NCR Self-Checkout Walmart - Let's Do The Numbers!

Review of NCR Self-Checkout

Time to take another look as one the journals is looking for data.

Question: Could you tell me, or tell me where to find, the number of self-checkout machines/terminals currently being deployed by retailers in the U.S. for a story I’m writing?

Answer:

A reasonable “estimated total” for 80% of US is over 200,000? Figure hw/service/support at 20K a unit and its a 4 billion dollar industry for the Fujitsu, NCRs, Toshiba, etc of the world.

Do Amazon hubs and USPS self-pickup count? Whole bunch of other numbers.

Number of SCO Self-Checkout units in US

Here are the number of stores for some of the top retailers in the United States per copilot with number of estimated SCO per store in brackets:

Walmart: There are 4,618 Walmart stores in the United States as of April 15, 2024 [10]
Amazon: The number of Amazon stores in the United States reached 528 in 2020 [5]
Costco Wholesale: There are 606 Costco stores in the United States as of March 19, 2024 [10]
The Home Depot: As of the end of the fiscal year 2023, The Home Depot had a total of 2,015 stores in operation throughout the United States [5]
The Kroger Co.: As of the end of 2023, The Kroger Co. had a total of 9,395 stores [10]
Walgreens Boots Alliance: Walgreens Boots Alliance operates close to 10,000 stores throughout the United States [1]
Target: As of February 3, 2024, Target had a total of 1,956 stores open throughout the United States [8]
CVS Health Corporation: As of the end of 2023, CVS Health Corporation had a total of 9,395 stores
Lowe’s Companies: As of January 28, 2022, Lowe’s Companies had a total of 1,737 stores in the United States [6]
Albertsons Companies: As of the third quarter of fiscal year 2020, Albertsons Companies had 2,253 stores [5]

The true number is well north of 300K is my guess

Seems to be an “audience grabber” for many media outlets (Forbes e.g.) beating up on self-checkout. Maybe that tone gets them more eyeballs and clicks (and more ad dollars). Used to be truth and accuracy in journalism was bigger than the national enquirer/globe type panderings. I’m 70 so I remember some of the good old days.

Self-checkout only gets bigger and bigger. Easier to spend more money, and faster. Used to have clerks handling dollar bills. Now it’s NFC and facial (low friction)

Biggest problem with SCOs and retailers is that too often they overweight their checkout mix of SCO-versus-Clerk. Too many SCOs and not enough clerks is a problem. Generally 4-to-1 SCO versus clerk and often higher.

Costco has the best SCOs. Those are “attended” self-checkouts and the employee does all the work in your cart scanning.

More Answer

Also… https://investor.ncr.com/news-releases/news-release-details/ncr-achieves-20-consecutive-years-self-checkout-global-market?mobile=1

The numbers seem to be holding for 2024 as they did in 2023.

In this report – 190K were shipped in 2022 and NCR had 1/3 of the shipments. This means that NCR shipped almost 63K units. You can figure that 2/3 of those were to the US or about 40K.

So in the last three years.. NCR has shipped over 100K in the US.

Let’s look at it a different way… Let’s assume that NCR has held a 30% ship share for the last 5 years. AND you use 190K (which is high) but you assume that only 50% are installed in the US (which is low).

If you just do 30% for the last 5 years you are at 285,000 units of NCR installed.

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