Why Self-Checkout Failed to Replace Cashiers

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When you shop at any retail chain or supermarket these days, you find yourself funneled to self-checkout where you’re stuck watching people fumble finding bar codes, bagging their own groceries, navigating the interface, panicking when the machine shouts at them or the screen freezes. Even if you wanted to go back to checkout where a cashier scans and bags for you, you can’t because those aisles are either closed. All this tech just suddenly appeared nationwide in the mid-2010s.

Since the debut of these machines, retailers from Kroger and Walmart to Target all gaslighted that self-checkout was faster and that these machines were there not to replace workers, but to instead to free them to be more productive. They stuck to this script year-after-year despite continuous backlash. Their stocks collectively grew as Wall Street applauded these investments, believing that tech innovation would unlock unprecedented efficiencies and profits for the age-old, overhead-intensive business of retail.

Fast forward just 5 years and self-checkout has been a flop. Some retailers have backtracked, ripping out their machines and going back to human cashiers. While a few chains have continued to gaslight that self-checkout is still the future, the reality is that even they are scaling back - restricting the conditions in which consumers can use these machines.

Ultimately, the retail industry is just as confused as everyone else as there’s no clarity in the data. Is getting rid of a few part-time, $10-15 hourly cashiers actually ever business-wise meaningful if you end up needing to hire full-time loss prevention? Did retailers who installed self-checkout end up saving money or improving their profits? Has anyone’s fundamentals actually changed before and after self-checkout? And how did such a conservative industry get caught up in this hype?

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