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We’ve talked about the fact that retailers are removing self checkout machines because of product loss and customer frustration. Added measures to control shoplifting often make the machines throw errors, requiring more employee oversight and making self checkouts cost more in overhead. They’re not cost effective for retailers at this point, which is good news for those of us who hate them. It turns out that self checkout machines also make people less loyal to a store. A study in the Journal of Business Research found that people have a poorer impression of stores when they have to use self checkout for larger numbers of items. No wonder Target is limiting self checkout to 10 items or less, although I doubt that will solve this problem. Here’s more on that study:
A recent study published in the Journal of Business Research found that self-checkout systems can lead to less customer loyalty when compared to a regular checkout staffed by an employee, especially for large purchases.
“Retailers are actually facing some dilemma regarding whether it’s really a good decision to install self-checkout systems,” said the study’s coauthor, Yanliu Huang, associate professor of marketing at the Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business.
Huang set out to understand how customers’ loyalty to a store is affected by whether shoppers choose to scan items themselves at a self-checkout kiosk or have an employee ring them up at a regular counter.
“More than one-third of U.S. customers use self-checkout systems, so it’s very relevant to both retailers and customers,” said Huang, who coauthored the research with Farhana Nusrat, her former student.
Huang and Nusrat ran five separate studies, some of which included asking hired participants to imagine themselves in different shopping scenarios at a grocery store or having them recall their recent grocery shopping trip.
Participants in some of the studies were asked to respond to questions or prompts about their sense of loyalty to the store based on their shopping scenario or experience. Questions focused on how likely the shopper was to return to the store, how valued as a customer they felt, and how the savings during their purchase made them feel rewarded.
Huang and Nusrat discovered that the amount of groceries being purchased matters.
When participants were put in scenarios where they only had six items, the sense of loyalty a customer felt was pretty similar if they used self-checkout or an employee rang up their order. When the purchase was 18 items though, that sense of loyalty was significantly higher for the customer that used regular checkout compared to the self-checkout.
“When you only have a very small basket size, it’s easy to use [the] self-checkout system,” said Huang.
Self-checkout kiosks represent about 38% of checkout lanes in grocery chains in the country, and the global market size of the machines is expected to continue to grow in the coming years, the study notes.
The findings of this study are definitely true for me. I very rarely go into grocery stores at this point and use delivery and pickup services for the most part. I typically only shop in person at Food Lion, which has no self checkouts and very friendly employees. I’ve never had a bad experience at a Food Lion! That may be due to corporate culture and the fact that their stores have predictable layouts. In comparison the competing grocery stores in my area, Kroger and Walmart, are awful. You often have to wait a long time to get service, at Kroger the aisles are often too small, and every location has a different layout. A few years ago they mixed up the aisles at most Walmarts to force you to make more impulse purchases too. When you’re ready to pay, you have to wait a long time for a cashier or you have to check out yourself and wait for someone to clear your error messages. It’s very tricky to figure out and anticipate why the machines require approval for purchases, which is surely by design.
As for Target, I recently placed a pickup order to include some Clevr Blends. I’m sure that I spent over $100 less than if I was browsing the store for items myself. I’ve learned through some very annoying experiences that it’s no longer pleasant to shop there in person.
Also I agree with this mom blogger that self checkouts ruin the social experience of shopping too.
photos credit Jim West / ImageBROKER / Avalon, Getty and via Instagram
