Kroger to expand program that cuts checkout lines
bizjournals.com
bizjournals.com
But on another note, I can't help but wonder how theft of merchandise will be handled. On one hand, you won't have to pay cashiers so you can "afford" to have more stuff stolen. But on the other hand, I know people that just love to get away with what ever they can. Case in point is this old man friend of my grandfathers that used to tag along every time we went out to eat. He would always order a glass of water for his drink (free). And then go over to the fountain drinks and dump it out and fill it back up with Sprite. He thought he was real slick. He used to be a crew chief on C130 gunships. But now he ain't around no more.
Charming. I always like being treated like a potential criminal. Maybe I can take off my belt, shoes and coat, empty my pockets, and walk through a scanner.
I know they have a theft problem, but I don't.
I already had to stop going to two stores because their self-checkout kept insulting me (I have one item, it does not need to go in the bagging area, because I don't have a bag for one item).
Here in Switzerland, the two top supermarkets (which basically form an oligopoly) have had this system operating in every supermarket I have entered within the last 3 years.
This is obviously motivated by the fact that Swiss wages are really high compared to the US, even adjusted for cost of living.
I'd be interested to hear how far along this tech is internationally.
https://www.marketingweek.com/1995/04/28/shelf-service-at-sa...
The smartphone app works, but is much less convenient I find because my phone goes off in between scanning items!
One drawback is buying alcohol - you have to wait for an assistant to do override to ensure you are over 18 - can result in a wait.
As for the various shops which offer self scan at checkout - most are very poor UX I find. You have to scan things and it is waiting for a weight to be added to bagging area - if you don't put it down it doesn't register. 5 items the same - all have to be scanned one at a time. Then there is annoying voice - I dislike them. Worst example is W H Smith at airports - not helped by lots of less than clued up people using them...
I wonder how long this will last though...
If you add even more self checkout stations, it would decrease efficiency, not increase it.
Also, not to mention all the times the few human lanes are clogged by people with 200 items that are holding up all the people just trying to buy a bag of cat food.
Now my hometown grocery store has 8 self-checkout booths managed by a single person. Since those 8 self-checkout booths did not replace 8 human lanes, I'm not sure how you can argue that it did not increase throughput.
But self-checkout lines are always open.
1. get better self-checkout systems. our target just upgraded theirs and... it's so much cleaner/faster/easier. I was OK before, but it's cut out so much apparent bloat that i can be in and out in under a minute if the payment system is fast.
2. mark some self-checkouts as "express" (or maybe "experienced"). Having to wait behind someone using the last self-checkout station who is going to do 40 items, and who apparently has never used self-checkout (or, to be fair, this store's version) is excruciating when you're standing there with 2 items. Marking a station as "for experienced users only" (or marking others as "for beginners") - would rub people the wrong way, but would probably help if adhered to.
* Scanning multiples of the same item. One retailer has this down: You scan one yogurt, and it shows "(+) 1 (-) yogurt". You press (+) five times, you get billed for 6 yogurts. The second biggest retailed just doesn't have this, so you stand there swiping the same yogurt six times, praying that the hard-coded delay between consecutive scans is small enough that you don't swipe too quickly.
* Consistency & Internal vs. external definitions: When scanning loose bread and cakes, the interface is quite clearly copied 1:1 from the existing cashier system. How do I know? Because it isn't ordered in any reasonable fashion. The available categories are something like "Bread" (makes sense), "confections" (Makes sense, I guess?) and "small baked goods" (???). I'm sure that makes sense to someone working there, but if buying a cinnamon bun stumps the user, there's something wrong.
The Kroger where I shop currently has self-checkout systems where they only let you scan the next item after the previous one has been placed in the "bagging area". That addresses the scan more than intended issue you mention, but it makes scanning individual items of the same type even slower.
However, to level up my game, though, I've switchted to their app (on iPhone, at least) where you scan things as they go into the cart, then pay directly from the app, and show the electronic receipt on the way out.
Only one line, (the one to get out.) minimal muss and/or fuss.
I guess you like being spied on.
Sam's Club Scan & Go permissions:
Location:
precise location (GPS and network-based)
Camera:
take pictures and videos
Wi-Fi connection information:
view Wi-Fi connections
Other:
receive data from Internet
view network connections
full network access
prevent device from sleeping
For what it's worth, joining any club store or rewards program is signing up for a certain amount of "being spied on", so I'm not that paranoid about it.
> Location:
> precise location (GPS and network-based)
So it knows which store I'm in. See also: scanning my member card before checking out.
> Camera:
> take pictures and videos
So it can scan barcodes.
> Wi-Fi connection information:
> view Wi-Fi connections
...but not control which ones to which you're connected. How often does your list of Wi-Fi connections matter when you're at the store?
>Other:
> receive data from Internet
Download item info?
> view network connections
Make sure it can get to the internet.
> full network access
Two-way communication about your purchases and payment to them.
> prevent device from sleeping
So that you don't have to wait for it to wake up between aisles.
These all seem reasonable for a self-scanning app. But then, a paranoid person could find reasons to be afraid of water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax
[0] or scan and decide not to buy!
[1] and whatever surveillance aggregators bid enough
Isn't this the same as described in the article?
The bottleneck seems to be Americans. I live in Canada but we get a lot of American tourists, and they always go to the self-checkout and then get confused about something and tie up a terminal for 5 minutes and then start loudly complaining about how terrible self checkouts are. There's some strange mentality among Americans where they know they hate self-checkout, they know they will fail to use them, but they still insist on skipping over all the staffed checkouts and using the self-checkout anyways.
This must be the case[1], I keep hearing self-checkout lines being slow but they are always the quickest way out of any store in almost every self-checkout store I've been to in southern Ontario.
[1] maybe a combination of the design of the local systems and the experience of the users, the penetration is quite large in the downtown city I live in, so people tend to be very quick
And you don't have to be faster than the cashier to be faster, you just have to be faster than 1/4 as fast as a cashier before one bank of self-checkouts is faster than the cashier.
Current self checkout systems appear to only move the work of a cashier onto the customer, then force them to wait longer for anything that needs correction.
But a while back the nearby Walmart put in a bunch of new self checkout terminals, and they are great. Excellent bar code recognition, and I've never had any problems with the bagging area.
I am puzzled by one thing. Sometimes when I hit the "pay now" button it puts up a reminder to make sure to scan items still in the cart (they have a hand scanner for scanning things like big bags of pet food, or heavy packs of drinks, and similar that you aren't going to try to bag). I've not been able to discern any pattern to how it decides when to put up this reminder. In particular, I have not noticed any connection to total price of the items I've scanned, or number of items I've scanned, or to any particular items that might tend to be purchased with items that are generally not bagged.
The only issue I've had with them is that once I thought I might have double scanned something. I was buying 12 packs of frozen vegetables, and somewhere near the end I thought I might have double scanned one of them. The display only showed the last 6 items scanned, but there were page forward/back buttons. However, there was no apparent way to tell if page back went back 6 items, or if it kept some context, so I was not able to figure out how many items I had actually scanned [1].
I could not figure it out, and neither could the attendant. We decided I probably had not double scanned. Alas, at the end when I got the receipt I saw that I had double scanned. Rather than try to fix it, I suggested that I just go and grab a 13th pack of frozen vegetables, and the attendant agreed that would simplest.
About a week later (surely just a coincidence), there was a software update on the terminals that improved the UI, including making the scrolling more sensible.
[1] In retrospect, I could have went by the prices. I could have added up all the items other than frozen vegetables, and from that and the current total figured out the number of vegetables.
The only problem are missing shopping bags and scanners which are slow, still running some flavor of embedded windows, I believe made by motorola.
I used it quite a bit when it was first offered, and saw a number of other customers use it as well, but now I rarely use it and I rarely see others using it either. The scanner guns are still there near the entrance to the store, but now there are carts piled in front of them so they'd be hard to get to even if you wanted to get one. Nobody cares, and I suspect they'll disappear at some point soon.
Honestly the whole system was just not reliable enough, IMO. The scan-it-yourself guns are not as fast as the laser barcode readers used on the actual POS systems; there's a noticeable and extremely irritating 1-2 second delay per item, which doesn't sound like much, but it's pretty annoying when you are trying to scan a dozen cans of cat food or something. Oh, and you can't do a [scan x quantity] entry, you have to scan each individual item, so for e.g. those cans of cat food, there's a disincentive to buying too many.
The real killer was the integration with the POS payment system though. When you get up to the front of the store, you go to a self-checkout line -- so right there, you might still have to wait in line, because there's no dedicated self-scan payment kiosk. One supposes they could have one if there was demand, though.
When you do make it up to the register, there's a complex dance that you have to go through to link the scangun you used to scan your items to your account, and then to the register you're paying at, so that the items will flow through and total up correctly. You have to scan a barcode on the self-checkout system, and then scan your "Giant card" (loyalty card), except sometimes this doesn't work, or sometimes it works but only if you scan them in the opposite order.
And of course if anything isn't working correctly, which happened way too often, you end up just having to re-scan all your groceries again, manually, at the self-checkout. I don't know about anyone else, but once I had that happen a couple of times, that was the end of using the scangun system for me. If I might just end up having to do the work twice, forget it -- I'll do the way that I know is just going to result in me doing it once. I hate lines, but what I hate even more is rework.
So I hope Kroger has worked out some of the kinks from the Giant system. It was a promising scheme, and I really wanted it to work, but it seemed like a 90% solution and what they really need is a 99.9% solution. Having the system fall flat on its face and force me to re-scan all my groceries even a few percent of the time is a non-starter IMO. That needs to be an outcome right up there with having the whole thing just catch on fucking fire, in terms of never being allowed to happen.
Kroger doesn't make their Kroger Plus Mandatory for the Self-Checkouts, but they do make it Mandatory for the U-Scan system.
Our bags have big bar codes to scan, and there's also a big "+1 bag" button on the self checkout machines.
As someone who has lived in California, sounds like you have a beef with a single store.
Every time I go in I have the same thought that it's such a waste of someone's life to spend most of it standing motionless with the sole purpose to reduce theft of plastic bags.