When self-checkout stands first became popular in the early 2000s, the promise was an attractive one: get in-and-out of the store faster by not having to wait in line for a checker. This worked especially well when you had just a few items—the regular checkout lines would handle the cartloads of groceries, and you would use the self-checkout for your smaller orders. As the decades have passed, however, self-checkout has transformed from being an optional to becoming the predominant way many big-box retail and grocery stores are now handling most checkouts. Convenience has become frustration, and it’s damaging our customer experience.
Understaffing
While the dream for retailers was that would need to employ fewer employees and thus save money on their labor costs—which, in a roundabout way, is supposed to help us save money as consumers—one of the major consequences is that there are now too few employees in the stores overall. This chronic understaffing means we are all often left in the lurch when trying to find items or answers to our questions. Fewer employees mean shelves go unstocked for longer, and disorganization takes far longer to fix. In short, it’s a mess!
This understaffing combined with the long-standing fact that retail jobs don’t pay very well has made working for these stores even worse on employees. Unhappy employees make for unhappy customers, as we all know too well. No wonder many of feel overlooked and unappreciated when we shop.
Frustrations Galore
Aside from the understaffing, another major source of dissatisfaction is the self-checkout experience itself. While promoted as a quick and easy process, most of us know how obnoxious these machines can be. Whether through human error trying to figure out how to type in the right produce code and making sure we don’t move an item into the bagging area too soon, or from buggy software and hardware problems, we find themselves having to scan items over-and-over. Got an age-restricted item, be it alcohol or several over-the-counter medications? Prepare to wait for that one overworked employee to see the overhead blinking light to give you an override.
Instead of feeling valued, we can’t help but conclude that these stores don’t care enough about us to provide a more seamless experience.
Shrinkage
For all the money these retailers hope they are saving, self-checkout introduces another significant problem: inventory shrinkage. By making us responsible for scanning and bagging their own items, the likelihood for mistakes skyrockets. Using the slow lookup tool for items without barcodes results in countless errors. Or we might miscount items or answer on-screen questions incorrectly. (That’s before you account for the fact that an unscrupulous few will intentionally use self-checkout as a way to shoplift!)
Customers cannot be responsible for preventing inventory shrinkage while also performing the duties of a cashier. We just want to buy the right items for a reasonable price, and be treated with some respect and dignity.
Accountability
Whatever self-checkout machines save stores in labor costs isn’t worth all the trouble they create. The machines are temperamental and unreliable, requiring lots of maintenance and troubleshooting. But most concerning of all, they have made our experiences palpably worse through understaffing and inconvenience. Who wants to struggle to find items on slowly restocked shelves, to search the store for anyone to help answer a simple question, or to deal with a frustrating and impersonal checkout process? That’s the kind of customer experience retailers how we won’t remember and hold against them.
But we should hold them accountable. As customers, we all have the power to complain to managers, post critiques on social media, and the like. But change through those avenues is slow. Instead, the best way to let your local stores know how strongly you feel about an issue is to participate in mystery shopping.
At The Brandt Group, we facilitate the conversation between customers and companies. And we’ve been doing it for over thirty years! If you want to make sure your voice is part of that conversation, consider shopping with us. Not only will you help make those businesses better places to shop at, you get paid for your opinions!
If you’re tired of feeling marginalized by retailers, check out our Becoming a Mystery Shopper page, and let’s work together to make sure business owners understand how much we value good customer service.
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