Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

OPINION:

Like it or not, retail is embracing self-checkout, as are shoppers

At a Sprouts supermarket while waiting in line for a cashier, I observe an employee supervising a bank of self-service scanning machines. She stands at attention like a butler, with cloth and spray bottle in hand.

A customer scans and bags his own groceries, pays with a card and walks away silently. The employee then sprays and wipes the machine before retreating to allow another shopper to check out.

Over several transactions in five minutes, no one greets her and she speaks to no one.

This might strike one observer as dignified and efficient, and another as unnerving; and they could both be right.

As long as I have the option, I will prefer the human worker to a machine. Yet I am fully aware I take this stand on melting polar ice.

Whatever customers think about it, retailers are moving toward touch-free payment technology with no human worker involved. Amazon opened its first cashier-less retail store in 2018. Walmart is testing all-self-checkout stores in Texas and in Canada, with “hosts” taking the place of cashiers.

When some chain stores backed off from self-checkout technology early in the century, I felt relief; but the machines have developed since, and shoppers have warmed up to them. Self-checkout kiosks shipped in record numbers worldwide during 2020.

In trade publications, industry executives point to surveys showing majorities of consumers enjoy self-checkout options, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The outstanding problems are seen as how to make processes quicker and easier, prevent theft and encourage more customers to use the technology.

My local Walmart has been expanding self-checkout machines since 2016. Even Costco, which famously pulled away from self-checkout in 2013, has started reintroducing them. Like it or not, this is the direction retailers are taking.

Kiosks are also on their way out — and so is cash. Retailers such as 7-11, Kroger, Sam’s Club and others have been experimenting with app-based ways for customers to pay at least as far back as 2018. In an interview for Kiosk Marketplace, AI executive Ariel Shemesh anticipates more scan-and-go technologies, “smart carts” and cameras in the future.

The labor involved in scanning items, bagging them and completing payment is being transferred away from paid employees to the customers themselves. It is worth noting what that displaces, such as skill, experience and integrity in an ensemble of people, like the folks at my community grocery store.

But in the world of business, this does not appear to be the “unique consumer experience” executives have in mind.

Writing in Forbes, Raydiant CEO Bobby Marhamat says self-checkout technology presents opportunities to “connect with shoppers” by upselling, advertising “exclusive” offers and “communicating brand messaging” (which sounds suspiciously like more advertising).

Those of us reluctant to embrace automation, who do not find a marketplace of scanners, cameras and drones attractive, will be promised enhanced convenience and cleanliness. We will be assured employees, albeit fewer of them, will be more readily available to help us elsewhere. Eventually there will be no choice.

On Friday night, a Target employee broke my years-long streak of self-checkout refusal — referred to within the industry as “friction” — through sheer subterfuge.

When the young woman invited me to step out of line and use a kiosk, I explained politely that I don’t prefer them and was happy where I was. She said, “I’ll check you out.”

After I left the line and followed her, she scanned my first item, pointed to where I would insert my card, and then walked away and left me to it.

This was rude, but I had to laugh. Human ingenuity had won again.

Algernon D’Ammassa is a columnist for the Las Cruces (N.M.) Sun-News.