Self-scanning in supermarkets was supposedly all about speeding checkout as a benefit to the consumer. This is about speeding boarding - that's the marketing friendly benefit to be shouted about.
In actuality supermarket self-scanning is often slower than a traditional checkout queue. Particularly when items require staff authorisation. I expect this to be no better than traditional boarding in most cases.
The real benefit to both this, and supermarket self-scanning, is another low wage employee can be canned. This isn't a very marketing friendly message so it's no surprise that this isn't the message that publicised loudest.
Per item? Sure. For small numbers of items, counting time spent waiting? Heck no, I regularly get through self-checkout much faster than people who get into a regular queue, in no small part because there's often a few times more self-checkout scanners than there are open checkouts.
When you have a full cart or two, the speedier scanning at a traditional checkout pays off. But usually both are available, not just self checkout, so you're free to choose when that isn't the case.
The big Tesco nearby has a single combined queue for all the 20 or so self-scan checkouts. They are rarely all in service. With a few items it is now always faster to go to an operator checkout unless you go in at 4am. The express lanes of "under 10 items" or "cash only" are a memory of a former, much faster time.
There is often an employee aggressively marshalling people to the self-scan checkouts at every available opportunity and trying to pull them away from the staffed lines.
In the local Pound shop they tried replacing all checkouts with self-scan, getting rid of all others. They had to reverse this a month or two later and put back half a dozen, now brand new, staff operated tills - ripping out a few weeks-old self-scanners to make space. They are again slower thanks to rarely having staff nearby to handle the steady stream of staff authorisations and errors, so there's a big delay every time someone wanders over from the back of the store to wave their bar code and immediately disappear again.
Sometimes it works though. At the Kings Cross Waitrose off peak there isn't a queue and the whole process is pretty quick. The good ones don't even bother weighing the stuff which speeds things.
Checkout queue optimization at a supermarket is pretty easy. It's all about time per scan. A good cashier (60-70 scans per minute) can be something like 50% more productive due to scan time savings. A slow cashier (10 scans per minute) is a drag.
Self-checkout is all about cutting labor hours, period. It is both slower and leads to much higher shrink (as much as 150% more) than a manned casher. Stores hope to make more money by keeping the store open longer. The hacks around the slowness of checkout without cashiers is for people optimizing for time is online ordering or shopping at midnight.
>> Self-checkout is all about cutting labor hours, period.
That is exactly the case. If you pay 10$ an hour for 3 shifts 8 hours each, this makes 3x8x10 = $240 a day. That is $7200 in 30 days per one checkout spot.
To setup equipment for self-checkout and maintain it order of magnitude cheaper compared to self checkout.
Another factor is eliminating managerial overhead while dealing with human beings, as one store manager told me referring to self-checkouts:
"They are never sick, they do not have an attitude, they do not quit and they can't be rude to customers".
Oh they can be rude to customers all right! And their attitude - push this button! Scan again! Put that item back on the scale! Alert! Alert! I despise them with every fibre of my being.
Yeah, I think the "rude to customers" thing (I've heard it too) is far too focused on the act of rudeness rather than the effects (unhappiness / lower retention).
Self-checkouts trade one kind of unhappiness for another, and many (most?) are horrifying experiences. There are a few that are reasonably quick and user-friendly, but certainly not all. Most seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel in an effort to squeeze a few more $ off the purchase price.
That’s not the right comparison. What you want to compare is how long it takes at a staffed queue vs an unstaffed one once you get to the front of the line (for the same purchase).
Things might be faster now with the unmanned ones, but the contention is that that’s only because they opened more checkout terminals. Granted, they wouldnt have done that with staffed ones because of the increased expense, but let’s not get confused about the real cause.
This seems like a faulty comparison. Space for registers is naturally limited. A single traditional register is replaced by 3 self-checkouts at my local grocery stores. Usually they opt for 6x self checkout replacing two traditional registers, manned by a single employee who can help with problems. In these cases it's not a question of staffing, but of space and the increase in space efficiency.
As always it depends on what you want to measure. Comparing total checkout time including queuing though for 'speed (items/s)' is going to naturally favor the self-checkout because the choice between normal and self checkout is heavily weighted by the number of items a particular person has. Anecdotally I've never seen anyone go through self checkout with a full cart but see it all the time with the normal registers. Additionally there's rarely the same number of traditional registers actually staffed compared to the number of self checkouts.
I agree. I would say that a better measure than items/s would be customers/hr (closer to throughput rather than speed) averaged across an entire store with and without self-checkouts. As you said, the optimal setup will depend heavily on the mix of customer types ("express" vs. full cart) a particular store gets. There's probably a good ratio for most stores between the two and I think that's what they're all converging on now.
Agreed that space is a part of the comparison, but what I've seen is that although they put 3 checkouts in the y-axis space of a single staffed lane, they end up having to use up almost 3 times as much space in the x-axis to allow people to pass each other, which simply isn't necessary to allow in a staffed lane. So I don't believe the amount of space is that different.
No, there really is a huge difference. It's more like 1.5 times the y-axis space in your example, they could get 6 self service checkouts in the space of 2 staffed ones:
Space comes with a price too. If you ignore all costs, a traditional checkout that is read when you walk up is probably faster most of the time vs an available self-checkout.
>What you want to compare is how long it takes at a staffed queue vs an unstaffed one once you get to the front of the line (for the same purchase).
Maybe if you're selling a checkout system. Personally I care how fast I can go from "got things" to "left building". (or maybe more accurately: left home -> returned home, but that has a lot more variables)
The other benefit of self-checkout is you can fit perhaps 8 machines in the space that you used to use for 3 lanes, so even though an individual checkout might take longer, overall you can probably get higher throughput on the self-checkout.
It is possible for there to be multiple benefits. In fact this is the most desirable, since when there is an immediate economic benefit to both sides, it is incentivized to happen.
In the case of supermarket self-scanning, sure, the supermarket can reduce costs.
However, the benefit to the customer is in a shorter total time through checkout. Entropy causes customers to arrive at checkouts in spurts, rather than there being a steady flow. It is expensive for stores for checkout operators to remain idle (and would be passed on in higher prices). So customers have to queue instead of there being more checkout operators available during spurts.
On the other hand, the cost of maintaining extra self-checkout machines costs very little. So in practice, they tend to be available to handle spurts of activity, resulting in faster overall checkout times for customers too.
For the stores: yes, reduced costs. For the customers: reduced costs result in lower prices in healthy markets, and also time to traverse checkouts is faster.
The same can be applied to airlines. Fewer staff at the line at the gate results in reduced staffing costs: sure. But also: less standing around in lines and less juggling at the front of the line (especially for the infirm, or those with kids, etc) is also a clear benefit to passengers.
It is cynical to ignore the other half of the benefits and focus just on costs. And in any case, reduced costs for the company results in lower prices for consumers.
> On the other hand, the cost of maintaining extra self-checkout machines costs very little. So in practice, they tend to be available to handle spurts of activity
If only! At the (UK) Tesco metro near my workplace, the staff have this insane habit of keeping half or fewer of the available self-checkout machines in operation. The rest of them have a big symbol like a stop-sign and are unusable.
Only if a big queue builds up will the single attending staff member go round and laboriously make the other machines available, whilst simultaneously having to attend to the frequent weighing issues caused by the machines. By the time they're done with this the lunchtime rush is practically over.
I mentioned this to a work colleague who suggested the reason is that they want to reduce the amount of time counting cash out of the machines at the end of the day, so having fewer machines in operation is preferable.
That doesn't make sense - you would think the machines could track their cashbox balances perfectly, requiring dumping it in a bag, printing a status report/receipt/audit log, and attaching that to the bag. No counting required!
Aldi and Lidl - the discount supermarkets in the UK manage just fine with spurts without a self scan machine anywhere. They are constantly opening and closing checkouts as the people waiting varies. They seem to have a default to get staff off tills and back to the rest of the store when people waiting drops to some prescribed number.
Go in really early or late and there are no lines occupied until a customer waits - usually no more than a minute as they appear to have a strong focus on keeping an eye out.
I would say there's a shorter overall wait, and a far higher likelihood of getting out of the store in the shortest overall time than any of the alternatives at the competition.
So no, I haven't seen any of these much-touted speed benefits. Quite the opposite frequently.
The actual scanning might be slower, but the queues are much shorter for self-scanning at the stores where I by groceries.
Also, where I live we have portable scanners. You pick up a scanner when you enter the store, you scan all your groceries and put them directly in the bag (or under the stroller) and when you reach the exit you leave the scanner and pay at a terminal and off you go.
Man I hate these with a passion. I always forget one thing or so, and then every now and then you're selected for a random check, and you feel like a common thief and have to do the walk of shame to the actual register for re-scanning and paying.
Also, the self scanners require you to weigh your fruits & vegetables at the f&v section. Although it seems they're adding scales to the self checkout boots lately, so hopefully I can start using the in-store scanning the way I use Anglo-Saxon self-checkout booths soon - just load up in the shop, scan everything yourself at the end.
Portable scanners FTW! Once you get competent with them it's ridiculous how much time you save. Add to that bringing your own bags and you are scanned and out in little more time than it took to do the actual shopping.
Every now and then you get audited, but I'll happily pay that price in order to have the scanner.
Though the difference between a supermarket checkout and an airplane is once you're through the checkout, you're free to leave.
You don't walk out the supermarket door and have to wait for a hundred people to load their cars and make their way out of the parking lot. Which means that getting you through the checkout faster just means more time waiting to get out of the parking lot.
Here in the Netherlands (at Albert Heijn stores) one small change from the US system makes all the difference: they don't weigh the product after you scan it. No 'unexpected item in bagging area' etc. It goes extremely quickly.
If there's a cashier with more than one person waiting I will go to the self-scanners.
I think it’s much more convenient with self-checkout, because I’m not holding up the line. I can take my sweet time and pack my bags as I go. It’s really a lot of trust being placed with the customer, it’d be very easy to shoplift.
It's not easy (not any easier) to shoplift because there are random checks. People are much less inclined to put something extra in the bag if they know they can be checked. The ones that do shoplift are not using the bags with a lot of other groceries to do it, they likely hide items in their clothing. In such a mode, it doesn't make any difference how and whether they check out any actual paid items.
In actuality supermarket self-scanning is often slower than a traditional checkout queue. Particularly when items require staff authorisation. I expect this to be no better than traditional boarding in most cases.
The real benefit to both this, and supermarket self-scanning, is another low wage employee can be canned. This isn't a very marketing friendly message so it's no surprise that this isn't the message that publicised loudest.