Comment: The polarising nature of self-checkouts
Self-checkouts continue to be a polarising feature of physical retail with many people valuing the non-interactive experience while others are frustrated at the clunky, emotionless nature of the shopping journey they deliver.
It’s clearly a similarly polarised scenario among retailers because in only the last few weeks we have seen how self-checkouts have been recognised as having reached a critical mass with certain operators who have ended their roll-outs of the tech while others continue to invest in more advanced self-checkout solutions and see a strong future for the technology.
The former is very much the situation with Asda that has recently stated it has reached the threshold whereby it has the optimal number of self-checkouts across its store estate. Rather than putting any more investment into these devices it has instead made the decision to put more money into additional hours in manned checkouts.
This “more colleagues on checkouts” policy is also the thinking of Booths supermarket chain that last year made the much-publicised decision to remove all self-checkout terminals from its stores and return to having only manned tills. Its decision was made to counter the feeling that self-checkouts were delivering a poor experience to its customers.
This experience invariably involves the annoying need for employee approvals on certain products, the miss-scanning of items, the failure of the weighing devices, and discounts not being correctly attributed…among other things.
In the US it is not only the clunky, laboriousness of self-checkouts that is putting a black mark against them but there is the potential for something much worse. If Bill SB 1446 gets approval in California it would prohibit all the state’s retail stores from offering self-checkout options unless certain conditions are met. These include having one store worker solely monitoring no more than two self-checkout lanes, limiting self-checkouts to 10 items or less, and disallowing certain products and goods from being purchased at the terminals. Such stipulations would undoubtedly present a potential existential threat to self-checkouts in the region.
Meanwhile, outside the ‘Sunshine State’ things are somewhat brighter for self-checkouts, according to research from RBR Data Services, which found that 2023 represented a record year for the global self-checkout market. More than 217,000 terminals were delivered worldwide – an increase of 12% on the previous year.
Europe was a particularly bright spot, with 29% growth across EMEA, which included replacement projects at major UK grocery retailers. Sainsbury’s is very much in this camp, unlike rival Asda, as it recently announced it is to upgrade its checkout technology across 22,500 devices including its self-checkout systems with its partner NCR Voyix. This forms part of its ‘Future Front-End strategy’ that involves putting an end to the clunky aspect of the devices that has contributed to their poor reputation among many shoppers.
This next generation self-checkout involves the integration of AI computer recognition. One function this powers is called ‘Picklist’ that identifies specific items quickly and also spots when a suspicious item has appeared in the checkout process – potentially reducing the level of theft going through self-checkouts. Another major upside is the ability of store employees to approve transactions remotely via tablets thereby removing the need to manually address each intervention at the till.
The latter problem often involves queries relating to the weight of certain items, a particular bugbear of mine, which suggests this next generation of self-checkouts could be the saviour of the technology for me and many other customers who have become increasingly jaded with the experience they receive today.
The basic self-checkout technology has been around since 1986 and the iPhone hit the market back in 2007 with a UX that has become ubiquitous on technology devices the world over so maybe it really is time that the self-checkout caught up with the intuitive pain-free interfaces to which we have all become accustomed and the devices can then become much less of a polarising element of the retail sector.
