Supermarket revolution: the end of shopping as we know it?
A new generation of supermarkets is being trialled, in which customers’ moves are tracked and their phones automatically billed. The technology could cut theft – and jobs. Rupert Neate reports
Welcome to the supermarkets of the future. They may look and feel like the supermarkets we are all used to – and stock the same bread, butter and bananas – but these shops are now fitted out with more than £1m of the latest technology that their bosses promise will put an end to our biggest frustration (queueing) and our most persistent crime (shoplifting).
Jill French, a legal secretary in her 30s, wearing a sharp navy suit and matching beret, has just left a Tesco Express on London’s Holborn Viaduct empty-handed. It’s coming up to 6.30pm on a Thursday and, like dozens of others, French has popped in for a few essentials on her way home. “I just went in to grab pasta, milk and some broccoli,” she says. “But there was such a queue I got frustrated and walked out.”
An eight-minute walk away is a near-identical Tesco Express where there are no queues. This shop is the cleverest of all the 2,700 Tescos in the UK. There are no checkouts, no checkout assistants, and – in theory – no chance of shoplifting. This Tesco is filled with thousands of cameras, weighted shelves and artificial-intelligence technology that watches your every move, figures out what you’ve bought and bills you directly as you walk out.
It’s not just Tesco that is trialling these new “smart” supermarkets. Retailers across the UK, and the rest of the world, are racing to deploy rival technology. The model for all of them is similar. First, you must download an app, register a credit card and scan a QR code on your phone to enter through train station-style gates. Barriers prevent those without the app from entering the shop. Once inside, the technology follows you around the store recording every item you pick up (and put back). When you’re done, you just walk out and after a few minutes your phone alerts you as to how much you’ve spent. The supermarkets say timepressed, easily frustrated people are crying out for a better, hassle-free shopping experience, and if these trial stores are successful they will roll out the technology across the country.
It’s almost 74 years since the first British supermarket opened in Manor Park, east London. At this branch of the London Cooperative Society, customers could walk round the store and take items off the shelves by themselves. It was revolutionary. In the years before, shoppers had to present the shopkeeper at a counter with a list of items that their assistants would fetch.
Choosing your own tomatoes was banned, and touching the products could lead to prosecution.
As with many innovations, the “self-service” supermarket concept was exported from the US, where retail pioneer Clarence Saunders opened Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1916. If you’re wondering about the name, Saunders said it was named “so people will ask that very question”. Today all shops, big or small, follow a similar concept. But our retail needs are evolving. The days of “the big weekly shop” are over, with Britons going to a supermarket at least twice a week, according to YouGov.
The new generation of AI stores is meant to respond to these changes, but are there dangers in tinkering with one of the last remaining social levellers? Supermarkets are more than just places to buy food; they provide a space for a daily mixing of people of different classes and backgrounds in our increasingly siloed world. If AI takes over, will those without access to the latest smartphone be barred from the great supermarket melting pot? Will lonely, older people lose their friendly chat with the cashier, which could be their only conversation of the day?
“If AI takes over, will those without access to the latest smartphone be barred from the great supermarket melting pot?”
Research supports retailers’ hunch about our frustrations with shopping. A recent survey found that more than a third of 2,000 people polled would walk out of the store rather than wait five minutes in a checkout queue, and 46% said they were so irritated by queuing that they would consider not coming back to the shop again. Laura Saunter, a senior retail analyst, says supermarkets have spent years trying to bust queues because they are the customers’ “number one pain point”.
“These stores are positioned at millennial parents who are busy; they want to be in and out, they don’t want to waste their time,” Saunter says. “And younger people, generation Z, just don’t want to interact with store staff.” The race is on. Tesco has already tested the technology at a shop in Welwyn Garden City for more than a year. Amazon has 15 stores that use similar technology. Aldi is preparing to open a similar smart store in south London. Morrisons is testing its own vision of the technology at its Bradford headquarters, and plans to roll out dozens of small stores elsewhere.
All of the supermarkets say the technology is designed to make shoppers’ lives easier, but experts say the real desire is to improve their bottom line as they can cut back on the wage bill and save
some of the £5.5bn lost every year to shoplifting and employee theft. The most frequently stolen items from UK stores include spirits, sirloin steaks, razor blades, cosmetics, infant formula and batteries, according to the Centre for Retail Research (CRR). Cheese also makes the top ten.
While fitting out supermarkets with the new technology costs about £1m per store, the firms installing it claim it will pay for itself within 18 months because it will hopefully eliminate theft. Supermarkets lose about 1.4% of their combined £200bn annual revenue to “shrinkage” – industry code for customer or employee theft and admin errors.
Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the CRR, says supermarkets thought they had found a solution to queue frustration and high wage bills with the introduction of selfscanning machines that were rolled out in the early 2000s and are now ubiquitous. “But it is very easy for customers to skip a few items through without scanning the barcode,” he says. “It’s quite easy to get away with things that you wouldn’t be able to at a staffed till.” Probe a little, and even the most upstanding friends and acquaintances have a shoplifting tale – from the south London primary school teacher who makes a point of stealing one item in every shop, to the writer who was tapped on the shoulder by a security guard who’d seen her tap the screen for one banana when she bagged two.
A study by the University of Leicester found that theft from stores with self-checkout machines was between 33% and 147% higher than those with only traditional checkouts. The researchers also found that the number of self-checkout machines available to use was correlated to the level of theft.
In response, shops have cut down on the number of self-checkout machines available. According to Bamfield, this explains why there are often out-of-order stickers on working terminals. Supermarkets have also begun installing screens on selfcheckouts showing a livestream of customers scanning their items. “They’re reminding you that every action you take is being filmed,” says Bamfield. “It’s like the shop saying, ‘Are you sure you want to steal?’”
It’s not just customers who steal. Bamfield’s research shows that about £1.4bn a year is lost to shoplifting, followed closely by £1.3bn in employee theft. Bamfield believes the most common technique staff use to steal is known in the industry as “the switcheroo”. “An uncle will say to his cashier nephew, ‘I’m coming into the store tomorrow afternoon and I’d like a discount,’” he explains. “When the uncle comes to the checkout, the nephew will have a barcode sticker for a watermelon or orange or something on his palm and while pretending to scan the uncle’s bottles of scotch whisky the nephew will scan the watermelon sticker.” Bamfield, who has spent a career working with retailers, isn’t sure the new checkout-free supermarkets will eliminate shoplifting altogether. “We just don’t know yet how good this technology will be at reducing theft.”
Shoplifting, which was first documented in the 16th century, began soaring in 2014 after the law was changed to define “low-value shoplifting” as a summary offence. This means that police forces can decide not to investigate thefts from shops of goods worth less than £200. People caught can still be arrested and face prosecution, but the 2014 Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act allows them to plead guilty by post. Police in England and Wales recorded 374,000 incidents of shoplifting in 2019 (the latest figures available), up from 317,000 in 2013, before the law changed.
Retailers have responded with more technology. Sainsbury’s is experimenting with machine-learning “concealment detector” tech. And the new generation of hi-tech supermarkets – with no queues, less shoplifting, lower wage bills – have clear benefits. But campaigners are concerned they represent another step in the UK’s march towards an “everyday surveillance society”.
“Going to the supermarket is one of the most mundane, everyday things we do. The fact that surveillance and data gathering in such a space is being normalised is deeply troubling,” says Emmanuelle Andrews, who works as a policy and campaigns officer at the human rights group Liberty. “Shopping should be one of the great levellers, where the businessman in the sharp suit is shoulder-to-shoulder with the pensioner on benefits. Everyone has to buy food, but with this technology only those with a smartphone and credit cards will be able to shop there.”
In the near term, the biggest losers from this technological revolution are likely to be Britain’s army of 270,000 checkout workers, most of whom are women. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has identified supermarket cashier jobs as among the most at risk of being replaced by automation, with 65% of checkout-operator jobs said to be in peril.
“Supermarkets lose over £5bn to shoplifting every year. Popular items include spirits, sirloin steaks and infant formula”
“The checkout-free technology is specifically designed to eliminate jobs and save money,” says Dr Carl Benedikt Frey, an Oxford University economist and expert on automation whose research the ONS statistics are based on. Up to 47% of all jobs could be done by machines “over the next decade or two”, he believes. Frey predicts that checkout workers are likely to be among the first to lose their jobs to the robots, alongside bar staff, farm workers and sewing machinists.
Supermarkets have offered stable employment to generations of Britons excluded from higher-skilled roles, providing reliable incomes – and the prospect of advancement – in communities blighted by manufacturing decline. Frey fears that a rollout of AI stores would send the checkout worker the same way as the elevator operator, which is the only one of 270 job descriptions in the 1950 US census to have been totally wiped out by automation.
“We think this coming change is unprecedented, but actually what is happening mirrors what we saw in the Industrial Revolution and hollowing out of middle-income jobs,” he says. “The technology is very different, but the effects on the economy are quite similar.”
Back in the Holborn Tesco, among the familiar daily groceries, a change is coming that could herald the biggest revolution in how we shop for groceries since the opening of the first supermarket on 12 January 1948. Like their predecessors, the smart supermarkets are said to be designed to make our lives easier. But is it time to allow the shop assistant to follow the elevator operator into obsolescence, or could we all learn to wait a little longer and enjoy a friendly chat at the checkout?
A longer version of this article appeared in The Guardian © Guardian News & Media Limited 2022