Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment

Here in Switzerland I scan my loyalty card at the entrance, grab a handheld self-scanner, scan items as I put them in my cart, scan out at the self-checkout area, finalize and pay at a self-checkout till.

Very convenient. There are random checks by the staff, one out of 20 times maybe.

I see a lot of comments that disagree with the article. Where I live in the US, the only grocery store near me has four self-checkout machines and only one other cashier on duty. This results in lines through the entire length of the store at all hours. People with $200 worth of groceries are checking themselves out and taking at least 20 minutes to complete the process. The people who have 12 items or less have to wait for a long time to leave the store.

I’m all for self-checkout if it is limited to 12 items or less because it is significantly slower to scan and bag groceries yourself than to have two people who are trained at this.

The process is so slow that we drive an additional 15 minutes away just to avoid that grocery store.

There's a noticeable difference between self-checkout stations, for example:

The stations at my local Harris teeter are unable to handle the user quickly scanning+placing products in the bagging area. I imagine this has to do with how the software translates changes in the bagging-area weight to a count of items. When this happens you have to wait around for the system to decide you aren't, in-fact, stealing.

These same stations also prevent further item scanning once an age restricted item (e.g. alcohol) is scanned, forcing you the wait around for the attendant before you can continue with your items.

Contrasted to the self-checkout stations at my local food-lion, which have none of these issues, the lack of UX is frustrating.

To top off with some non-content: You'd really think more people would have learned how to reliably scan barcodes after observing others do it hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

Self-checkout literally always works for me. Items that require an ID, requires an associate to confirm, but they're always there to help me. The worst thing about self check out is when there's not enough machines!

I disagree. I have had almost no issues with self-checkout, and I use it every week when buying lots of groceries. I think I only had an issue once or twice when the item I was trying to buy wasn't in the system.

Are the machines used in the US in some way different/worse than the ones used in Europe? Most of my local supermarkets are basically all self-checkout these days (generally smallish urban supermarkets with a bank of 5-10 self-checkouts plus some closed human-operated one); there's usually someone there to fix problems and authorise alcohol, and usually _one_ open human operated checkout.

And it's generally _fine_. I remember a lot of problems when they started showing up 20 years ago, but it's distant-memory stuff at this point. Bigger supermarkets also tend to have self-scan things that you bring around the aisles with you for big shops.

(One fun exception: a few years back all the grapefruits on offer were unusually small, I think due to adverse weather conditions in Spain. If you tried to buy grapefruits, the machine would become concerned that the grapefruits you'd put in your bag weren't as heavy as it expected, and required an employee to reassure it. There are presumably acceptable weight ranges for fruit, and the problem grapefruits just fell outside it...)

My beef with self-checkout tills is that I don't use carrier bags, preferring to put my goods in my backpack. The self-checkout tills won't accept a backpack in the packing area; too heavy, I suppose.

Joining in the mix here. I literally take such great pains to avoid having to use anything OTHER than self-checkout. They are a god-send to mankind.

It depends. Self checkout works wonderfully on stores like Walmart and Target. 0 issues.

However in stores like Fry's/Kroger/Albertsons, it effectively treats me like a thief.

The test to me is M&S on Waterloo Station. At 6pm it seems the world is in this slightly claustrophobic but big enough supermarket. There is one queue (as there should be) and it is a steady walk. At the end are a big array of self service tills, always several to spare, and several staff guiding people. Something that feels like it should be a nightmare is actually a good experience.

I was standing at a Home Depot self-checkout, looking all over for an employee to help me with an item, finding nobody. The guy next to me was waiting too and I asked him "does anyone work here any more?"

He said "I guess we do."

I wonder how they're going to get me to stock shelves and clean the restroom.

I just don't like ringing up and bagging my own groceries. I'll pay extra for someone else to do it just please stop making me use the self check out.

I never have a problem with self checkout here in the UK, mainly using Tesco for grocery shopping. It just works, and I appreciate the convenience.

I've recently started using their service where you scan items with a portable scanner as you go around the shop, and bag them immediately. Checkout is even quicker because everything is already in my bags, and I can see a running total of how much I'm spending. Again, it just works.

What doesn't work is product location discovery. I get that they want me to wander around looking for the coffee or whatever that theyve relocated yet again, because they think I'll make more impulse purchases, but it still frustrates me.

I'm going to disagree and say that self-checkout has been good, and I only see the systems improving at stores I frequent and more stores are adding it every day. I'd call that a success.

> You know how this process actually goes by now: You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks bleat and flash when you fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning those items is sometimes a crapshoot—wave a barcode too vigorously in front of an uncooperative machine, and suddenly you’ve scanned it two or three times. Then you need to locate the usually lone employee charged with supervising all of the finicky kiosks, who will radiate exasperation at you while scanning her ID badge and tapping the kiosk’s touch screen from pure muscle memory. If you want to buy something that even might carry some kind of arbitrary purchase restriction—not just obvious things such as alcohol, but also products as seemingly innocuous as a generic antihistamine—well, maybe don’t do that.

Sounds like most of those issues are self-inflicted by cheaping out on all the hardware. Reliable scales, scanners, etc. aren't hard to figure out, if you bother paying enough for it.

In the half-decade or we've had self-checkouts in Austria, they've been mostly reliable – I've only ever had real trouble in the first six months of their deployment (teething issues), and in the first half of 2023, when producers were shrinkflating their packagings so often that the inventory databases couldn't keep up and scales were regularly expecting the wrong values. That seems to have quieted down again too, thankfully.

Here in Denmark, I use the “Scan & Go” feature whenever available. I use my own bag, scan items using my phone before dropping them into the bag, and use Apple Pay to finalise the whole transaction. A QR code is displayed on my phone allowing me to open the gate at the self-checkout line.

I can be in and out of the shop within a minute or 2-3, never needing to talk to a human.

The only disadvantage is that I can’t get my bottle deposits paid out using the app; I have to go to the till for that.

I would say my worst experience with self checkout was at ikea. During a busy time of year, we visited ikea and picked up about $1000 worth of stuff. As you know, $1000 can net you a lot at ikea - so we probably had at least 50-60 items.

We would have been happy to wait in line for a traditional cashier but there were only self checkout lanes. And long lines for those too! We finally get to the front of the line, dutifully scan each item. Of course it’s impossible to track what’s scanned already since the area to place items is no larger than the one at the supermarket. Fat chance putting a shelf on that tiny area.

Anyway, the system decides that due to our purchase volume, we were selected for a “random rescan”. So we wait for someone to come over and it picks three items for the person to scan. Of course they screw it up, and the system now declares the entire order needs to be started from scratch.

How exactly did anyone save time or effort in this case? What a nightmare.

Seems true in America. I rarely choose self checkout, for the reasons listed.

However I spent 3 years in London and self checkout dominates. The Sainsburys by my house had ~40 self checkout kiosks and only about 6 regular checkout lanes. I only used the checkout lane one time in multiple years (same at Waitrose and Tesco).

There are a few things that made it better:

1) Produce in these stores is rarely sold by weight. It’s more common to get produce in packaged quantities with a bar code. Much easier to scan. And generally the tech seems to just work, it rarely complained that I had missed an item when I hadn’t.

2) Fewer item purchase restrictions. Even alcohol was allowed at self checkout but you did have to flag someone down for that.

3) People do smaller shopping trips. Each person at an urban market in London is likely buying a basket of goods, not a whole cart. That makes the entire process much more streamlined and space efficient.

I’ve found it depends on the store and what you’re trying to do. Larger higher traffic grocery stores have their weight sensors calibrated much more finely. At kroger for example i’m always frustrated i forget to register my bag and need to empty it and start again. At sprouts things mostly “just work”, I rarely have issues.

Another annoyance: after moving to California i’m fairly frustrated by the “No Alcohol in Self Checkout” rule. Buying a sandwich and a single bottle of wine? Good luck standing in line behind someone with a cart full of produce! Don’t really see what this law does except cause frustration. In states where it’s allowed you need an attendant to verify ID anyway, same as a regular line. Another stupid CA rule.

Most of the issues stems from corporations trying to save a buck. If you want to see how it should work go to a Market Basket. When you pull into the parking lot, the first thing you will notice is the place is packed. Then you think, wow the lines are going to be long and you notice people's carts are packed full. Now that your cart is full its your time for the check out line. In two minutes your in the parking going wow that was fast. Most Market Baskets have 18 cash registers each one is open with a bagger and two managers standing watching and waiting for any issues. Then your thinking there are at least 38 people at the registers

Here in the Albert Heijn in the Netherlands, headquarters must love it. In Groningen I sometimes see 8 students checking out at the same time while the store would only have place for 3 to 4 regular check outs. It seems to me like much higher parallelization.

At least in Finland, self-checkout works pretty well. Stores of all sizes basically have them, at least in Helsinki. If there's over four machines, there's almost always a person standing by just to help the customers with any issues. In the larger stores, I've often seen two people dedicated to that. If there's just two machines, it's always right next to a traditional checkout with a cashier.

Cashiers have never been the ones tasked with bagging our groceries over here, so I guess it's not that big of a step to just scan and throw it in the bag after that.

It works wonderfully at my US suburb. Have in mind that my county has a culture of law and order with a fully funded police force and educated population.

I cannot stand Walmart asking me if I want a printed receipt and an email receipt or just a printed receipt, as if only-digital isn’t a reasonable possibility, and that unlike other retailers (Home Depot comes to mind), they don’t link your email to your card, so if you click for email, you have to type it in every single time. Whoever managed this didn’t think it through.

> Much of the blame for that can be placed on the systems themselves. During the years I spent processing purchases at big-box and chain retailers in the 2000s, every point-of-sale system I used felt more intuitive and less error-prone than the ones I’m now regularly tasked with navigating as a paying member of the public.

Modern UX for the win!

The amount of touchpoints in the grocery supply chain is staggering: manufacturer -> distributor -> grocery store -> shelves -> cart -> checkout -> bags -> vehicle -> home -> pantry. Online shopping should remove ~4 of those steps, but the shopping experience is still too poor.

It's still shocking to me that people - alive and well today! - used to have:

* full service gas stations

* live in maids

* a mailman, milkman, iceman, and paperboy they knew the names (and birthdays!) of

Call it false nostalgia or what you will, but we lost the plot somehow on paying for dignity-as-a-service.

Sincerely, the "everything-is-worse" department

"Loyalty Card" is a euphemism for a self-imposed privacy violation device. They are ubiquitous for the same reason as Self-Checkout. People are eagerly willing to surrender there privacy in order to save a few cents or gain convenience. ..

This seems crazy to me. I have one of these issues maybe once every 50 times I use a self checkout. And I think could tolerate much more of that before I consider a cashier interaction a better experience.

Funny, I use whenever possible this "failed experiment" and it works fine for me

Don't blame other for machines that suck and/or your inability to follow instructions I guess

Article is behind a paywall, so apologies for commenting on the title alone.

Even if self-checkout as it is implemented today doesn't work [1], that's not a reason to declare it a failed experiment. It's a reason to improve the technology. The only thing stopping us from having universal self-checkout is lack of quality in the hardware and software.

There is a separate conversation about what impact self-checkout has on jobs and food prices. It's an empirical question what the ratio of automated to human checkout should be in order to maximize throughput. Maximizing throughput means lower food prices for everyone. However, if it happens that maximizing throughput means letting go of tens of thousands of human workers, then that also has an impact on the economy. This is why we should have a robust social safety net in wealthy societies.

[1] I don't actually think this is the case. I use self-checkout multiple times per week at the grocery store, and I almost never have an issue. Maybe 1 in 10 visits I'll need assistance from staff, which takes less than a minute.

Self-Checkouts have been here in the UK for years and work pretty well now.

What an idiot. I love self-checkout.

By principle I tend to avoid them, as they are yet another reason to hire less people.

Only for the boomers who still struggle with touchscreens and digital instructions and want a poor person doing the checkout for them. I have literally never seen someone younger than 50 have an issue with self checkout.