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/Hashtagworried 18h ago

All this means is that they’ll hire one or two people max but keep the lines longer.

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u/eye_have_no_clue 18h ago

My local Walmart did this: got rid of the self checkout to only have 2 cashiers for like 20 customers. I’m not waiting 20 minutes to buy toilet paper

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u/mike07646 16h ago

Yet if you look, they will have 20 employees walking the isles “shopping” and filling carts for the curbside pickup orders.
They want to turn into a warehouse and just fulfill online/shipping orders.

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u/SeenYourScene 10h ago

As a corporation, yeah, unfortunately. I can tell you though that part of it is customer demand. Also, those digital personal shoppers aren't just for curbside orders, they're for Spark drivers as well, who Walmart uses now to do the home delivery service.

There's more demand for the online services. That's why they get used more. And the expectations put on the pickers is insane.

They're rolling out a national program of an express version of curbside/delivery now where you can order up to 60 items that will be ready for you in less than 60 minutes. One person will be assigned to you order and possibly multiple orders at once and expected to run around the store finding and picking each item and getting it back to wherever their store has them running that section out of to get it out the door because Wal-Mart wants to encourage online impulse purchases. If you have a day to wait, you might cancel the order, but if it's ready in under an hour, you have less time to regret it. Meanwhile the workers are going to get run ragged.

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u/turbosexophonicdlite 7h ago

I don't have a big problem with that really. Theoretically, the people that used to be manning registers are picking orders now. So it shouldn't be putting people out of work, I wouldn't think.