Self Checkout at Supermarkets, Helpful Convenience or Stealthy Scam

You pick up your son from karate and decide to do some grocery shopping. You valiantly parry continued requests for Oreos, Fruit Roll-Ups and Yoohoos. Your quest is over and you look longingly at the exit door but must face the cashier before you can escape. Your eyes flicker past rows of dimmed globes. You suddenly realize you must face the dreaded robotic menace before your quest is finally over. You trudge over to the U-Scan. You're repeatedly rebuked by the robot, "Please place your item on the scale," it says coldly. You grimace as you clearly see your item is on the scale. You angrily bag your groceries yourself. The lone human attendant has to come over to assist you several times before the transaction is completed. Grocery store shopping didn't used to be so hard.

Shouldn't you have been compensated in some way for the extra effort and hassle associated with using the self check out?

I find myself asking this question quite often lately, especially after 9PM when most grocery stores don't even offer "full check out." When there used to be a choice between self and full service gas stations, did we not get discount for pumping our own gas? If we get a discount for letting the grocery stores track our purchases and have to fumble around in our wallets for our MVP/Lowe's Foods/Giant/(Whatever your local grocery store is that offers yet another discount card that you won't be able to find to save 10 cents on coffee creamer) card, why aren't we offered a discount for using self checkout?

The obvious answer is that the machines cost so much that grocery stores aren't making any extra money by installing them and are just offering them to you, the customer, so you'll save time. One manufacturer of such machines, Fujitsu (this is the company that makes U-Scan), states that owners can expect a return on investment of "12 months or less."

This means, after a year, the grocery store is making extra profit at the expense of your labor. Fujitsu states that four U-Scan stations can reduce labor by as much as 120-150 staff hours per week and these stations handle about 120-140 customers per hour. Let's assume that each staff hour is equivalent to $12 an hour (average grocery store clerks make less than that, but some of them have costs associated with benefits). That means the grocery store is saving $6,480 per month per four U-Scan stations.

To calculate how much of this savings could go to each customer, we would have to calculate how many customers go through each four U-Scan stations a month. At certain times, no one is using the U-Scan stations, so let's assume that the average rate of customers using the U-Scans is 5 percent of the published maximum. With each grocery store open 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, that would give a savings of 30 cents per check out. This is meager, but about equivalent to savings a customer gets from using aforementioned check out card when they have ten items or less.

The only thing I seem to save by using the U-Scan is the embarrassment of buying prophylactics.

At times, I realize, you can save some time by using the self checkout. But recently I have noticed that the lines for the self checkout are just as long as the ones for the full checkout. Shouldn't we get at least a 30 cent discount for the hassle of bagging our own groceries? I don't know-I would pay an extra 30 cents just to be able to say "Hi" sometimes.

Sources:

"Fujitsu's U-Scan self-checkout system gives you a competive edge." Fujitsu.