The Fred Meyer on Hawthorne opened two staffed lanes on Sunday afternoon, which I had not seen in a while, and the line for them was longer than the line for the eight kiosks sitting empty behind me. People waited. Given a choice between a machine that works and a person who might, a lot of shoppers picked the person.
The kiosks are quietly going away. Costco tightened membership checks at self-checkout last year. Walmart pulled lanes at some stores. Dollar General said in March it was scaling self-checkout back across a large chunk of its fleet and putting employees at the front.
Every one of those announcements was framed as a shrink problem. Losses, theft, inventory accuracy.
That framing is convenient and it is not what customers experienced.
Self-checkout did not fail because people stole, it failed because it told the customer that the last ninety seconds of the visit were their job now, and the customer heard that message perfectly.
Think about what the kiosk actually communicates. It asks you to scan, bag, weigh, and troubleshoot. It accuses you when the bagging area disagrees with it. It summons an employee who arrives annoyed, because you have interrupted the thing they were doing. Then it thanks you. The whole sequence is a small ceremony of being mildly distrusted while doing unpaid labor.
Three things follow for anyone running a retail brand. One, the checkout is not the end of the experience, it is the last thing that happens, which means it is what the visit is remembered as. Two, every efficiency you push onto the customer is a message about how much you value their time relative to yours. Three, distrust is expensive in a way that never shows up in the shrink line.
Trader Joe's never installed a single one, and the crew has been trained for years to talk to you while they scan. That is not nostalgia, it is a deliberate read that the interaction is the product. New Seasons here in Portland runs the same play. Both charge more than their competitors and both have people who will drive past a closer store to get there.
So when a chain reverses course now, the honest version is not that shoppers turned out to be thieves. It is that the chain outsourced its last impression to a machine and got a worse impression back.
It is that the chain outsourced its last impression to a machine and got a worse impression back.
I got the human lane eventually. The checker asked about the leeks, I said soup, she said her mother put a whole lemon in hers. Forty seconds. I have thought about that soup twice since, and I have never once thought fondly about a kiosk.