Self Checkout (SCO) is a system that provides consumers an option to pay for purchased items without direct contact with the retailer’s staff. As an alternative to the traditional cashier, it draws success to the retailing business while aiming to offer compelling in-store experience to the customers.
The self-checkout option is meant for shoppers who want a quick exit, and prefer using the machines to dealing with store personnel. In a 2004 survey by research company IDC, respondents see the following key benefits of self-checkout system:
Among all devices and technologies covered in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) field, self checkout system is perhaps the most popular model to be studied as a real world example. Design a system that involves both logical and physical interactions between human and a computer requires deep understanding in many areas such as human behaviour, artificial intelligence, continuous scanning techniques and secure payment systems.
In 1992 Martin Goodwin and Bob Henry created the first Point of Sale (POS) software that could run on the Microsoft Windows platform (Kalplan, Karen, 1995). At the same year, Price Chopper Supermarkets claims to be the first supermarket in the world to offer “Do-it-yourself” checkout system (Roger Clarke, 1997). Each installation costs about $15,000, compared with about $10,000 for a normal POS. The procedure requires a customer to interact with the system on Intel 80-486-driven display to:
- scan the bar-codes of each of the products they wish to purchase;
- place the goods in a bag;
- make payment; and
- receive change.
If you look at today’s item purchasing process, these sequence of actions have not changed much in a typical positive user scenarios. However, the human interaction interface have changed significantly over the last 20 years to match the customer service industry that demands higher efficiency.
One of the core technology enables a modern SCO is touch screen – the easiest to use and most intuitive of all computer interfaces. The first capacitive touch screen was invented around 1965 – 1967 by E.A. Johnson at the Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern, UK ( (Johnson, 1965), only 2 years after Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute invented the first mouse prototype. Development progress of Graphical User Interface (GUI) enhanced the communication between human and computer. SCO is one of the typical success case in this area. Multi-touch screen technology has also enter to the self service field since its first emergence in 2006 presented by Jeff Han from NYU media research lab. Vendors like 3M, NCR and IBM have already incorporate the functionality to their retail solutions for more precise touch performance even at the edge and corners of the display (3M solution, 2013).
The hardware changes of SCO in the last 5 years were driven by growing customer and management demands as well as the rapid development of technology in related areas. According to Selfserviceworld.com, 50 percent of retail consumers surveyed prefer to use credit cards for self checkout transactions, 25 percent prefer to use debit cards, 15 percent don’t care and only 10 percent prefer cash. These statistics drives the initiative on system integration with smartcard docks. Since the first contactless cards in the UK were issued by Barclaycard in 2008 (The UK Cards Association, 2010), Paypass (also known as Tap-and-Go) is widely deployed in SCO to drastically improve the shopping efficiency.
Notice that I’ve never seen PayPal as an available payment method in Australia’s SCO, although NCR (the supplier to Coles Australia SCO) has announced integration with PayPal this year (NCR, 2013).
According to a 2006 U.S. analyst study, consumers spent over US$110 billion on self checkout transactions, up 35 precent over 2004 (IHL Consulting Group, 2006). In Australia, Big W deployed their first self checkout in March 2003, while retail giant Woolworths deployed NCR fastlane in April 2008. A 2009 study estimates that by 2014, there will be 430,000 self-checkout systems installed worldwide (Caroline Cooper, 2009). According to RBR, the global SCO installed base is forecast to more than triple to reach 381,000 by 2015 (RBR Global, 2010).
While the success of SCO clearly defined by these exciting figures, questions are asked by analysts and retailers on whether the solution is still winning retailers the constant race to optimize profits and satisfy customer needs to stay ahead of growing competition in the retail marketplace.
In the original U.S. patent by Schneider (#5083638) (United States Patent, 2010), SCO is supposed to “allows high shopper efficiency by minimizing customer handling of products…”. The point gets lose to a large degree over years due to implementation decisions and the complexity of design, result in sub-optimal invention. There are several high priority problems of the system:
- deterrent of customer fraud
- shopping efficiency
- non-coded product support and
- usability for non-experience users
Fraud detection logic inevitably putting a customer in an uncomfortable position when it carefully checks and warns every single action a customer is taking. You’d wish there’re never embarrassing “remove item in the bag”, “unexpected item in the area” or the ultimate “please wait for assistant”. Truth is, the system have no ability to register every customer’s face and reputation to identify if you’re an experienced and trusted customer or just someone who has the best intention for shoplifting. An interesting report from SMH talked about “scan scams” where some shoppers scan carrots as bananas to save money (Georgina Robinson, 2011), although the vast majority still do the right thing.
Providers leveraged the ensuing research information to further enhance the line of self checkout solutions over the last decade. One constant challenge during this process is shrinkage, which poses an ongoing dilemma for retailers. According to a report developed by the Food Marketing Institute (FMI), removing the cashier from the checkout equation and implementing self checkout lanes has considerable potential to reduce shrinkage, if the lanes are deployed using best practices (IBM, 2008). In the incident of carrot-banana-swapping, there are solutions available such as deploy genetic recognition device and sonar detection device to tell if an item is as claimed, but the cost of deploying such technologies would not make up with the shrinkage fix. However, strategies like educate and reward self checkout staffing, configure associate logins with limited access, apply appropriate measurement and reporting procedures and use video surveillance could reduce the potentials in shrinkage without the need to apply higher security level on SCO consoles.
The Australian Financial Review last year reported that both Woolworths and Coles are cutting back on self-service checkouts in some inner-city supermarkets, finding that it’s still faster and cheaper to employ register operators. Often this takes the form of a single queue system served by multiple registers (Angus Kidman, 2012).
From a certain degree, SCO put a tremendous trust to the community. The system is aiming to to improve labour utilization and increase sales by shortening waiting time, but the fact that a retailer willing to give its customer control in purchasing gives people an opportunity to evaluate their behaviour and to give back the trust.
Self checkout system become part of the fast pace modern society encouraging people to be more independent on fulfilling tasks with better privacy at their own convenience and choice. People get use to self controlled purchasing and payment methods just like how they get use to Google a question before asking others. The term “Service” used to mean a customer directly contact with the service organizations. However, in many cases nowadays it becomes communication between a person and technology. To many gen Ys, talking to a computer like PSP, xBox, iPad apps or these self checkout consoles is sometimes easier than initiate a conversation with parents and colleagues. Imagine a day when people can self serve anything and everything, would there still be a chance for any human conversations?
On the other side, the fact that traditional interpersonal nature of the service encounter gradually thinned out strikes an alert to service industry like Hospitality where service level is a key selling point. It becomes more difficult to introduce a variety of self-service technology while still maintaining service quality. The entire purpose behind SCO or any other forms of self service, is to enhance the service speed and quality while improve sales figure, on that note, a hybrid mode of technology and traditional service achieves the goal with best practice in any service industry.
Reference
Roger Clarke, “Price Chopper Supermarkets: Integrated POS Services and Advanced EDI”, 1994-1997, Retrieved 2013-06-10.
Caroline Cooper, “New study says self-checkout terminals to quadruple by 2014”, 2009, Retrieved 2013-06-09.
Kaplan, Karen. “Do-It-Yourself Solution: Small Grocery Chain Has Big Plans for Its Retailing Software”, “Los Angeles Times”, 1995-11-29, Retrieved 2010-10-12.
United States Patent and Trademark Office, USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database, 2010-10.
IHL Consulting Group, “2006 North American Self-Checkout Systems Market Study”, 2006-06-22.
Vaida Kazakeviciute, Aarthy Subramanian, “Analysis of Self Checkout System”, 2011-06-25, Retrieved 2013-06-09.
IBM, “IBM Checkout Environment for Consumer-Service software”, IBM White Paper, 2011-01, Retrieved 2013-06-09.
IBM, “Shrink and self checkout, Trends, technology and tips”, IBM White Paper, 2008, , Retrieved 2013-06-11.
RBR, “RBR Global EPOS and Self-Checkout 2010”, Retrieved 2013-06-08.
The UK Cards Association, “Key Facts and Stats”, 2010-07-10, Retrieved 2010-08-06.
Angus Kidman, “Are self-service checkouts on the way out?”, 2012-06-14, Retrieved 2013-06-09.
Geogina Robinson, “Self-service checkouts: are bad apple scan cheats going bananas?”, 2011-08-03, Retrieved 2013-06-09.
NCR, “NCR and PayPal Working Together to Make Everyday Easier for Consumers When Dining Out and Shopping”, 2013-01-15.
Johnson, E.A., “Touch Display – A novel input/output device for computers”, Electronics Letters 1 (8): 219–220, 1965.
3M Multi-Touch System PCT2000PX, “3M solutions retail”, 2013.
Mary Bellis, “Who Invented Touch Screen Technology?”, Retrieved 2013-06-11.
Bubbly Sherry 