Beep. Beep. Beep.
If everything goes well, this can be the quickest way out of a store: pile up your groceries, swipe your credit card, pack up, move on. The whole thing should be over in a few minutes.
But that’s not always the reality. The machine does not recognize your spaghetti. You clicked on the image of a zucchini on the screen, but there is a cucumber in your shopping cart. And if you buy something like alcohol or medication, you still have to wait for a store employee to come by.
Unknown items in the packaging area.
“There’s always a problem,” said Sandra Abittan as she left a local Tesco supermarket in northwest London on Friday, noting that she often has to wait for help when using a self-checkout.
But she said she still usually chooses them because she finds their lines tend to be shorter.
No warm welcome from machines.
Self-checkouts have been on the rise worldwide for 20 years. Many chains expanded their use during the height of the pandemic, when minimizing human contact was particularly important. But Booths isn’t the only one rethinking the automated revolution: In September, Wal-Mart told Insider that it was cutting branches at a handful of stores, although it didn’t say why.
In 2016, a study of retailers in the United States, Britain and other European countries found that retailers with self-checkouts and apps had a loss rate of about 4 percent, more than double the industry average, with researchers saying that self-checkouts have a loss rate seduced It caused shoppers to behave in ways they normally wouldn’t and made theft less detectable.
Booths, which employs around 3,000 people, said in a statement that its staff’s interaction with customers results in a better experience. “We based this not only on what we believe is right, but also on feedback from our customers,” the company said. “Delighting customers with our warm welcome in the north is part of our DNA.”
Can humans and machines coexist peacefully?
At Tesco in northwest London at lunchtime on Friday, most people seemed to opt for the self-checkout, especially because the queue was actually shorter than those at human-operated cash registers. (One customer said he chose the human option because he bought his items with cash.)
But eliminating self-checkouts entirely, as Booths had announced, would be a “bad idea,” Ms. Abittan said.
She had used self-checkout to avoid queues and everything went smoothly.
“I didn’t have any problems,” she said. “Once.”