[xnorswap]

This article didn't ring true at all given all the supermarkets near me have been expanding their self-service offerings while reducing their staffed tills.

Even my local Waitrose now only has 1 or 2 staffed tills.

Then when I got to the examples I realised the article is entirely US focussed. Is there a cultural difference to explain why self-service would be more of a failure in the US?

[kbelder]

I haven't seen any decrease of their usage in the US, only a steady increase. I think the article is wrong, or my region is unusual. And my region is not unusual.

[pavon]

Yeah, in the last few years I have not seen any stores in my area (in the US) decrease the number of self-checkout lanes, while several have increased the self-checkout lanes and/or decreased the number of cashiers working. This is despite increasing anti-theft measures in other ways like locking up more items in cabinets. Perhaps this article is based on interviewing management about upcoming changes that have not occurred yet, but otherwise it doesn't match my experiences.

[tracerbulletx]

It's not remotely true in the US either. This is probably some kind of hit piece.

[eesmith]

Almost entirely US focused. There's one UK mention: "In the UK, supermarket chain Booths has also cut down on the number of self-service kiosks in its stores, as customers say they're slow and unreliable." linking to https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-67373472

That says "Booths is believed to be the first UK supermarket to move away from using self-service tills, which have become increasingly common in recent years." so yeah, hardly an indication of a widespread UK trend.

[bluGill]

Some self checkouts are slow and unreliable. However that is a bug in those particular units. Some of them are just as fast and reliable as what the clerks get - plus I'm never in line behind someone else who is slow. I've had enough waiting for someone who can't figure out which lottery ticket they want to lose their money on. I've had enough waiting on someone else who picks an item that is missing a tag. I have places to be, and lines are not serving me.

[tracerbulletx]

Every time I'm speed running a self checkout I day dream about a world where the price of my groceries is modified significantly lower based on my leader board rank for that day, and that the slow person in front of me is being penalized for being outside the top 100.

[gertrunde]

Booths, which has 27 shops...

[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booths]

[eesmith]

The link I gave to https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-67373472 says "All but two of the 28 stores run by the company, which trades in northern England, will have staffed checkouts."

That article is dated 10 November 2023, while the relevant Wikipedia text was changed on 24 February 2021‎.

[gertrunde]

I didn't mean to give the impression that I disagreed with your comment - merely pointing out that they are a particularly small supermarket chain.

[eesmith]

I was more pointing out that the article contained that information already, and was more accurate, so didn't think that the Wikipedia link added anything.

[cassianoleal]

I think it added the information to the thread. I live in the UK and had never heard of Booths despite having travelled around. At first, I thought the article was wrong and meant the Boots drugstore chain instead. Knowing that it's a local, small chain would have helped clarify it.

And yes, reading the article would do that as well but I usually read the comments first before I decide if I want to waste time on the actual thing.

[nxobject]

Which is interesting, since it’s the BBC…

[eesmith]

... in the "International business" section.

[nxobject]

Touché!

[saxonww]

It may be that grocery shopping in parts of the US is different than what you're accustomed to. At least where I live, it's common to shop for a week's worth of groceries (or more), vs. shopping more often. This means that the checkout process is handling a larger amount of items per customer on average.

As to why it's unpopular, I think that's pretty simple.

The classic checkout system at grocery and home goods stores in the US involved a checkout aisle with a conveyor belt, a cashier scanning items and processing payment, and a bagger bagging up items and placing them back in your cart. Your responsibility was putting all your stuff on the conveyor belt and then paying. Cashiers and baggers were dedicated staff trained for the job, and the result was that you got through checkout quickly.

Now, replace this with a cluster of small kiosks, with one person 'supervising' but the rest of the process the responsibility of the customer. The customer has to do all the work, with less space to do it, and they aren't trained to do it well. At any time, maybe 1/3 of the kiosks are not working for some reason. A variety of scenarios cause working kiosks to stop processing and wait for supervisory input.

It's no wonder people get frustrated by self-checkout. The key is to think about it as a customer, who has seen an optimal process that was easy for them get replaced with one where they have to do a lot of work. Oh, and for a variety of reasons their grocery bill has also gone up, so it's not obvious that they've saved any money due to this change either.

I like self-checkout as a replacement for the old 10-items-or-less express aisles. If I want to buy one or two things, I like not having to wait behind someone with a full cart. But when you replace everything with self-checkout, those full carts end up taking even longer to process; for my weekly grocery run I go to the store that still has cashiers and baggers, so I can get in and out more quickly.

[happytoexplain]

I haven't read the whole article, but it seems to be describing everything I've experienced first-hand.

My local grocery store has had them for a few years. At first they were great, but slowly things got bad. Whatever they did, the machines are now totally unreliable. They didn't monitor the weight of your groceries before, and now they do, and they complain multiple times per trip that the weight isn't right. They also require you to put all your bags in the bagging area first and hit a button to weigh them, but that fails 100% of the time if you put more than three bags in for some reason. It also randomly doesn't have the thing you scanned in its inventory (I don't know where that failure lies in the pipeline). They also just pop up other random errors.

For every single instance of the aforementioned issues, an employee must come over and override it. They seem at their wits' end.

I was told that one reason things changed is because they saw a huge jump in loss/theft.

Note that none of this has seemed to stop stores from actually investing in the things, which may be the source of confusion. But I assume they still use them because of the same reason everything is shit: They'd rather things be shit than pay people more.