So I’ve noticed a downward trend at my two local Giant grocery stores. Several years ago they had a few roaming baggers for all the registers. This makes economic sense because their services are not necessarily needed 100% of the time at each checkout station.
However, the recent trend is to just eliminate the baggers entirely. I am trying to get my head around how this is beneficial for the grocery store.
I presume the customer is not supposed to bag the groceries because there isn’t a grocery bag station near the customer area. What happens is that the checkout person rings up a bunch of items until the table area gets full, then he/she turns around and has to then bag them all. Rinse and repeat. The result is that the checkout person spends half their time ringing up groceries and the other half bagging.
Now, to look at this in an economical sense: Since the checkout person is doing two jobs, they have to have more checkout people to process the same number of customers. I would also think that checkout personnel were more expensive than baggers because they have to handle money and master a semi-complicated tool (the register). If this is true, shouldn’t it be cheaper to hire roaming baggers than more checkout personnel?
As often as not, a customer will walk over to the bagging area and bag their own groceries. I do this, as it speeds my departure.
Whether you have baggers or not, there will be periods of time during which a checkout lane has no customers in it; these periods end when a new customer arrives. During these customerless periods, any employees involved in the checkout process are idle. Without baggers, the cashier is idle less often and for shorter durations, but the customer throughput per hour is still the same (unless the line gets so long that customers start shopping at other stores).
So: no baggers, labor cost is lower, gross receipts remains the same.
Most of your point hinges on this assumption, and that makes more sense during down times like 0700-1600 on weekdays. But 1600-2200 M-F and all weekends, these stores are full of people, and there are NEVER empty lines. Checkers are going as fast as they can.
During these busy times it still seems to me that the stores would beneift from baggers.
It only benefits them if customers would walk away because the line is too long. If the customers are willing to stay and spend their money, there’s no profit to be had in getting them out the door faster.
My local Whole Foods has a small lot, and it fills up, so there’s a benefit to getting people out the door, and off their property. People WILL move on if they can’t find a parking space, or if there’s a big line to simply get in the parking lot.
The local grocery chains to me have also been going to one bagger per store to none in the past year, and it has gotten so bad that last night the lines were to the back of the fracking store and I couldn’t even navigate my cart around, I abandoned everything but the baby cereal which I bought at the in store pharmacy.
I’m sure I’m not the only one, fuck em if wasting customer time is worth the salary of one bagger.
What’s wrong with you people? In the UK, customers bag their own groceries. There might be the odd bagger around to help the old dears, but aise from that, you’re on your own. I can’t see the problem.
Heck, nowadays, half the checkouts don’t even have cashiers, we have to scan AND pack.
This doesn’t happen every day, but at our two local grocery stores a youth group often volunteers to bag. Typically, it’s a school class or club gathering donations for a trip or a project. There’s a jar near the door for contributions and I think they get a lot of them. There’s no shortage of willing hands.
This was many, many years ago, so I don’t know if it’s done this way now, but our military base commissary used volunteer baggers exclusively, and they worked entirely for tips. The baggers were either retired military or active duty troops living on base that had extra time on their hands.
An interesting thing about the commissary was, even though barcodes or scanners didn’t exist then, the store carried very limited items whose price rarely changed, so the career checkers had them all memorized. They were so quick that it took two very fast bag boys to handle one checker, and we came in an hour early just to prepare double bags and save time later.
Depending on the design and attentiveness of the cashier, this can be awkward. The ones around here have a bad habit of placing items where it’s as inconvenient as possible to get them. I don’t mind bagging my own stuff, assuming I can even get at it.
Bingo all the large groceries by me have lanes designed to keep the customer away from the groceries, there is a barrier and the only way to get to the bagging area is to walk around behind the checkout next to the cashier.(which I’ve never seen anyone do)
I think this has a lot to do with the answer. The grocery stores would love everyone to use self-checkout, where one cashier can monitor four (or more) registers, with customers doing their own bagging.
They don’t want to lose any customers by making it mandatory, but eliminating baggers saves money, increases lines at manned registers and increases use of self-checkout, which saves even more money. It’s a win-win for the typical grocery store.
(For the record, though, several of the grocery stores in my area have lines on the self-service lanes too.)
In the supermarket I visit most frequently, they will page all departments to send spare staff to the front to man registers and bag groceries during the busiest times. And in Target stores (not a supermarket, although they have started to sell more grocery-type items) the bagging stand is placed next to the register so that the cashier can bag as he/she rings up the items. Walmart stores have that carousel thing for holding bags.
The grocery store I work at doesn’t use baggers at all - there are two conveyor belts leading down from the checker’s stand to send orders down after they’ve been rung through, with bags at the end, and the customer bags their own goods at the end of the transaction. It works pretty well.
Here in Australia the cashiers scan the item and drop it into a bag, either the supermarket’s plastic version or my reusable bags that I hand over before any scanning starts. When a bag is full it is moved to the end for me to put in my trolley/cart. It seems as fast or faster as any checking out I did in US supermarkets when I lived there.
Only Aldi just moves my stuff for me to bag up myself.
United grocery stores around here not only have baggers, but the baggers carry your groceries out to the car, always, and run the carts back to the store. Apparently United has realized that they benefit from not having shopping carts cluttering up the parking lots.
One point of grocery economics that seems to escape most people, especially grocery store managers is that every cent that goes into the till goes through a checkout. Therefore, the simplest way to limit gross receipts is to limit the number of checkouts open. Of course you don’t want idle checkout clerks so it becomes a problem in optimization what the best way to manage the situation is. But it is not by assuring a long line in every checkout line. There used to be a grocery store near me that, by all appearances, seemed to pride itself in how many people were in line at each checkout. When a new store opened a mile away whose principle seemed to be try to limit the checkout lines, I simply stopped going to the first place and started using the second. The first soon closed and second still prospers. And seems to have a flying squad of packers, not quite one for each register in use, but close. And somehow the manager manages to keep the lines short and rarely have an idle checkout clerk.
And yes, I would sometimes look into the first and, seeing extra long lines, just walk out. The reduction in business has to come from somewhere.
Bagging is faster than checking, so I expect groceries would win if they spend money from the baggers on more checkers. But some of them might be trying to push people to self-checkout. I believe the store where I shop has a limit on items in self checkout - if you have a full grocery cart, you’ll be clogging the place up for a long time since checkers are a lot faster than self checkout.
I prefer to bag, but I see plenty of people in front of me who consider it beneath them. I think a big part of it is where you want to be in customer service. Some groceries pride themselves on being no frills, some are good, and some claim to be good but are awful. How many checkers do you want to handle high volume days but who may be pretty idle normally?
I don’t know, but I suspect that the checkers at the Safeway I like are doing other jobs behind the scenes, since when lines get long the manager is very good at opening up new stations, and there usually seems to be people available.
You think the cashier bagging is a new idea? They did it back in the 50s. I never saw a supermarket bagger until 1970, at least.
It works just fine until the cashiers get busy (and most supermarket I know don’t have baggers on duty all the time even today). When the lines get long, then a bagger helps, but they only have baggers around at peak times to keep the lines moving. Express lines never have baggers, either.
Haven’t seen baggers in yonks. I bag my own and get a discount because I bring my own bags. Some stores don’t have bags at all anymore. You have to bring your own. Baggers at those stores would increase food prices and slow the checkout lines.
They’ll still need a few manned ones, at least in California, to handle age-restricted items that are apparently not legal to allow people to purchase at self-checkouts. OTOH, I’m now wondering how my nearby Fresh & Easy deals with this, since I’m pretty sure they sell alcohol (non-drinker, so I don’t know for sure) and do not have checkers per se. All checkouts are self-check, but employees are pretty much right there anyway (even had one surprise me by bagging my stuff for me while I was scanning on a recent visit).