Whitney Curtis/AP Images for Fresh Thyme Market
An employee assists a customer at the self-checkout lane during the grand opening of Fresh Thyme Market at City Foundry STL, November 10, 2021, in St. Louis, Missouri.
Marc Perrone stood in the line at his grocery store recently behind a shopper with a large order. A worker approached him and suggested he use self-checkout. Perrone said he’d wait for the cashier. The worker insisted, but he stayed with the cashier and let the woman behind him go ahead and use the machine. “I got out of there before she did,” says Perrone, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.
Somewhere at the intersection of relentless corporate cost-cutting and traditional consumer preferences sits the current moment in retail automation: When a critical mass of customers express strong preferences for interactions with human workers, some companies take those inputs seriously. However, in many instances eliminating self-checkout is less about pleasing customers and more about theft.
In Great Britain, Booths, an upscale family-owned supermarket chain serving northern England, announced last week that it planned to ditch its self-checkout stations in most of its stores and reinstate human cashiers. Management kept only two self-checkout machines across its 27 stores to handle transactions in locations that see tourist crowds. Booths executives chalked the decision up to customer feedback: They weighed in about lost cashier jobs, getting help when needed, or realizations that shoplifting by people who’ve learned to outwit the machines also led to higher prices.
On these shores, Walmart, Costco, and others have brought back cashiers at some locations for similar reasons. Amazon, the ubiquitous provider of everything for everybody, has had its own setbacks with Amazon Go, its cashless, cashier-less answer to convenience stores, shuttering nine locations across New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. “We’re continuously refining our store formats to find the ones that will resonate with customers,” a company spokesperson said. One problem might be the vibe: Fast Company described one New York store as “a bodega crossed with a morgue, or perhaps a vending machine extrapolated into concrete.”
Gregarious people don’t mind shuttling items onto a conveyor belt, chatting about the weather, or griping that the fresh-baked chocolate muffins are sold out again. The cashier-less experience also has distinct psychological consequences, as a 2022 Saturday Night Live skit illustrated through one skit featuring Black customers all convinced that the store was a shoplifting “trap.”
Self-checkout delivers for pick-up-and-go shoppers easily frustrated by human interactions. But machines can be as annoying as people. Scan the item improperly and some human will be with you shortly. Fluency in one store’s self-checkout regime doesn’t necessarily translate to another store’s U-Scan. How about those vegetables that require weighing? And U-Scan can’t card your alcohol purchase.
In addition to whittling down an entire category of blue-collar jobs, what many consumers don’t understand is that under a self-checkout paradigm, they are now unpaid “workers” and less-skilled ones at that. This free consumer labor has set companies strategizing to find new ways to further cut labor costs by maximizing the U-Scan concept—all of which butts up against growing human suspicion and discomfort with automated systems and artificial intelligence.
Worse still, “workers” frustrated by high prices respond by beating the self-checkout system. “The problem is it’s slower,” Perrone says. “People feel like why should I do the work; you’re supposed to supply the people that help us check out—and in some people’s rationalization they’re charging me so much for groceries, it’s OK if I slide some.”
In many instances, eliminating self-checkout is less about pleasing customers and more about theft.
Grocery stores that have avoided self-checkouts plug their superior customer service. Market Basket, a family-owned New England supermarket chain beloved by employees and customers for its low prices and superior working conditions, has never offered self-checkout—not even in its newest and largest store, which opened in Concord, New Hampshire, last year. “A human being waiting on a human being” is how its popular CEO Arthur T. Demoulas (the survivor of a family feud over his business model) described his thinking on the checkout experience.
Trader Joe’s has no self-checkouts and a similar philosophy. Vice CEO Jon Basalone says, “We believe in people, and we’re not trying to get rid of our crew members for efficiency sake, or whatever the reasons are [that] people put self-checkout in.”
A Feedback Group 2022 survey found shoppers prefer checkouts staffed by cashiers to self-checkouts, 54 percent to 46 percent. FMI—The Food Industry Association—figures indicate that in 2021, two-thirds of grocery customers used conventional cashier checkout aisles. Only one-third of grocery retail customers used self-checkout, though that’s more than double the number of shoppers that used them in 2018. Retail Dive reported similar percentages; however, the vast majority of people surveyed still wanted a self-check availability, which tracks for people who might only have a couple of items.
Self-checkouts have taken over because of what retail analysts call the “self-checkout paradox.” Promoted as a time-saving device, self-checkouts have nothing to do with customer satisfaction and everything to do with cost-cutting and maximizing profit margins. But not waiting means getting out faster, right? Not exactly. “Cashiers know exactly where that UPC code is on that can or on that bottle of milk or on that loaf of bread or on that frozen food item,” says Perrone. The U-Scan “is clunky,” he adds. “Customers are turning the thing all different directions trying to get it.” And if they ring one item up twice, some human has to deal with that.
But theft is a bigger concern that the absence of cashiers exacerbates. Organized retail theft by groups has been emboldened by lightly staffed stores and police forces occupied with serious violent crimes. A National Retail Association report indicates that most of these thefts involve consumer goods, like paper towels and toilet paper, while about 45 percent of those goods end up in online marketplaces. (Luxury products account for a little more than 10 percent of stolen goods.) Sales of stolen goods “appear to be shifting away from third-party online sellers and toward peer-to-peer websites that facilitate direct engagement among buyers and sellers.”
Individual shoplifters have figured out ways to scan a less expensive item to mask pilfering a more expensive item like a steak (it’s all about the weight). Some people simply slip additional items that they don’t pay for into their bags. Known in the industry as “shrinkage,” theft that chisels away at profit margins is more of a concern than the customer experience. Walmart now issues devices to employees who monitor self-checkouts that keep a running total of purchases at individual self-checkout stations. Trigger this device, and an employee escorts the customer to a register to restart the process. Deploying a whole new staff of workers to guard against theft would tend to indicate that using cashiers instead would have numerous benefits.
Perrone says pleading poverty due to shoplifting won’t work at the bargaining table. “If employers come to me at the table and say, ‘Look, we’re losing money because shoplifting’ and they make it difficult to me to try to negotiate wages for my members because they made a bad management mistake,” Perrone says, “I’m going to argue at the table that they need to remove those machines.”
Despite Bureau of Labor Statistics projections of cashier employment declines of 10 percent over the next decade, government analysts still estimate 577,600 cashier openings each year, on average, over the decade, due to retirements and moves into other jobs.
In the long run, some retailers may expect customer resistance to fade, especially since younger consumers habituated to automation have less of a problem with the machines. Food retailers continue to opt for cashier-less stores, smart carts, and mobile checkout systems. But the cautionary tale about theft pops up there, too. Wegmans discontinued its self-checkout app after shoplifting soared into the stratosphere.
Nevertheless, Perrone senses a shift that is more complex than generational preferences. Some companies won’t change, he says, but more companies may give up on the machines once they connect the dots to dollars. The switch will make for faster transactions and happier customers, and will differentiate them from companies that rely more heavily on the technology. “The implementation of the U-Scan was pretty much negative for everybody that had any interaction with them,” Perrone contends. “What you’ll potentially see is more companies doing that, especially once they start figuring out that it might actually be cheaper to actually get their employees in there.”
