Yahoo UK’s poll of the week lets you vote and indicate your strength of feeling on one of the week’s hot topics. After 48 hours the poll closes and, each Friday, we’ll publish and analyse the results, giving readers the chance to see how polarising a topic has become and if their view chimes with other Yahoo UK readers.
Supermarket giant Morrisons is to remove some self-checkouts from stores after CEO Rami Baitiéh admitted the chain went ‘too far’ with the technology.
Baitiéh said: “Morrisons went a bit too far with the self-checkout. This had the advantage of driving some productivity. However, some shoppers dislike it, mainly when they have a full trolley.”
Other British supermarket chains including Asda and Booths have also moved to switch back to manned tills amid consumer dissatisfaction with automated checkouts.
Analysis by Morrisons of the number of self-checkouts in each store found that 20 stores needed to cut back on the number of unmanned tills, Retail Gazette reported.
Morrisons’ supermarket in Brough, Yorkshire, recently removed self-checkouts in favour of four new manned tills – and Baitiéh said both employees and customers were “very satisfied with the change”.
Baitiéh also linked large numbers of self-checkout tills to a rise in shoplifting in the supermarket chain.
In August, Asda announced it was investing £30 million into putting more staff back on tills.
Self-checkout technology was developed in the 1980s and first deployed on a large scale in the 1990s, with retailers hoping that automated tills would cut queue times and cut costs.
But consumers remain to be sold on the benefits of the technology, with customers often left waiting due to technology problems and age checks.
A 2022 YouGov poll found that just 36% of Britons would choose a self-checkout till in an empty supermarket, compared to 56% who would choose a manned till. A poll in 2024 found that 27% of us rank self-checkouts as an annoyance in supermarkets – more than the 26% who say the same for having to pay for plastic bags.
Christopher Andrews, author of The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy told the BBC this year that the self-checkout has failed to deliver both for consumers and for stores.
He said: “It hasn’t delivered anything that it promises. They’re finding that people need help doing it, or that they’ll steal stuff. They ended up realising that they’re not saving money, they’re losing money.”
But what do you think? Are self checkouts a benefit or a bad thing?
Come back on Friday to read the results and analysis.
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