Walmart Removing Self Checkout – Fact Check
Seems to be a popular topic considering as far as major retail goes it is generally referencing less than 10 stores. You see nice “grabby” headlines when you search and then the articles opens with example of two or three stores removing out of thousands. Retail Dive for example. It’s popularity is due to traffic audience tendencies and catering to that audience in order to gain higher advertising rates. To a large extent most of the audience is media in fact and irrelevant to a buying audience. A buying audience might be small grocer wanting to compare problems with NCR versus Fujitsu. Both of those companies have big clouds over their heads in one way or another.
The usual questions are:
- Why are stores removing self-checkout? — looks like 10 in Walmart (thousands of store). Dollar General is but they are an outlier and dollar is in their name.
- Will self checkouts go away? — not a chance. More and different classes and technology. Walmart has at least 5 classes of just SCO + two of assisted. Last year they had one.
- How does Walmart detect theft at self-checkout? — there are cameras, lidar, barcodes, scales and people. The latest Walmart self checkouts are tougher than the NCR
- What is the problem with self-checkout? — Generally it suffers from PR problem. People being replaced by machine and having the option of scanning themselves. The NBC story dragged out the bunch of bananas assuming we are a bunch of monkeys.
- Is Walmart bringing back cashiers? – only for temporary periods like Christmas to handle burst traffic. Its also good PR
July 2024
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- NBC News does a hatchet job basically in search of headlines — The initial “setting the table” is the title “Major retailers are backtracking on self-checkout”. They then point to Dollar General. If you research at all you will get numbers ranging from 12,000 to 3000 to 300. This is what the NBC reporter used for data. Bigger numbers are best.
- Let’s check on how many stores they have. Looks like they just hit 20,000 stores.
- From May 10-Q SEC Filing — We have continued to experience significantly higher inventory shrink. Although we continue to take actions designed to reduce shrink, we anticipate it will continue to materially pressure our financial results in 2024. To address shrink challenges, as well as to enhance the overall customer and associate experience in our stores, we continue to implement and refine our self-checkout strategy, including limiting self-checkout to transactions of five items or fewer, and converted some or all self-checkout registers to assisted checkout options in approximately 12,000 stores. Further, we have invested in retail
labor as discussed below and we are implementing plans designed to improve store manager turnover rates. - The inventory and the customer demographics for Dollar General are very different than primary retail like Walmart and Target
- Terrible story. We refuse to hyperlink it — https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/major-retailers-are-backtracking-self-checkout-rcna160234
Walmart removes some self-checkout lanes from its branches. The list of locations where self-checkout lanes are being removed now includes Shrewsbury, Missouri, Cleveland, Ohio and Albuquerque, New Mexico, according to a Daily Express U.S. report.
According to the report, many retailers are reducing the number of self-checkouts as a response to an increase in shoplifting. The news outlet claims that self-checkout thefts are five times more likely than traditional cashier checkout theft.
Niel Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, told the news outlet: “Theft rates at self-checkouts are reasonably high both because of deliberate actions and accidental mistakes. Forcing more customers to use manned checkouts resolves a lot of these issues and saves retailers money.”
April 2024
Walmart said it has removed self-checkout lanes at two additional stores — one in Shrewsbury, Mo., and another in Cleveland.
“As part of our announced plans for additional investments and improvements to facilities across the country, we’ve decided to remove self-checkout lanes and replace them with staffed lanes at select locations,” Brian K. Little, a spokesperson for Walmart, told Supermarket News.
The decision was based on several factors, including feedback from employees and customers, shopping patterns, and business needs in the area, he said.
“We believe the changes will improve the in-store shopping experience and give our associates the chance to provide more personalized and efficient service,” Little said.
Last year Walmart said it had removed self-checkout from three stores in Albuquerque.
The company has previously stated that it has no plans for the widespread removal of the service, and Little said the company had no additional news to report about changes in its checkout lanes.
Earlier this year Dollar General said it was removing self-checkout from 300 stores, and scaling it back at other locations, due in part to high levels of theft. Customers are now limited to a maximum of five items in the self-checkout lanes.
Costco, meanwhile, said it added more personnel to its self-checkout areas after discovering that non-members were using the self-checkouts using the membership cards of other individuals.