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'It hasn't delivered': the failure of self-checkout technology
- xnorswap 3y agoThis 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?
- eesmith 3y agoAlmost 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 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.
- nxobject 3y agoWhich is interesting, since it’s the BBC…
- bluGill 3y agoSome self checkouts are slow and unreliable. However that is a bug in those particular units. Some of them are just as fast and reliable as what the clerks get - plus I'm never in line behind someone else who is slow. I've had enough waiting for someone who can't figure out which lottery ticket they want to lose their money on. I've had enough waiting on someone else who picks an item that is missing a tag. I have places to be, and lines are not serving me.
- tracerbulletx 3y agoEvery time I'm speed running a self checkout I day dream about a world where the price of my groceries is modified significantly lower based on my leader board rank for that day, and that the slow person in front of me is being penalized for being outside the top 100.
- gertrunde 3y agoBooths, which has 27 shops... [Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booths]
- eesmith 3y agoThe link I gave to https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-67373472 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-67373472 says "All but two of the 28 stores run by the company, which trades in northern England, will have staffed checkouts." That article is dated 10 November 2023, while the relevant Wikipedia text was changed on 24 February 2021.
- gertrunde 3y agoI didn't mean to give the impression that I disagreed with your comment - merely pointing out that they are a particularly small supermarket chain.
- eesmith 3y agoI was more pointing out that the article contained that information already, and was more accurate, so didn't think that the Wikipedia link added anything.
- cassianoleal 3y agoI think it added the information to the thread. I live in the UK and had never heard of Booths despite having travelled around. At first, I thought the article was wrong and meant the Boots drugstore chain instead. Knowing that it's a local, small chain would have helped clarify it. And yes, reading the article would do that as well but I usually read the comments first before I decide if I want to waste time on the actual thing.
- eesmith 3y agoI can understand that. But from my viewpoint it felt like you were telling me something you thought I wasn't aware of, even though I had read the article before making my comment, or perhaps you thought the number in the article was wrong while the one from Wikipedia was correct.
- tracerbulletx 3y agoIt's not remotely true in the US either. This is probably some kind of hit piece.
- kbelder 3y agoI 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.
- pavon 3y agoYeah, 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.
- saxonww 3y agoIt 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.
- happytoexplain 3y agoI 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.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoThere is a technology where the shopping cart itself is the self checkout.
- jtriangle 3y agoThey have stores in the nice parts of china that you badge in with your wechat login, grab stuff, and rfid readers read the tagged stuff you took and charge you for it as you leave. Zero staff required aside from stocking. 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.
- lucidrains 3y agobeen using the self checkout at Uniqlo recently. works beautifully
- bsnnkv 3y agoUniqlo has by far the best self checkout implementation I've used. My first experience with it, I was so suspicious that it was going to mess something up because I'm used to poor self checkout experiences, but now I'm over that and wish self checkout was implemented this well everywhere else.
- boonzeet 3y ago[dead]
- heads 3y agoM&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!
- noodlesUK 3y agoThe M&S tills are funny. I've identified what the issue with them at my store is: the scanner doesn't beep when it sees an item, it beeps when it can no longer see an item. I'm pretty sure someone configured the scanners wrong so that it's set to trailing edge rather than leading edge.
- xnorswap 3y agoWaitrose do have a weighing device, but it's calibrated to have a very generous tolerance. 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".
- monero-xmr 3y agoIt’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.
- AlexandrB 3y agoIt's not just expertise, but division of labor: while you unload the cart another person can be scanning in parallel. Plus checkout lines are optimized to make scanning fast - unlike most self-checkouts. If I have more than a handful of items I prefer the speed of a regular checkout.
- Ekaros 3y agoI agree, I usually buy single bigger bag worth of stuff at one time. So self-checkout monitored by one person is most of time option that feels speediest. As there really isn't line. Not that when I walk past normal tills they are too many people there. The other chain here does lot worse with both checkout and tills. Somehow always having lines...
- AlexandrB 3y ago> 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.
- bsnnkv 3y ago> 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
- dns_snek 3y agoI don't steal even though I share the sentiment, but if I didn't have the means I could see myself using that as a very easy rationalization. Having to deal with soaring grocery prices while observing record grocery store profits has about the same effect as pouring gasoline on a fire.
- eptcyka 3y agoI 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.
- noodlesUK 3y agoI 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.
- asimpletune 3y agoHere in Italy there are huge super markets that are scan and shop. My 80 year old family members go and do it without any issues. It’s actually kind of nice.
- farmdve 3y agoAlmost my sentiment. Quite often pre-packaged items that need to weight a certain amount are slightly more or slightly less resulting in the terminal err-ing out. The self checkouts over here are regularly supervised by employees and regularly they need to intervene especially for alcohol.
- sunflowerfly 3y agoOur local Walmart has given up weighing items post scan. It helps a lot. 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.
- hermitcrab 3y agoI 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.
- 23B1 3y agoThere'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.
- HWR_14 3y agoThe problem with something like AmazonGo is that people don't just like being tracked by CCTV. Making it more obvious will drive people away. To say nothing of people not trusting it to accurately ring up their purchases.
- 23B1 3y agoCCTV is practically ubiquitous in literally every retail location in the world... Several mitigations for the latter on the software side.
- NoboruWataya 3y agoI 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.
- karaterobot 3y agoI 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.
- cuttysnark 3y agoUNEXPECTED 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.
- hcarvalhoalves 3y agoSelf checkout doesn’t work if you’re afraid people will steal.
- lucysienna 3y ago[dead]
- vidanay 3y agoThis 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.
- sebazzz 3y agoSeems 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.