Self-service: Booths supermarket puts staff back behind its tills | Hacker News Reader

Self-service: Booths supermarket puts staff back behind its tills

bbc.co.uk

16 pointsthunderbong32 comments

Self-service tills are good for when you've only got a very few items to purchase and rather than stand in a long line of a staffed checkout, you can just use that instead.

Otherwise, yes, as the article mentions, they're quite frustrating to use if you have to wait for staff approval for, say, alcohol purchases, and it can take a while for said staff member to attend to the self-service till; you might as well have waited in the staffed checkout line.

Bringing staff back to checkouts increases employment. That can only be a good thing.

Perhaps some time in the future, someone will come up with a robotic assistant intelligent enough to do the checkout task... but I suspect that's not going to happen at least for another 5 years or so.

> Self-service tills are good for when you've only got a very few items to purchase and rather than stand in a long line of a staffed checkout, you can just use that instead.

Reaction I: Back in the day, many stores had staffed "Express" checkout lanes for that. Or, they actually cared about keeping the lines short.

Reaction II: Judging by some long lines I've seen recently - to use the self-service tills - businesses are starting to optimize away the speed advantage of self-service tills.

My observations also support Reaction II. Customer waiting time is free for the store, they will increase it right up to the point people start giving up and leaving.

Enshittification is not just for software.

> Customer waiting time is free for the store

Disagree. Customers will get angry long before they actually give up and walk out, especially if there is no easy alternative.

Guess what happens the moment there is an easy alternative.

The empirical evidence suggests a theoretical competing alternative is doing nothing to stop this or other enshittification trends in established markets.

My secret trick at the local grocery store was going to the non express checkout if it had even 1 less person than the express checkout because people took a lot more time to pay than it took the cashier to scan and bag their stuff.

The benefit of the express checkout is the number of tills, where 4 self checkouts usually end up replacing the space for 1 manned checkout, so even if 3/4 customers are really slow, odds are you will still find an open self checkout station on arrival.

That being said, manned checkouts are superior in every way (like I said, cashiers are usually much faster than the customers themselves) as long as the grocery store mitigates the number of stations problem by having a single checkout line so you don’t end up waiting an inordinate amount of time because you made the mistake of standing in line with a customer who chooses to pay their groceries in quarters.

Unfortunately the concept of a single checkout line seems alien to the grocery stores in my area.

> ...people took a lot more time to pay than it took the cashier to scan and bag...

Stores vary, but one of my reasons for usually paying with cash is to minimize the chance of computerized delays or f*ck-ups during payment.

> ...cashiers are usually much faster than the customers themselves...

My experience is that this varies enormously between stores. Trader Joe's, Aldi, and most "little local" stores are fast. Vs. the last time I was at a Target - Cashier Training [FAILED], No Long Procedures Required During Checkout [FAILED], Sane Store Policies [FAILED], Competent Manager Available [FAILED], etc., etc.

I agree with both your reactions.

> Bringing staff back to checkouts increases employment. That can only be a good thing.

Imagine how much more employment there would be if we got rid of agricultural machinery and went back to people growing crops with manual labor.

My local Uniqlo just has a bin you put all your clothes into and then pay. It’s… actually really great. And takes a bare fraction of the checkout time, since nothing needs to get scanned.

Random anecdote: Yesterday I accidentally stole two different things from self-checkouts. At the grocery store I stole 2 flats of Coke Zero because I forgot the stuff under the cart. At Home Depot I tried to buy 2 packs of leaf bags but somehow ended up with 3. I noticed the Coke problem after I had left the store but in time to go back pay for them, but not the leaf bags.

If the store had noticed the problem would they have treated me like a criminal? I'm the type of guy who goes back to pay for something even after a successful accidental theft, which I suspect puts me in the minority, but I don't think it's uncommon either.

From my understanding a lot of stores these days do notice the problem but just silently update a database entry somewhere until you've serially stolen $500 worth of merchandise (or whatever the local threshold is to make legal pursuit worth their time).

Walmart and target probably do for sure

They probably didn't update the entry when I returned to pay for that Coke though!

I much prefer going through a self checkout but it’s a poor solution. The traditional checkout process makes sense because there’s a person involved, if no person is involved then there are much better solutions.

Stores in the UK like Tesco and Waitrose have had scan-as-you-shop devices for many years, and there’s other stores (like M&S) which support scan-as-you-shop using your smartphone. Amazon Fresh has the zero-scanning magical detection of what you’re buying using cameras.

If you’re going to have a checkout, have a person at the checkout. If you want a more efficient process, don’t have a checkout, let customers scan as they shop.

When I've been to grocery stores with self checkout, there's usually one attendant at a computer near a group of self checkout stations. I believe the idea is that it's cheaper to staff less checkout employees even if that doesn't eliminate them completely.

What self checkouts give you is single queue multiple servers. That hasn't been implemented on cash registers in my experience. We tend to buy just a few items at a time so self checkouts work well since I am pathalogicly impatient.

I've seen this implemented at several places. Usually it takes the form of a long serpentine line stretching through a bunch of racks of impulse buys with a "wait here for next available cashier" sign at the front and a long bank of registers leading towards the exit. It's more common at hardware or big box retail stores, but I have seen it at grocers as well.

Yeah, one of the big chains here implemented that a few years ago and it's quite nice. You get all the benefits of human cashiers while eliminating the multiple queue issue. A lot of people still prefer the old way, maybe because the line does seem a lot longer (though it moves a lot faster as well).

The main reason why you don't see it everywhere is due to psychology: customers perceive a long, single-file line (one queue) as taking longer, even when, mathematically speaking, it will on average be quicker due to multiple workers servicing the queue.

There are no longer even "multiple workers" servicing the queue necessarily. All Lidl locations in my vicinity in Europe have only a single human cashier operating alongside the self-service kiosks. When these shops were built, six different human-cashier lanes were created, but today only one ever operates even at rush hours. And indeed, it is often faster to go through the queue feeding into the self-service kiosks than to stand in the human-cashier queue.

My local Meijer has 30 unused lines maybe only one or two being staffed.

The two self checkout stations each have 20+ stations but they use the single line system which seems to always have 10+ people waiting. The line does move quickly.

Then they have 3 super-quick self checkouts. These are labeled 5 items or less and don't include any shelf (direct into a single bag) and no weighing functionality (provided by a nearby machine that prints a barcode you scan).

I've only been in a Costco once, but I recall them using one queue multiple registers.

I was at Walmart recently, and I went to the human checkout line. The lady at the register asked me, with a little bit of an edge, why I didn't use the self check out.

I told her very politely that I don't support self check out, because the more of those Walmart has the less they needed her. I said that I support her having a job, not the self check out machines. She had no response.

Maybe employees are happy with self check out, but I think it's rotten, and it takes away jobs that can and should be done by humans. Maybe have a few of them, but seeing the machines rapidly multiply at Walmart, Target, Safeway, and others is deeply disappointing.

Many of the stores I go to seem to have thwarted this strategy by having no human run checkouts even open most of the time! Even if they do they seem to intentionally under-man them so they are super backed up.

Do you only buy clothes made from hand woven fabrics?

Man your'e fighting the wrong combat...and doomed to loose.

I don't enjoy having a camera with facial recognition pointed at my face when purchasing groceries. I also don't enjoy 10:1 ratio of card vs cash registers.

I brought a bar code scanner to scan my book collection (they are surprisingly cheap and works with just about anything since they just act like a USB keyboard for your computer, anyway) so I know how fast self-checkout should be.

I reality? Self-service sucks. The machines are super slow and having to scan and put away each item one at a time is even more annoying. Half the time you get some clerk to check up on you and so on.

So I don't use them. I can stand in line and just read on my phone instead. Plus as a bonus, when the clerk ends up undercharging me (pretty sure that happened last month) I don't have to worry about being accused of theft[0].

[0]: I once had a clerk scan a 12-pack of beer and announce the price and then ask me to pay. It was only when I pointed out that he had charged me the price of one beer that he realized his mistake. Autopilot is a thing that happens and it isn't worth the risk of a theft accusation.

Ha, I live in northern England right near one of their stores.

You need to remember Booths are probably the 'poshest' supermarket in the UK. They don't compete on price, they compete on service - I remember the first time I bought a box of eggs and the cashier checked each individually for damage.

Personally I like this - assuming they have plenty of staff on the tills.

If they’ve got the customer data to back up the choice it sounds like a good move. Personally (n=1) most of the time I prefer the self-service checkout and the occassional problem when an item won’t scan or there’s some software screw up is a small price to pay for the chance to just keep to myself and move a little faster.

It was a tremendous value for the businesses who implemented it until customers decided that someone should be paid for that work and it might as well be them.

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