Theft, errors, inconvenience: US retailers abandon self-checkouts

Dissatisfaction with self-checkouts is growing and stores are starting to abandon the technology after its rapid development over the past few years, reports CNN.

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British supermarket chain Boots said it was closing self-service checkouts in all but two of its 28 stores. In the US, Walmart, Costco, Wegmans and other chains have also revised their self-checkout strategies.

"Our customers have been telling us this for a long time - that the self-service machines we have in our stores can be slow, they can be unreliable and they are decidedly impersonal," Boots managing director Nigel Murray said.

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Self-service machines also frequently misidentified which fruits and vegetables customers were purchasing. Purchasing alcohol also did not go smoothly, as employees had to check the age of customers.

“Some buyers, for example, don’t know how one type of apple differs from another,” Murray said. “It makes all the fuss, and then as soon as you put the alcohol in the basket, someone has to come and check that you are of the right age.”

Problems with self-care

Self-service machines were first introduced in the 1980s to reduce labor costs. They shifted the work of paid employees to unpaid customers.

Self-checkout spread to supermarkets in the early 2000s as stores sought to cut costs, and during the pandemic, many shoppers used self-checkout for the first time to minimize close interaction with employees and other shoppers.

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But now retailers are rethinking self-checkout. They found that self-checkout resulted in higher product losses due to customer errors and intentional shoplifting (known as "shrinking").

One study of retailers in the US, UK and other European countries found that companies with self-checkout and apps had a loss rate of about 4%, more than double the industry average.

Some products have multiple barcodes or barcodes that do not scan properly using self-checkout technology. Products, including fruit and meat, usually need to be weighed and manually entered into the system using a code. Customers may accidentally enter the wrong code. In other cases, shoppers do not hear a beep to confirm that the item has been scanned correctly.

Other shoppers take advantage of lax controls at self-checkout counters and have developed methods of theft. Common tactics include refusing to scan an item, replacing a cheaper item (bananas) with a more expensive one (steak), scanning fake barcodes attached to wrists, or scanning everything correctly and then leaving without paying.

Stores have tried to limit losses by tightening security features at self-checkouts, such as adding weight sensors. But additional anti-theft measures also lead to more troubling “unexpected item in packing area” errors that require employee intervention.

Walmart removed self-checkout machines from some New Mexico stores earlier this year. ShopRite removed them from a store in Delaware after customer complaints. Last year, Wegmans discontinued a mobile app that allowed customers to scan, package and pay for groceries. Costco said it was increasing staffing in self-checkout areas after discovering non-members were sneaking inside to use membership cards that didn't belong to them.

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Costco executives said this year that losses increased "in part, we believe, due to the introduction of self-checkout."

Five Below, a discount toy retailer, said losses were higher at stores with more self-checkout counters. The company plans to increase the number of staffed cash registers in new locations.

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