Retailers appear to be facing a self-checkout reckoning | Hacker News Reader

Retailers appear to be facing a self-checkout reckoning

businessinsider.com

20 pointsNN8823 comments

I always use self-checkout and vastly prefer it. My music, book, or podcast never has to stop, I can scan and bag faster than most employees, and the lines are normally short or non-existent. I regularly walk up to a self-checkout and process 10x items compared to the person next to me and I’m walking out while they are still working through their handful of items.

The only thing that I hate is how the person they do staff is normally MIA or not paying attention. Too often I get “assistance is on the way” which really means “you need to flag down someone”. For everything from “you skipped bagging too many items” (sorry I was buying 4 cases of water), to “you tripped the weight sensors too many times” (again, sorry I’m fast at this and your system is slow/buggy), to “you are buying alcohol or meds that are restricted” (totally understand but pay attention and come over when that happens please).

But if I don’t hit one of the cases above (which I don’t in 80-90%+ of my trips) then it’s way better. Even having to wait 20-30 seconds for an assistant isn’t the end of the world and better than waiting in line.m and make small talk while an uninterested kid puts your bread under cans in a bag.

Whoever though self-checkout = no staff was a moron from the start _but_ it does mean fewer staff. You can have 1 employee supervising 4-6 stations and if they are halfway competent they can bounce between them checking IDs and the like.

Lastly I wish more self-checkout stations had the spinning bag carousels and more space to put stuff. That’s my only other gripe. Sometimes they have like 2-4 bags stations/holders and I often need more than that.

It's been a while now since I used a self-checkout, but my general philosophy is "Sorry, $Employer pays me to fight with buggy, UI-from-hell computers at $Job. If you want me to fight with your self-checkout system, my rate is \$$Lots/hour".

(Admittedly, there are quite a few stores where PoSh*t PoS systems, poor training, and poor staffing team up to make live-human checkout just as bad.)

I have preferred self-checkouts for over a decade, and I usually avoid grocery stores without them. The user experience is simply superior to traditional checkouts. I can proceed at my own pace, and there is no forced interaction with a random person.

The UIs are also superior to the vast majority of web/mobile software I use, because they rarely change. After a year or two, you just get used to them. And when you visit a foreign country, you often find that they use the same software there as well.

How much UX superiority is due to the shorter lines? I definitely prefer self-checkout at Walmart, but if their cashiers were as efficient as e.g. ALDI it wouldn't be as valuable

ALDI gets me through the checkout faster than I could do it myself at the other large grocery chains, primarily because they have put in place efficiencies throughout the whole supply chain. Eg the Barcode is as long as the side of the box it's on for most items, and the PoS machine is simple with highly optimised lookups so you can scan a hell of a lot of product quickly. My local self serves need time to think between my lazy scanning, and then time to think about every other step along the way. I'm almost convinced a study or three have suggested that the slower the software the more chance I'll purchase the chocolate next to the machine.

ALDI and Trader Joe's* have both moved into my area in the past decade or two. Neither has self-checkout. Only ALDI has the big barcodes.

What I notice is that both seem to have "customer checkout MUST be fast" as a C-suite priority. Vs. big American stores love their "something went wrong again, so now we all stand and wait while the cashier and manager try to figure this out" delays. Or have several idle employees hanging around while one hard-working cashier has a dozen+ customers waiting in line. Or have "Special Offers" which require the cashier to stop and handle paperwork for several minutes. Or...

*ALDI and Trader Joe's have closely related, German management & ownership:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Albrecht

https://www.aldireviewer.com/aldi-and-trader-joes-are-they-t...

Barcode scanning is not the bottleneck. The slowest part is packing the bags. Aldi get speed by asking you to pack bags after paying.

Hence why I said everything in the chain. I gave a singular example of and optimisation.

Most stores around here have self-checkouts that are actually pleasant to use. No scale, no bullshit, it's very rare for an employee to be required and in those cases, one is usually available. That only works because people are generally honest, wages are high and crime is low, and might change as people get more pressed for money.

One store/chain had a user-hostile system (nasty self checkout software, had to wait for an employee to unlock something, then an exit gate check with barcode scanning, then an employee doing a random sample check to make sure I didn't scan a cheaper product instead) and to "encourage" people to use it they reduced actual checkouts so there were massive queues. I don't know if they improved it because I haven't been back in years now.

I used the US style checkouts (in and outside of the US) a few times and holy hell how are people putting up with it.

Meanwhile, airline self-check-ins are horrible because they know you don't have any other option at that point and will put up with both the line and the horrendous system, and probably won't think about it the next time you buy a ticket (and even if you do, it'll be from the same airport and most airlines will be using the same horrible system).

Walking into Walmart now, if I see I've got to self checkout, it means I usually only get what I absolutely need.

For my shopping habits (shop til the cart is full), that means I purchase maybe only 5-10% of what I'd normally spend on such a trip. That's an inefficient trip to me.

And I was one of those people who would wait for a worker to ring me up, no matter how long the line.

Now that you can't even count on the tobacco/alcohol lane to be open, they've successfully forced me to change my shopping habits.

Changing shopping habits is usually the holy grail of retail marketing, butin this case it can't be the direction they want to encourage.

I know I'm not every shopper, but the more a person typically buys/spends per trip, the more likely they are to see self-checkout as a hassle (more work/ takes longer), and more likely they are to eventually reduce their per-trip item count.

Your comment has me thinking of the time during the pandemic when there were supply chain issues and Amazon was trying to find ways to encourage people to buy less stuff for once. I wonder if we are still having issues on the supply side and these changes like limiting store hours and forcing people into self checkout are actually ways of applying a short term patch.

Much reddit discussion here in Oz about how shit they are. And, as theft levels rise how self checkout becomes enabling of intrusive social oversight by computer.

I try to avoid them, I think young kids need jobs and checkout jobs aren't the worst thing in the world (Australia has a very strong minimum wage law)

These companies are just jealous of the stores that didn’t do self checkout. They see 20 traditional lanes in those stores and only 1 or 2 of them ever staffed at bargain-basement wages and say “that’s what we wanted all along! You mean customers will just wait in the line?!”

A real important sentence here is "Industry estimates suggest inventory losses can rise by 31% to 60% — or more — depending on the number of self-checkout stations used in a store."

I believe it. Home Depot's checkout is so easy to game. The person they have watching the checkout gives zero fucks and is more likely to help you steal shit than prevent mistakes. I have gotten so much free shit from home depots self-checkout that I lost count.

Later I check the receipt to find items missed. That's with employees helping.

I want a discount for using the self checkout . Stop n shops self checkout is so bad I avoid it at all costs .

Home Depot self checkout is the worst, I was actually coming to these comments to call it out specifically.

There _no way_ to enter part codes. So if you grab a few washers, a bolt, and something else without a barcode on it you _have_ to have the assistant come over, login, then enter the codes/quantity.

I even took pictures of the barcodes in the aisle one time and it wouldn’t work, the assistant said those barcodes don’t scan, entered the 3 character code on the washer/bolt/etc is the only way.

At least at Kroger I can enter the produce code or search by name.

They outsource all their tech to big contracting firms. Their apps, website, and everything else technology-wise were a complete clusterfuck during the pandemic and I wouldn't be surprised if they are all still hosed.

Home Depot is the most successful big box hardware store chain in the US. It is a serious WTF trying to use their site.

Time waiting in line for salesperson = productive phone time.

Time doing salesperson's job = lost time.

No thanks, "self" checkout.

Unless the store takes the items from the cart for you and scans them this isn't true. You still have to move every time. So it's just an extra wait time. I'd rather go home faster for my "productive" phone time.

You're talking about the few seconds needed to push a cart forward without looking? Dumping everything from cart to belt is much faster than scanning and bagging each item.

Also, any customer-scanned barcode exception requires waiting for store staff to be summoned. So far, human-staff checkout has always been fastest, except when buying a single item (in which case, the nearest corner store staffed by humans is faster).

Anybody tried Decathlon checkout? Just throw in the items in the box at the bittom, it automatically adds the item to the bill.

No scanning no fiddling necessary.

Sam’s club has the app checkout, which I prefer to waiting in line at Sam’s. Just scan everything as you go using your own phone. Tap pay and bypass the line (or at least the checkout line).

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