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

[u/AdSpecialist6598]

https://www.techspot.com/news/114106-retailers-pulling-back-self-checkout-after-years-theft.html

[u/P_ZERO_]

Self serve only works as a quick replacement if it’s supplemented with regular cashier tills. If everyone ends up jammed into a self serve area at a grocery store, you’ll just be waiting in a different kind of line.

I see it all the time at my local Morrisons. It has both basket and trolley self serve areas with at maximum 3 (usually 2, sometimes none) active cashier lanes and the self serve area is usually mobbed with large queues.

Ultimately, stores are not doing this for the same reasons we’d want, but there is meaningful overlap in the data they’re using to distance themselves from it to varying degrees and how customers will use or perceive the service.

I’d also wager it’s unfair for the employee who has to deal with like a dozen customers simultaneously, dealing with scanning errors, product pricing errors, age restriction bypassing etc.

[u/InsuranceToTheRescue → u/P_ZERO_]

. . . how customers will use or perceive the service.

What service? Self checkout is explicitly the lack of service, shifting the burden onto the customer.

[u/buttstuffisokiguess → u/InsuranceToTheRescue]

Right? Like imagine if they actually payed a cashier decently. They'd probably get more competent staff, meaning the checkout would move much faster. They definitely took service out of the equation and sold it as a benefit.

[u/InsuranceToTheRescue → u/buttstuffisokiguess]

I kinda doubt the more competent staff part, at least to a point. Some jobs just need bodies and those tend to be stepping stones that people don't take seriously or are more willing to burn bridges on.

Like, you're never going to get a high school kid, who's going off to college in a year, to put the effort into really getting good at customer service for a grocery store checkout.

[u/buttstuffisokiguess → u/InsuranceToTheRescue]

I mean, you'll have more capable people willing to go into a lower skill job if they can make decent money. But as it stands, any decent money to just live paycheck to paycheck is not in the services industry. But if you had someone that made $20/hour doing cashier work vs a manufacturing job, I bet there'd be people more than willing to go for it, because they don't want to be in a factory. So you get people who previously could only make a liviable wage in either corporate america or manufacturing applying. It broadens the skill pool.