Waitrose to roll out self-checkout technologies to all its 270-plus stores
Waitrose is rolling out both self-checkout terminals and its Quick Check/Quick Pay shopping tool to all its stores as it finds the return on investment stacks-up for every single branch when combining both self-service tools. By Glynn Davis
Speaking at the Wincor Nixdorf Executive Briefing in New York – alongside the NRF Convention & Expo – Graham Heald, director of retail services at Waitrose, highlighted how successful had been its implementation of self service checkouts, of which 175 can be found in 37 of its branches.
“We’ve developed a convenience format – between 3,000 to 6,000 sq ft – of 27 stores that can drive significant footfall and in these small branches self-checkouts are vital,” he says, citing one central London store where 24% of all transactions go through self-checkouts – equating to 15% of total sales.
They are also successful in some larger branches including Canary Wharf where 15 units account for 20% of transactions and 13% of total branch sales. “Particularly at lunch time we get a huge influx that we could not accommodate with traditional checkout lanes. Self-checkouts work incredibly well,” says Heald.
However, he admits that despite the best efforts of its technology provider Wincor Nixdorf there are branches in its 271-store estate where there is “not the right return on investment” from self-checkouts.
But by combining the Quick Check/Quick Pay technology – whereby customers scan their own products as they go around the store – with self-checkouts, the need to provide supervisors to handle interventions over issues such as weighing products is massively reduced. Heald calculates it could remove £7 million of costs and provide the ROI for having self-checkouts in all its stores.
“The model only works for us when you bring the two together…so by the end of 2013 a branch without self-checkout and Quick Check will be rare,” says Heald.
