
Some of the pros around here are not very good and take longer than I do, but the Aldi ones are usually fast with those giant barcodes! The last one, however, charged me for two melons but I didn’t have any, removed one, but not the 2nd so I had to go back over. My data points and the workmanship around here show sometimes quicker than me, but not if a line for them and none for diy.
I scan my items as they go into the bag. As I get to the checkout all I have to do is pay. That is waaaaay more efficient than going to a traditional cashier.
Self checkout was great for me because I’d have like 3 items and breeze on out. Now people come to them with overloaded carts because they don’t have any actual checkouts.
Yeah, checkers are so slow. Self checkout lets you slam everything across in like 5 seconds, swipe, leave.
Easy.
I swear every time I pull into a manned checkout lane at one specific store I get the nastiest look from the cashiers. There are 3 functional self checkout kiosks and the scale on all of them is slightly under a single square foot. I’m not buying a thanksgiving feast, but forgive me if my regular shopping trip is more than a single cup of yoghurt and a TV dinner, and consequently cannot all fit on the self checkout scale. It’s not like I’m asking them to open a lane just for me, they’re just upset I’ve interrupted their scrolling session.
I try not to go there often, but sometimes my goto location is closed or doesn’t have something I know I’m going to need. I know it’s not all stores or employees because my normal one is pretty good and I can generally use the kiosk without issue, but it’s so frustrating that the culture has shifted to expect all people to use the self checkout regardless of their situation. And I say this as someone who uses them regularly.
Same here - I bring one bag from home and when it gets full I stop shopping. Even waiting behind one half full shopping cart in a cashier line is slower than waiting for an available self-checkout.
It’s always a clumsy experience for me. In some stores I just walk in, get a drink, scan, pay, and be out in less than a minute. But for my actual shopping? Way too much stuff on that little terminal thing.
Retailers within the same chain seem to have different policies on how many check outs are staffed.
I’m in Australia and buy our groceries from woolworths.
There’s one I go past on my way home and there’s very rarely any proper checkouts manned. There’s usually one “express” at which you can only buy 12 items or something, but there’s usually several people queued there.
The other one where we go to do our weekly shop always has several proper checkouts manned. Usually when there’s more than 1 person being scanned and 1 waiting they will call over the PA to get another staff member to open another lane.
IDK who’s decision it is or what strategy they follow to decide which stores will do check outs what way.
Grocieres…from Woolworth? Funny. Here (Germany) it’s just a horribly shitty dollar-store without any food.
We have two chains which form an oligopoly in the grocery market here. Coles and Woolworths (Colesworth). Like tesco or something. Better presented than Aldi.
