Nobody likes self-checkout. Here’s why it’s everywhere

On Jul 10, 2022

If you’ve encountered these irritating alerts at the self-checkout machine, you’re not alone.

“We’re in 2022. One would expect the self-checkout experience to be flawless. We’re not there at all,” said Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has researched self-checkout.

Customers aren’t the only ones frustrated with the self-checkout experience. Stores have challenges with it, too.

Self-checkout is everywhere, despite its issues.

The machines are expensive to install, often break down and can lead to customers purchasing fewer items. Stores also incur higher losses and more shoplifting at self-checkouts than at traditional checkout lanes with human cashiers.

Despite the headaches, self-checkout is growing.

In 2020, 29% of transactions at food retailers were processed through self-checkout, up from 23% the year prior, according to the latest data from food industry association FMI.

This raises the question: why is this often problematic, unloved technology taking over retail?

Making customers do the work

The introduction of self-checkout machines in 1986 was part of a long history of stores transferring work from paid employees to unpaid customers, a practice that dates all the way back to Piggly Wiggly — the first self-service supermarket — in the early 1900s.

Instead of clerks behind a counter gathering products for customers, Piggly Wiggly allowed shoppers to roam the aisles, pick items off the shelves and pay at the register. In exchange for doing more work, the model promised lower prices.

Shoppers at Piggly Wiggly, the first self-service supermarket, in 1918.

Self-checkout, however, was designed primarily to lower stores’ labor expenses. The system reduced cashier costs by as much as 66%, according to a 1988 article in the Miami Herald.

The first modern self-checkout system, which was patented by Florida company CheckRobot and installed at several Kroger stores, would be almost unrecognizable to shoppers today.

Customers scanned their items and put them on a conveyor belt. An employee at the other end of the belt bagged the groceries. Customers then took them to a central cashier area to pay.

The technology was heralded as a “revolution in the supermarket.” Shoppers “turn into their own grocery clerks as automated checkout machines shorten those long lines of carts and reduce markets’ personnel costs,” the Los Angeles Times said in 1987 review.

But self-checkout did not revolutionize the grocery store. Many customers balked at having to do more work in exchange for benefits that weren’t entirely clear.

It took a decade for Walmart (WMT) to test self checkout. Only in the early 2000s did the trend pick up more widely at supermarkets, which were looking to cut costs during the 2001 recession and faced stiff competition from emergent superstores and warehouse clubs.

Walmart first tested self-checkout in the late 1990s.

“The rationale was economics based, and not focused on the customer,” Charlebois said. “From the get go, customers detested them.”

A 2003 Nielsen survey found that 52% of shoppers considered self checkout lanes to be “okay,” while 16% said they were “frustrating.” Thirty-two percent of shoppers called them “great.”

The mixed response led some grocery chains, including Costco (COST), Albertsons and others, to pull out the self-checkout…

Nobody likes self-checkout. Here’s why it’s everywhere

Making customers do the work

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