Self Check Outs

[storewanderer]

and 90% of the time for Grocery Outlet since they don't have as much PLU entry product and often have baggers.

My Grocery Outlet has stopped bagging altogether, at least when you bring your own bags. The last two times I shopped there they just shoved my items down to the end of the counter and started ringing up the next person. And since their checkout areas are not built for this process, it doesn't work well.

Some store employees do not want to touch customer bags due to sanitation concerns. This only started during COVID, now by this point in time pretty much every store has told employees they have to bag for customers, and if a store is still refusing I'd suggest talking to store management to find out what is going on. I am not sure if there is any guidance from Grocery Outlet corporate on this topic but suspect there is and suspect that a store refusing to bag in customer reusable bags is not compliant.

Some employees wear gloves due to this "must bag for customers in customer's bags" thing. Look at the gloves of those employees and you won't want those employees touching your bag...

[ClownLoach]

Can validate that the Temecula Stater Bros remodel is complete, and absolutely beautiful store that is completely new inside. The entire original 90s Albertsons layout is removed, they constructed and relocated bakery and deli. They did not install self checkout but instead the 4 new tiny express checkouts. So it looks like they're moving away from it already after including in their last two years of full remodels, light remodels, and new builds.

[storewanderer]

Can validate that the Temecula Stater Bros remodel is complete, and absolutely beautiful store that is completely new inside. The entire original 90s Albertsons layout is removed, they constructed and relocated bakery and deli. They did not install self checkout but instead the 4 new tiny express checkouts. So it looks like they're moving away from it already after including in their last two years of full remodels, light remodels, and new builds.

A mistake in my opinion but if they can staff front end with efficient employees then it may work out for them.

[ClownLoach]

Can validate that the Temecula Stater Bros remodel is complete, and absolutely beautiful store that is completely new inside. The entire original 90s Albertsons layout is removed, they constructed and relocated bakery and deli. They did not install self checkout but instead the 4 new tiny express checkouts. So it looks like they're moving away from it already after including in their last two years of full remodels, light remodels, and new builds.

A mistake in my opinion but if they can staff front end with efficient employees then it may work out for them.

Agreed. The new and remodeled SB stores were doing an excellent job of supervising and managing the self checkout. The top competitor is the Flagship tier Walmart next block over, and the large retiree customer base is furious about the 36 self checkouts and the fact you must wait in two lines to get a full service register. So I wonder if this is a intentional competitive reaction to be full service only for this specific store.

[brendenmoney]

Can validate that the Temecula Stater Bros remodel is complete, and absolutely beautiful store that is completely new inside. The entire original 90s Albertsons layout is removed, they constructed and relocated bakery and deli. They did not install self checkout but instead the 4 new tiny express checkouts. So it looks like they're moving away from it already after including in their last two years of full remodels, light remodels, and new builds.

A mistake in my opinion but if they can staff front end with efficient employees then it may work out for them.

Agreed. The new and remodeled SB stores were doing an excellent job of supervising and managing the self checkout. The top competitor is the Flagship tier Walmart next block over, and the large retiree customer base is furious about the 36 self checkouts and the fact you must wait in two lines to get a full service register. So I wonder if this is a intentional competitive reaction to be full service only for this specific store.

If there is any company that can efficiently run a full-service check out, it is Stater. The Riverside store I previously mentioned that added self-checkout as part of it's remodel is close to UC Riverside, so I imagine the self-checkout added to that store is meant to appeal to students. The same might apply to their Oceanside store, where self-checkout is available for beach-goers who want to run in and quickly grab a few items. Based on this, Stater may be adding in self-checkout on a case by case basis. As for the newly remodeled store in Temecula, I imagine their full-service checkout must have worked well enough that Stater chose to keep it the way it is. When Albertsons chose to remove self-checkout in a major chunk of their Southern California stores at the end of 2016 (which Albertsons reversed this decision in 2019), they aimed for including self-checkout in stores that had higher concentrations of quicker smaller purchases, mainly in college, beach, and other high traffic communities. Stater is likely following this same tactic.

[storewanderer]

A mistake in my opinion but if they can staff front end with efficient employees then it may work out for them.

Agreed. The new and remodeled SB stores were doing an excellent job of supervising and managing the self checkout. The top competitor is the Flagship tier Walmart next block over, and the large retiree customer base is furious about the 36 self checkouts and the fact you must wait in two lines to get a full service register. So I wonder if this is a intentional competitive reaction to be full service only for this specific store.

If there is any company that can efficiently run a full-service check out, it is Stater. The Riverside store I previously mentioned that added self-checkout as part of it's remodel is close to UC Riverside, so I imagine the self-checkout added to that store is meant to appeal to students. The same might apply to their Oceanside store, where self-checkout is available for beach-goers who want to run in and quickly grab a few items. Based on this, Stater may be adding in self-checkout on a case by case basis. As for the newly remodeled store in Temecula, I imagine their full-service checkout must have worked well enough that Stater chose to keep it the way it is. When Albertsons chose to remove self-checkout in a major chunk of their Southern California stores at the end of 2016 (which Albertsons reversed this decision in 2019), they aimed for including self-checkout in stores that had higher concentrations of quicker smaller purchases, mainly in college, beach, and other high traffic communities. Stater is likely following this same tactic.

Albertsons removal of self checkout in 2016 was a much different time. The units removed were NCR units that just didn't work all that well. NorCal didn't remove many self checkouts (only store I saw remove them was Sparks, NV but supposedly there were others). At that point in time few Targets had self checkout and if they did they only had 4 of them, Kroger was already big on self checkout, Wal Mart was expanding it slowly... where I am going is they had the wrong system in place (NCR), needed to do the POS upgrades to start accepting Chip cards, and customers were not yet as used to self checkout as they are today. It was a real big problem Albertsons was desperately trying to upgrade its POS systems (the "updated" Safeway systems they decided to go with chainwide- 95% of Safeway was still on the "old" Safeway system at the time of merger but the pre-merger Safeway had "updated" a few stores to the current system) to get them accepting chip cards, and the NCR self checkout would not interface with the updated POS systems/would not accept chip cards. I don't know why the Safeway system had so much trouble with that as a lot of other chains updated old systems to accept Chip cards during that time period (took a while but they did it). So the situation Albertsons was in, back in 2016, was if they kept self checkout in a store, it meant not doing the upgrade to accept Chip cards... which meant they had all credit card fraud liability "on them" due to still running swipe cards. SoCal had major problems with cloned cards/card skimming and there was serious liability (Ralphs had already switched to accepting Chip cards at that time; same with Wal Mart, Target, etc.) involved in not upgrading the card processing. So they really had no choice but to ditch self checkout and do the register upgrades to accept Chip cards at that time.

I think the first Toshiba self checkout I saw at Safeway was in 2017 in NorCal and it replaced some NCRs. That division as I mentioned did very few self checkout removals but came up with the solution to switch to Toshiba self checkouts. OR/WA also did very few self checkout removals at the Safeway banner and kept NCRs around in a surprising number of cases.

Random Safeway locations throughout Safeway kept NCR self checkouts well into 2019 and the funny thing was at some point they actually did make it so those accepted Chip Cards and could interface with the "upgraded" Safeway POS systems but it was not until they had already rolled the upgraded systems out chainwide and had already put Toshiba self checkouts in their best stores... I wonder if any Albertsons/Safeway units still have NCR self checkouts or all finally got the far superior better Toshiba units.