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 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?

> 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 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.

UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA

If one is buying in a hurry, or just a handful of things, or maybe "sensitive" items at the pharmacy, self-checkout is a nice-to-have. Apart from that, it's been a PITA that I can only assume is even worse for people who don't spend their lives working with computers, debugging systems or finicky UIs/bad apps.

I would say at least 1 time in 5 I encounter some kind of issue with the self-service checkout at my local supermarket. The scale won't work, or it doesn't detect when I've put something in the bagging area, or a barcode isn't recognised, or something else. And that's leaving aside the times I try to buy alcohol (or NA beer...) and need approval.

And then I have to stand there like a twat for 20 minutes trying to get the attention of a member of staff because there is one staff member for 20+ machines and everyone is having the same issues.

The technology may or may not have delivered for shareholders, but in my experience it hasn't delivered value for customers. Perhaps the bigger question is why we put up with stuff like this.

Maybe it'll get better in time (though it has had many years to improve already). I used to despise the passport machines in the airport, now I merely dislike them.

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.

I haven't used self-checkout voluntarily: if you go to Lowe's or Target too early, they don't have anyone on the checkout line yet, so you don't have a choice except to come back in an hour. But the experience is bad, and it exists solely to save money by putting people out of a job, with the side effect of making customers do free work. If they all go away tomorrow, good riddance.

I will always prefer the self-checkout option, and scan-as-you-go as long as the pickup of the scanner is easy. The queue for the self-checkout will have to be significantly larger for me to consider wasting someone else's life to scan my products. Maybe I'm jaded, but not long ago there were scandals of till workers being asked to use diapers for the holiday season.

It’s not an absolute thing. If you have someone staffing 6 of them to assist with errors and prevent theft, then it can speed up people trying to get in-and-out. If you have a giant cart of groceries, then someone who’s an expert at scanning and bagging will make everything go much faster.

People like speaking and projecting in absolutes, but the truth is mixed.

Seems to be an international phenomenon. Here in the Netherlands supermarkets have been plagued by both stealing and annoyed customers who are flagged (randomly I suppose) every time they need to be checked, and then need to wait for minutes before some employee starts checking them.

M&S colossally fucked up with their contract. It has an unbelievably frustrating amount of scan lag. An absolute classic example of one person buying a product on behalf of the end user and completely screwing up. I really hope someone got fired for that one.

Waitrose on the other hand did away with any kind of weighing device. Can’t have an unexpected item in bagging area if the bagging area isn’t expecting anything at all!

This last weekend, I got stuck in a "Unknown item in bagging area -> Please return item to bagging area -> Unknown item in bagging area" infinite loop.

Self checkout doesn’t work if you’re afraid people will steal.

I don't go to supermarkets much (my partner does that) but I hate the self-service kiosks at airports. I would much rather deal with a human being.

There is a technology where the shopping cart itself is the self checkout.

been using the self checkout at Uniqlo recently. works beautifully

I haven't seen any decrease of their usage in the US, only a steady increase. I think the article is wrong, or my region is unusual. And my region is not unusual.

Yeah, in the last few years I have not seen any stores in my area (in the US) decrease the number of self-checkout lanes, while several have increased the self-checkout lanes and/or decreased the number of cashiers working. This is despite increasing anti-theft measures in other ways like locking up more items in cabinets. Perhaps this article is based on interviewing management about upcoming changes that have not occurred yet, but otherwise it doesn't match my experiences.

It's not remotely true in the US either. This is probably some kind of hit piece.

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 recent years." so yeah, hardly an indication of a widespread UK trend.

It may be that grocery shopping in parts of the US is different than what you're accustomed to. At least where I live, it's common to shop for a week's worth of groceries (or more), vs. shopping more often. This means that the checkout process is handling a larger amount of items per customer on average.

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.

I haven't read the whole article, but it seems to be describing everything I've experienced first-hand.

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.