Northern supermarket chain Booths is axing self-service checkouts in favour of Real Humans in almost all its shops. This is terrible news for misanthropes, but blessed relief for those of us who scream inwardly at the robotic request to please remove the last item from the bagging area when there IS no extra item, only the tuna I just scanned.
Apparently, we luddites are in the majority. According to the company’s managing director Nigel Murray, the decision to scrap the machines was based on customer feedback. “Our customers have told us this over time, that the self-scan machines that we’ve got in our stores can be slow, they can be unreliable, they’re obviously impersonal,” he said. And while I’ve never shopped in Booths, I can say with certainty that those problems aren’t unique to their self-service checkouts.
For a supposedly time-saving innovation, automated checkouts sure need a lot of time-intensive human intervention. Age verification when you’re buying booze; decrypting the mysterious means of selecting and weighing loose produce (different in every shop).
In my local supermarket, everything from moisturiser to baby formula is locked up in a special shoplift-proof box, which needs a human being to release it. And that’s before you get to the faff of whether the item you are scanning weighs what the computer thinks it ought to. Please remove the last item from the bagging area – there isn’t anything there, please just let me pay, what have you got against tuna, or me, or me having tuna?
Human beings, on the other hand, are awful in different ways – some of them chew gum, try to upsell you, or raise their eyebrows about how much tuna you’re buying – but at least it’s clear which of you is working. With even the most lackadaisical till attendant, your job is done once you’ve filled the trolley.
But faced with a till and scale, checking out your own shop can feel like sitting an exam you weren’t expecting, while a queue of harassed shoppers builds up behind you.
Some days, the anonymity of self-service is a balm for the soul – if I’m cripplingly hung over, for instance, or buying something embarrassing – but ultimately, me and my tuna are team Real Human.
While it feels nicer to interact with a person than a robot, large companies do not always make decisions in line with those preferences. On the contrary, when it comes to business, profits are king and time is money. And unlike people, machines don’t take lunch breaks or ask for living wages.
Despite their foibles, it would also be hard to deny that plentiful self-checkouts make shopping faster. As such, I fear they are here to stay.
In a world of increasing automation, Booths is something of an outlier – counterintuitively, that point of difference will make them the first choice for customers who value human contact over efficiency. As for me, marooned in Booths-less London, my battle with the robots must continue. There’s something unexpected in the bagging area (there isn’t) – someone is coming to help. Help.
