The human factor ian's Rural Ramblings
Shopping and especially grocery shopping is a necessity nowadays for most of us. All but gone are the days for hunt, forage and grow your own produce to fulfill all your needs. Some people still mange it and kudos to them. For the rest of us it is a trip once or more often a week to the supermarket.
Sadly, I’m just about old enough to remember the days before supermarkets. My mother was big on chores, me doing them that is. So, a few times a week when I wasn’t a school I had to trek half a mile, uphill, to the grocer, green grocer, butcher sometimes the newsagent and rarely to the sweet shop when I had authorisation to spend some of the change. I guess it taught me how heavy shopping was and a familiarity with money. I think looking back I would have passed on both of those for a while to do something more interesting.
One day, I our high street a new shop opened. It was larger had more stock lines and while one still had to line up to be served it was quicker, if your shopping list was up to scratch and often the groceries were cheaper putting pressure on the traditional shops. Before long the layout of the store changed and shock upon shock people cruised the aisles filling up their own trolleys and lining up for a checkout. There were mutters and grumblings but the choice and lower prices soon quelled any real shopper rebellion.
Now, supermarkets are often chains of corporate giants that take the lion’s share of the market from anything from foods to household goods. Supermarkets have become an ultra organized, highly competitive industry employing millions of people around the world. Being competitive it was an obvious step for a team of bean counters one day to come up with the selfservice checkout and in 1982 it became a reality.
Here we are 35 years later and self-service checkout is still not the favourite over regular checkouts. In my research, I have read that selfservice checkouts are a high target for theft. Items not scanned and items scanned as something else. Then there are the customer gripes, who are usually using the self-service because they are in a hurry. Top of the list of gripes seemed to be the self-service didn’t work properly followed by the person in front was taking too long. Some kind of road rage syndrome here maybe? Next, it was, I need help but there was no staff to help, which kinds of defeats the purpose of self checkout doesn’t it? Lastly, it was not understanding the system.
From my own perspective, the few times I have used self-checkout, items haven’t scanned, I’ve had issues with the payment system both cash and card and I’ve left the store feeling it would have quicker and easier to line up at the regular check out.
Beyond that if the supermarket industry wants to make self checkout more acceptable in my view it must take account of the fact that if customers are going to be doing everything themselves should there be a discount at the check out? This may be hard to reconcile with the theft issue. Furthermore, I feel uncomfortable about the soullessness of the procedure plus if we all went to self checkout there would be less jobs. And maybe at the centre of it is the soullessness. Humans are social animals, bean counters are too so I’ve heard, 35 years and counting and self checkout is not that popular, maybe there is a message here? I wonder how much all the hardware and technology cost to install and run?