Self Service
Not too long ago grocery shopping was a full customer service experience. While selecting groceries you had the full service of the butcher or bakery counter while shopping. When your cart was full, the cashier rang up your groceries with a friendly attitude and the bagger carried your bags out and placed them in your car for you. It was generally a pleasant experience. However, grocery shopping is leaning more and more towards the trend of self-service. This is cutting down on their labor costs, but leaving discouraged customers.
Not only do most grocery stores have self checkout lanes installed, but they are not providing cashiers for the regular lanes so a shopper is sometimes forced to use self check-out instead of being checked out by a human being. These self-check out systems use a touch screen display to allow the customer to scan bar codes themselves. Customers are asked to manually identify items such as fruit and vegetables and place them on a device that weighs them. Then weight is then processed into a monetary amount using a price computing scale within the system. After each additional item, the user must place it on the bagging platform so that the weight can match up with what has been scanned or weighed.
In some grocery store chains such as Market Street and Central Market, there have even been price-computing scales installed throughout the store. In these cases, a customer can take the produce, olives or potato salad they want and weigh them on a scale that will convert them into price per pound and print a bar code. Then, at the self-check out lane there is no weighing and manually identifying items needed. The item will already have a barcode and can just be scanned. Some retail chains see this as improving the process of self-check out while also cutting down on labor needed to man the deli counter or prepared foods section.
While this is saving the stores money and ultimately probably cutting down on the product’s price based on less overhead, some customers do not think it is worth it. Studies have shown that it only takes one bad experience to turn a customer into a non-user of self-service checkouts. Customers that are confused and then embarrassed about the machines inability to scan their item will never use it again. There are other kinks that frustrate customers. Such as having to scan every single packet of Kool-Aid so they weight matches. Whereas, the cashier could have just scanned one and told the cash register to multiply it by 20. Coupons and loyalty card discounts are more difficult to handle in the self-service lanes. Also, while the price computing scales inside the machine can convert the weight on the scale into the price designated for the item the customer chooses on the touch screen, the customer still has to choose the correct item. If they choose bananas instead of plantains, they might get charged much less than they should.
Self-service is also starting to work it’s way into pharmacies. Med dispensing kiosks are being implemented in Canada. McDonalds is even trying to roll out a self-service order and pay machine in Europe! Even movies can be checked out in a self-service vending machine now. As each aspect of our lives moves to self-service, it leaves customers wishing for human interaction with cashiers more than ever.