Self-checkout has been a thing in retail for something like 25 years.
I remember a local grocery store installing a SCOT-labelled terminal in the late 90s (can't track down the make/model) that was remarkably high-tech for the time with machine vision to track movement of items from cart to scanner to bagging area in addition to irregular movements that might constitute
shrinkage. The workflow was glacial by modern standards with the user having to wait for the system to seemingly
step through events and exceptions that triggered lockdowns were all too common, but if you weren't buying much and the express lanes were queuing up it was a convenient option; a fringe benefit was it also felt like we were on our way to the future than a later
IBM commercial predicted
(and is now sort of here).
But in recent years - seemingly ramping up with the pandemic - self-checkout has transitioned from
an option to
the option at megalomarts across the country as there are often no cashiers available outside of customer service. The most apparent cause is the rise of pickup orders - staff that would have once been checking out in-store customers are now fulfilling orders for internet customers.
So now in-store customers are being funneled to self-checkout as the only real means of making that purchase. And while modern self-serve POS terminals are a world away from the SCOT terminal of decades past they've still got deficiencies that make the self-checkout experience unpleasant:
- At a fundamental level the physical layout is usually quite bad
- Most stands I've seen are planar - infeed, scanner, outfeed are on the same plane - making handling difficult
- The bagging arrangement is inexplicably worse than actual cashier stands
- Retailers are packing more self-service checkstands per square foot than manned checkstands
- Once you've scanned and bagged everything you have to then reload the cart
- The pace is agonizingly slow
- Scanners are sometimes artificially throttled
- Item lookup is absolutely agonizingly slow
- Some stations will go into lockdown should you dare not to place scanned items into the (strain gauge-weighed) bagging area
- The UI/workflow is trash
- Touchscreen hardware is almost always garbage, requiring more pressure than is reasonable
- The UI is bafflingly slow
- Exceptions requiring employee intervention are all too frequent
- Scan one thing too many? Employee intervention required.
- Lookup failed because of crummy UI? Employee intervention required.
- Violated some black box rule because of machine vision, too many scans that didn't make, trying and failing to do something obvious with the UI, got unlucky and the system decided it was N events and the employee needed to be handed a task? Employee intervention required.
I've generally made my peace with this new reality - any place that does grocery has generally removed the throttling and strain gauge checks.
But the growing trend of
receipt checks is bothersome. I've spent considerably longer going through self-checkout than an employee checkout. All under the watchful eye of the employees minding clusters of self-checkout lanes and arrays of camera
per checkstand no doubt capable of surprisingly capable machine vision. The transaction completed and ownership was exchanged;
the funds are the merchants, the goods are mine. And
then someone wants to stop me to ensure nothing is in arrears? This isn't a
membership place like Costco or Sam's where the receipt check is part of the overarching membership agreement. I am simply not always feeling sufficiently charitable to
indulge corporate paranoia.
I'm well aware of
shopkeeper's privilege and the Texas statute on the matter is
refreshingly brief. It's a tough argument to make that refusal to cooperate with a post-transaction receipt check constitutes reasonable suspicion of theft. And retailers walk a
very fine line attempting to detain someone - even for the investigatory purposes within the statute - that doesn't wish to cooperate. Sure they can file a criminal complaint, threaten or initiate a civil suit, place your likeness on a wall of shame, issue a trespass notice, trash your name on social media ... all of which will likely prove futile and/or troublesome.
And yes I'm well aware of the escalating shoplifting problem. Making the self-checkout experience less sh_tty
(i.e. addressing the pain points I enumerated above) would go a long ways towards reducing shrinkage
(from self-checkout; suspect that slipping merch under articles of clothing or walking a shopping cart out the exit is the bulk if it).
Longer-term, eliminating the self-checkout altogether would broadly improve the customer experience altogether. The IBM vision I linked above is probably impractical - individual RFID tags on every item in the store is likely impractical at best. The Amazon Go process is likely too expensive and ultimately too rigid ... for now. I gather many a European grocer has perfected the process with a handheld scanner that you scan merch with as you shop; when done walk to the front of the store, pay, and
then a cursory receipt check
(I'd much prefer this approach over the preferred intrusive phone app approach that American retailers are leaning on).
