The Facebook invite arrived shortly before the holidays and took a minute to make sense: It was a “Self Checkout Employee Holiday Party” at a Meijer store in Grand Rapids.
Get it? Because we’re all “employees” when we’re ringing up our own groceries?
As Christmas approached, the event went moderately viral, and several thousand people indicated an interest in attending — enough that it was picked up by local news outlets, and the store brought in extra staff for the event. A small handful of invitees showed up, but otherwise the hypothetical party failed to materialize.
It is difficult to imagine a better metaphor for the entire self-checkout experience. The party, if it ever started, fizzled long ago. For all but the tiniest grocery hauls, self-checkout is the worst.
Self-scan kiosks started appearing at chain grocery stores in the 1990s and were commonplace by the early 2000s. The mutual appeal to customers and businesses was obvious. Shoppers would love the convenience. Stores could hire fewer cashiers and cut labor costs in a business with notoriously low margins. It would streamline and revolutionize the retail experience.
(Narrator voice): But it didn’t. Everybody reading this has surely used self-checkout lanes or kiosks many times and invariably experienced the same handful of indignities, again and again.
Such as trying to find one that actually works. Or getting the dreaded alert about an “unexpected item in the bagging area.” Or accidentally scanning an item multiple times, then flagging someone down to void an item and, while they’re at it, verify you are old enough to buy cold medicine.
Don’t forget the blinking light informing the lone exasperated employee, and everyone nearby, that you are a moron who cannot perform this allegedly easy task.
In almost every public setting, I will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid interacting with people I don’t know, but for several years I’ve opted to be rung up by a human cashier whenever possible. Why? Here’s a thought: People who are trained on a specific task do a better job than people who are not.
It seems I’m not alone in this preference. In general, major grocery chains continue to expand their use of self-checkouts, but consumer backlash is prompting some retailers to roll back or at least rethink their dependence on the process.
Walmart has removed self-checkout kiosks entirely at some of its stores in New Mexico. Target is experimenting with strict 10-item self-checkout limits. Wegmans, a grocery chain in the northeastern U.S., has eliminated a self-checkout app that allowed customers to scan groceries as they shopped.
Customer dissatisfaction led the British supermarket chain Booths to roll back self-checkout almost entirely, and a Booths cashier told Business Insider last month that workers preferred the human-powered version of the system.
If it meant staying employed, I’d probably like it too. But these days there is something almost refreshing about an automation that seems obvious in theory, but in practice completely fails to optimize the process for either the user or the business.
Even when everything works, the upsides for stores are dubious. The equipment is expensive to install and maintain, and as we all know, they still require staffing. That includes security, since the self-checkout system, which works partly on the honor system, is uniquely susceptible to theft.
A 2023 survey by LendingTree found 15 percent of shoppers have intentionally stolen an item at self-checkout; among Gen. Z, it’s more than 30 percent. A 2016 study in the U.K. suggested stores using self-checkout experienced a 4 percent loss rate, double the average for grocers.
Not all of that loss is intentional. My partner recently rang up some organic bananas as “regular” produce by accident (the horror!) and was subsequently hovered over by an employee who assumed she was trying to scam the store.
And fair enough, the kid was just doing his job. But when that job means supervising every amateur cashier’s clumsy attempts at scanning and bagging, why don’t they save us all some trouble and ring up the groceries themselves?