Self-checkout kiosks have been appearing in various stores over the last couple of years. Businesses believe they can save money by having one employee monitor mulyiple registers. Customers are sold these as a convenience.
Here’s how it’s supposed to work:
- You place all of your items on the input tray
- While there are items on the input tray {
- you scan an item
- you place that item in the bag or on the output tray
- You pay
}
An employee monitors the console of all four self-serve checkouts in the event the customer’s having a problem — for example, they’ve selected produce that doesn’t have a sticker. This happens all the time to me with tomatillos.An unstated, but equally significant reason is to watch for a customer surreptitiously slipping an extra item into their bag. Items are also weighed on both the input and output side. The system assumes you’ll put the item scanned in the bag before scanning another. If there are any discrepancies, the system squawks and signals the employee. In grocery stores, self-checkout is usually limited to ten or fewer items.
A business’ potential savings is the three cashiers it doesn’t need to allocate. Assuming a checker made $10.00 per hour (including benefits), and there are three positions displaced, that’s a theoretical windfall of $60k per year.
The customer potentially benefits from a quicker transaction. There’s also a use case where you’re purchasing an item that you feel you may be morally judged in some bizarre manner: Preparation H, tampons, bikini-area hair removal cream, Cosmo, bubble gum flavored ice cream, or whatever.
An unintended customer benefit is not being subjected to potential impulse buys while waiting in line. How many of us have bought a bag of Skittles or batteries because they were right there in front of us while we were waiting? My kids are uncanny in their ability to zoom in on the most unhealthy sugar pseudo-food at the 3′ level. There’s none of that in the self-checkout area.
Fred Meyer and QFC, both owned by the Kroger mega grocery chain, have self-serve registers available. They work okay, though certain items like tomatillos consistently require manual intervention. Given our distance from Mexico, I suppose this is understandable. I usually favor for the human register unless it’s Eric’s, which will drive me to the machine every time. Eric is… well, a polynimrod. For example, last time I went through his line, he asked me how my day was going three times during the checkout process. For fun, I changed the answer the third time.
PCC, a natural foods store, is the most pleasant to shop at, despite being the most expensive. The employees are knowledgeable, and the cashiers work at least six months in the store. PCC has no self-serve kiosks, nor do I ever expect them to.
So now, amid PR, Home Depot has begun installing self-checkout kiosks. Meanwhile, they’re closing down many the human checkout lines in order to drive traffic to self-checkout. Based on several trips to Home Depot, I’ve concluded that they do not work.
The fundamental problem with Home Depot’s implementation of self-serve checkout is there are huge variances among the items’ sizes, shapes, and weights. For example, a recent purchase included a 5 gallon container of paint, a plastic putty knife, an 8′ baseboard, and two 3/16” hexagonal nuts. I scanned the paint and plopped it on the output tray. I followed up with the putty knife and put it in the bag. While I attempted to scan the third item, the register self-immobilizes itself, seemingly convinced that I’m attempting to shoplift as it chides me to put the item in the bag or rescan it.
What’s happened is the paint weighs about 60 pounds while the putty knife is less than an ounce. The scale doesn’t have the precision to deal with that, and the register system gets confused. When you think about it, Home Depot is much different use case than the grocery store because most groceries fit in the cart and are designed to be handled by normal people like, say, soccer moms.
In a grocery store, the employee would be paying attention. However at Home Depot, there are usually three or four yakking among themselves. (I think they could be betting on how many items I’ll get through.) I’ve gone through this register abyss enough times that I just immediately go ballistic until someone opens another register or manually rings up whatever it is I’m trying to get through.
The store employees know the self-serve registers are a problem. I’ve also called the Home Depot corporate headquarters in Atlanta. The customer relations person did the deer in headlights routine, but when pressed, conceded the system was still new.
Home Depot is very conveniently located to my house, but because of the difficulty in paying for things, I’ve been channeling more of my home improvement business at Lowe’s. (I’m sufficiently out in the ‘burbs that finding specialty stores for everything is very inconvenient. One exception was when I needed washers to fix a faucet. Neither HD nor Lowe’s was able to help me find the one for my specific faucet.)
On another tangent, last month I saw A&E’s biography on Home Depot. The show detailed the store’s history from founding by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank through the hiring of Nardelli. I wanted to find some more background information, and visited A&E’s Biography site.
There are two things I hate about this site. First, their homepage is wholly dependent upon Macromedia Flash. Admittedly, I am still a little stuck in the 80s — but not enough that I’d tell jokes in or about binary — and find Flash-based navigation to be a distraction. It’s a high crime against user interface when there’s no option to skip the animation to view the site. After all, Flash is a plugin.
The second thing that bothers me about the site is how horrid their search mechanism is. What do you think you’d find if you typed “Home Depot” in the A&E search engine? go ahead and try it, I’ll wait. Think that’s an anomaly? Try looking up Arthur Blank or Bernie Marcus.
I couldn’t find them, either. Google has spoiled us all.