With that said, the Richard Stallman in me still regrets giving Amazon the opportunity to capture HD video of me in meatspace that is linked to my customer profile.
I'm surprised it has taken this long to roll out, as I remember in the mid 90s one supermarket trialed it, but then they abandoned it, and twenty years later it's back.
IMO this gives most of the benefits (admittedly theft may be easier, but it's no different than regular shopping), but non of the they-are-tracking-everything-I-look-at privacy issues.
Self-checkout still requires things to come out of your bag, so the person who's there for when a self-checkout machine inevitably needs cashier assistance can be keeping an eye on several stations at a time.
With scan-and-go, those eyes need to be moved to the shelves, which is a much larger area and won't all be in one person's line-of-sight at once (and the person can easily obscure vision of the shelf).
I don't see how that could ever have been the case. Self-service replaces skilled labor (employee cashier) with unskilled labor (customer cashier.) Why would that ever be more efficient? When you throw in matters like needing to wait for an employee every time somebody buys liquor or cough syrup, it's clear self-service is doomed to be much slower.
It seems to me, self-service is actually designed to reduce labor costs for the store.
I see no conceivable upside. I totally get why companies are installing them; it's plain old greed. There is nothing complicated about that. But knowing that doesn't make me want to use them.
Apple Stores have had this since 2011. I'm not sure why it's taken so long for other stores to get on board.
Maybe the delay for supermarkets is that they operate on such small margins that upgrading technology takes a long time.