By Felicity Duncan
Today, as I stood waiting for a cashier to come and deal with a malfunctioning self-checkout till that was backing up the queue, I got to thinking about South Africa. Specifically, about how some elements of South African society have expressed a wish for self-checkout tills and frustration at SA retailers’ failure to adopt them. There’s a view, in many quarters, that this is yet another example of unions holding the country back. I think this view is wrong.
It’s certainly true that unions have expressed strong objections. When Pick’n’Pay opened a few trial self-checkout tills back in 2016, the unions were having none of it. But in this case, far from holding back retailers and the nation at large, I would argue that unions are actually saving South African shoppers and stores from a terrible choice.
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Let me make my case.
Self-service tills are slower, not faster
One of the big “benefits” touted by those advocating for self-checkout, such as Altron Bytes Managed Services (which, obviously, wants to sell these systems), is that it makes shopping “more convenient” for customers. This is simply not true. I have used self-checkout for over ten years, in multiple US states and European countries, and I am here to tell you that it usually makes shopping in a store less convenient and slower.
In large part, this is simply because your fellow shoppers are not better at doing checkout than professional cashiers. They’re much worse.
The reality of self-checkout is a kind of purgatory, where you are stuck behind a sweet, confused mom, with two squirming toddlers, who is having trouble with a smashed bag of jelly beans that won’t scan. She stands, helpless, while the self-checkout till says, in a reassuring, mechanical voice, “Help is coming.” Godot-like, you stand waiting for help – in the form of a real human cashier – that is always coming and never comes.
And the problem isn’t just that most human beings are bad at checkout. Self-checkout tills are imperfect machines. Some of them are badly calibrated, for example, so that a slight shift in your groceries makes the machine think you’ve added a product to the pile that you haven’t scanned. The till flashes a red light and asks you to scan the product you’ve missed. Unfortunately, this product does not actually exist, making the task impossible. At this point, you’re stuck – you either leave or find a human cashier to fix things while the rest of the queue glares at you in rage.
In my experience, self-checkout is almost always slower than cashier-assisted checkout, unless the person in front of you is buying a seriously huge pile of groceries or needs to do something complicated involving cigarettes, vouchers, or multiple methods of payment. During peak times, when people have a large pile of stuff to manage, self-checkout is chaos.
And it’s not just that self-checkout is slow and error-prone. It also makes the rest of the shopping experience worse, because it means fewer in-store workers, which makes it harder to find someone to help you find items or deal with problems.
Self-checkout is meant to make in-store shopping more like online shopping, where human involvement is minimal. But it doesn’t really do that, because what makes online shopping convenient is not the fact that you manage your own checkout. Rather, it’s the fact that:
- You can do it from your couch;
- You can easily find what you’re looking for using search tools;
- You don’t have to carry your purchases to your car, but instead can have them delivered to your door.
Self-checkout doesn’t make any of these things true about in-store shopping. Instead, by reducing the number of shop-floor workers, it removes a core advantage of in-store shopping, which is that you can have a human help you.
Aside from the undeniable pleasure of avoiding human interaction – which, as an introvert, I value – self-checkout makes shopping objectively worse.
Self-service tills don’t reduce costs
What about the other side of the argument though? Sure, it may slow things down a bit for customers and create new frustrations. But on the plus side, retailers can enjoy massive cost savings, right?
Well, no. Just because a technology makes certain promises doesn’t mean that it delivers. Self-checkout doesn’t eliminate the need for cashiers. In my experience, you need at least one cashier per two self-checkout tills to help people deal with the problems that crop up. That would obviously still represent a cut in labour costs.
But according to the Financial Times, the story doesn’t really end there. Self-checkout is associated with a rise in petty shoplifting. It’s very easy to steal at self-checkout. In fact, often it would be much easier to steal than it is to actually scan and pay for the item you want, given the quality of the systems involved.
Thus, stores that install self-checkout find their “shrinkage” – losses due to theft – increases. This is obviously a cost item. Many hire additional security to deal with the problem, so you often have a grim-faced security guard standing next to the cashier at the self-checkout aisle, both of them watching you fumble slowly through the process.
Aside from being a bit farcical, the whole situation means that, per the FT, ”the savings amassed from firing checkout staff [are] entirely offset by the costs of shoplifting and associated security staff.” In a country like SA, where crime is already an issue, self-checkout would probably necessitate an army of security guards to replace the retrenched cashiers.
I like technology. I think that automation is a good idea – it’s made us all healthier and richer. But automation shouldn’t be done just for the sake of automating. There must be a business case. Where automation makes a process worse and more expensive, it’s hard to see the upside. So instead of fuming that Cosatu is keeping away the delights of self-checkout, you should probably be saying a silent thank you every time someone helps you bag your groceries. Trust me, you’ll miss that service when it’s gone.
