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.
I get why they do it that way, but they already check your receipt before you exit, you're supposed to have a membership that they supposedly check at the door before you shop there (I know they don't really) which they could presumably revoke if you got caught trying to steal, and self-checkout receipts already have the turquoise bars to prompt them to check closer, so it feels a bit absurd.
The self checkouts over here are regularly supervised by employees and regularly they need to intervene especially for alcohol.
In the UK many of the small grocery stores limit shopping to what fits on the scale at one time. While highly annoying, it mostly fits the shopping habits. That would not work at all in the US.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 for a long time now
Having to deal with soaring grocery prices while observing record grocery store profits has about the same effect as pouring gasoline on a fire.
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.
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.
Several mitigations for the latter on the software side.
People like speaking and projecting in absolutes, but the truth is mixed.
The other chain here does lot worse with both checkout and tills. Somehow always having lines...
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!
They trust their customers (or trust their profit margins!) enough to have it calibrated at such.
The result is a very pleasant experience compared to Sainsbury's where it feels like you're mistrusted. Just re-adjusting your bags seems to need a staff member to come over and fix the inevitable "discrepancy".
Amazon has similar, but staffed, stores like this in the US.
So it is possible to do seamlessly-ish, we just aren't there yet in terms of adoption.
