Some thoughts on automated checkout machines

On of the things with the automated checkouts is they are available all the time. A human worker works 40 hours a week. But these stores are ofen open 7am to 10pm, 7 days a week.. or 105 hours a week. The human worker also has sick leave, 2 weeks a year, vacations, probably 4 weeks a year, maternity leave, statuatory holidays off. And then there is the growing long term disabilities.

And even when you get the human worker to work, getting them to actually work is hard. Its amazing to go into stores with long queues and seemingy tons of staff working, but only a couple at the till. Working at the till taking customers one after another is hard, so employees find a million reasons to not be at the till while they are there.

Meanwhile I've seen stores now with 8 automated checkout lanes(2 batches of 4). 7 out of 8 were operational. One down due to 'technical difficulties.'

This is a huge selling feature for stores, if you know when you go there there will be little to no wait time. Whereas some stores I've seen it is like a 15 minute wait at times to actually pay for what you chose.




Yes most retail chains either have to get big and offer everything like the big boxes, or go down to the big boxes.  Either way we end up with the vast majority of volume going through big boxes.

The automted checkouts give Tescos and friends a big advantage as its capital investment.  If a company has 1,000 stores and plans to install an average of 4 automated checkouts per store, that is 4,000 units.  Now economies of scale in rolling out these things come into play.  They can even test upgrades at a few locations and see how things work.  Say the units are £100,000 each time 4,000 units, that is a £400 million order.

It is the industrialization of retail.  Automated warehousing and automated shelf stacking are further out but coming.  Another thing is ordering, they already have what they are selling linked up in the human tills computer scanning system.  So the system can see what is selling faster and automatically place orders for more. 

And of course using intelligent software to figure out pricing on the fly.