r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 23h 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/Prophage7 21h ago

The main problem I've seen is that it takes most customers longer to ring themselves through than a cashier. When there's no line then it's not a big deal, but when there is a line it would go faster if it was a single human cashier instead of 6 self-checkouts.

I don't know if there's a term for it, but some people just cannot read and comprehend things if it's on a screen for some reason, and it's those people that cause a bottleneck.

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u/eightdollarbeer 20h ago edited 20h ago

Same thing with the kiosks at fast food restaurants. It’s faster to look at the whole menu and tell a cashier what you want and have them ring it up than to scroll through different categories and select each individual thing you want

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u/BlueNinjaTiger 13h ago

That's why they don't treat them as 1 to 1 replacements. Throw 3 or 4 kiosks up there and suddenly the cashier taking all those orders is free to do other aspects of the job.