Retailers in Europe, like Booths supermarkets, and the United States, like Walmart, are pulling back on having self-checkout in light of complaints and shoplifting.
Yeah I have trouble believing this. They just remodeled the Walmart near me and I bet there's 60 self checkout machines. There's like maybe 3-5 normal checkout lines in between the self checkout.
Exit gates you need a receipt to go through. That shit isn't even legal, I've been waiting for someone pushing that to the SC so they'll have to dismantle them nationwide.
Ppft, stores thinking they can hinder my free movement in society? I'll go violent over that, that's where I draw the final line, no more of this capitalist surveillance shit, you put barriers in my way I'll stomp them to pieces.
Kroger here just added two more lanes of self-checkout. We won't use them. We're a family of 3. We buy a lot of groceries. Doing it by ourselves would take so much more time.
Our Kroger had two rows of mini self checkouts, 2x3, and adjacent it was a cashier checkout. They removed one of the rows of minis and replaced it and the subsequent with a conveyor self checkout instead, so 3 minis and 2 conveyors.
Now there are fewer places to check out, and the belted checkout is annoying as all hell to use. If you have 3 items it's wasteful to use it because you have to walk 5 feet to fetch your bags, and if you have a large cart of groceries you wouldn't want to self checkout anyway because it's a hell of a lot easier to have help.
I keep seeing stories every so often on Facebook about this. I feel like these stories just pop up to bring up engagement on the site. most stores in my area (Florida) have increased self checkout
Yeah I think they saw a couple of examples Of stores taking out the self checkout lanes and ran with them. Although you could say the theft that the self checkout lanes allow is a recurring expense, but that's probably not nearly as much as the saving that the machines give.
Shrink has hovered around 1.5% (that's 1.5% of total sales...) And the NRF has been coy about the fact that 1/3 of that shrink is "administrative" issues - lost product, mis allocated, warehouse issues, broken in transit, etc.
Additionally, a little less than a third is from employee theft, and a the remaining 36% is external theft.
But since they lump mistakes and general admin issues in with theft, they get to claim a higher number whenever they complain very loudly so that they can redirect the conversation away from the massive increase in profits they have had, along with the increase in wage theft cases they are losing, as well as trying to cover up the fact they are closing "under performing" stores in poorer neighborhoods (which not limits access to people in those locations, but the store doesn't care, they dont buy stuff anyway...).