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- Retailers hoped to save big on labor costs by introducing self-checkout lanes.
- Recent moves from the biggest retailers suggest it's proving harder than expected.
- It seems many stores still need real people to help customers with their purchases.
Self-checkout may not be the money-saving "revolution" some retailers were hoping for.
More than 30 years after the introduction of self-checkout and its promises of labor-cost savings, the tech has become ubiquitous in stores nationwide.
Now retailers including Costco, Walmart, and Kroger are rethinking some self-checkout strategies. Some are finding they still need employees to combat theft and assist with purchases, review IDs, and check receipts.
Costco, for example, has started asking staff to check membership cards in the self-checkout lanes, as well as assist with scanning items.
Dominick Reuter/Insider
The company said the move would help crack down on shoppers improperly sharing memberships at self-checkout registers. Costco relies on membership fees for a majority of its profit.
Walmart said last week it was pulling self-checkout from at least three stores in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and replacing the lanes with traditional staffed registers.
The company didn't elaborate on reasons for the change and said it has no plans for "widespread" removal of self-checkout.
Walmart started rolling out a hybrid approach to self checkout in 2020. The redesigned checkout zones replaced traditional lanes with a staffed corral of kiosks where shoppers could opt to scan and pay on their own, or have a worker do it for them.
Walmart
A press release touted the redesign's human touch.
"In this new layout, you get greeted from the entranceway and helped all the way through the whole process," a store manager said in a release. "We will go to any register, and we will help you in any fashion you want, whether it's checking out one item or all the items. Any questions you have, we're right there for you."
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Kroger, meanwhile, is going all in on self-checkout in at least one store where it's no longer offering traditional registers. But Kroger told Retail Dive that the change didn't result in labor cuts, and it still has front-end staff to assist with scanning and bagging groceries.
This is not exactly the labor-minimizing tech retailers were promised.
Kroger, Walmart, and Costco did not respond to Insider's request for additional details on their self-checkout strategies.
Retailers invest in tech to monitor self-checkout theft
Industry estimates suggest inventory losses can rise by 31% to 60% — or more — depending on the number of self-checkout stations used in a store.
Matt Kelley, a loss-prevention expert who formerly worked in asset protection at Home Depot, told Insider last year that self-checkout forced retailers to make a trade-off between labor-cost savings and the increased expense of theft.
"Inherently, that means there's going to be less eyes on a transaction," Kelley, who is now with LiveView Technologies, added at the time. "And there's going to be more of an opportunity for the dishonest people to be dishonest."
Walmart and Kroger use sophisticated video-monitoring and sensor tech to track merchandise through stores and self-checkout lanes. But some shoppers have told Insider they still saw unpaid items pass without raising alarm.
Missed or skipped scans are not always intentional — people and machines both make mistakes. In any case, the solution appears to be the same: assigning employees to monitor and assist customers.
Far from being the autonomous money collectors retailers were hoping for, self-checkout stations require supervision, maintenance, and IT support, Christopher Andrews, a Drew University sociologist and the author of "The Overworked Consumer," told CNN last year.
Self-checkout "delivers none of what it promises," he told the outlet.
To be sure, many retailers are still investing in the technology. But some appear to be reconsidering how they use it, and whether to bring more humans into the process so it runs smoothly.