Please place item in the bag. Please wait for assistance.
If youve encountered these irritating alerts at the self-checkout machine, youre not alone. According to a survey last year of 1,000 shoppers, 67% said theyd experienced a failure at the self-checkout lane. Errors at the kiosks are so common that they have even spawned dozens of memes and TikTok videos. Were in 2022. One would expect the self-checkout experience to be flawless. Were not there at all, said Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has researched self-checkout. Customers arent the only ones frustrated with the self-checkout experience. Stores have challenges with it, too.
Making customers do the work
The introduction of self-checkout machines in 1986 was part of a long history of stores transferring work from paid employees to unpaid customers, a practice that dates all the way back to Piggly Wiggly the first self-service supermarket in the early 1900s. Instead of clerks behind a counter gathering products for customers, Piggly Wiggly allowed shoppers to roam the aisles, pick items off the shelves and pay at the register. In exchange for doing more work, the model promised lower prices.
Self-checkout, however, was designed primarily to lower stores labor expenses. The system reduced cashier costs by as much as 66%,according to a 1988 article in the Miami Herald. The first modern self-checkout system, which was patented by Florida company CheckRobot and installed at several Kroger stores, would be almost unrecognizable to shoppers today. Customers scanned their items and put them on a conveyor belt. An employee at the other end of the belt bagged the groceries. Customers then took them to a central cashier area to pay. The technology was heralded as a revolution in the supermarket. Shoppers turn into their own grocery clerks as automated checkout machines shorten those long lines of carts and reduce markets personnel costs, the Los Angeles Times said in 1987 review. But self-checkout did not revolutionize the grocery store. Many customers balked at having to do more work in exchange for benefits that werent entirely clear. It took a decade for Walmart (WMT) to test self checkout. Only in the early 2000s did the trend pick up more widely at supermarkets, which were looking to cut costs during the 2001 recession and faced stiff competition from emergent superstores and warehouse clubs.
The rationale was economics based, and not focused on the customer, Charlebois said. From the get go, customers detested them. A 2003 Nielsen survey found that 52% of shoppers considered self checkout lanes to be okay, while 16% said they were frustrating. Thirty-two percent of shoppers called them great. The mixed response led some grocery chains, including Costco (COST), Albertsons and others, to pull out the self-checkout machines they had installed in the mid-2000s. Self-checkout lines get clogged as the customers needed to wait for store staff to assist with problems with bar codes, coupons, payment problems and other issues that invariably arise with many transactions, grocery chain Big Y said in 2011 when it removed its machines.