LONDON — When it comes to grocery shopping, there seem to be two types of people in this world: those who prefer self-checkout and those who prefer interaction with a human being.
Booths, a small chain that has been selling groceries in the north of England since 1847, has decided its customers fall into the second category and announced this month that it will eliminate self-checkouts in all but two of its 28 stores. They are bucking a trend that has redefined retail shopping around the world for the past 20 years.
When things are going well, self-checkout can be the quickest way to get out of a store: stack your groceries, swipe a credit card, bag them up, and go. Everything should be over in a matter of minutes.
But that is not always the reality. The machine does not recognize your spaghetti. You clicked on the image of a zucchini on the screen, but what you have in the basket is a cucumber. And buying something like alcohol or medication still means you have to wait for a store employee to come.
“There’s always a problem,” Sandra Abittan said as she left a Tesco supermarket in northwest London, noting that she often has to wait for help when using a self-checkout.
But he said he usually still chooses them because he finds their lines tend to be shorter.
Self-collection boxes have been increasing around the world for 20 years. Many chains expanded their use during the height of the pandemic, when minimizing human contact was particularly important. But Booths isn’t the only one reconsidering the automated revolution: In September, Wal-Mart told the website Insider that it would eliminate self-checkouts from a handful of stores, although it didn’t say why.
In 2016, A study of retailers in the United States, Britain and other European countries found that retailers with self-service checkouts and apps had a shrink rate of about 4 percent, more than double the industry average, and researchers said the self-checkout lines tempted shoppers to act in ways they normally wouldn’t and made theft less detectable.
Booths, which has about 3,000 employees, said in a statement that having its employees interact with customers provided a better experience. “Delighting customers with our warm northern welcome is part of our DNA,” the company said.
At lunchtime on a recent Friday at Tesco in northwest London, most people seemed to choose the self-checkout option, largely because the queue was shorter than at the human-run checkouts.
But eliminating automatic payments entirely, as Booths announced, would be a “bad idea,” Abittan said. He had used self-collection to avoid having to wait in line and everything went well.
“I had no problems,” he said. “Miracle”.
By: CLAIRE MOSES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6995016, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-11-21 19:50:07
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