San Francisco Stores Stopping Self Checkout

[Alpha8472]

Target and Safeway stopping self checkout in San Francisco due to theft.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/ ... 542348.php

[veteran+]

Target and Safeway stopping self checkout in San Francisco due to theft.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/ ... 542348.php

I LOVE the way the self check out trend is backfiring on the retail industry. Karma

That is what ya get when profit is more important than your employees.

[ClownLoach]

Target and Safeway stopping self checkout in San Francisco due to theft.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/ ... 542348.php

I LOVE the way the self check out trend is backfiring on the retail industry. Karma

That is what ya get when profit is more important than your employees.

The majority of retailers are spending more on payroll than they did 5 years ago. Very few actually reduced labor with self checkout (the bad boy list including our fave CVS, Walgreens, Five Below, Michaels, Dollar General, and a few others). The majority of retailers have moved the labor to the online ordering side of the business because it's so insanely labor intensive and costly. Target and Walmart both are way, way up on payroll because of the online ordering "epidemic" and if they didn't do self checkout to offset it then they would have to raise prices substantially because of the money losing e-commerce crap Wall Street demands. Again - - unless you spend a fortune on item mapping and order batching software and have enough orders for it to work, it takes 20 to 30 times as much labor to process a single average e-commerce order than it does for a regular full service checkout order. You don't have to be a mathematician to recognize the problem - if it's taking 30X the labor and 10% of your orders are e-commerce then you're already stuck hiring more people even if you moved the majority of the cashiers to order pulling. Target has already stated over 10% of their transactions are online. The average Walmart now has more order pullers than cashiers, with some stores now in the triple digits with multiple Assistant Managers running pickup. Basically if it wasn't for self checkout then all these e-commerce orders would bankrupt even the largest retailers unless they raise prices substantially. Target and Walmart are the best examples of retailers treating their people well in this situation as both have battled Wall Street and specifically declared the raising of wages and billions of dollars in increased labor hours. So I don't exactly know how to respond to your criticism that this is biting Target in the rear for mistreating their people.

Now, let me flip the argument to this specific article. Notice the ceiling over the dismantled self checkout area. You'll see the new RFID canopy scanners. These are the devices I saw rolling out three years ago in Las Vegas and now they're in a few high shrink stores in California. They are over every single doorway and checkstand and can provide incredible levels of visibility once data has time to be processed (unfortunately it's not real time, but someday will be). So Target can directly compare what items have gone through the self checkout area to what has been paid for and see shrink in real time. They can investigate internal theft and loss the same way, when they see that Susie on register 5 has dozens of unpaid items go through her lane every time she works. So what's really cool about this technology is that it makes shrink into a fact based discussion finally. They can see that $X,000 per hour is stolen on self checkout, that 17 bottles of Tide weren't paid for in that area yesterday along with three Samsung TV sets and enough beer to fill a shopping cart. So obviously the community has decided that they no longer value shopping at this store and want to pillage it until it closes so they now have to take dramatic anti-customer measures. Where this is going to be painful for the customer is that for the reasons I discussed above they are not going to put the labor back onto the front end and the lines will get longer. That will only make more customers choose online ordering, which will have to be curtailed to reduce the financial losses but then will result in sales losses. Eventually something is going to snap and either prices will be raised substantially or the store will be closed.

You know the Safeway isn't going to add back labor to offset the loss of the self checkouts either. The cashier who used to supervise the bank of 6 or so registers will now run one checklane.

None of the big box retailers are making billions off self checkout. Let's not kid ourselves. (The little box bad boys I mentioned are a different story and deserve our criticism, they need to end the online ordering process entirely and tell customers to use Instacart or something else).

[veteran+]

I do not disagree with your metrics on this at all.

It all smells like a phyrrhic victory self imposed by the retailers.

I should have included customers (regarding profit over people) because they lose with big and small retailers, even though they do not realize it.

I do not know many retailers and/or service companies that do not mistreat their employees so I will let that statement stand.

[storewanderer]

Misleading article. ONE LOCATION of Safeway appears to have stopped self checkout in San Francisco. As far as the ONE LOCATION of Target it is not clear to me they are actually removing self checkout.

First off, we don't know what Target is doing. Those self checkouts in the picture of the San Francisco City Target are 10+ year old NCR units. Target has been actively pulling those units out. Those are leased units. Such leases often run 10 years. 10 years is probably about up. That store opened around 2013. I have not seen one of those units in service at a Target Store in over a year.

Are the self checkouts at that San Francisco City Target being removed or simply updated with current Target equipment?

As far as that SINGLE LOCATION OF Safeway goes, it is difficult to tell what they are doing but as a chain they continue to actively add and expand self checkout units across their divisions. On the other end of the spectrum when Safeway made its "San Francisco" changes such as adding exit gates and other security measures to the Market Street Store, they added a second pod of self checkouts actually DOUBLING the number of self checkouts in that store.

As a customer I do not appreciate going to a store without self checkouts and standing in a line to pay. This sort of frustration will actually stop me from shopping at a given store. Walgreens and Dollar Tree both come to mind- no self checkouts, SLOW checkout, understaffed checkout, really a terrible front end experience. If it is a place like Trader Joe's with a properly staffed/run front end then okay, I am good without self checkout there, I get in and out quickly anyway.

[ClownLoach]

I do not know many retailers and/or service companies that do not mistreat their employees so I will let that statement stand.

And it is unlikely that you'll find anyone who has been more mistreated than me. Probably because I refused to mistreat my people.

[ClownLoach]

Misleading article. ONE LOCATION of Safeway appears to have stopped self checkout in San Francisco. As far as the ONE LOCATION of Target it is not clear to me they are actually removing self checkout.

First off, we don't know what Target is doing. Those self checkouts in the picture of the San Francisco City Target are 10+ year old NCR units. Target has been actively pulling those units out. Those are leased units. Such leases often run 10 years. 10 years is probably about up. That store opened around 2013. I have not seen one of those units in service at a Target Store in over a year.

Are the self checkouts at that San Francisco City Target being removed or simply updated with current Target equipment?

As far as that SINGLE LOCATION OF Safeway goes, it is difficult to tell what they are doing but as a chain they continue to actively add and expand self checkout units across their divisions. On the other end of the spectrum when Safeway made its "San Francisco" changes such as adding exit gates and other security measures to the Market Street Store, they added a second pod of self checkouts actually DOUBLING the number of self checkouts in that store.

As a customer I do not appreciate going to a store without self checkouts and standing in a line to pay. This sort of frustration will actually stop me from shopping at a given store. Walgreens and Dollar Tree both come to mind- no self checkouts, SLOW checkout, understaffed checkout, really a terrible front end experience. If it is a place like Trader Joe's with a properly staffed/run front end then okay, I am good without self checkout there, I get in and out quickly anyway.

These units are being upgraded overnight at Target with no customer impact, so something is out of the ordinary there. But that store has rather famously been locked up aggressively so I don't see how self checkout removal could be helpful. But they do have more scientific data than most retailers since they have gone through the costly installation of full RFID surveillance and can actually determine real shrink unlike 99.999% of stores.

I agree that every Albertsons Cos refresh adds more self checkout and I do not see that changing. Much more they can do to prevent losses.

Reporting on retail is terrible these days.

[storewanderer]

I do not know many retailers and/or service companies that do not mistreat their employees so I will let that statement stand.

And it is unlikely that you'll find anyone who has been more mistreated than me. Probably because I refused to mistreat my people.

This happens more often than you think and is far from limited to retail or service industry. The toxicity in upper middle management at many companies and governments is unreal.

[veteran+]

I do not know many retailers and/or service companies that do not mistreat their employees so I will let that statement stand.

And it is unlikely that you'll find anyone who has been more mistreated than me. Probably because I refused to mistreat my people.

Same here. I SEE you!

Got in trouble many times for that and the only thing that saved me was "my numbers". Best in class in all metrics is hard to dismiss. All because of my Teams

[reymann]

i think stores will be shutting down self-checkout and restrict hours for minors to come in the stores in the next year to try to reverse trends and encourage more app ordering and delivery.