Self-Checkout Tech Innovations Alleviate Labor Pain Points For Grocers

During quarantine, as consumers looked for ways to get their food needs met while minimizing contact with people outside their quarantine bubbles, self-checkout went from being the exception to the norm for many grocery shoppers.

Now, as vaccinated consumers’ contagion concerns subside, self-checkout is becoming more a matter of convenience than one of safety (though, of course, sanitation remains a must). A survey highlighted in PYMNTS’ Digitizing Unattended Retail Payments report found that 85 percent of consumers believe self-checkout is faster than checking out with a cashier, and more than half of consumers expect their self-checkout usage to increase through the rest of the year.

For grocers, taking advantage of this desire for self-checkout presents an opportunity to make the most of their workforce while meeting demand for eCommerce orders.

“Labor is harder to get, [and grocers] have a lot more tasks to manage in the store now,” Kirk Goldman, vice president, business strategy at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, which makes self-service systems among other hardware and software solutions, told PYMNTS in an interview. “Store associates have to go through the store and pick items for these ecommerce orders to be picked up either inside or outside the store, and … it’s almost forcing retailers to expand their self-service options or get more utilization out of what [labor] they have.”

PYMNTS’ study, The Bring-It-To-Me Economy: How Online Marketplaces And Aggregators Drive Omnichannel Commerce, created in collaboration with Carat by Fiserv, surveyed over 5,000 U.S. consumers about how their shopping habits have changed since the start of the pandemic. The study found 57 percent of consumers order groceries online and 46 percent are doing so more often than before March 2020.

Additionally, PYMNTS data from last year’s How We Will Pay report found that 1 in 5 consumers had used a self-service kiosk to make a purchase in 2020, up 25 percent from around 16 percent of consumers in 2019.

Many major companies are getting onboard, not only installing self-service checkout kiosks but also seeking out new, more frictionless ways to enable cashierless grocery purchases. Amazon announced its first full-size Amazon Fresh grocery store with the company’s “Just Walk Out” cashierless checkout technology, which uses computer vision and shelf weight sensors to update shoppers’ virtual carts as they add and remove items from their physical carts, auto-charging customers as they walk out of stores.

Similarly, autonomous shopping tech provider AiFi is planning to open 1,000 computer vision cashierless checkout convenience stores with Dutch retail technology company Wundermart, Israeli cashierless checkout company Trigo recently announced a new investment that brings its total funding to more than $100 million, and checkout-free technology company Grabango recently raised $39 million in Series B funding. Amazon is also known for its checkout-free smart shopping carts, a system of which grocery giant Kroger began testing its own version at the start of the year.

In addition to computer vision and smart carts, another frontier in the space is self-checkout through consumers’ mobile devices. As Raz Golan, CEO of Israeli-based mobile checkout company Shopic, told PYMNTS in an interview in 2020, mobile-enabled self-checkout “allows retailers to better communicate with customers as they shop.” These in-store digital integrations can drive revenue overall.

“The online business is much less profitable than brick and mortar, so grocery retailers are actively pushing customers to get into stores, where they can get a great upsell rate,” Golan explained. “Once you give a customer a unique and smooth experience in a physical store, they will come more often, even at peak hours, because all the stuff that’s not so much fun is taken out of the equation.”