Is there room for self-checkout in South Africa?
A recent trip to the UK drew my attention to how retail technology has developed since my last visit. In particular, I was excited to see the progress made by self checkout in UK supermarkets. I can’t help but wonder how successful this would be in South African retail, if used in the right conditions.
In the UK self-checkout, self-scanning and 24 hour grocery stores are proliferating at a rapid pace. With fewer staff in store, extended hours become more feasible and the convenience factor certainly multiplies out.
This is in stark contrast to my experience of rushing to my local supermarket to buy a much-needed grocery item before closing time at 19:00, and then having to wait in a long queue behind a shopper who is trying to pay for a trolley of goods and a telephone bill with a credit card that will not authorise. A self checkout point would certainly have been a welcome alternative in this instance.
It would work well in a 10-items-or-less queue and will certainly reduce time spent in store, when coupled with other modern payment methods. It would, in turn, make a large-format hypermarket into a true convenience offering.
Although retailers aren’t necessarily looking to reduce the number of staff they employ, they do want to speed up the checkout process.
Self-service points would greatly improve efficiency in convenience stores as well as in the few 24-hour food stores we have, namely for the same reasons above Again shoppers just want to grab a few essentials and checkout; they don’t have time to browse.
While this technology has its own set of challenges (it requires supervision by staff, for example), it can be used to create a more user-friendly shopping experience, albeit in a controlled environment.
Please feel free to make comments or raise new issues by
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