The trouble with supermarket self checkouts

The author is handwavingly wondering aloud if shoplifting is responsible for the cost of living crisis, spurred on by new shittier checkout procedures.

No, it's demonstrably not. I shop from a few small local grocery stores within walking distance that haven't changed their checkout systems in years, in a nice neighborhood in downtown. The prices had skyrocketed regardless.

I actually prefer self checkout, especially when the UX is reasonably good (Target). I definitely subtract points for unavialable (Home Depot, Walmart) or non-functioning (Chipotle) tap to pay.

But the worst self checkout experience by far is McDonalds. Why does it take ~100 taps on the screen to order three items? Whoever designed that UX should be working the cash register, not designing UX's.

Edit: just successfully used tap to pay at Chipotle, so I guess they finally fixed that.

Colorado recently started charging for plastic bags (a good thing imo). However the self-checkouts at all of the stores I've been to simply cannot handle a reasonable workflow. I can't add my personal bags to the bagging area before I start scanning and tare the scale or anything. I either have to do the entire operation in two stages: scanning then bagging, or I have to have the lone employee come over and confirm that I'm not stealing stuff every third item.

Not to mention that the bagging area is not designed for personal bag use really at all.

Self checkouts like the author mentioned, which have the "unexpected item in bagging area" component, are awful. Plus the machines are usually laggy.

When the machines are responsive and there's no irritating behaviours of the machine, then they're just fine, or even better than a cashier.

The problem with most self checkouts is that the value prop for the stores seem obvious - lower wages - but the value for consumer is not obvious in most cases - because in most cases, it doesn’t exist.

It’s not a better experience and it feels very much like I am now being asked to do more while still paying more.

My trouble with supermarket self checkouts:

We used to go to the store, pick out our items and a employee would ring them up and bag them.

Then you had to bag them yourself.

Now you have to ring them up as well.

Hedonic quality adjustment failed to capture this (and other examples of) 'enshittification' taking place and thus underestimates inflation. During Covid consumers became accustomed to worse service and longer waits and business realized what they could get away with and now run skeleton crews. The lower quality of these offerings haven't been factored in to the official inflation statistics, on the other hand if the iPad gets a little faster they are quick to hedonic quality adjust inflation down.

Albert Heijn in the Netherlands interestingly seems to have none of the mentioned problems.

You swipe or scan your items and place them in your bags however you want. If you scan a beer bottle they let you keep going and someone watching sees that you are an adult just remotely ticks a box before you get to the checkout stage.

There is no scale checking the weight of your bags, the only annoyance is that occasionally a worker comes over before you complete your transaction to randomly check what you put in your bags. Aoart from that it's all very fluid.

On the other hand I have experienced all the mentioned problems in Canada at a Provigo in Quebec.

So I think all this is really just a matter of implementation and actually caring about user experience. All if these issues are solvable, the store just has to decide it cares about these issues and not accept a suboar solution.

One difference I'll note, of course a bit of a wild guess, is maybe one of culture. In North America people really don't want to be bothered by random checks, they feel it's a violation of their privacy or personal space. So everything, including security, has to be automated as much as possible. In Europe people are used to the idea of random checks maybe because it's part of the experience of taking public transport.

"Rather than speed things up, they make us miserable" - well, they weren't introduced to speed things up, they were introduced to allow the supermarket to save personnel and therefore money. I usually avoid them, because most of the time I either have some alcoholic beverage or some loose items (vegetables etc.) which would require waiting for assistance, and at that point the staffed checkout is faster.

Target? I know a guy works in their data center. Says the self-checkout weighing is disabled - single most common trouble area. Also those cameras and screens that show you standing there? That signal goes nowhere. Starts and ends at the station. Their LAN didn't have the bandwidth to support it, and not enough storage anywhere to record it. So it's just to make you feel conspicuous. Like 'placebo surveillance', it works, sort of.

Funny, self-checkout has made my experience much better when shopping at Whole Foods.

It's true that the checkout itself takes 2-3x as long. But that's more than offset by the fact that instead of waiting in line for 10 minutes, there simply is no line anymore.

So it's sped up my grocery store visits by at least 5 minutes. (It may help that they don't use a weight sensor, so there are never any frustrating errors like the author describes.)

I was playing "shops" with my four-year-old and he told me it was "self checkout" and went and did something else. True story.

I haven't seen anyone mention what to me is the biggest issue with self-checkout, false accusations of theft. I recently went through the self-checkout line in my local grocery store and accidentally left one item behind. When I went back to the store to retrieve it, they accused me of trying to take the item without paying for it. They said the person monitoring the self-checkout lines saw me put it in the bagging area without scanning it first. I had to go back to my car and get the receipt, which clearly showed I had paid for the item, but needless to say it was unnerving being accused of theft. I always use the staffed checkout lanes now, self-checkout isn't worth the trouble.

We had a recent experience with one.

We had 3 or 4 bags we brought. We pressed "use our bags", pressed 4, and starting setting them up in the weight-sensitive area. By the time I finished setting up the first bag, the screen had gone back to the initial state, and when I set a bag down, it began complaining. It took a couple minutes just to get bags set up. We also didn't have room in the weight area and had to put some bags on the non-weight area.

Then we had quite a few issues with it complaining about moving or not moving things to the bagging area, several of which required waiting a minute for an employee to come over, type in their override code and clear the error.

Then we selected the wrong fruit because it wasn't accepting the 4 digit code, but it was more expensive, so we once again had to wait for an employee to come fix the issue, as you can't undo any mistakes on your own.

Overall the experience took 10-15 minutes (felt like eternity) and that compares to what would be 60-90 seconds with a cashier. Most of that time was waiting 30-60 seconds during each of the 4-5 times an error came up that we had no power to clear ourselves.

Of course one of the takeaways here is... don't use self-checkout for more than about 5 items max. One bag. Any more and just **ing go to a human. The other is... these systems are shit and they are not designed to work with your customers, but rather to use your customers, regardless of the toll it takes on them.

At my supermarket the self checkout line is usually mostly young to very young shoppers with just a few items. When you watch them check out they have adapted to the idiosyncrasies of the particular machine and navigate it with few hiccups. I still prefer the in-person checkout most of the time but have also learned to avoid the usual pitfalls of the robot. Also, sometimes I'll arrive with a pocketful of change and feed that into the self-checkout, even though it takes a long time. I don't want to burden a checker with that.

I much prefer the handheld scanner method, in which you scan while you shop. This used to be more widespread in the UK before self checkout took over. I seem to remember it being launched in the late 2000s?

Advantages:

1) Your scanning labor is spread out across your entire visit

2) No need to unload and bag everything at the end

3) You can see a running price total

Is that last point the reason why supermarkets moved away from them? Because they don’t want you to budget in realtime?

On the east coast, Stop & Shop has the best self-checkout experience I've seen. You get a bar code scanner when you enter the store and scan and bag as you walk around. At checkout, you scan the reader, keep everything you already bagged in the cart, and pay. Checkout takes all of 30 seconds. Bonus: you immediately know what each item costs from the display on the scanner.

Here in France the larger Carrefour stores have another system in addition to the usual self-checkouts. You can grab a scanner at the entrance and scan each item as you take it from the shelf. At the checkout they check a few random items and you pay. It's fast when you buy a lot of items. You do have to get used to scanning stuff yourself, which takes some practice.

The instance of enshittification under discussion is lucrative for the (big) retailers in at least two ways: first (obvious), they get to hire less people and in this way increase their margins, since they never promised to pass any savings to the consumer in the first place and also something something supply chain something something inflation; second (slightly less obvious), it is nudging the less impulsive consumers to have their (bi-)weekly groceries delivered so they don't have to go to the store physically at all. Where I live (a dense urban area), supermarkets are getting fewer and either smaller or with the delivery logictics space gradually cannibalizing the in-person shopping space. I can only conclude that sufficiently scaled-up home delivery of groceries is more lucrative for retailers than traditional in-store shopping, probably due to some combination of smaller variety / more standartization, delivery fees etc.

Back in the past, you used to have to go to the front of the shop and give them a list of what you wanted. They'd return with your bags full of what you ordered.

When the modern supermarket came along, there was uproar. People couldn't understand why they had to traipse the aisles! Isn't that what the staff were for? Why are customers having to do their job for them?

Of course, the supermarket realised that having people make impulse purchases, see new goods, and choose their preferred ripeness of fruit, made a lot more money than they lost from upset customers not returning.

Similarly, there's a modern calculation that a few customers fiddling the weight of their marrows is vastly offset by not having to recruit, train, employ, and manage till staff. And shoppers don't get stuck behind someone who wants a natter with cashier or who wants to pay in pre-decimal currency or wants to argue over an expired voucher.

But, luckily, thanks to capitalism you have a choice. Go to a supermarket like Lidl if you want to avoid self-checkouts. Or use online shopping. Or send your kitchen maid to deal with those craven machines.

At least the self checkout tills in Switzerland are not equipped with scales, which make the whole experience so much worse.

Nevertheless, I prefer to use a real cashier if the queues are not too bad.

Well, anecdotally, I've noticed catching a person every few months just slipping right out. One guy did it right in front of me after he saw the opportunity when the employee had to help out another customer's machine. smh.

self-checkouts and procedures can definitely be improved, but I'm relatively happy they're available because it is a fast way (not always though) to get in and out of the grocery store for me.

I would use self checkouts if they offered me a discount on the price. But if they don't they're just asking me to work for free, and on top of that randomly accusing me of being a shoplifter, so I'm passing.

Speaking as an entitled boomer raised by and with the ethos of a mother who went through food rationing in WWII this article is a lot of hot air about nothing important.

Strong old man screams at cloud vibes here. I love self checkout. And I'll gladly bid a friendly good day to any employee that would ask to see my bag after I've used one.