Check(-out) yourself

An increasing number of supermarkets and stores such as Home Depot are making use of self-checkout aisles. The very presence of these devices seems to imply an offer of increased efficiency to the shopper. Surely this is an innovation and innovations tend to offer some form of positive change. Yet, we must ask what aspects of the ordinary check-out procedure in particular will be bettered by the absence of a clerk. What inefficiencies are inherent to this sort of human interaction? The conversation? The barcode scanning? The exchange and counting of cash? In days of yore, arithmetic might have slowed such financial exchanges. But this difficulty was overcome long ago with the change-calculating cash register. Everything else is as inefficient at a self-checkout as it is at an ordinary one. Except that the self-checkout requires fewer employees and this, of course, is the point.

There is much that could be said about the social and political ramifications of this innovation, but for this post I will stick to the technological implications. What does it mean for a store to push check-out responsibilities onto the consumer? Foremost, it requires a technical interface that requires no training. But does such a thing exist? Look at the blinking VCR display at your grandparents' house. I dare say that the iPod interface is seen as universally comprehensible only because those who would have trouble with it were already scared off by the term "mp3." In the case of self-checkout, we may assume that a large number of people who would have trouble with the interface will make no attempt to use it and will instead rely upon the traditional form of check-out. We may also assume that ambitions will run high amongst another group that is not really up to the task and that these people will reduce the overall efficiency of self-checkout, perhaps so much so as to make it a fruitless enterprise for everyone. In any case, we should be relieved to know that at least one clerk will remain on the workforce as a monitor and facilitator of self-checkout operations.

I went to Home Depot, one of the most poorly-run establishments in the world, to see how self-checkout was helping or hurting their business. Home Depot seems to be the perfect place for self-checkout because in my experience the vast majority of the store's employees know no more about the inventory – what it is, where it is, if it is, etc – than the customer. Before observing other customers using the self-checkout, I thought I'd give it a shot myself. I scanned several items with no trouble. But disaster struck when I attempted to scan a small plank of wood. The database was unaware of the product. The attendant came over and tried to scan the plank's barcode. Nothing. So he called the lumber department a few times. Eventually an elderly man came over from the lumber department with a handwritten list of prices that spanned several crumpled pages. Yikes, I thought. But I was wrong, this man found the price of my plank almost instantly on his crumpled pages. That taught me a lesson.

My initial priority in observing the self-checkout was to ascertain what sort of customer chooses this method over the traditional one. The most significant factor affecting this decision seemed to be the number of items in the customer's cart. The majority of people in the self-checkout aisle had only a few items, which seemed to reflect a belief that scanning a few items yourself would be quicker than contending with the much longer lines in the human-checkout aisles. More than any bias of age or technical knowhow, there was a noticeable bias of demeanor – the customers who chose the self-checkout appeared to be in a more of a rush than the others. The self-checkout was empowering a "if you want something done right (or quickly), do it yourself" attitude. Whether this belief was justified is hard to say. There were any number of hold-ups at the self-checkout. The two most common problems were the initial confusion of where to begin and confusion over the machine's stipulation that an item must be placed on the bagging platform after being scanned. Interestingly, by the second or even third scanned item, a number of customers were still neglecting to abide by the proper bagging platform procedure despite repeated scolding by the machine.

The majority of customers paid with credit cards, but for both credit and cash payments, the financial transaction tended to be the smoothest step in the process. This was not surprising since it may be assumed that the average consumer interacts with pay stations of all kinds on a highly regular basis. Though their dealings with other elements of this procedure may be substantially more limited. It was surprising, however, to see that most customers were not perturbed by the computer interface in general. Clearly this type of interface is also reaching ubiquity. The greatest challenges were procedural ones – issues of how the software instructed the user to engage with the hardware. The computer voice asked the customer to move a scanned item to the "bagging area" and displayed a legible graphic of this. Yet, there was something very disorienting about this request. Why? Perhaps it was an issue of language – the term "bagging area." But I think it was something else. I think the problem with this element of the exchange was that the customer did not understand why this step was so explicitly necessary and so they were delayed as they tried to comprehend the purpose of what was being asked of them. Presumably, this is a theft-deterrence measure and so it is easy to imagine why the customer may not immediately grasp the purpose – they don't suspect that they are under suspicion. In observing this element of self-checkout, I came to see that a smooth interaction with a device requires the user's comprehension of why something is being asked of them. A user is reluctant to carry out a procedure, particularly a financial one, when they are uncertain of its purpose. An explanation of the what apparently cannot replace an explanation of the why if it is not self-evident.

The length of the average transaction was between three and five minutes, but many of these were one or two item checkouts. One might expect that each additional item in a cart would add an increasingly negligible amount of time to the overall procedure since the overhead of orienting oneself to the system is the most time consuming element. To the contrary, I found that the sense of hesitance or confusion had not fled from the customer by the time they reached the last item in their cart. Each item was its own hazard. For a few customers, the first item or two went smoothly, creating a false sense of security, which was soon replaced with dread when the third or fourth item could not be found in the database or the barcode could not be read. The latter was a common problem as Home Depot does little to maintain the careful storage of merchandise in its stores. On the whole, however, I was surprised to see that self-checkout was running quite smoothly. I think it is impossible to understate the importance of the fact that the self-checkout customer is a self-selecting one. If all customers were forced to contend with the machine, it would be far more disastrous.