I really love the new machines they have in some supermarkets, where I can scan my stuff and pay the machine, all by myself. There’s usually no line, and it sure feels like I’m leaving the store faster, but I wonder if it is an illusion created by the fact that I spend almost no time bored, waiting for the people in front of me. I have to admit that I probably scan and pack slower than the professionals.
My question is: Have any studies been done on this? Am I really getting out of the store faster?
I don’t see why the stores would particularly care if you are getting out faster. What you are, however, is getting out of the store cheaper. At the stores that I have been to, one employee monitors four to six check stands. So, they are employing one person instead of four (or six). How long the line is is utterly irrelevant.
You know, it seems to me that the store might be motivated, to a point, to keep you in the store longer, not get you checked out faster. The longer you’re in the store, the more you’re likely to spend. Let’s have you spend a bit of time in front of the impulse rack. Got kids? Great. We’ll put the kid-friendly stuff right at their eye level so they’ll bug you for it. Why would the store want you to get out faster?
My experience with self-checkout is that they’re usually the slowest way out of the store. It seems that there is always something wrong and I have to turn on the dreaded blinking light. And wait. And wait. And wait. Even worse, the person in front of me will turn on the blinking light AFTER I have unloaded my cart. Now I’ve got to wait longer. I only use the self-checkout if I have only one or two things and there is NO ONE ahead of me. Otherwise, it’s just way to slow.
A store that is not having to staff every register can have more registers open, meaning that lines tend to be shorter, regardless.
My anecdotal experience has been that folks who check out full shopping carts piled high tend to go to a staffed checkout lane, meaning the self-checkouts tend to attract customers with fewer items–more than the “8” or “12” specified at the express lanes, but generally fewer than whole carts. This means that there are fewer waits for $150 sales to be bagged and re-carted.
Folks who choose the self-checkout lane tend* (with, of course, exceptions) to be folks who are willing to exert themselves to actually make the effort to get their purchase completed and bagged with a certain amount of efficiency. They tend to use plastic or cash (and those who use checks are required to take their check to the common cashier, getting them out of the way, sooner).
Yeah, I have stood behind the poor person who could not outguess the selection screen for produce (Hint: Belgian Endive, Escarole, Kale, and Romaine, and similar green stuff is located under “greens” and Cantalope, Honeydew, and Muskmelon are under “melon” so that you can find related things on the same pages in case you know them under a slightly different name), and the twit who went down to bag all her groceries before paying rather than pushing the stuff down to the end and putting the separator bar across the conveyor so she could bag her stuff while I checked out my four items behind her, but most of the folks who select self-checkout are more aware.
I hate those machines. They scan way too slowly, and everything has to be pilled up on a scale on one side. If you try to take something off, or don’t even put an item there in the first place because it is too bulky, the machine stops and you can’t do squat until you get assistance. Yes, they work for one or two items, but thats about it.
While that is true, I wonder what the income lost is on impulse items in the checkout line. I always see people dropping those items (sometimes several) into their pile on the conveyer. Those impulse items are often high profit as well.
Oh, you can actually buy produce on those machines? I’m too afraid to even ask most of the time so whenever I got produce on my cart, even if it’s just a clove of garlic, I’d head straight for the regular registers.
The whole thing about not being able to remove items from the scale really annoy me, though, especially since they force you to use those tiny bags that can hold one or two items at a time.
You’re getting out faster probably because the self-checkout lines scare the crap out of most people and are therefore almost always empty! At least that’s what I’ve noticed.
The biggest problem I’ve found with them at supermarkets is if you’re alone and have a lot of items. You have to constantly stop and bag or at least unclog everything before the canned ham falls onto the eggs!
And you can pay for produce at them, but its tricky. After putting it on a scale you then have to tell it exactly what kind of fruit/veg you have. And even though it will actually show pictures of them on the screen I found it a pain because supermarkets today can carry freakin dozens of different varieties of bananas, apples, cucumbers etc. and they all look the same.
In places like Home Depot though they are a godsend!
Most produce comes with a label on it with a 4 digit code. If there is such a label, at a self-checkout lane (at least the ones with which I am most familiar, there are obviously multiple layouts possible) one pushes the “produce” “button” on the screen. Then one types the four digit code, and sets the item on the scale/scanner. One may then push a number–say you are buying avacados, which are priced 2 for $3. You must both weigh the avacados and tell it that there are 2 avacados in your bag. That’s the easy kind.
Not everything has a nice 4 digit number. If you can’t find one, one has to figure out what the item is, and how it is listed in the system. This can be tricky–I don’t use the system often enough to know how they divide things up–If one is buying a lot of produce it is generally faster to let the cashier ring things up. See Tomndebb’s post for one set of groupings.
The third way which one sometimes must use to get produce paid for , is to get the attention of the attendent who types in a code. Using this method, I think I got plums rung up when I actually had avacados, once.
Some stores I’ve been in have little booklets with the codes there for the customre. Others just have numbers on (some) produce and numbers in the computer. It depends. And just like do-it-yourself credit/debit card scanning, there is just enough variation in how things are set up and operated to make using the self-scanners at various stores a wee bit frustrating. (Even apart from the frustrations mentioned by others.)
Wow! I’ve never seen a self-checkout with a conveyor belt before, neither at grocery stores in Michigan and Ontario, or at Home Depot. Here we can only wait with our goods in the cart until the person ahead of us gets out of the way, then its wait; press the start button; scan; put the item into the bag on the scale, rinse and repeat. If the scale gets full, you’re screwed. If you have multiples of the same item, you have to scan them individually. What a bore.
I myself only go to them if one is empty and I have few enough items that I know I’m faster than a real checker. That’s when I go to either of the close supermarkets that I treat as convenience stores (still not over their use of f-ing “discount cards”). My two main grocery stores don’t have self-checkouts (or cards). The first is kind of middle-class upscale, so I think self-checkout wouldn’t be well received, after all, that why we pay $0.10 more per pound of potatoes. The second probably hires cheap illegals and would have theft concerns with self-checkout (yeah, I shop at both ends of the scale).
I only did it once. It was such an enormous pain in the ass that I never did it again. For starters, I always pay by check (I don’t do “debit”) so you have to wait for a worker bee to come by and handle the transaction anyway. I don’t remember how the produce thing works. Or wine. It’s just easier for me to do it the old-fashioned way. Plus, I buy postage at the checkout point. I don’t think you can do that at self-checkout, either.
I’ve never seen one at all, conveyor or no. How do they work? Should I be thankful we don’t have them here? Should I be fearful we will within a year or two? Why don’t people just walk out without paying for half the stuff? What’s a sixteen year-old “Night Manager” going to do when he’s monitoring six lanes and I’m 300 pounds of hairy mean mofo?
Round here they have express ones with no conveyor belt, for people with 10 items or less, as well as conveyor belts. What annoys me is that there’s no movable divider at the end of the belt, and the person after you almost never waits for you to finish bagging, so their stuff comes flying down the belt and mixes in with your stuff. I always wait for the person in front to finish bagging, accompanied by the people behind me coughing loudly and looking over my shoulder as if to say “get on with it”.
Typically there are several lines monitored by an attendant. There are frequent foul-ups with the scanners and the belt not detecting that you placed an item of the known weight on it, and they have to remove security tags on things like clothes and expensive booze, so they are kept busy sorting things out.
This may be true but i don’t think it’s a given based on what we know. Without knowing speed of use (which is definately slower there seems no debate) we don’t actually know that that one cashier has a higher throughput monitoring 4 - 6 queues than he/she would if they were on a regular till. Therefore we don’t know if it is actually saving them money. If throughput is the same or similar then it would actually cost them more because they have to buy and maintain more machines.
I wondered about that when they first installed them here. But then i realised that it isn’t really any different to regular shoplifting. You still need to use a bit of sleight of hand or something. You can’t just pass two things through and only scan one because it all gets weighed. To do this you’d need to take an item directly from your basket and place it in your bags *beyond * the weighing conveyor belt.
Now if you are willing to do this and hope nobody notices i don’t see how different that is from just picking things off the shelf and sticking them in your pocket.
Yes, I’ve shopped at several supermarkets in Australia recently, and they don’t have them there yet. I’m sure that the big chains are looking at the idea, but they do take up a fair bit of space, and require rebuilding the checkouts to enable it.
You could walk out without paying for stuff, I’m sure, but yo can do that at ordinary checkouts too. I’m sure they’ve worked out the risks, and the saving in staff time makes up for the extra losses.
Every place I’ve used a self-checkout lane, as soon as you scan the item, you place it in the bag, which is on a scale. There is no conveyor belt after the scanner. The amount of space available to put your stuff on the scale varies depending on whether it is an express 15 items or less, or unlimited line. (Though, really full carts should go through a non-self-checkout line, because the hassle involved in bagging a really full cart without the ability to take off full bags and put them in your cart is just not worth it, even if you don’t have a bunch of unlabeled produce–or cards. My mom likes to buy cards. Cards don’t weigh anything. Stuff that doesn’t weigh anything doesn’t work well with the scale. In my opinion. Based on my experience.)
Our local BJs has a conveyor belt (which also weighs the item and reverses if there’s a problem). I use them most of the time; they seem faster primarily because you’re actually doing something, not watching the checker ring up the sale.
The one supermarket that has them has you weigh the bags. It’s also a semi-express lane: There is a limit to the number of purchases.
Home Depot uses the same system as the supermarket.
How they work: at my local store, there is no conveyor. You go up to a machine that looks like an ATM that has a scanner and a scale attached to it. The scale also serves as the platform for the grocery bag. You scan each item and put it in the bag. The machine will alert you (and refuse to go to the next step) if the scan didn’t register, or if the item you scanned and the weight on the scale don’t match up. The first time I used it, it kept resetting because my purse kept knocking into the scale. I have also had oddly shaped items creep off the scale. Once you have mastered all this, you pay with cash or credit, like an ATM. If cash, it spits your change back at you. There is a cashier station with a person, so if you really have a problem, the cashier can help you. At the store I go to, it’s one person for five stations.
The technology works better than I would have thought, after doing it once or twice normal people like you and me can anticipate anything that has the potential to mess up the system and adjust accordingly. The most annoying part is the people in front of you who just stand there punching buttons in a panic and ignoring the instructions, taking up everyone’s time. (And to be fair, also people using it for the first time and going much slower, like I did)
What stops people from walking out without paying: about the same thing that stops people in regular lines from walking out. You could slip a can of tuna in your coat pocket, but you could do that in a regular line as well. You do have to walk past the cashier station, and that person can see (on a computer monitor) if you have a huge amount of groceries and a total bill of $1.57, or if a station is still waiting for payment and you are walking away. I’m guessing they would call security, which I think is what would also happen if Mr. 300 lb Gorilla simply announced to a 16 year old cashier in a regular line that he had no intention of paying. I’m sure a person could develop a system for beating the machine, but it’s the kind of thing where it seems like it would take a lot of time and effort for a relatively small net gain and a fairly large risk of alerting a staff person.
It seems like the stations at my store were designed pretty well in that sense. The scale platform is the only surface area anywhere near you – there isn’t anywhere else to put your groceries other than the scale platform, so if you wanted to move any items past that point without checking them out, you’d have to throw them to an accomplice standing on the other side of the check-out, or have a coat with very large pockets.