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British supermarket chain Booths is removing almost all self-service checkouts in stores in response to customer feedback.
Booths, an upscale grocery chain that has most of its 28 stores in the north of England, is bucking the self-checkout trend. The UK’s two largest grocery chains, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, have installed thousands of self-checkouts while reducing the number of staffed checkouts.
Booths managing director Nigel Murray told the BBC: “We like talking to people and we’re really proud that we’re largely moving to a place where our customers are served by people, not artificial intelligence, but from us.” “I strive for actual intelligence.”
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British grocery chain Booths is removing almost all self-checkouts to improve customer service. (Julia Gomina via iStock / iStock)
Murray told the outlet that customers found Booth’s self-scanning machines slow and unreliable, as well as impersonal.
“We’re not big fans of self-checkouts,” Murray added in a comment to The Grocer, a U.K.-based trade publication. “We pride ourselves on our excellent customer service, and you can’t do that with a robot.”
He told The Grocer that Booths first installed self-checkouts in its stores six years ago to increase efficiency and control labor costs, but that customers didn’t like having to wait for an employee to validate their ID when shopping Alcohol and that there were challenges renting food from the kiosks.
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Walmart recently removed some of its self-checkout lanes from stores in New Mexico as the company experiments with different checkout formats amid rising retail thefts. (Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images / Getty Images)
While Booths is abolishing most of its self-service checkouts, it is keeping them at two of its busiest branches in the Lake District, which can be inundated with tourists in the summer months.
Booths’ move away from self-checkout lanes comes as major U.S. retailers such as Walmart and Wegmans are reevaluating their use of the kiosks.
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According to Insider, Walmart recently removed self-checkout lanes at several stores in Albuquerque, New Mexico, due to losses from theft and testing of employee-assisted self-checkout kiosks.
Wegmans told The New York Times that it had withdrawn a popular self-checkout app because “the losses we are experiencing prevent us from continuing to make it available in its current state.”
Portal contributed to this report.