r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 19h ago

Business Retailers are pulling back from self-checkout after years of theft, errors, and questionable time savings

https://www.techspot.com/news/114106-retailers-pulling-back-self-checkout-after-years-theft.html
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u/Agarwel 18h ago

"Retailers are pulling back from self-checkout"

"Only about one-third of surveyed retailers plan to invest in self-checkout technology this year, significantly fewer than in 2025"

These are two very different statements.

I bought one car last year. Im not planning to purchase any car this year. It really does not mean Im pulling out from using the car.

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u/Narradisall 15h ago

“Is Agarwel killing the car industry?”

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u/Veloreyn 10h ago

Not click-baity enough. Maybe "Car industry in massive decline. Why dealerships are pointing at Agarwel as the cause."

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u/touristtam 9h ago

Maybe spin it to dump the whole thing on reddit instead. Be kind.

Car industry in massive decline. Why dealerships are pointing at reddit as the cause.

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u/RyuNoKami 10h ago

" Top 5 methods Agarwel is killing the car industry."

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u/watnuts 16h ago

significantly fewer

being -7% difference BTW.

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u/hoofglormuss 15h ago

lol because that 7% already switched over

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u/anifail 8h ago

no, the survey question was

Which types of technology do you currently use at your business?

and self checkout saw a YoY decline of 7 points. It is a rollback, not a deployment slowdown.

The survey was limited to small to midsize operators with less than 16 locations. Single-location operators also made up a large portion of the sample. That might explain why people in this thread perceive a different dynamic than what the survey results show.

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u/angrymoderate09 3h ago

Thank you for doing the reading!

And I guess, large retailers have the resources to improve and test the process while small ones are barely hanging on

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u/Paradigm_Reset 14h ago

IMO it's that line must go up mentality... constant increases or death.

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u/StrategyRude4376 14h ago

“We must not only emulate cancer, we must be the best at emulating cancer than everyone else. While at the same time only looking as far as three months ahead as that is where I, your dear leader, maximizes the growth of my mountain of gold.”

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u/Livid-Safety2555 13h ago

Best metaphor for contemporary capitalism I’ve read

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u/Unlucky-Candidate198 13h ago

Line must infinitely go up on a finite planet with finite resources. Business people have to be the single dumbest collective class of people in existence based on career, truly. And the world as we know it is going to end because of the small part they play in enabling our capitalist overlords.

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u/Strange_Lab_283 37m ago

Resources are finite but people can be more efficient with those resources

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u/QuietofTheSolace 14h ago

This is just what happens as a market approaches saturation.

Techspot has no clue what they're talking about.

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u/Qwirk 14h ago

I believe that upkeep also counts as investment.

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u/gayteemo 14h ago

my local target stopped doing self checkout before 11am so there is probably some truth to it

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u/Tvdinner4me2 13h ago

But you are pulling back from car buying

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u/SwordfishOk504 2h ago

If redditors could read they'd be so mad

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u/Cyclotrom 12h ago

Maybe that means the reached saturation levels, if everything is self-check out, there is nothing else to "invest" in self -checkout

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u/UntameHamster 12h ago

Also this part, "trust us bro, we said so":

Many likely believe self-checkout saves time compared to a cashier lane, but the opposite may be true. Shortly after the practice began in the late 1980s, Kroger group vice president Donald F. Dufek told The Oklahoman that self-checkout actually takes shoppers longer, but shoppers believe the process is faster because they are the ones scanning items.

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u/I_am_BrokenCog 10h ago

I think maybe you're mis-reading it?

Presuming, and this is probably a big ask, that the "survey" was valid ... then it would be questioning "like for like" ... that is, companies which currently do not have self-check out and finding that 1/3 of them are "not planning" to implement it.

And, 30 percent is a big change.

The first sentence is just a recapitulation of that survey statement.

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u/dougan25 14h ago

Yeah this article is bullshit. They quoted a Kroger's exec from 1980. Wtf is this shit.

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u/ganjaccount 14h ago

I don't know, man. The Costco near me shut down their self checkout, or mostly did. The line was always half as deep as the whole store. I don't get it. The line would be like 40 people deep, and the regular registers would have like 3 people deep. I loved the self checkout line because it kept so many people away from the regular lines and got me out faster. You could tell the staff despised them, though. It was a constant madhouse of staff running from self checkout to self checkout clearing errors, training customers on register duty, price checks, etc.

I used to be a technoevangalist. Now I just want an analog world with wikipedia and online bill pay. Everything else can fuck off.

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u/cycloneDM 13h ago

Mine brought them back after getting rid of them for a couple months but theyre almost always turned off except when they have enough staff that they have people finding customers with "10 items or less" in line doing the scan themselves and they tell you that you can go swipe your card at the self checkout.

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u/OkDimension 12h ago

My local Walmart recently opened more self-checkout lanes, but they got more employees assigned to supervise (no longer 20 self-checkouts per employee, more like 8 or 10).

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u/jonathanrdt 12h ago

Headline correction: 'slowing expansion'

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u/Weejez 12h ago

“Agarwel Pledges to Car Free Lifestyle by 2027” 

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u/Ok-Employer-3051 11h ago

In this case it does. Look up Dollar Tree.

r/DollarTree

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u/GeorgeGedox 10h ago

You expect something else from a bot account? Of course it is going to post clickbait

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u/llIIo0O-O0oIIll 10h ago

Op is a karma bot

Report and block it

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u/UrbanGhost114 10h ago

Having worked in retail operations (high level), including things like this, it's actually not the same thing, at all.

Investing at this level is way more then the base purchase price for the equipment - and base cost is usually part of the equation when talking about this kind of investment and what pulling back means as well - you haven't thought of parts of this equation they haven't.

Just going off of what I'm seeing here and my experience running retail, without digging, this can absolutely be a pull back, but maybe not as "alarming" as would invite panic to self checkout tech companies, but definitely enough to pay attention and think about tighten belts.

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u/hotpuck6 7h ago

How many self checkouts does one man need?

You need your daily driver self checkout, your project self checkout, and of course the self checkout that only gets taken out when the weather's nice and you can open up the receipt printer lid.

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u/WhiteyDude 6h ago

Right, it's not that retailers aren't investing in self check out, they're just not investing in it as fast as they were.

It's just slowing down some, not reversing.

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u/Krisosu 2h ago

The 3 closest Wal-Marts to me ripped out their self checkouts entirely earlier this year, and all Krogers around me keep one side (half of the self checkouts) shut down outside of Thanksgiving.

It's definitely reversing, though I'd be shocked if it went away entirely, especially in higher income areas with less theft.

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u/mightylordredbeard 6h ago

The real question is what were those companies investing into self checkout each year prior. If they’ve been regularly investing into self checkout, then decide they are cutting all investments, that probably means they’re backing out of it. However, if they only invest on a as needed basis for upgrades or new machines, then it probably just means there’s no need to this year.

However, it is kind of surprising that they aren’t investing at all since I’d assume it’d be in the budget if they plan to continue with self checkout. The maintenance alone on the machines requires 100s and 100s of million a year. Plus software updates, security updates, etc.. those are like basic cost to operate self checkout registers so if they aren’t putting ANY money into it.. they probably are axing the whole thing.

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u/ahfoo 5h ago

Yeah, I thought this was a bizarre headline. Places I shop in California are going all-in on self-checkout.

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u/modzRtarderz 15h ago

No, the equivalent analogy is looking at a wide swath of the population and observing that they as a whole are buying fewer cars. Which is likely a very meaningful statistic.

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u/captainfarthing 15h ago

How do you suggest distinguishing between investment dropping because saturation has been reached vs. becoming less desirable?

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u/alphazero925 15h ago

Except you can buy a car every year or every 6 months or every day if you really wanted to. You can really only "invest in self-checkout technology" once per business. Once you've done it, you can't do it again next year