Only about one-third of surveyed retailers plan to invest in self-checkout technology this year, significantly fewer than in 2025, according to an annual retail industry report. While...
What you describe is not at all my experience in Europe (mainly UK and Portugal, plus a bit Germany).
Small tills with not enough room for a big shopping, pushy and badly designed software, the whole “check your age” for alcohol with a single employee handling 20+ self-checkout tills, the thing bitching and moaning if you bring your own bag, different quirks for self-checkout tills in different stores, not taking cash payments and so on, are incredibly common and what’s rare is the ones which work smoothly.
I mean, I would love those schemes some people describe (in Scandinavia?) were you basically check things in as you pick them up, but I have yet to see anything like that myself in the countries I lived in during the self-checkout era.
So far all I’ve seen in Europe are shit cheap implementations which only ever beat the manual checkout in speed if all you have is a handful of things (so, not a weekly shopping) or the store itself purposefully closed pretty much all manual tills and caused huge queues in order to push people to use self-checkout.
PS: By the way, in my experience in Europe, it’s always you that pack your own bags, which actually makes the manual checkout even faster since at the same time the cashier is doing the checkout you’re doing the bagging, so the whole thing can go twice as fast whilst in a self-checkout it’s only one person doing both.
makes the manual checkout even faster since at the same time the cashier is doing the checkout you’re doing the bagging
There’s nothing stopping people at self-checkouts from putting items in bags as soon as they’ve scanned them. But lots of morons will first scan everything, then proceeed to take another stretch of time to leisurely find their bags and figure out how to pack things.
That’s not the self-checkout’s fault, that’s plain human stupidity.
For what it is worth, yesterday I tried to do place the machine first exactly because of that. The machine complained. I did not insist, since it was faster for my five items to just do what it wanted me to do, but it is possible the setup just does not like it.
What you describe is not at all my experience in Europe (mainly UK and Portugal, plus a bit Germany).
Small tills with not enough room for a big shopping, pushy and badly designed software, the whole “check your age” for alcohol with a single employee handling 20+ self-checkout tills, the thing bitching and moaning if you bring your own bag, different quirks for self-checkout tills in different stores, not taking cash payments and so on, are incredibly common and what’s rare is the ones which work smoothly.
I mean, I would love those schemes some people describe (in Scandinavia?) were you basically check things in as you pick them up, but I have yet to see anything like that myself in the countries I lived in during the self-checkout era.
So far all I’ve seen in Europe are shit cheap implementations which only ever beat the manual checkout in speed if all you have is a handful of things (so, not a weekly shopping) or the store itself purposefully closed pretty much all manual tills and caused huge queues in order to push people to use self-checkout.
PS: By the way, in my experience in Europe, it’s always you that pack your own bags, which actually makes the manual checkout even faster since at the same time the cashier is doing the checkout you’re doing the bagging, so the whole thing can go twice as fast whilst in a self-checkout it’s only one person doing both.
Self-checkout works well in the Netherlands.
Imagine checkout is like rail. In the UK and Germany a disaster, but in Holland it mostly is pretty good. 😉
There’s nothing stopping people at self-checkouts from putting items in bags as soon as they’ve scanned them. But lots of morons will first scan everything, then proceeed to take another stretch of time to leisurely find their bags and figure out how to pack things.
That’s not the self-checkout’s fault, that’s plain human stupidity.
For what it is worth, yesterday I tried to do place the machine first exactly because of that. The machine complained. I did not insist, since it was faster for my five items to just do what it wanted me to do, but it is possible the setup just does not like it.