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Self-checkout may be preferred by shoppers for a variety of reasons. For starters, it feels like the way to go if you only need a handful of items and don’t feel like waiting in a cashier’s line. Or if you’re late for school drop-off and haven’t even brushed your teeth, making interacting with an actual human a hard sell.
But somehow, it always seems like whenever you don’t have the energy to change out of your pajama pants, the self-checkout machine you’re on goes completely off the rails, leaving you a victim of the very technology that was supposed to save you from inconvenience. An item needs clearance from an employee, and that employee is busy helping six other shoppers. There’s an unscanned item in the bagging area. And all the while, your 8 a.m. ponytail-and-morning-face image reflecting back at you from the monitor is, well, a little scary.
Mortification aside, there are a lot of issues with self-checkout. For companies, a major one is “shrink,” or business losses due to intentional and unintentional theft. There are also machines that break frequently, and slow lanes because more employees are needed to assist customers. After years of self-checkout appearing in more and more stores now, many are getting rid of it altogether, or adapting the way it’s used.
Here’s a short list:
- Dollar General: The retailer, which had moved to exclusive self-checkout, is the latest store to reverse course on the technology. “We had started to rely too much this year on self-checkout in our stores,” Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said Thursday on an earnings call. “We should be using self-checkout as a secondary checkout vehicle, not a primary.”
- Walmart: Earlier this year, Walmart started pulling back on the number of self-checkout stations it has in New Mexico stores.
- ShopRite: The supermarket chain cut back on the number of self-checkout stations at a store in Delaware, following complaints from customers.
- Booths: And the reversal in self-checkout isn’t just happening in the U.S. British supermarket chain Booths said it’s removing self-checkout stations in all but 2 of its 28 stores.
- Five Below: The discount retailer isn’t getting rid of self-checkout stations, but instead is increasing the number of staffed cash registers in new locations.
- Target: The national chain is no longer allowing customers with carts full of items to use self-checkout. The machines will be only for customers buying 10 items or less.
- Costco: The popular bulk retailer is adding more employees to help with self-checkout lanes, but not only because of the frustrations we’ve felt over errors. It’s primarily to curb nonmembers from sneaking in and using membership cards that don’t belong to them.
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