There has been a small flurry of recent reports of retail stores abandoning self-checkouts, citing a number of reasons. From NPR:

Dollar General came to rely too much on self-checkout. The chain had put it in the vast majority of stores, but now is reeling it back in. Self-checkout will be just for people buying five or fewer items. It will be gone completely from 300 stores, and at 9,000 stores, workers will now run it.

Alina Selyukh, “Some big retailers reverse course and scale back their use of self-checkout,” NPR, March 18, 2024

Target is also now limiting self-checkout to shoppers with 10 or fewer items, according to NPR, and Walmart has removed it from some stores.

While the self-checkouts were popular with many customers and enabled the retailers to save money by eliminating thousands of workers, the retailers soon discovered downsides. One of them was a surge in the “five-finger discount”:

Self-checkouts made shoplifting easy, giving thieves open access to scan what they want – or not scan items at all. And the stakes were low if caught – many jurisdictions declined to prosecute shoplifters. Now, stores are wising up to the costs.

Some research showed that theft increased by 30% after stores introduced self-checkouts. With shoplifting already high, continuing to enable criminals is no longer sustainable.

Matty Jacobson, “The End of Self-Checkouts: Why Major Stores Are Shutting Them Down,” MSN, February 29, 2024

Retailers who shut down self-checkouts saw shoplifting drop noticeably. Part of that decline may be that people take the idea of shoplifting more seriously if they are stealing from someone they can see as opposed to, say, manipulating a machine.

Illegal alcohol sales to minors

British stores are making similar decisions: British supermarket chain Booths recently reported that it was taking the self-checkouts out of all but two of 28 stores. But issues other than shoplifting were also in play there:

“Our customers have told us this over time — that the self-scan machines that we’ve got in our stores … can be slow, they can be unreliable (and) they’re obviously impersonal,” Booths managing director Nigel Murray told the BBC.

Customers at Booths also frequently misidentified which fruits and vegetables they were buying when prompted by self-checkout machines. Alcohol purchases also were not smooth transactions through self-checkout because employees had to verify customers’ ages.

“Some customers don’t know one different apple versus another, for example,” Murray said. “There’s all sorts of fussing about with that and then the minute you put any alcohol in your basket somebody’s got to come and check that you’re of the right age.”

Nathaniel Meyersohn, “Walmart, Costco and other companies rethink self-checkout,” CNN, November 13, 2023

Better technology might help with some of these issues. But not all of them. Refusing the sale of alcohol to minors is a legal obligation for retailers in many jurisdictions. If the use of self-checkouts results in an increase in minors stealing or illegally buying alcohol, we can be sure of one thing: It won’t be the machine that is sitting at the defense bench.

Canada is experiencing similar problems

Six locations of iconic Canadian Tire have scrapped self-checkouts, and at least one other retailer is following suit. One issue is that many customers don’t like them:

Two weeks ago, franchise owner Scott Savage removed the four self-checkout machines at his Giant Tiger discount store in Stratford, some 90 kilometres west of Hamilton. He says, rather than theft, he made the change because many of his customers are seniors who dislike using the machines. “The biggest complaint you have from everybody is, ‘You don’t pay me to work here,'” said Savage. “They would line up at my regular registers, and they would just prefer that service.”

Sophia Harris, “More stores are ditching self-checkout amid theft and customer complaints,” CBC, April 30, 2024

A new type of shoplifter?

Brand marketing strategist Melinda Deines points to a study that shows that self-checkouts cause shoppers to view theft differently. Some of the traits of these SWIPERS (Seemingly Well-Intentioned Patrons Engaging in Routine Shoplifting) that she identifies are 1) They are frustrated by the machine and steal out of exasperation. 2. It is much easier to steal from the machine than from a watchful human. 3. If caught, the thief can always say it was an honest error. It may be impossible to prove otherwise.

And then of course they rationalize:

The removal of human interaction may amplify the sense that stealing from a big corporation doesn’t hurt anyone. In today’s inflationary economy, financial stress adds another reason to rationalize theft. In addition, consumers may feel that retailers are saving money by reducing labor costs so they are entitled to share those savings. Or, they may feel this is their way of forcing the retailer to “pay them” for doing a job that was previously done by staff.

Melinda Deines, “Theft Versus Experience: a Behavioral Approach to Self-checkouts,” SLD blog, August 2, 2023

It’s too soon to tell how big a setback these problems will be to the vision of an entirely automated retail store. But there is no question that it is a challenge today.