“Self-checkout lines get clogged as the customers needed to wait for store staff to assist with problems with bar codes, coupons, payment problems and other issues that invariably arise with many transactions,” grocery chain Big Y said in 2011 when it removed its machines. (COST), Albertsons and others, to pull out the self-checkout machines they had installed in the mid-2000s. The mixed response led some grocery chains, including Costco “From the get go, customers detested them.”Ī 2003 Nielsen survey found that 52% of shoppers considered self checkout lanes to be “okay,” while 16% said they were “frustrating.” Thirty-two percent of shoppers called them “great.” “The rationale was economics based, and not focused on the customer,” Charlebois said. Walmart first tested self-checkout in the late 1990s. Only in the early 2000s did the trend pick up more widely at supermarkets, which were looking to cut costs during the 2001 recession and faced stiff competition from emergent superstores and warehouse clubs. Many customers balked at having to do more work in exchange for benefits that weren’t entirely clear. The technology was heralded as a “revolution in the supermarket.” Shoppers “turn into their own grocery clerks as automated checkout machines shorten those long lines of carts and reduce markets’ personnel costs,” the Los Angeles Times said in 1987 review.īut self-checkout did not revolutionize the grocery store. Customers then took them to a central cashier area to pay. An employee at the other end of the belt bagged the groceries. The first modern self-checkout system, which was patented by Florida company CheckRobot and installed at several Kroger stores, would be almost unrecognizable to shoppers today.Ĭustomers scanned their items and put them on a conveyor belt. The system reduced cashier costs by as much as 66%, according to a 1988 article in the Miami Herald. Self-checkout, however, was designed primarily to lower stores’ labor expenses. Library of Congress/Corbis Historical/Getty Images Shoppers at Piggly Wiggly, the first self-service supermarket, in 1918. In exchange for doing more work, the model promised lower prices. Instead of clerks behind a counter gathering products for customers, Piggly Wiggly allowed shoppers to roam the aisles, pick items off the shelves and pay at the register. The introduction of self-checkout machines in 1986 was part of a long history of stores transferring work from paid employees to unpaid customers, a practice that dates all the way back to Piggly Wiggly - the first self-service supermarket - in the early 1900s. This raises the question: why is this often problematic, unloved technology taking over retail? In 2020, 29% of transactions at food retailers were processed through self-checkout, up from 23% the year prior, according to the latest data from food industry association FMI. Stores also incur higher losses and more shoplifting at self-checkouts than at traditional checkout lanes with human cashiers.ĭespite the headaches, self-checkout is growing. The machines are expensive to install, often break down and can lead to customers purchasing fewer items. Self-checkout is everywhere, despite its issues.

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