Unexpected item in bagging area.”
As you hear the five most exasperating words in the English language, you pause your scanning. Pick up the previous item. Gently put it back down.
“Unexpected item in bagging area.”
You do a different kind of scanning now, looking up and down the checkout area, searching hopelessly for a familiar flash of uniform that means help is coming. Nothing.
Eventually the cavalry arrives, harried and grim-faced, to stab at the screen until the overzealous robot is appeased. You exchange tight smiles. They disappear to attend to the multitude of other beleaguered shoppers.
You scan the next item.
“Unexpected item in bagging area.”
And on and on it goes, round and round, forever and ever, ad infinitum.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When the concept of self-service checkouts was first devised in the 1980s, it was with the vision of a utopian shopping experience where consumers could breeze in and out at speed. The notion struck David R Humble, president of an electronics company, while he was waiting in line at a Florida grocery store. The story goes that the cashier was being so slow that a frustrated customer in front of him grabbed the scanner and started doing it himself – and thus a revolutionary idea was born.
The first prototype took a reported three years and $5m to develop, before being installed in a Kroger store in Atlanta, Georgia, in July 1986. However, they didn’t become widely popular until around 20 years later. By 2013, there were 191,000 worldwide. In 2023 alone, 217,000 new terminals were delivered across the globe, up 12 per cent year on year, according to a report from RBR Data Services. “The pandemic hit and it ballooned due to the lack of labour in the store and because shoppers wanted to distance themselves,” says “Supermarket Guru” Phil Lempert, an expert analyst on consumer behaviour and marketing trends. Global installations are predicted to reach two million by 2029.
In the UK, the trend travelled from supermarkets to brands like Boots and WH Smith, and is now even a staple at fast-food outlets including McDonald’s and Leon. There’s no sign of the onslaught slowing down.
Clearly, there are benefits for both purveyor and consumer. Retailers save money on staffing – only needing one or two workers to oversee 10 checkouts, for example, rather than one cashier per till. Shoppers usually save time – lines are shorter and move more quickly and transactions can be done at speed (barring the “unexpected item” hoopla).
And yet there has been some dissent of late. In 2022, more than 240,000 shoppers signed a petition calling for Tesco to “stop replacing people with machines”. Last year, Booths, the upmarket supermarket chain found in the north of England, declared it was scrapping nearly all its self-scanning stations in favour of staff-operated tills in response to customer feedback.
“We believe colleagues serving customers delivers a better experience and the vast majority of Booths customers are not just happy we have removed self-checkouts, but grateful,” a spokesperson told The Independent nine months on.
More recently, both Asda and Morrisons expressed reservations. The former pledged to put more staff on manned checkouts after acknowledging it had reached a natural ceiling with self-service tills – “I think we have reached a level of self-checkouts and scan-and-go where we feel that works best for our customers, and we feel we’ve got the balance just about right,” Michael Gleeson, Asda’s chief financial officer, said in August – while the latter is “reviewing” the number of self-scan terminals with a view to replacing some with staffed alternatives.
“Morrisons went a bit too far with the self-checkout,” chief executive Rami Baitiéh admitted to The Telegraph last month. “This had the advantage of driving some productivity. However, some shoppers dislike it, mainly when they have a full trolley.”
Lempert gives an emphatic “no” when asked whether self-scan has delivered on what it promised; while he admits there are still a number of people who prefer self-checkout when buying six items or fewer, he claims “it definitely has been negative for most shoppers”.
The key is in recognising that there are different types of clientele with different needs, according to Lorraine Gamman and Jeffrey Doruff of Central Saint Martins. “There will always be people who want to go fast, and those who don’t,” says Gamman, a professor of design who heads up the university’s Design Against Crime Research initiative.
Doruff, a design researcher, points to those for whom a self-scanning experience is a struggle: “It might be their age or that they just have less experience with these types of technologies and might need a lot of assistance. They might not speak English well, and maybe it’s not apparent how to navigate to a screen in a different language, if such a thing even exists. Stores with a larger local immigrant population have also found that their customers need a little more support.”
Self-scan has given rise to a new brand of criminal: the middle-class shoplifter
