Self-checkout registers falling short

Quote:

Retailers appear to be facing a self-checkout reckoning Self-checkout may not be the money-saving "revolution" some retailers were hoping for. More than 30 years after the introduction of self-checkout and its promises of labor-cost savings, the tech has become ubiquitous in stores across the US. Now, retailers including Costco, Walmart, and Kroger are rethinking some of their self-checkout strategies. Some are finding they still need employees to combat theft, assist with purchases, review IDs, and check receipts.

Faulty technology that still requires a lot of manpower and supervision to make work, massive opportunity for theft, and a near universal hatred by consumers. What's not to love?


https://www.businessinsider.com/walm...r%20purchases.

Quote:

Although self-checkout counters eliminated some of the tasks of traditional cashiers, they still needed to be staffed and created a need for higher wage IT jobs, he said. Self-checkout, Andrews added, “delivers none of what it promises.” In the biggest headache for store owners, self-checkout leads to more losses due to error or theft than traditional cashiers. “If you had a retail store where 50% of transactions were through self checkout, losses would be 77% higher” than average, according to Adrian Beck, an emeritus professor at the University of Leicester in the UK who studies retail losses. Customers make honest errors as well as intentionally steal at self-checkout machines. Some products have multiple barcodes or barcodes that don’t scan properly. Produce, including fruit and meat, typically needs to be weighed and manually entered into the system using a code. Customers may type in the wrong code by accident. Other times shoppers won’t hear the “beep” confirming an item has been scanned properly.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/09/busin...ail/index.html

Certainly everyone who has encountered these things have run into the conflict of making them hard to steal from while also easy to use. The weighted bagging area is meant to confirm that everything that goes into a bag is what was scanned at the register. If the scales are too sensitive, they are constantly throwing errors that require a human employee to unlock. If not sensitive enough, they are easy to trick for thieves. Any time I go to the local grocery store while it's even a bit busy, it's common to see like half the self-checkout registers blinking for attention while the exasperated human employee goes register to register clearing the errors (without so much as a cursory check for theft) and trying to deal with annoyed customers who don't know what they did wrong.

ETA: I can confirm what the story claims about Costco. Recently they've had an employee stationed at the self-checkout line checking membership cards and asking for photo ID to make sure people weren't using the self-checkout to share memberships. 6 self checkout registers that have 2 employees constantly supervising it, one to check IDs and the other supervise, clear errors, and deal with any other problems that arise from assuming your customers will know how to use these properly. Seems like an awful lot of manpower for 6 registers that move very slowly compared to the traditional scheme.

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