Overseas Self-Checkout Pockets Going Well Beyond U.S.
Written by Evan SchumanAugust 7th, 2008
As U.S. retailers struggle to get customers to use self-checkout lanes and to manage the process, overseas merchants are moving well into Self-Checkout Phase Two, with digital cameras used to identify foods by comparing items with an image database and making self-checkout theft much more challenging with multi-chute fully automated tunnels.
Still, those technological trendsetters are found in pockets throughout Europe, Asia and Australia, with most overseas retailers still slow to embrace self-checkout, according to a new report from European retail tech analyst firm Planet Retail. That said, for those merchants who have deployed, they are often exceeding their U.S. counterpart.
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3 Comments | Read Overseas Self-Checkout Pockets Going Well Beyond U.S.
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-Ed
August 8th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Maybe I’m getting too old, but isn’t this all just overuse of tech? It must be cheaper to hire a couple of people to see if something is a potato or a squash, weigh it, and hit the button. There will still need to be an army of employees to get everyone sorted out when the alarms and buzzers go off because the apples were scanned as tomatoes. Frankly, I think this is a waste of tech.
I never use self checkout. It is too annoying, and some item always doesn’t have a readable barcode or isn’t in the database, or some other issue.
And it doesn’t save the CUSTOMER anything!!!
But then I’m old.
Grins,
RW
August 11th, 2008 at 2:30 am
RW,
I highly appreciate your comment. Retailers want to save the customers the queues. It is true that retailers could also fight queues by hiring more staff. But they mostly don’t want to. They aim to save labour costs especially in saturated markets were cost cutting is their most efficient way to increase profits (more than 60 per cent of their costs are labour costs).
It is likely that tomatoes and apples (and all other products) in some years are identified by picture recognition software — without any barcode or RFID chip. If you think about the rapid development of picture recognition in the manufacturing industry (robotic), and if you take into account that already today bottle return machines identify items only by picture recognition, it is likely that these technologies will also automate the future checkout.
Bjorn Weber
Planet Retail, Frankfurt, Germany
October 8th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Hi,
this article is excellent, I’m interested in going deeper in the analysis. You mentioned a report published by “planet retail†but I don’t find it (I’ve looked for it in the special report section on http://www.plannetretail.net )? What is the title of this report? Where can I find it ?
I have two aditional questions :
- Why mobile self scanning devices are not much more used in retail ? Is that only because of the risk of theft or is there any other more intrinsic reason ?
- Why the project of fully automated tunnel scanners have not left the laboratories ?
Thanks for your answer,
Pierre-Arnaud.