Self-Serve Checkouts Fading From Grocery Stores
28th September 2011
Good. I hate those damned things.
When Keith Wearne goes grocery shopping, checking out with a cashier is worth the few extra moments, rather than risking that a self-serve machine might go awry and delay him even more.
Most shoppers side with Wearne, studies show. And with that in mind, some grocery store chains nationwide are bagging the do-it-yourself option, once considered the wave of the future, in the name of customer service.
“It’s just more interactive,” Wearne said during a recent shopping trip at Manchester’s Big Y Foods. “You get someone who says hello; you get a person to talk to if there’s a problem.”
And you provide jobs for young people, partially disabled people, and those on the left side of the bell curve who, let’s face it, don’t have a lot of options.
September 28th, 2011 at 16:58
What!? Can this be the Automation Advocate speaking??
Who are you, and what have you done with Tim?
September 28th, 2011 at 22:39
I’m the guy who’s busy wondering how all these people from the left side of the bell curve wound up on the Internet.
I would welcome true automation. This isn’t it. Automation is when I dump the contents of my cart at one end and pay for my bagged groceries at the other, with a machine doing what the checkout guy does now, and lowering both the cost for the grocery store and the price to me. This is just shifting the cost of doing what the checkout guy does from the grocery store to me. It’s the same as pumping your own gas — that isn’t automation either.