'It hasn't delivered': the failure of self-checkout technology

Costco is so annoying about this, it's not even that it complains about unexpected items, it requires you to put every scanned item on the scale, and if you're shopping at Costco, you probably have some pretty bulky, heavy items that you'd really rather just put back in the cart instead of building the Leaning Tower of Palettes of Toilet Paper and Tuna.

I get why they do it that way, but they already check your receipt before you exit, you're supposed to have a membership that they supposedly check at the door before you shop there (I know they don't really) which they could presumably revoke if you got caught trying to steal, and self-checkout receipts already have the turquoise bars to prompt them to check closer, so it feels a bit absurd.

Almost my sentiment. Quite often pre-packaged items that need to weight a certain amount are slightly more or slightly less resulting in the terminal err-ing out.

The self checkouts over here are regularly supervised by employees and regularly they need to intervene especially for alcohol.

Our local Walmart has given up weighing items post scan. It helps a lot.

In the UK many of the small grocery stores limit shopping to what fits on the scale at one time. While highly annoying, it mostly fits the shopping habits. That would not work at all in the US.

Here in Italy there are huge super markets that are scan and shop. My 80 year old family members go and do it without any issues. It’s actually kind of nice.

I haven't seen any decrease of their usage in the US, only a steady increase. I think the article is wrong, or my region is unusual. And my region is not unusual.

Yeah, in the last few years I have not seen any stores in my area (in the US) decrease the number of self-checkout lanes, while several have increased the self-checkout lanes and/or decreased the number of cashiers working. This is despite increasing anti-theft measures in other ways like locking up more items in cabinets. Perhaps this article is based on interviewing management about upcoming changes that have not occurred yet, but otherwise it doesn't match my experiences.

It's not remotely true in the US either. This is probably some kind of hit piece.

Almost entirely US focused. There's one UK mention: "In the UK, supermarket chain Booths has also cut down on the number of self-service kiosks in its stores, as customers say they're slow and unreliable." linking to https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-67373472

That says "Booths is believed to be the first UK supermarket to move away from using self-service tills, which have become increasingly common in recent years." so yeah, hardly an indication of a widespread UK trend.

It may be that grocery shopping in parts of the US is different than what you're accustomed to. At least where I live, it's common to shop for a week's worth of groceries (or more), vs. shopping more often. This means that the checkout process is handling a larger amount of items per customer on average.

As to why it's unpopular, I think that's pretty simple.

The classic checkout system at grocery and home goods stores in the US involved a checkout aisle with a conveyor belt, a cashier scanning items and processing payment, and a bagger bagging up items and placing them back in your cart. Your responsibility was putting all your stuff on the conveyor belt and then paying. Cashiers and baggers were dedicated staff trained for the job, and the result was that you got through checkout quickly.

Now, replace this with a cluster of small kiosks, with one person 'supervising' but the rest of the process the responsibility of the customer. The customer has to do all the work, with less space to do it, and they aren't trained to do it well. At any time, maybe 1/3 of the kiosks are not working for some reason. A variety of scenarios cause working kiosks to stop processing and wait for supervisory input.

It's no wonder people get frustrated by self-checkout. The key is to think about it as a customer, who has seen an optimal process that was easy for them get replaced with one where they have to do a lot of work. Oh, and for a variety of reasons their grocery bill has also gone up, so it's not obvious that they've saved any money due to this change either.

I like self-checkout as a replacement for the old 10-items-or-less express aisles. If I want to buy one or two things, I like not having to wait behind someone with a full cart. But when you replace everything with self-checkout, those full carts end up taking even longer to process; for my weekly grocery run I go to the store that still has cashiers and baggers, so I can get in and out more quickly.

I haven't read the whole article, but it seems to be describing everything I've experienced first-hand.

My local grocery store has had them for a few years. At first they were great, but slowly things got bad. Whatever they did, the machines are now totally unreliable. They didn't monitor the weight of your groceries before, and now they do, and they complain multiple times per trip that the weight isn't right. They also require you to put all your bags in the bagging area first and hit a button to weigh them, but that fails 100% of the time if you put more than three bags in for some reason. It also randomly doesn't have the thing you scanned in its inventory (I don't know where that failure lies in the pipeline). They also just pop up other random errors.

For every single instance of the aforementioned issues, an employee must come over and override it. They seem at their wits' end.

I was told that one reason things changed is because they saw a huge jump in loss/theft.

Note that none of this has seemed to stop stores from actually investing in the things, which may be the source of confusion. But I assume they still use them because of the same reason everything is shit: They'd rather things be shit than pay people more.

> There's just no sense of "social contract" when interacting with a self-checkout. It's much easier to rationalize theft as merely striking back at a large, faceless corporation when you're interacting with a machine.

I wonder how much this rationalization is influenced by the growing public belief that corporations themselves have broken the social contract / have not bound themselves by any kind of social contract for a long time now

The problem with something like AmazonGo is that people don't just like being tracked by CCTV. Making it more obvious will drive people away. To say nothing of people not trusting it to accurately ring up their purchases.

I agree, I usually buy single bigger bag worth of stuff at one time. So self-checkout monitored by one person is most of time option that feels speediest. As there really isn't line. Not that when I walk past normal tills they are too many people there.

The other chain here does lot worse with both checkout and tills. Somehow always having lines...

It's not just expertise, but division of labor: while you unload the cart another person can be scanning in parallel. Plus checkout lines are optimized to make scanning fast - unlike most self-checkouts. If I have more than a handful of items I prefer the speed of a regular checkout.

The M&S tills are funny. I've identified what the issue with them at my store is: the scanner doesn't beep when it sees an item, it beeps when it can no longer see an item. I'm pretty sure someone configured the scanners wrong so that it's set to trailing edge rather than leading edge.

Waitrose do have a weighing device, but it's calibrated to have a very generous tolerance.

They trust their customers (or trust their profit margins!) enough to have it calibrated at such.

The result is a very pleasant experience compared to Sainsbury's where it feels like you're mistrusted. Just re-adjusting your bags seems to need a staff member to come over and fix the inevitable "discrepancy".

They have stores in the nice parts of china that you badge in with your wechat login, grab stuff, and rfid readers read the tagged stuff you took and charge you for it as you leave. Zero staff required aside from stocking.

Amazon has similar, but staffed, stores like this in the US.

So it is possible to do seamlessly-ish, we just aren't there yet in terms of adoption.

Uniqlo has by far the best self checkout implementation I've used. My first experience with it, I was so suspicious that it was going to mess something up because I'm used to poor self checkout experiences, but now I'm over that and wish self checkout was implemented this well everywhere else.