Even contested, self-service machines have become commonplace; understand

According to a 2021 survey of 1,000 shoppers, 67% said they had experienced failures at self-service counters in commercial establishments. Kiosk bugs are so common that they even spawned dozens of TikTok memes and videos, for example.

“We are in 2022. One would expect that the experience of self-checkout was perfect. We’re not there,” said Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Laboratory for Agro-Food Analysis at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, who researched this service.

Customers aren’t the only ones frustrated with their experience. self-checkout. Stores also have challenges with this.

The machines are expensive to install, often break down, and can drive customers to buy fewer items. Stores are also subject to higher losses and more thefts at automated teller machines than at traditional, staffed checkouts.

Despite the headaches, self-service is growing.

In 2020, 29% of food retailer transactions were processed through self-checkoutup from 23% a year ago, according to the latest data from the food industry association IMF.

This begs the question: why is this often problematic and unloved technology dominating retail?

customers doing the work

The introduction of self-service machines in 1986 was part of a long history of stores transferring work from paid employees to unpaid customers, a practice that dates back to the Piggly Wiggly – the first self-service supermarket – in the early 1900s.

Instead of clerks behind a counter collecting products for customers, Piggly Wiggly allowed shoppers to roam the aisles, grab items from shelves and pay at the checkout. In exchange for more work, the model promised lower prices.

O self-checkout, however, was primarily designed to reduce store labor expenses. The system reduced cash costs by as much as 66%, according to a 1988 article in the Miami Herald.

The first modern self-service system, patented by Florida’s CheckRobot company and installed in several Kroger stores, would be almost unrecognizable to shoppers today.

Customers scanned their items and placed them on a conveyor belt. An employee on the other side of the conveyor was bagging groceries. Customers would then take them to a central area of ​​the cashier to pay.

The technology was heralded as a “supermarket revolution”. Shoppers “become their own clerks as automated checkout machines shorten long trolley lines and reduce grocery store personnel costs,” the Los Angeles Times said in 1987.

But the self-checkout did not revolutionize the supermarket. Many clients balked at having to work harder in exchange for benefits that weren’t entirely clear.

It took Walmart a decade to test the service. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that the trend expanded more widely into supermarkets, which were looking to cut costs during the 2001 recession and faced stiff competition from emerging superstores and warehouse clubs.

“The logic was economics-based, not customer-centric,” said Charlebois. “From the beginning, customers hated them,” he pointed out.

A 2003 Nielsen survey found that 52% of shoppers rated self-service lanes as “good”, while 16% said they were “frustrating”; 32% of shoppers found them “great”.

The mixed response has led some US grocery chains, including Costco, Albertsons and others, to pull out the self-service machines they installed in the mid-2000s.

“Self-service queues get clogged because customers have to wait for store staff to help with barcode, coupon, payment issues and others that invariably arise with many transactions,” supermarket chain Big Y highlighted in 2011. , when you removed your machines.

Wakaways

The change to the self-checkout it also created unintended consequences for stores.

Retailers discovered that self-service stations were not self-contained and required regular maintenance and supervision, said Christopher Andrews, a sociologist at Drew University and author of “The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets and the Do-It-Yourself Economy.”

While self-service counters eliminated some of the tasks of traditional cashiers, they still needed to be staffed and created a need for higher-paying IT jobs, he explained.

O self-checkout, Andrews added, “doesn’t deliver anything it promises.” In the biggest headache for shopkeepers, it leads to more losses due to error or theft than traditional cashiers.

“If you had a retail store where 50% of transactions were done through self-service, losses would be 77% higher” than average, according to Adrian Beck, professor emeritus at the University of Leicester in the UK, who studies retail losses.

Customers make honest mistakes and intentionally steal from self-service machines.

Some products have multiple barcodes or barcodes that do not scan correctly. Products, including fruits and meats, typically need to be weighed and manually entered into the system using a code. Customers may enter the wrong code by accident. Other times, shoppers will not hear the “beep” confirming that an item has been scanned correctly.

“Consumers are not very good at scanning reliably. Why should they be? They are not trained,” said Beck.

Other customers take advantage of the lax supervision of isolated windows and develop techniques to steal. Common tactics include not scanning an item, swapping a cheaper item (bananas) for a more expensive one (steak), scanning fake barcodes attached to your wrists, or scanning everything correctly and walking away without paying.

Stores have tried to limit losses by beefing up self-service security features, such as adding weight sensors. But additional anti-theft measures also lead to more frustrating “unexpected item in bagging area” errors, requiring store employees to intervene.

“There’s a delicate balance between security and customer convenience,” Beck said.

Self-service is here to stay

Despite the many shortcomings of the self-checkout for customers and shopkeepers, the trend only grows in the USA.

Walmart, Kroger and Dollar General are setting up exclusive self-service stores. Costco and Albertsons brought back the self-checkout after removing it years ago. Amazon took the concept a step further with cashierless Amazon Go stores. It may be too late for stores to turn their backs on this service.

Today’s stores are catering to shoppers who realize that the self-checkout it is faster than traditional cashiers, although there is little evidence to support this. But because customers are doing the work instead of waiting in line, the experience can feel like it’s moving faster.

Shopkeepers also saw competitors installing the self-checkout and have determined that they don’t want to lose.

“It’s an arms race. If everyone else is doing it, you look like an idiot if you don’t,” said David D’Arezzo, a former executive at Dollar General, Wegmans and other retailers. “Once you take it out of the bag, it’s very difficult not to offer more.”

Another factor that accelerated the spread of self-service was Covid-19.

During the pandemic, many customers have opted for the service to avoid close interactions with cashiers and packers. And employee hiring and retention challenges have led stores to rely more on machines to attract customers.